Traveling Spirits

Traveling Spirits PDF Author: Gertrud Hüwelmeier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135224161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Globalisation has provided tools for religious actors and organisations to thrive in migrant communities, as fluid transnational networks help project messages across borders and from a local to a global audience. This volume addresses several under-examined questions of religious practices within migrant communities and transnational religious networks.

Traveling Spirits

Traveling Spirits PDF Author: Gertrud Hüwelmeier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135224161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Globalisation has provided tools for religious actors and organisations to thrive in migrant communities, as fluid transnational networks help project messages across borders and from a local to a global audience. This volume addresses several under-examined questions of religious practices within migrant communities and transnational religious networks.

Traveling Spirit Masters

Traveling Spirit Masters PDF Author: Deborah Kapchan
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819501360
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance—and indeed all sacred music—is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Engaging the Spirit World

Engaging the Spirit World PDF Author: Kirsten W. Endres
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857453599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In many parts of the contemporary world, spirit beliefs and practices have taken on a pivotal role in addressing the discontinuities and uncertainties of modern life. The myriad ways in which devotees engage the spirit world show the tremendous creative potential of these practices and their innate adaptability to changing times and circumstances. Through in-depth anthropological case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, the contributors to this book investigate the role and impact of different social, political, and economic dynamics in the reconfiguration of local spirit worlds in modern Southeast Asia. Their findings contribute to the re-enchantment debate by revealing that the “spirited modernities” that have emerged in the process not only embody a distinct feature of the contemporary moment, but also invite a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity itself.

Mattering the Invisible

Mattering the Invisible PDF Author: Diana Espírito Santo
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800730675
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Exploring how technological apparatuses “capture” invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

Alive with Spirits

Alive with Spirits PDF Author: Althaea Sebastiani
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 1633413241
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
“A wonderful and moving introduction to animism, as well as a fantastic introduction to witchcraft; even the seasoned practitioner will gain so much from reading Sebastiani’s offering.” —Mhara Starling, author of Welsh Witchcraft: A Guide to the Spirits, Lore, and Magic of Wales At the root of most spiritual traditions is the aspiration to realize one’s birthright: an intimate connection with the Land and the spiritual energies that inhabit it. This connection with the Land and its spirits is perhaps nowhere more powerfully felt than in the various traditions of Paganism and witchcraft. But the conditions of modern society strain that relationship, leaving us feeling separated from our craft and unable to feel that deep and vital connection. Discover a path to fully embrace a world filled with spirits, communion with the Land, and a greater sense of belonging in the world—a worldview known as animism. Explore animism in a hands-on way that teaches through firsthand direct experiences. Through embodied exercises based in wholeness, you’ll learn to see the world more fully for what it is and to better understand your place in it. ​Learn the three general types of local spirits Explore the importance of relationships and what it means to be in community Uncover the way that the wholeness of the world is reflected in the wholeness of the self Begin to nurture right relationships with your local spirits Alive with Spirits provides you with a firm foundation from which to transform your witchcraft practice, rooting it into the Land and in strong, respectful relationships with the spirits around you.

Having the Spirit of Christ

Having the Spirit of Christ PDF Author: Giovanni B. Bazzana
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300249519
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
A provocative reinterpretation of accounts of spirit possession and exorcism in early Christianity The earliest Christian writings are filled with stories of possession and exorcism, which were crucial for the activity of the historical Jesus and for the practice of the earliest groups of his followers. Most critical scholarship, however, regularly marginalizes these topics or discards them altogether in reconstructing early Christian history. This innovative book approaches the study of possession from a different methodological angle by using a comparative lens that includes contemporary ethnographies of possession cross-culturally. Possession, besides being a harmful event that should be exorcized, can also have a positive role in many cultures. Often it helps individuals and groups to reflect on and reshape their identity, to plan their moral actions, and to remember in a most vivid way their past. When read in light of these materials, these ancient documents reveal the religious, cultural, and social meaning that the experience of possession had for the early Christ groups.

Spirits without Borders

Spirits without Borders PDF Author: K. Fjelstad
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119700
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Spirits without Borders is an ethnographic study of the transnational and multicultural expansion of Vietnam's Mother Goddess Religion and its spirit possession ritual. The work explores how and why the ritual spread from Vietnam to the US and back again and the impact of ritual transnationalism in both countries.

Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath

Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath PDF Author: Barbara Alice Mann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190456477
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin. Both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth" but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Alice Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to their earliest versions and sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Indigenous culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the purportedly lost, and often caricatured, world of Indigenous American thought.

Cosmopolitan Sociability

Cosmopolitan Sociability PDF Author: Tsypylma Darieva
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317979311
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
This book approaches the concept of cosmopolitan sociability as a cultural or territorial rootedness that facilitates a simultaneous openness to shared human emotions, experiences, and aspirations. Cosmopolitan Sociability critiques definitions of cosmopolitanism as a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality that arise from contemporary experiences of mobility and globalization. Challenging these assumptions, the book explores the degree to which a 'cosmopolitan dimension' can be practised within particular religious communities, diasporic ties, or gendered migrant identities in different parts of the world. A wide variety of expert contributors offer rich ethnographic insights into the interplay of social interactions and cosmopolitan sociability. In this way the book contributes significantly to ethnic and migration studies, global anthropology, social theory, and religious and cultural studies. Cosmopolitan Sociability was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia

Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia PDF Author: Bryan S. Turner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317636457
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.