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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
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: 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: Taiwo Afolabi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811906416
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
This book explores the role of national theatres, national cultural centres, cultural policy, festivals, and the film industry as creative and cultural performances hubs for exercising soft power and cultural diplomacy. It shows how can existing cultural and non-cultural infrastructures, sometimes referred to as the Orange Economy, open opportunities for diplomacy and soft power; ways by which cultural performance and creative practice can be re-centered in post-colonial Africa and in post-global pandemic era; and existing structures that cultural performers, diplomats, administrators, cultural entrepreneurs, and managers can leverage to re-enact cultural performance and creative practice on the continent. This volume is positioned within postcolonial discourse to amplify narratives, experiences and realities that are anti-oppressive especially within critical discourse.
Author: Andrew J. Strathern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044118
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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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.
![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: Hsain Ilahiane
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442281820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
Berbers, also known as Imazighen, are the ancient inhabitants of North Africa, but rarely have they formed an actual kingdom or separate nation state. Ranging anywhere between 15-50 million, depending on how they are classified, the Berbers have influenced the culture and religion of Roman North Africa and played key roles in the spread of Islam and its culture in North Africa, Spain, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, these dynamics have over time converted to redefine the field of Berber identity and its socio-political representations and symbols, making it an even more important issue in the 21st century. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Berbers contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy, and politics. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Berbers.
Author: Azra Hromadžić
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785338013
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
World-wide migration has an unsettling effect on social structures, especially on aging populations and eldercare. This volume investigates how taken-for-granted roles are challenged, intergenerational relationships transformed, economic ties recalibrated, technological innovations utilized, and spiritual relations pursued and desired, and asks what it means to care at a distance and to age abroad. What it does show is that trans-nationalization of care produces unprecedented convergences of people, objects and spaces that challenge our assumptions about the who, how, and where of care.
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:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004306056
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
This book analyses the various cultural, social, economic and historical aspects that are formative in African societies’ experiences of being in transit on the road to prosperity. It gives insight into transformations that took place in African societies in the past century.
