This book seeks a reconsideration of the phenomenon of sorcery and related categories. The contributors to the volume explore the different perspectives on human sociality and social and political constitution that practices typically understood as sorcery, magic and ritual reveal. In doing so the authors are concerned to break away from the dictates of a western externalist rationalist understanding of these phenomena without falling into the trap of mysticism. The articles address a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas.
Table of Content
Introduction: Outside All Reason – Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology
B. Kapferer
Chapter 1. Anthroposophy and Voodoo in Dominican-Haitian Borderlands
M. Brendbekken
Chapter 2. The Smell of Death: Theft, Disgust and Ritual Practice in Central Lombok, Indonesia
K.G. Telle
Chapter 3. Sorcery, Modernity and the Constitutive Imaginary: Hybridising Continuities
B. Kapferer
Chapter 4. The Sorcerer as the Absented Third Person: Formations of Fear and Anger in Vanuatu
K. Rio
Chapter 5. Sorcerous Technologies and Religious Innovation in Sri Lanka
R. Bastin
Chapter 6. Maleficent Fetishes and the Sensual Order of the Uncanny in South West Congo
R. Devisch
Chapter 7. Fantasy in Practice: Projection and Ontrojection, or the Witch and the Spirit-Medium
M. Lambek
Chapter 8. The Discourse of ‘Ritual Murder’: Popular Reaction to Political Leaders in Botswana
O. Gulbrandsen
Chapter 9. Strange Fruit: The South African Truth Commission and Demonic Economies of Violence
A. Feldman
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University and Honorary Professor at University College London.
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