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The Evil Eye
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 334

The Evil Eye

The evil eye--the power to inflict illness, damage to property, or even death simply by gazing at or praising someone--is among the most pervasive and powerful folk beliefs in the Indo-European and Semitic world. It is also one of the oldest, judging from its appearance in the Bible and in Sumerian texts five thousand years old. Remnants of the superstition persist today when we drink toasts, tip waiters, and bless sneezers. To avert the evil eye, Muslim women wear veils, baseball players avoid mentioning a no-hitter in progress, and traditional Jews say their business or health is "not bad" (rather than "good"). Though by no means universal, the evil eye continues to be a major factor in th...

Heart of Lightness
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 324

Heart of Lightness

Edie and Victor Turner were among the most influential researchers in the 20th century. Together they raised the idea of participant observation to heights most anthropologists never achieve. These memoirs are a testimony to a remarkable partnership and to Edie Turner's own achievements after Victor's death.

The Nomads of Mykonos
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 330

The Nomads of Mykonos

This is the ethnography of the Mykoniots d'élection, a 'gang' of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a tourist space, offers them an extreme identity, which in turn is aesthetically marked by the transient cultural properties of Mykonos. Drawing semiotically from its ancient counterpart Delos, whose myth of emergence entails a spatial restlessness, contemporary Mykonos also acquires an idiosyncratic fluidity. In mythology Delos, the island of Apollo, was condemned by the gods to be an island in constant move...

Performing the Nation
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 436

Performing the Nation

  • Categories: Art

Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

We Will Dance Our Truth
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 390

We Will Dance Our Truth

In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter's interpretation of the community's ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of "historical inscription" reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their narrative of myth-and-history known as the Testamento, their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions.

The Challenges of Orpheus
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 316

The Challenges of Orpheus

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2008-01-28
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  • Publisher: JHU Press

As a literary mode 'lyric' is difficult to define precisely. This text confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics as its relationship to its audiences, the impact of material conditions of production and other cultural pressures, and lyric's negotiations of gender.

Voices from the Straw Mat
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 352

Voices from the Straw Mat

From its humble "straw mat" origins to its paradoxical status as a national treasure, p'ansori has survived centuries of change and remains the primary source of Korean narrative and poetic consciousness. In this innovative work, Chan Park celebrates her subject not as a static phenomenon but a living, organic tradition adapting to an ever-shifting context. Drawing on her extensive literary and performance backgrounds, Park provides insights into the relationship between language and music, singing and speaking, and traditional and modern reception. Her "performance-centered" approach to p'ansori informs the discussion of a wide range of topics, including the amalgamation of the dramatic, the narrative, and the poetic; the invocation of traditional narrative in contemporary politics; the vocal construction of gender; and the politics of preservation.

Centering the Margins of Anthropology's History
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 287

Centering the Margins of Anthropology's History

The series Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing the awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 14, Centering the Margins of Anthropology’s History, focuses on the conscious recognition of margins and suggests it is time to bring the margins to the center, both in terms of a changing theoretical openness and a supporting body of scholarship—if not to problematize the very dichotomy of center and ma...

A Short History of Western Performance Space
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 332

A Short History of Western Performance Space

This innovative book provides a historical account of performance space within the theatrical traditions of western Europe. David Wiles takes a broad-based view of theatrical activity as something that occurs in churches, streets, pubs and galleries as much as in buildings explicitly designed to be 'theatres'. He traces a diverse set of continuities from Greece and Rome to the present, including many areas that do not figure in standard accounts of theatre history.

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 289

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

Ritual studies today figures as a central element of religious discourse for many scholars around the world. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Catherine Bell's sweeping and seminal work on the subject, helped legitimize the field. In this volume, Bell re-examines the issues, methods, and ramifications of our interest in ritual by concentrating on anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions. Now with a new foreword by Diane Jonte-Pace, Bell's work is a must-read for understanding the evolution of the field of ritual studies and its current state.