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This ethnography compares how members of majority white and African American Pentecostal churches in Buffalo, New York receive and understand divinely inspired insights.
This interdisciplinary introduction offers students a truly global overview of the worldwide spread and impact of Christianity. It is enriched throughout by detailed historic and ethnographic material, showing how broad themes within Christianity have been adopted and adapted by Christian denominations within each major region of the world. Provides a comprehensive overview of the spread and impact of world Christianity Contains studies from every major region of the world, including Africa, Asia, Latin America, the North Atlantic, and Oceania Brings together an international team of contributors from history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as religious studies Examines the significant social, cultural, and political transformations in contemporary societies brought about through the influence of Christianity Discusses Protestant, Evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox forms of the faith Features useful maps and illustrations Combines broader discussions with detailed regional analysis, creating an invaluable introduction to world Christianity
In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.
"This book continues the conversations begun in Emilie Townes's path-breaking A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering. Once again, Townes brings together essays by leading womanist theologians, interweaving a concern for matters of race, gender, and class, as these bear on the survival and well-being of the African-American community. In Embracing the Spirit the emphasis is not on evil and suffering, but on "hope, salvation, and transformation" for individuals and their communities."--Jacket
To Be Cared For offers a unique view into the conceptual and moral world of slum-bound Dalits (“untouchables”) in the South Indian city of Chennai. Focusing on the decision by many women to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity, Nathaniel Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a “foreign” ideology that disrupts local communities. Far from being a divisive force, conversion integrates the slum community—Christians and Hindus alike—by addressing hidden moral fault lines that subtly pit residents against one another in a national context that renders Dalits outsiders in their own land."
This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people’s resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has been addressed and perceived predominantly through the broad perspectives of social and economic theories as well as public health and development discourses. This volume however, focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS. The contributions describe the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face and shed new light on the transformation of social and moral orders in African societies, which have been increasingly marginalised in the context of global modernity.
This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana’s time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. Richard Werbner focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana’s capital. Werbner shows how charismatic "prophets"—holy hustlers—diagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. He also shows how these healers enter into prayer and meditation and take on their patients’ pain and how their ecstatic devotions create an aesthetic in which beauty beckons God. Werbner challenges theoretical assumptions about mimesis and empathy, the power of the word, and personhood. With its accompanying DVD, Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy integrates textual and filmed ethnography and provides a fresh perspective on ritual performance and the cinematic.
Growing economic inequality, corporate influence in politics, an eroding middle class. Many Americans leave it to politicians and the media to debate these topics in the public sphere. Yet other seemingly ordinary Americans have decided to enter the conversation of wealth in America by donning ball gowns, tiaras, tuxedos, and top hats and taking on the imagined roles of wealthy, powerful, and completely fictional characters. Why? In No Billionaire Left Behind, Angelique Haugerud, who embedded herself within the "Billionaires" and was granted the name "Ivana Itall," explores the inner workings of these faux billionaires and mines the depths of democracy's relationship to political humor, sati...
AIDS has devastated communities across southern Africa. In Lesotho, where a quarter of adults are infected, the wide-ranging implications of the disease have been felt in every family, disrupting key aspects of social life. In Infected Kin, Ellen Block and Will McGrath argue that AIDS is fundamentally a kinship disease, examining the ways it transcends infected individuals and seeps into kin relations and networks of care. While much AIDS scholarship has turned away from the difficult daily realities of those affected by the disease, Infected Kin uses both ethnographic scholarship and creative nonfiction to bring to life the joys and struggles of the Basotho people at the heart of the AIDS pandemic. The result is a book accessible to wide readership, yet built upon scholarship and theoretical contributions that ensure Infected Kin will remain relevant to anyone interested in anthropology, kinship, global health, and care. Supplementary instructor resources (https://www.csbsju.edu/sociology/faculty/anthropology-teaching-resources/infected-kin-teaching-resources)