"In Dante's Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere m…
Jeanne Favret-Saada is arguably one of France’s most brilliant anthropologists, and The Anti-Witch is nothing less than a masterpiece. A synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation, where the line between researcher and subject is blurred—if not erased—The Ant…
How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sier…
Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade in Sierra Leone have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialsm, and the country's ten-year rebel war.
The witchcraft confessions given by Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn, 1662, are widely celebrated as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Their descriptive power, vivid imagery and contentious subject-matter have attracted considerable interest on both academic and popular leve…
"Among the most important sources for understanding the cultures, religions, and systems of thought of ancient Mesopotamia is the large corpus of magical and medical texts directed against witchcraft. The most important of these texts is the Akkadian series Maqlû ("Burning"). Th…
This book deals with a fascinating and original claim in 16th-century Europe. Witches should be cured, not executed. It was the physician and scholar Johann Wier (1515-1588) who challenged the dominant idea. For his defense of witches, more than three centuries later, Sigmund Fr…
"Contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence under China's Emperor Wu"--Provided by publisher.