The Sudanese Zār Ṭumbura Cult

The Sudanese Zār Ṭumbura Cult PDF Author: Gerasimos Makris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003802591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a historically sensitive ethnography of the zār ṭumbura spirit possession cult, associated with descendants of African slaves who live mainly in the area of Greater Khartoum, Sudan. It considers the history and transformations of ṭumbura, from the 19th-century slaving era to the present post-Islamist autocracy. The chapters examine the ṭumbura spiritual universe and ceremonial life, its relation to the more popular female cult of zār borē and to other now extinct forms of celebrating the zār spirit(s), as well as ṭumbura’s combination of possession, sorcery, ancestor worship and ṣūfī piety. Based on long-term fieldwork, the study shows how successive generations of subaltern cult devotees construct a positive self-identity based on an alternative reading of Sudanese history. The author explores the edges of Sudanese Islamic religiosity and probes the limits of anthropological classifications concerning religious experience. Situating ṭumbura in its wider context, the book discusses subaltern modes of historicity in their articulation with dominant conceptions of history, traces the legacy of slavery and the role of memory and invites comparisons with Middle Eastern, Sahelian and even New World societies regarding stigmatised identities, slavery, race, memory and history. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, history, religious studies, Islamic studies and African studies.

The Sudanese Zār Ṭumbura Cult

The Sudanese Zār Ṭumbura Cult PDF Author: Gerasimos Makris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003802591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a historically sensitive ethnography of the zār ṭumbura spirit possession cult, associated with descendants of African slaves who live mainly in the area of Greater Khartoum, Sudan. It considers the history and transformations of ṭumbura, from the 19th-century slaving era to the present post-Islamist autocracy. The chapters examine the ṭumbura spiritual universe and ceremonial life, its relation to the more popular female cult of zār borē and to other now extinct forms of celebrating the zār spirit(s), as well as ṭumbura’s combination of possession, sorcery, ancestor worship and ṣūfī piety. Based on long-term fieldwork, the study shows how successive generations of subaltern cult devotees construct a positive self-identity based on an alternative reading of Sudanese history. The author explores the edges of Sudanese Islamic religiosity and probes the limits of anthropological classifications concerning religious experience. Situating ṭumbura in its wider context, the book discusses subaltern modes of historicity in their articulation with dominant conceptions of history, traces the legacy of slavery and the role of memory and invites comparisons with Middle Eastern, Sahelian and even New World societies regarding stigmatised identities, slavery, race, memory and history. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, history, religious studies, Islamic studies and African studies.

Shackled Sentiments

Shackled Sentiments PDF Author: Eric J. Montgomery
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149858599X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
The ramifications of the trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and domestic African slave trades are immeasurable, and they continue to disaffect black people from Africa to Haiti and Los Angeles to Lagos. Shackled Sentiments focuses on the memories and embodiments of slavery through case studies from western, eastern, and central Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The contributors to this collection examine the ways that memories of slavery have been internalized. Slavery and memory are assessed from multiple perspectives: as sets of ritual practices, community-based systems of spirit veneration, mechanisms of resistance and national pride, sacred languages informing personhood, and instruments for healing and well-being. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, religion, art, and linguistics.

Zar

Zar PDF Author: Hager El Hadidi
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 1617977713
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of the history and waning culture of zar in Egypt, and the world in which Muslim women negotiate relations with spirits Zar is both a possessing spirit and a set of reconciliation rites between the spirits and their human hosts: living in a parallel yet invisible world, the capricious spirits manifest their anger by causing ailments for their hosts, which require ritual reconciliation, a private sacrificial rite practiced routinely by the afflicted devotees. Originally spread from Ethiopia to the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf through the nineteenth-century slave trade, in Egypt zar has incorporated elements from popular Islamic Sufi practices, including devotion to Christian and Muslim saints. The ceremonies initiate devotees—the majority of whom are Muslim women—into a community centered on a cult leader, a membership that provides them with moral orientation, social support, and a sense of belonging. Practicing zar rituals, dancing to zar songs, and experiencing trance restore their well-being, which had been compromised by gender asymmetry and globalization. This new ethnographic study of zar in Egypt is based on the author’s two years of multi-sited fieldwork and firsthand knowledge as a participant, and her collection and analysis of more than three hundred zar songs, allowing her to access levels of meaning that had previously been overlooked. The result is a comprehensive and accessible exposition of the history, culture, and waning practice of zar in a modernizing world.

Historical Dictionary of the Sudan

Historical Dictionary of the Sudan PDF Author: Robert S. Kramer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810861801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 621

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Republic of the Sudan was long the largest country in Africa and, according to the general consensus, also one of the least successful in many ways. This was not entirely its fault since it lay along the fault line between Muslim and Christian Africa and between the Nile Valley civilizations and African Sudanic cultures. This partly explains the long and bloody warfare waged by the Southerners to achieve independence, which they did in July 2011. So this hefty book actually covers not one but two states. This fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Sudan does so, first, through a lengthy and detailed chronology tracing its relatively few successes and numerous failures. The introductory essay does an admirable job of putting it all in perspective. But the most informative part is the dictionary, with now over 700 entries for this fourth edition. They deal with important personalities, politics, the economy, society, culture, religion and inevitably the civil war. There are also appendixes and an extensive bibliography.

Religion and Anthropology

Religion and Anthropology PDF Author: Brian Morris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521852418
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
This important textbook provides a critical introduction to the social anthropology of religion, focusing on more recent classical ethnographies. Comprehensive, free of scholastic jargon, engaging, and comparative in approach, it covers all the major religious traditions that have been studied concretely by anthropologists - Shamanism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and its relation to African and Melanesian religions and contemporary Neopaganism. Eschewing a thematic approach and treating religion as a social institution and not simply as an ideology or symbolic system, the book follows the dual heritage of social anthropology in combining an interpretative understanding and sociological analysis. The book will appeal to all students of anthropology, whether established scholars or initiates to the discipline, as well as to students of the social sciences and religious studies, and for all those interested in comparative religion.

Reckoning with Change in Yucatán

Reckoning with Change in Yucatán PDF Author: Jason Ramsey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003802613
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reckoning with Change in Yucatán engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating local belonging and a force of transformation in its own right. For residents of Chunchucmil, a historic rural community in Yucatán, Mexico, history is anything but straightforward. Living in what is both a defunct 19th-century hacienda estate and a vibrant Catholic pilgrimage site, Chunchucmileños reckon past, present, and future in radically different ways. For example, while some use the aging estate buildings to weave a history of economic decline and push for revitalization by hotel developers, others highlight the growing fame of the Virgin of the Rosary in the attached church and vow to defend the site from developer interference. By exploring how past and future are channeled through changing built environments, landscapes, sacred relics, and legal documents, this ethnographic study details how the politics of change provide Chunchucmileños with a common language for debating commitments to place and each another in the present. Against Western notions of ‘History’ as a relatively coherent account of change, the book suggests we reframe it as an ongoing performance that is always fractured, democratic, and morally tinged.

Spirit Possession, Modernity & Power in Africa

Spirit Possession, Modernity & Power in Africa PDF Author: Heike Behrend
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299166342
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Africa as well as in Europe, many spirits and their mediums are part of local as well as global cultures. Christian spirits named Hitler, Mussolini, or King Bruce (Bruce Lee) flourish in a pantheon of new holy spirits in Uganda waging war against the government. Spirits of airplanes, engines, guitars, and angels are found in Central Africa; and thunder, snakes, and rain as well as playboys and prostitutes inhabit the spirit world in West Africa. Spirit possession cults have continued to proliferate, even in the secular West, and continue to be a subject of intense interest. Despite the continuous expansion of the field, some problems are only now beginning to be explored. The experts in this volume focus on questions of power, the history and inner dynamics of cults, the role of gender and images of the other, based on research conducted during the last fifteen years in Africa. The contributors document changes taking place across the continent as possession beliefs and practices respond to new circumstances and address the shifting local implications of an increasingly global socio-economy. Gender, ethnicity, and class are examined as intersecting forces and features of spirit phenomena. The case studies presented are richly contextualized: history, social organization and upheaval, alternative religious options--all are considered relevant to an understanding of possession forms. Contributors: Leslie Sharp, Heike Behrend, Adeline Masquelier, Mathias Krings, Jean-Paul Colleyn, Alexandra O. de Sousa, Susan Kenyon, Tobias Wendl, Ute Luig, and Linda Giles Co-published with James Currey Publishers, U.K. The Wisconsin edition is not for sale in the United Kingdon, the traditional British Commonwealth (excepting Canada), nor in Europe.

Changing Masters

Changing Masters PDF Author: G. P. Makris
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810116986
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Get Book Here

Book Description
The spirit possession cult of zar tumbura has a devoted following among Muslim descendents of slaves and other subalterns in the Sudan. In Changing Masters, G. P. Makris studies zar tumbura as part of a wider zar complex for what it reveals about shifting ethnic identities in the modern Sudan. More generally, his work exposes the processes subordinate groups use to assert a positive identity that counters the identity conferred upon them by the dominant culture. Makris engages the tumbura devotees of the area of Greater Khartoum in an animated discussion of their understanding of themselves and their world. Using oral histories, songs associated with the various spirits, and accounts of ceremonies he witnessed, he shows tumbura to be a response to victimization first in slavery and later by subordination. It functions as a counterdiscourse challenging the dominant discourse of the ex-slaveholding classes and enables its practitioners to assert a separate, alternative identity. This assertion, embodied in the idiom of possession, is achieved through a continuous reworking of meaning as it is imparted by religion, descent, and historical consciousness.

Across The Boundaries Of Belief

Across The Boundaries Of Belief PDF Author: Morton Klass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429971117
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book focuses on anthropological questions and methods, and is offered as a supplement to textbooks on the anthropology of religion. It is designed to help students collecting and interpreting their own fieldwork or archival data and relating their findings to the work of others.

Spirit Possession as Historical Source

Spirit Possession as Historical Source PDF Author: Susan O'Brien
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description