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BY MIKE MAGEE In George Packer's classic 2013 New Yorker article titled "Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans – and its money – to the realm of politics," there isContinue reading...

Front cover -- Half title -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Foreword by Tomeu Estelrich -- Simone Weil Bibliography and Abbreviations Used -- English Translations of Simone Weil -- Introduction -- From the Translator -- 1. Timeline and Profile -- 2. Encountering the Poor -- 3. Christic Mysticism and the Exodus of Self -- 4. A Paradoxical Testimony -- Conclusion: A Witness for Difficult Times -- Appendix I: Letter to Georges Bernanos (1938) -- Appendix II: Love (III) -- Appendix III: Letter to Maurice Schumann -- Appendix IV: Come With Me (Prologue) -- Bibliography -- Back cover

By tracing the steps of Domingos Alvares, a powerful African healer and vodun priest, James Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.

While the early scholars thought that magic practices and beliefs would soon disappear, research from the second half of the twentieth and 21th centuries in Europe testifies to the fact that many people continue to believe in the effects of magic, and that counter-magic continues to be practiced. This paper gives a short overview of magic-related beliefs and practices in 21th century rural Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is based on fieldwork that I conducted in the countryside from 2016 to 2019, among the population of all three major ethnic groups, i.e., Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, as well as some Roma. Fear of magic is rather widespread: many interlocutors claimed to have suffered the consequences of bewitchment or narrated about the bewitchment experiences of their close relatives and acquaintances. While narratives on bewitchments referring to the time before the war were often related to bewitched cows and milk, after the war they mainly concern psychological and psychosomatic disorders, anxiety or depression, marital problems, problems within the family, but also unacceptable behaviour (such as aggressiveness, insubordination, cheating etc.) as well as infertility and bachelorhood, which are most often explained as a consequence of someone else's magic. To counteract the effects of bewitchment, people turn to various specialists, among whom the most popular are Muslim clerics called hodžas. In spite of their help against bewitchment, their reputation is generally extremely ambivalent: dealing with "magic" is considered to be contrary to Islamic teachings; taking money from people in distress is deemed problematic; and their knowledge triggers ambivalent attitudes.

1. Trade of wildlife for use in traditional medicines, rituals, magical spells and cultural practices occurs globally and has been studied mostly in Africa and Asia. 2. The grey slender loris Loris lydekkerianus is used for both medicinal and ritual purposes, but little information is available on how the user is meant to extract their medicinal properties, or the potential impact these practices have on the species' populations. 3. From 2014-2021, we used open-ended interviews with 293 informants in three slender loris range states in Southern India to collect qualitative information on people's beliefs regarding the use of slender lorises in traditional medicine, black magic rituals and other cultural practices. To understand this further, we analysed data on 139 live slender loris rescues from three rescue and rehabilitation centres and one government organization in Bengaluru, India collected over an 18- year period. 4. We found that 116/139 live individuals had been involved in black magic rituals, including piercing, or burning the body and the eyes. These ritual practices occurred more often to female slender lorises and during the new moon. Data from 293 inter-views revealed that astrologers regularly use live lorises for fortune-telling or for warding off evil. Slender loris body parts are used to make traditional folk medicine, develop black magic potions that bring people harm, hypnotize people or to thwart evil. 5. Habitat loss and anthropogenic pressures, coupled with the existing slender loris trade for cultural practices, are a cause for grave concern. Numerous deep-rooted superstitious beliefs and rituals continue to thrive in modern India, and this is potentially one of the major threats to India's already imperilled slender loris population. More research into the prevalence of loris use for black magic is needed to assess the impact on species sustainability.