Suchergebnisse

This book places the Manchester School in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. Werbner reveals not only the cosmopolitan distinctiveness but also the force of creative difference in the ideas, interdisciplinary approaches, and travelling theories of the intimate circle around Max Gluckman.

This social biography illuminates one hundred years of family history in western Zimbabwe from the colonial period to the present. At the heart of the book are the life stories of several generations of Kalanga men and women in a single extended family as told to the author during his two extended research visits. Members of the family are active agents throughout the book, marshalling their own concepts of character, family mortality, and public authority to contend with the colonial world and its postcolonial heritage. The book records, from generation to generation, a heritage of both endurance and empowerment in the face of large-scale eviction, displacement from home, the threat of imposed resettlement, guerilla war, and near starvation in a food blockade. (DÜI-Hff)

This article makes a critical contribution to interpretive anthropology by recovering its interest in the moral imagination, while linking this to the poetics of wisdom divination, primarily among Tswapong of Botswana and more widely across a vast part of Southern Africa. This mode of divination appeals to imaginative moral reflection and ethical deliberation along with practical wisdom in the quest for well‐being. The esoteric oral literature in wisdom divination is rich in cross‐cultural understandings, transmitted over considerable barriers, and re‐created over centuries. Its evocative praise poetry, having no known author, is archived in the memories of experts, the diviners, and is recited and interpreted selectively during diagnostic séances. Yet anthropologists and literary scholars have not paid serious attention to the oral poetry and its remarkable wide‐ranging archive. Against that, this article documents the acrobatic stylistics of the divinatory poetry and shows how it appeals artfully for reflexivity, for heightened consciousness, and for unmasking the hidden in everyday life. The main analysis carries forward an anthropology of ethics that overcomes the usual division of labour between the study of ethics and aesthetics.

Sociolinguistics and poetics -- Deep dialogue with Evans-Pritchard -- In praise of the moral imagination -- Acrobatic stylistics, agonistic vision -- From tablet archive to wisdom seances -- Poetics and archives -- Family seances : rhetoric, deliberations, and decisions -- Cosmic and personal understandings : diviners, headmen, strangers -- From hooved archive to charismatic seances -- A charismatic diviner's archive : hooved divination -- The cross-over: originality, hybridity, and metamorphosis -- The charismatic seance : arguments, intimacy, and intimations -- Conclusion: in comparison

[Book contents:] Holy hustling -- Between the prophetic and the pastoral -- The lives of prophets and bishops -- Escalating crisis : faith and trust "under destruction" -- Schism, innovation, and continuity -- Personal nearness and sincerity in prayer -- Diagnosis, reconnaissance, and fabrication -- Prescribing Christian cosmetics : moving bodies and intercorporeality -- Old and new in Chrisitian reformation -- From film to book--dianoia and noesis