The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell

The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell PDF Author: Kiyoshi Umeya
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956552798
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell is a highly detailed ethnography about how the Jopadhola in eastern Uganda talk about, interpret and cope with death, illness and other misfortunes. The book presents a provocative discussion that critiques the idea of the revival of witchcraft in the neo-liberalised contemporary world, as represented by the 'modernity model of witchcraft', and attempts to formulate a 'spiderweb model' that connects witchcraft to contemporary society in a more complex manner. The book is a unique ethnography of the collective memory of indigenous knowledge and local historicity. The author moves the reader from curse to misfortune to fortune as he plots the notion of 'curse' as deeply embedded in the Adhola way of life. He weaves between culture, religion, state and modernity with lived experience. Did the concept of witchcraft unwittingly endear the Adhola to the Christian way of life because of the presence of the notion of 'curse' in the Bible or make them less susceptible to the vagaries of modernity compared to their neighbours? These are some of the questions that the author puts on the table in a deeply reflective manner. The phenomenon of witchcraft is given an intriguing angle that invites the reader to reexamine earlier anthropological writings on the subject among African peoples.

The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell

The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell PDF Author: Kiyoshi Umeya
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956552798
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 766

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Gospel Sounds Like the Witch's Spell is a highly detailed ethnography about how the Jopadhola in eastern Uganda talk about, interpret and cope with death, illness and other misfortunes. The book presents a provocative discussion that critiques the idea of the revival of witchcraft in the neo-liberalised contemporary world, as represented by the 'modernity model of witchcraft', and attempts to formulate a 'spiderweb model' that connects witchcraft to contemporary society in a more complex manner. The book is a unique ethnography of the collective memory of indigenous knowledge and local historicity. The author moves the reader from curse to misfortune to fortune as he plots the notion of 'curse' as deeply embedded in the Adhola way of life. He weaves between culture, religion, state and modernity with lived experience. Did the concept of witchcraft unwittingly endear the Adhola to the Christian way of life because of the presence of the notion of 'curse' in the Bible or make them less susceptible to the vagaries of modernity compared to their neighbours? These are some of the questions that the author puts on the table in a deeply reflective manner. The phenomenon of witchcraft is given an intriguing angle that invites the reader to reexamine earlier anthropological writings on the subject among African peoples.

Feast as a Mirror of Social and Cultural Changes

Feast as a Mirror of Social and Cultural Changes PDF Author: Frédéric Armao
Publisher: Æ Academic Publishing
ISBN: 1683461967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Feasting seems to be an inseparable element of peoples’—especially their collective—lives. ___|___ The proposed volume consists of original unpublished texts in which their Authors search for the answers to the following questions: How far have we gone astray from the primeval idea of celebrating the feast, from understanding tradition in terms of the Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, or the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim? Are there still any traditional, in its very meaning, feasts? If not—if they are invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger [1983] 1992)—why are they called “traditional”? What elements have changed and why? What has had the greatest impact on celebrating feasts? What are the new factors influencing the course of a feast’s celebration? ___|___ It was difficult to categorize the texts contained in this book because the subjects discussed in them very often overlap. Still, it was possible to recognize several accentuated aspects that served as the basis for the division of the book into three sections: 1) Culture and Identity; 2) Ritual and Cultural Values; 3) Culture and Policy. The contributors are scholars who represent various international institutions and fields of research, and use different approaches and methodologies to study the subject of the feast. This publication is an opportunity to bring the results of their research together in one book. The volume contains chapters in which various aspects of feasts, festivals, and festivities perceived as a mirror of social and cultural changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are presented. It provides a unique and rich resource in the fields of culture, folklore, religion, anthropology, sociology, as well as politics and other cultural and social sciences. In the future, we hope to broaden the scope of our research and to include more ethnic groups and their cultures in order to see the changes they have undergone and factors that caused them. _____ TABLE OF CONTENTS _____ Frédéric Armao (University of Toulon, France), Uisneach: from the Ancient Assembly to the Fire Festival 2017 | Key words: Bealtaine, folklore, Irish festivals, mythology, Uisneach _____ Bożena Gierek (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland), Lajkonik (Hobby Horse) as Theatrum of the Period of Corpus Christi in Kraków (Poland) | Key words: Corpus Christi, feast, Lajkonik, raftsmen, theatrum _____ Tatiana Minniyakhmetova (University of Tartu, Estonia), Manifestation of Various Values in Traditional Udmurt Feasts | Key words: “beestings,” feast, porridge-meat, symbols, Udmurts _____ László Mód (University of Szeged, Hungary), Grape Harvest Feast as an Attempt to Develop Local Identity and Cultural Heritage. The Hungarian Case | Key words: cultural heritage, grape harvest feast, invented tradition, local identity _____ Marek Moroń (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland), The Use of Sacrifice Feast of Eid ul-Adha in Bengal as an Instrument of Promoting Communal Violence for Political Purposes. The Situation in the 1920s, 1930s and 2017 | Key words: Bengal, cow sacrifice, Eid ul Adha, Hindu, Muslim, politics _____ Ewa Nowicka (University of Warsaw, Poland), Performing Ethnicity: Buryat Ethnofestivals and a Rediscovered Tradition | Key words: Buryatia, cultural canon, ethnofestival, identity, rediscovered tradition _____ Alīna Romanovska (Daugavpils University, Latvia), Diaspora Festivals as a Way for Development of Cultural Identity in the Regional City: the Case of Daugavpils (Latvia) | Key words: creolization, diaspora, festival, identity, regional city _____ Monika Salzbrunn (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), The Swiss Carnivals of Payerne and Lausanne: Place-making between the mise en scène of Self and the Other(s) | Key words: Brandons, carnival, Othering, performance, place-making, wordplay _____ Tigran Simyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia) and Ilze Kačāne (Daugavpils University, Latvia), Transformations of New Year Celebration in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Era: the Cases of Armenia and Latvia | Key words: Christmas (New Year) tree, Ded Moroz, New Year, post-Soviet, Santa Claus, Soviet, transformation _____ Kiyoshi Umeya (Kobe University, Japan / University of Cape Town, South Africa), Feasts to Send-off the Dead: with Special Reference to the Jopadhola of Eastern Uganda | Key words: agency of the dead, feast, funeral rites, Jopadhola, modernity, Uganda

Bouncing Back

Bouncing Back PDF Author: Tamara Enomoto
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956553263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
In 2018 South Africa's so-called "mother city", Cape Town came into the global spotlight as being the first city in the world to (almost) "run out of water," a crisis that only exacerbated the pressures placed upon a population staggering under socio-economic and politically-tinged environmental predicaments. Japan on the other hand has long sustained an international reputation for the massive scale of natural and anthropocentric crises its people have faced, overcome, and succumbed to. The most recent (pre-Pandemic) occurrence of which being the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiima nuclear plant accident. What comes to mind when Japan, South Africa, and the notion of resilience are mentioned in the same utterance? Well, considering how societies respond to disaster, (man-made and natural), Japan and South Africa feature high on many lists both for our triumphs and our failures to account for the most vulnerable among us in moments of catastrophe. This edited volume draws on transdisciplinary perspectives and multi-sited research to reflect on the high stakes involved when people are expected to repeatedly survive crisis. The authors take "resilience" as a contested yet generative lens through which to examine some of the most salient questions of our time. Culled from two seemingly disparate geopolitical locales, the insights offered here are hauntingly connected, shedding light on questions of collective and individual responses to calamity - questions that, in the wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic, are now urgently being grappled with by everyone, everywhere.

Citizenship in Motion

Citizenship in Motion PDF Author: Itsuhiro Hazama
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956550698
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Anthropological reflections on citizenship focus on themes such as politics, ethnicity and state management. Present day scholarship on citizenship tends to problematise, unsettle and contest often taken-for- granted conventional connotations and associations of citizenship with imagined culturally bounded political communities of rigidly controlled borders. This book, the result of two years of research conducted by South African and Japanese scholars within the framework of a bilateral project on citizenship in the 21st century, contributes to such ongoing efforts at rethinking citizenship globally, and as informed by experiences in Africa and Japan in particular. Central to the essays in this book is the concept of flexible citizenship, predicated on a recognition of the histories of mobility of people and cultures, and of the shaping and reshaping of places and spaces, and ideas of being and belonging in the process. The book elucidates the contingency of political membership, relationship between everyday practices and political membership, and how citizenship is the mechanism for claiming and denying rights to various political communities. Self requires others to construct itself, a reality that is subject to renegotiation as one continues to encounter others in a world characterised by myriad forms of interconnecting mobilities, both global and local. Citizenship is thus to be understood within a complex of power relationships that include ones formed by laws and economic regimes on a local scale and beyond. Citizenship in Africa, Japan and, indeed, everywhere is best explored productively as lying between the open-ended possibilities and tensions interconnecting the global and local.

Asinamanzi

Asinamanzi PDF Author: Minga Mbweck Kongo
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956554979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The book opens up a new pathway for a contemporary ethnographic exploration of the politics of water in an unequal society, specifically focusing on the challenges faced in Khayelitsha, South Africa. South Africa is confronted with a quadruple threat of water scarcity, energy depletion, inflation, and unemployment, leaving politicians unsure of where to begin in minimizing the damage. Using incompleteness and conviviality as a framework, the book delves into the subjectivities created by the lack of water and its impact on various aspects of life, including medical, ecological, spiritual, and political dimensions. It also examines the inequalities in water access in Cape Town, highlighting the inequitable development patterns and the strategies deployed by residents to cope with inadequate water access. The book demonstrates the complex relationships and intricacies of water and how humans think about, relate to, and respond to water, particularly when it is lacking. Overall, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the complexities of water and its profound significance in different spheres of human life. “The book we have in our hands is a fine work on the intricacies of contemporary life in South Africa (and beyond). Instead of the patronising and condescending viewpoint that usually enables social scientists (especially anthropologists) to address ‘the poor’, Kongo demonstrates the complexities of people’s reasoning and feeling.” Antonádia Borges, Professor of Anthropology, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), Brazil “Minga’s excellent ethnography offers a rare account of the convivial relationships that structure everyday living and mobility in a place of ‘liquid shit’ in the midst of a precarity provoked by the sociopolitical absence of water in a city filled with water for everything, yet insensible to incompleteness as life-craft.” Divine Fuh, Associate Professor, Director of the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town “Asinamanzi is a raw book about the impact that a lack of piped water has on people living in informal settlements in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. It describes a world of ‘liquid shit’ that assaults the senses and erodes the dignity and relationships of people living in it. Amidst this ‘incomplete’ existence, residents bravely struggle to establish a ‘convivial’ social life.” Ilana van Wyk, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stellenbosch University “Asinamanzi is about the daily realities of living with water scarcity and raw sewage running through streets and houses. The book examines the social, cultural, religious and health dimensions of water, and provides rich ethnographic insights into what it means to strive to live with dignity in settings characterized by the broken infrastructures of everyday life.” Steven Robins, Professor of Anthropology, Stellenbosch University

Word Play

Word Play PDF Author: Vivian Lee Snodgrass
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1481717472
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Word Play is a riveting book regarding an interactive game played with words and God. Inside its pages are the clues to understanding the game. The desired result from playing is to know God better. This book addresses confusion generated by the daily use of words without concern for their actual meanings, more specifically, the words used by Christians. It is a book about God and not religion. Some may discover the contents of Word Play strenuous. Word Play is designed to make readers think. There is a good chance your brain will hurt while reading Word Play. If so then I fulfilled my mission. Enlightenment from critical thinking opens the gateway to the heart. When there is clarity there is understanding and where there is understanding there is power. Word Play was written as a tool to access God's power through words. It is not a book to be taken lightly. Word Play has a new and different approach for understanding more regarding the power of words. Anyone who desires to know more about this power from God should read Word Play. The lessons learned took over two decades to receive. It took almost two years to write about them. Warning: The awareness resulting from reading Word Play may be overwhelming to some. This is not a book for children.

The Common Sense Spell Book

The Common Sense Spell Book PDF Author: Debbie Dawson
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1493130609
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
In The Common Sense Spell Book, you will learn how to create magic. Real spells, keyed to you and filled with your own symbolism that work with your own strengths. It begins with what you need to know and consider before you start, what you need to do to create and cast a spell and what should be done to clean up afterwards. Delving thoroughly into both the theory and mechanics of folk magic, The Common Sense Spell Book contains and explains all you need to know to be able to confidently craft successful spells and perform real magic.

From Homer to Harry Potter

From Homer to Harry Potter PDF Author: Matthew T. Dickerson
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 1587431335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Drawing from a viewpoint informed by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara explore the influence and importance of ancient biblical narrative, Greek mythology, Arthurian legend, and other works of "Faerie" on our literary culture. They discuss how myth and fantasy offer profound insights into truth and provide sound assessment of modern authors such as Philip Pullman, Walter Wangerin, and J.K. Rowling."--BOOK JACKET.

The Witch's Book of Shadows

The Witch's Book of Shadows PDF Author: Jason Mankey
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 073875191X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Discover the fascinating history, tradition, and modern uses of the Book of Shadows. This fun and easy-to-use guide provides essential information on creating and consecrating a Book of Shadows, as well as how to make it a part of your practice. Learn about the various types of Books of Shadows, their roles throughout history, and how they differ from regular spellbooks. Enjoy advice and excerpts from the grimoires of well-known modern and historical Witches. Explore a wide variety of ideas for what to include in your own Book of Shadows. Like a magical chart showing where you've been and where you're going, this wonderful tool is your personal guide to Witchcraft. Praise: "This is the complete guide to the Book of Shadows...Mankey has given Wiccans a great gift."—John Beckett, blogger at "Under the Ancient Oaks" and author of The Path of Paganism "This engaging, personal, and well-researched book explores a little-considered subject, the Book of Shadows, from every angle."—Yvonne Aburrow, author of All Acts of Love and Pleasure: Inclusive Wicca (Avalonia, 2014) "If Books of Shadows are your bag, then look no further. Jason Mankey once again shows off his skill as a well-practiced Witch with this collection of stories, tips, and tricks about that most personal of magical tools: the Book of Shadows. A great addition to every Wiccan's shelf."—Jenna T. Beachy, author of The Secret Country of Yourself: Discover the Powerful Magick of Your Endless Inner World "As always, Mankey brings insight and delight to the magickal process. The Witch's Book of Shadows is an in-depth, yet approachable guidebook to all the elements of crafting your own Books of Shadows. Dive in and enjoy!"—Lasara Firefox Allen, bestselling author of Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality

The New Aradia

The New Aradia PDF Author: Laura Tempest Zakroff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781947544161
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
The New Aradia is a handbook is designed to serve as a collection of ideas to teach, share, inspire, empower, protect, and guide. Within its pages are sigils, spells, recipes, essays, invocations, rituals, and more, all gathered from experienced magical practitioners. At your fingertips is an arsenal of tools to aid you on your path.