The Social Life of Spirits
Ruy Blanes (Ed.)
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Description for The Social Life of Spirits
Paperback. Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. This book challenges this notion. Editor(s): Blanes, Ruy Llera; Santo, Diana Espirito. Num Pages: 296 pages, 15 halftones. BIC Classification: JHMC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 230 x 153 x 19. Weight in Grams: 448.
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities - with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions - providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the ... Read more
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities - with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions - providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the ... Read more
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2013
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press United States
Number of pages
296
Condition
New
Number of Pages
312
Place of Publication
, United States
ISBN
9780226081779
SKU
V9780226081779
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1
About Ruy Blanes (Ed.)
Ruy Blanes is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bergen and associate researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon. He is coeditor of Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections. He lives in Bergen, Norway. Diana Espirito Santo is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Center in Anthropology at the New ... Read more
Reviews for The Social Life of Spirits
"The Social Life of Spirits makes the argument of the 'social life of things' go full circle, cogently arguing that immaterial spirits, just like material things, should be approached as social beings with a life and trajectory. Going beyond beliefs or representations, it proposes to describe spirits through their effects, asking how are spirits made to happen and what do ... Read more