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Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond
Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of the spread of indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon to Western societies, looking at how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The authors focus on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals.
Armenian Christianity Today
Armenian Christianity Today examines contemporary religious life and the social, political, and cultural functions of religion in the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia and in the Armenian Diaspora worldwide. Scholars from a range of countries and disciplines explore current trends and everyday religiosity, particularly within the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC), and amongst Armenian Catholics, Protestants and vernacular religions. Themes examined include: Armenian grass-roots religiosity; the changing forms of regular worship and devotion; various types of congregational life; and the dynamics of social composition of both the clergy and lay believers. Exploring through the lens of Armenia, this book considers wider implications of ’postsecular’ trends in the role of global religion.
La Santa Muerte in Mexico
For over a decade the cult of La Santa Muerte has grown rapidly in Mexico and the United States. Thousands of people—ranging from drug runners and mothers to cabdrivers, soldiers, police, and prison inmates—invoke the protection of La Santa Muerte. Devotees seek her protection through practicing popular vows, attending public rosaries and masses at street altars, and constructing and maintaining home altars. This book examines La Santa Muerte’s role in people’s daily lives and explores how popular religious practices of worship and devotion developed around a figure often associated with illicit activities. She represents life with the possibility of respite but without ultimate redemption, and she speaks to the complexities of lives lived at the fringes of violence, insecurity, impunity, and economic hardship. The essays collected here move beyond the visually arresting sight of La Santa Muerte as a tattoo or figurine, suggesting that she represents a major movement in Mexico.
Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas
This volume demonstrates how, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholicism and Christian-derived celebrations as spaces for autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment. Their appropriation of Catholic-based celebrations calls into question the long-held idea that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora either resignedly accepted Christianity or else transformed its religious rituals into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance. In cities and on plantations throughout the Americas, men and women of African birth or descent staged mock battles against heathens, elected Christian queens and...
The radical otherness that heals
The Radical Otherness That Heals proposes an interesting theoretical advance in various schools of local and regional, and national and transnational analysis. It is based on a multilocal ethnography and a detailed sociological and political reading of the interactions between institutions and social and cultural representations of otherness. The original theoretical proposal consists of reading the reconfiguration of shamanisms stemming from processes of ethnicization and patrimonialization, and skillfully reconstructing the national ideological space and the most recent effects of multiculturalism through representations of otherness Anne-Marie Losonczy, Director of Studies at the Ecole Pr...
Beyond Therapeutic Culture in Latin America
By focusing on quantitative and qualitative research in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, this book expands on the notion of "therapeutic culture." Usually considered a global phenomenon disseminated from North to South, and associated to "modern" forms of "psychologized" subjectivity, "therapeutic culture" has become a key notion to understanding contemporary culture. However, this path-breaking research, grounded in a bottom-up perspective that follows specific therapeutic narratives, shows that the concept of the "therapeutic" should be extended to encompass a diversity of practices, both "secular" and "religious," "modern" and "traditional," that are deemed as therapeutic by the actors in...
Crafting Wounaan Landscapes
"This book reveals how indigenous Wounaan practice conservation in the face of national and international environmental governance"--Provided by publisher.
Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica
This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica. It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region’s indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo・Colombian Area.
The Black Diaspora of the Americas
The forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the trnasatlantic slave trade created primary centres of settlement in the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States - the cornerstones of the New World and the black Americas. However, unlike Brazil and the US, the Caribbean did not (and still does not) have the uniformity of a national framework. Instead, the region presents differing situations and social experiences born of the varying colonial systems from which they were developed. Using the Caribbean experience as the focus, Christine Chivallon examins the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as founding events in the identification of a black diaspora experience. The exploration...
Rites, Rights & Rhythms
Colombia has the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world, but Afro-Colombians have long remained at the nation's margins. Their recent irruption into the political, social, and cultural spheres is tied to appeals to cultural difference, dramatized by the traditional music of Colombia's majority-black Southern Pacific region, often called currulao. Yet that music remains largely unknown and unstudied despite its complexity, aesthetic appeal, and social importance. Rites, Rights & Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific is the first book-length academic study of currulao, inquiring into the numerous ways it has been used: to praise the saints, to grap...
