Description
Book Synopsis Based on vivid and colorful case studies about Mafiosi, priests, mothers, and migrants, the author offers new perspectives on the anthropology of religion and magic through categories of landscape, the body, human practice, and material experience. The focus on women as religious practitioners is linked to the idea of religion as a primary mode of production that creates and helps to maintain human reserves in a fast changing, male-dominated world. It is through this mechanism that the Catholic Church, the oldest existing bureaucratic agency of globalization, has maintained its power. Exploring aspects of spirit experiences, trance, the cult of saints, official ecclesiastical cults, and especially witchcraft, this book reveals the explosive, sometimes violent creativity of religion, its relation to magic, and its multi-facetted social value for humans as reflected in the religiously based, pragmatic realism of everyday life in the Mediterranean.
Trade Review “Hauschild has produced a visceral ethnographic account from the perspective of healers that also subtly addresses questions about the production of ethnographic data.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Table of Contents List of Figures
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Linda, the Woman Who Helps
Chapter 2. Women, Men, Books
Chapter 3. Vito and the Spirits
Chapter 4. The Cursed
Chapter 5. Bitter Truths
Chapter 6. The Ancestral Line of the Magi
Chapter 7. Can Priests Fly?
Chapter 8. The Good Shepherd
Chapter 9. Carnival
Chapter 10. The Cement of Power
Chapter 11. The Nightmare
Bibliography
Index
