Christian missions in Africa are commonly viewed as a blatant example of ethnocentrism. This stereotype partly exists because the day-to-day interaction between missionaries and Africans has so rarely been studied. This book shows how Africans and missionaries co-produced a Catholic Church in the Uluguru mountains of Eastern Tanzania in the late colonial period, thereby adapting each others' routines in the fields of initiation, education, magic, and religion. It explores how the presence of the mission resulted in a rift between spiritual and worldly magic, and in the underdevelopment of the capacity of Waluguru to manage their own practices of revelation.
Magic and Modernity is the first book to explore comparatively how magic--usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern--is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social sciences have studied how modern culture and institutions incorporated and even produced magic. This book is the first to adopt a comparative approach to the study of magic as something that has a place in modernity, and that helped to constitute modern society at local and global levels. The essays in this collection contribute to recent discussions in anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and sociology that increasingly question the extent to which modern self-conceptions are accurate reflections of a state of affairs in the world rather than cultural interventions.
The British Empire drew on the talents of many remarkable figures, whose lives reveal a wonderfully rich involvement with the crucial issues of the period. In many cases they left a legacy of travel writing, novels, biography and ethnography which made important contributions to our knowledge of other cultures."Writing, Travel and Empire" explores the lives and writings of eight such figures, including Sir George Grey, Gertrude Bell, Sir Hugh Clifford, and Roger Casement. All travelled the Empire - from Grey, the renowned colonial governor who undertook dangerous journeys to the interior of Australia, to Tom Harrisson, the emaciated polymath, war hero and Arctic explorer, whose time in the New Hebrides embraced both cannibalistic rituals and a meeting with film legend Douglas Fairbanks Sr, who sought Harrisson out for a Hollywood feature about savage life.All saw themselves as writers, despite their very different approaches and interests, and each was writing against a backdrop of the impending disappearance of indigenous cultures around the world. Writing from the margins of what was shortly to become the more formalised discipline of anthropology, their work yields interesting insights into both the issues of empire and the ways in which academic disciplines define the boundaries of their subject. Embracing themes such as gender and travel, racial science, the globalisation of 'native management' and the internal colonies, and with a geographical coverage that extends from South America to Russia via Africa and the South Seas, "Writing Travel and Empire" will engage all those with an interest in cultural geography, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, biography and travel writing.
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