This remarkable and controversial book explores the ways in which colonial Europeans have been represented in African ritual art and drama. Through a profound re-examination of Western concepts of otherness and mimesis, the anthropologist and art historian Fritz Kramer shows tha…
Enter an ethnographically surreal work located in a fictive Latin American country: The Magic of the State focuses on the theater of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead - Blacks and Indians, Europe's fetishized others - pass into the bodies of…
Enter an ethnographically surreal work located in a fictive Latin American country: The Magic of the State focuses on the theater of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead - Blacks and Indians, Europe's fetishized others - pass into the bodies of…
Charismatic visions and the role of mediums; possession ceremonies and ecstatic trance; the social contexts and practices of invocation: these are a number of the intriguing topics addressed by this comprehensive undergraduate textbook, the first of its kind to offer a thorough …
"This ... work ... examines spirit possession rituals in relation to interpersonal, institutional, structural and expressive processes, and underscores the potential of possession to adapt to changing circumstances. Each chapter offers ethnographically grounded and theoretically…
""This ethnography is more like a film than a book, so well does Stoller evoke the color, sight, sounds, and movements of Songhay possession ceremonies.""-Choice ""Stoller brilliantly recreates the reality of spirit presence; hosts are what they mediate, and spirits become flesh…
