Search results for ""Author Stephan Palmié""
The University of Chicago Press Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa
A comparative investigation of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science that aims to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices. Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest and protoethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of the spirits of the dead? How do genomics and “ancestry projects” converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the United States took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecué onto the streets of Philadelphia? Can we consider Afro-Cuban spirit possession as a form of historical knowledge production? By writing about Afro-Cuban ritual in relation to Western scientific practice, and vice versa, Palmié hopes to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices, revealing the logic that brings together enchantment and experiment.
£24.43
HAU The Mythology in Our Language – Remarks on Frazer`s Golden Bough
In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough," published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact - continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology's theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an anthropologist, in the hope that it can kickstart a new era of interdisciplinary fertilization. Wittgenstein's remarks on ritual, magic, religion, belief, ceremony, and Frazer's own logical presuppositions are as lucid and thought - provoking now as they were in Wittgenstein's day. Anthropologists find themselves asking many of the same questions as Wittgenstein - and in a reflection of that, this volume is fleshed out with a series of engagements with Wittgenstein's ideas by some of the world's leading anthropologists, including Veena Das, David Graeber, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Michael Puett, and Carlo Severi.
£28.00