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Author: Susan Rasmussen
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761861491
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
This book examines alleged “superhuman” powers predominantly associated with smith/artisans in five African societies. It discusses their ritual and social roles, mythico-histories, symbols surrounding their art, and changing relationships between these specialists and their patrons. Needed but also feared, these smith/artisans work in traditionally hereditary occupations and in stratified but negotiable relationships with their rural patron families. Many of them now also work for new customers in an expanding market economy, which is still characterized by personal, face-to-face interactions. Rasmussen maintains that a framework integrating anthropological theories of witchcraft, alterity, symbolism, and power is fundamental to understanding local accusations and tensions in these relationships. She also argues that it is critical to deconstruct and disentangle guilt, blame, and envy—concepts that are often conflated in anthropology at the expense of falsely accused “witch” figures. The first portion of this book is an ethnographic analysis of smith/artisans in Tuareg society, and draws on primary source data from this author’s long-term social/cultural anthropological field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali. The latter portion of the book is a cross-cultural comparison, and it re-analyzes the Tuareg case, drawing on secondary data on ritual powers and smith/artisans in four other African societies: the Amhara of Ethiopia, the Bidan (Moors) of Mauritania, the Kapsiki of Cameroon, and the Mande of southern Mali. In the concluding analysis, there is discussion of similarities and differences between these cases, the social consequences of ritual knowledge and power in each community, and their wider implications for anthropology of religion, human rights, and African studies.
Author: Susan Rasmussen
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761861491
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines alleged “superhuman” powers predominantly associated with smith/artisans in five African societies. It discusses their ritual and social roles, mythico-histories, symbols surrounding their art, and changing relationships between these specialists and their patrons. Needed but also feared, these smith/artisans work in traditionally hereditary occupations and in stratified but negotiable relationships with their rural patron families. Many of them now also work for new customers in an expanding market economy, which is still characterized by personal, face-to-face interactions. Rasmussen maintains that a framework integrating anthropological theories of witchcraft, alterity, symbolism, and power is fundamental to understanding local accusations and tensions in these relationships. She also argues that it is critical to deconstruct and disentangle guilt, blame, and envy—concepts that are often conflated in anthropology at the expense of falsely accused “witch” figures. The first portion of this book is an ethnographic analysis of smith/artisans in Tuareg society, and draws on primary source data from this author’s long-term social/cultural anthropological field research in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities of northern Niger and Mali. The latter portion of the book is a cross-cultural comparison, and it re-analyzes the Tuareg case, drawing on secondary data on ritual powers and smith/artisans in four other African societies: the Amhara of Ethiopia, the Bidan (Moors) of Mauritania, the Kapsiki of Cameroon, and the Mande of southern Mali. In the concluding analysis, there is discussion of similarities and differences between these cases, the social consequences of ritual knowledge and power in each community, and their wider implications for anthropology of religion, human rights, and African studies.
Author: Brittany Slatton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315294958
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 574
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Book Description
Recent books have drawn attention to an unfinished gender revolution and the reversal of gender progress. However, this literature primarily focuses on gender inequality in the family and its effect on women’s career and family choices. While an important topic, these works are critiqued for being particularly attentive to the concerns of middle-class, heterosexual, White women and ignoring or erasing the issues and experiences of the vast majority of women throughout the United States (and other countries). Women and Inequality in the 21st Century is an edited collection that addresses this dearth in the current literature. This book examines the continued inequities navigated by women occupying marginalized social positions within a "nexus of power relations." It addresses the experiences of immigrant women of color, aging women, normative gender constraints faced by lesbian and gender non-conforming individuals assigned the female gender at birth, religious constraints on women’s sexual expression, and religious and ethnic barriers impeding access to equality for women across the globe. Contributors to this collection reflect varying fields of inquiry—including sociology, psychology, theology, history, and anthropology. Their works employ empirical research methods, hermeneutic analysis, and narrative to capture the unique gender experiences and negotiations of diverse 21st-century women.
Author: Robert D. Miller II
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647540862
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people.
Author: William C. Olsen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253017505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.
Author: Tara F. Deubel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
Saharan Crossroads: Exploring Historical, Cultural, and Artistic Linkages between North and West Africa counteracts the traditional scholarly conception of the Sahara Desert as an impenetrable barrier dividing the continent by employing an interdisciplinary lens to examine myriad interconnections between North and West Africa through travel, trade, communication, cultural exchange, and correspondence that have been ongoing for several millennia. Saharan Crossroads offers a unique contribution to existing scholarship on the region by uniting a diverse group of African, European, and American scholars working on various facets of trans-Saharan history, social life, and cultural production, and bringing their work together for the first time. This trilingual volume includes eleven chapters written in English, five chapters in French, and three chapters in Arabic, reflecting the multicultural nature of the Sahara and this international project. Saharan Crossroads explores historical and contemporary connections and exchanges between populations living in and on both sides of the Sahara that have led to the emergence of distinctive cultural and aesthetic expressions. This contact has been fostered by a series of linkages that include the trans-Saharan caravan trade, the spread of Islam, the migration of nomadic pastoralists, and European colonization. The book includes three major sections: (1) history, culture, and identity; (2) trans-Saharan circulation of arts, music, ritual performance, and architecture; and (3) religion, law, language, and writing. While the gaze of international political analysts has turned toward the Sahara to follow problematic developments that pose serious threats to human rights and security in the region, it is especially timely to recall that the people and countries of the Sahelo-Saharan world have maintained long histories of peaceful coexistence, interdependence, and cooperation that are too often overlooked in the present.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
![Africa [3 volumes] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/UOTNEAAAQBAJ?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1774
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Book Description
These volumes offer a one-stop resource for researching the lives, customs, and cultures of Africa's nations and peoples. Unparalleled in its coverage of contemporary customs in all of Africa, this multivolume set is perfect for both high school and public library shelves. The three-volume encyclopedia will provide readers with an overview of contemporary customs and life in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa through discussions of key concepts and topics that touch everyday life among the nations' peoples. While this encyclopedia places emphasis on the customs and cultural practices of each state, history, politics, and economics are also addressed. Because entries average 14,000 to 15,000 words each, contributors are able to expound more extensively on each country than in similar encyclopedic works with shorter entries. As a result, readers will gain a more complete understanding of what life is like in Africa's 54 nations and territories, and will be better able to draw cross-cultural comparisons based on their reading.
Author: Susan Rasmussen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498582583
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Persons of Courage and Renown is a theoretically engaged ethnography by a social/cultural anthropologist that explores issues of culture, memory, creativity, and power by analyzing beloved, yet vulnerable, actors, acting, and play performances in Tamajaq-speaking, predominantly Muslim, traditionally stratified, and semi-nomadic Tuareg communities in northern Mali. The town and region of Kidal are the primary sites of field research. This book traces how Tuareg actors powerfully negotiate cultural memory and encounters in communities caught, between political violence and peacekeeping efforts in northern Mali. Urban, state, and nongovernmental bureaucracies there seek to reshape Tuareg verbal art performances to comply with official agendas aimed at transforming local culture. This book shows how acting and plays are crucial in continuing, but also debating and redefining, the meanings of older verbal art performances of Tuareg tales, songs, and epics, as well as wider cultural knowledge and social practice. Their arts offer important possibilities for peacemaking in a turbulent and unpredictable world.
Author: George Joffé
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 042999964X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 766
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Book Description
This comprehensive Routledge Handbook on the Modern Maghrib introduces and analyses the region in its full complexity, focusing on the countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya, as well as the northern and western Sahara. In addition to country studies that provide historical and geopolitical background, a series of thematic explorations engage with a range of social, linguistic, cultural and economic aspects, providing a rich mosaic of current scholarship on the region. Addressing important debates such as the volatile international relations among constituent states, the role of women in society, and the environmental impact of climate change, the book considers natural resources, music, media and language, and revisits the history of borders and social tribal structures. What emerges is not only a variegated picture of the Maghrib as a complex and rapidly changing region, but one marked by stark contrasts and divergences among its constituent states based on their Ottoman and colonial experiences, their relationships with their Saharan and Mediterranean neighbours, and their own political trajectories. This Handbook fills an important gap in knowledge on a region increasingly significant in European and American affairs, and will appeal to anyone interested in the history, economies and societies of North Africa.
Author: Andrew J. Strathern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131704410X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 863
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Book Description
This companion provides an indispensable overview of contemporary and classical issues in social and cultural anthropology. Although anthropology has expanded greatly over time in terms of the diversity of topics in which its practitioners engage, many of the broad themes and topics at the heart of anthropological thought remain perennially vital, such as understanding order and change, diversity and continuity, and conflict and co-operation in the reproduction of social life. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the contributors to this volume provide us with thoughtful and fruitful ways of thinking about a number of contemporary and long-standing arenas of work where both established and more recent researchers are engaged. The companion begins by exploring classic topics such as Religion; Rituals; Language and Culture; Violence; and Gender. This is followed by a focus on current developments within the discipline including Human Rights; Globalization; and Diasporas and Cosmopolitanism. It provides an interesting and challenging look at the state of current thinking in anthropology, serving as a rich resource for scholars and students alike.
