The Social Life of Spirits
Ruy Blanes er post doktor her ved Institutt for Sosialantropologi i Bergen. Sammen med Diana Espírito Santo, har han editert en ny og spennende bok om ånders sosiale liv - The Social Life of Spirits. Publisert av Chicago Books, finnes boken nå i de elektroniske butikkhyllene.
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The Social Life of Spirits
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 spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.
Editors: Ruy Blanes and Diana Espírito Santo
"This is a brilliant book"
Roger Sansi, University of London
"More than just a ‘social life of spirits,’ the volume offers us glimpses of the irreducibly spiritual life of the social”
Martin Holbraad, University College London
“This is a great volume of essays, a real testament to the subtleties that emerge out of empirical research"
Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics and Political Science
Teksten er hentet fra University of Chicago Press 6.des.2013