Search results for ""Author Diana Espirito Santo""
University Press of Florida Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo
Studying the relationships cultivated by mediums between the living and the dead.Based on extensive fieldwork among espiritistas and their patrons in Havana, this book makes the surprising claim that Spiritist practices are fundamentally a project of developing the self. When mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead, argues Diana Espírito Santo, they develop, learn, sense, dream, and connect to multiple spirits (muertos), expanding the borders of the self. This understanding of selfhood is radically different from Enlightenment ideas of an autonomous, bounded self and holds fascinating implications for prophecy, healing, and self-consciousness. Developing the Dead shows how Espiritismo's self-making process permeates all aspects of life, not only for its own practitioners but also for those of other Afro-Cuban religions.
£32.35
The University of Chicago Press 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.
£25.20
