Where Humans and Spirits Meet (eBook)

The Politics of Rituals and Identified Spirits in Zanzibar

Kjersti Larsen (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2008
184 Seiten
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
978-0-85745-056-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Zanzibar, an island off the East African coast, with its Muslim and Swahili population, offers rich material for this study of identity, religion, and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the phenomenon of spirit possession in Zanzibar Town and the relationships created between humans and spirits; it provides a way to apprehend how society is constituted and conceived and, thus, discusses Zanzibari understandings of what it means to be human.

Autor

Kjersti Larsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and African Studies at the Department of Ethnography, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. She has carried out fieldwork in Zanzibar since 1984 and since 1997 has also conducted fieldwork in Northern Sudan.

Inhalt

Map of the Western Indian Ocean
Preface and Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction


Considering perspectives on spirit possession

The fieldwork: people, engagement and context

The fieldwork: ritual participation

Performance, meaning and reflexivity

Ritual, communication and enactment

Knowledge, experience and forms of negotiation

The book


Chapter 2. Introduction to Zanzibar: the place, its politics and organization


A view of the past and the present

Identity, social privileges and political reorganization

A plural society

Gender, distinctions and effects in everyday and ritual life

Gender, ritual participation and knowledge


Chapter 3. Spirits, possession and personhood


The position of spirits

Spirits are beings with a worldly existence

Spirit possession and practices

Personhood, notions of strength and self-control

Experiencing spirits


Chapter 4. Makabila, people and spirits


Articulation of differences and the problem of identity

Identification of a spirit

The demands of spirits belonging to different makabila

The world of spirits and human beings


Chapter 5. Human concerns, spirits and recreation of relationships


How the spirits reveal their presence in the human world

Communication between humans and spirits

The ritual group and the ritual framework

Ngoma ya sheitani: a celebration and a cure


Chapter 6. Between self and other: body and mind


Ngoma ya ruhani

States of body and states of mind

A bodily experience of spirits

Losing oneself to the spirit

Altered states of body, altered states of mind


Chapter 7. Gender: relations, markers and sexuality


Gender and complementarity

Concealment and disclosure

Acts of disclosure and moral ambiguity

Enactment and perceptions of the body

Strict categories in a flexible universe

Gender images and human practices


Chapter 8. Women, men and gendered spirits


A ngoma ya kibuki ritual

Matters of affection, pride and self-control

Presentation, representation and excess

Comedy, parody and the ways of humans and spirits

Body, aesthetics, and gender images

On reflections and acts of transgression


Chapter 9. Conclusion: social identities and dramatization of the other


An aesthetic moving together

Improvisation, play and the dramatization of a life-world

Reflections on embodiment and modes of knowing


Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Reihe/Serie: Social Identities
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Weitere Religionen
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Anthropology of Religion, Anthropology (General), Performance Studies • Religion
• ISBN-10: 0-85745-056-5 / 0857450565
• ISBN-13: 978-0-85745-056-2 / 9780857450562