Raquel Romberg's Books

Healing Dramas

Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Healing Dramas

Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy. What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective. Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

313

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292774613

ISBN 13

9780292774612

Witchcraft and Welfare

Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Witchcraft and Welfare

Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujería emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujería has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

336

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292774605

ISBN 13

9780292774605

Witchcraft and Welfare

Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Witchcraft and Welfare

Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

336

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292774605

ISBN 13

9780292774605

Suicide Social Dramas

Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere

By: Haim Hazan,Raquel Romberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Suicide Social Dramas

Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere

By: Haim Hazan,Raquel Romberg

Through an ethnohistorical chronicling of the emotionally-laden treatment of selected suicide media-events, this book offers a neo-Durkheimean account of suicide, addressing its social-moral threat and the ensuing need to gloss over its unsettling incomprehensibility. An analysis of the social dramas, cultural performances, and suicide talk aired in the Israeli public sphere, it suggests that such public glossing practices atone for and bring about the symbolic rectification of the socially detrimental effects of suicide. Drawing on Durkheim’s thought on the social significance of suicide and the sacred cohesive power of society’s self-representations through rituals and commemorations, the authors revamp the contemporary pertinence of these cultural devices, showing how, in the process of reconstituting and redressing the disrupted order, suicide talk constitutes a revival mechanism of communal ‘life giving’. A rekindling of the Durkheimian approach to suicide that examines how society deals with suicide’s shattering of normative we-feelings, Suicide Social Dramas: Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory, Israel studies, suicide studies, and the interpretation of societal and cultural processes.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

253

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000411591

ISBN 13

9781000411591

Healing Dramas

Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Healing Dramas

Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By: Raquel Romberg

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

313

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292774613

ISBN 13

9780292774612

Risk Work

Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987

By: Faye Raquel Gleisser

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Risk Work

Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987

By: Faye Raquel Gleisser

This book tells the story of US performance artists who adopted guerrilla tactics during the 1970s and 1980s in response to the "cultural domestication of militancy" in the United States. In the 1960s, as US news was covering anti-colonialist resistance in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, they fashioned the persona of the "guerrilla fighter" as the embodiment of a "foreign" agent of threat. A key example was Che Guevara, resplendent in his beret and camouflage garb. It wasn't long before the nation was consuming endless images of militant protestors donning berets and carrying guns in gestures conjuring Che. As the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Young Lords, and Weathermen adopted the uniforms and the tactics of armed and psychological interference, artists across the country began to use sabotage, hijacking, deception, and other "risk work" to wage conceptual war on both art and society. They fabricated Chicano gang wars, held TV talk shows hosts hostage, and posed as hijackers in the garb of guerrilla-terrorists made iconic by the news"--

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

293

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226826465

ISBN 13

9780226826462

Suicide Social Dramas

Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere

By: Haim Hazan,Raquel Romberg

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Suicide Social Dramas

Life-Giving Moral Breakdowns in the Israeli Public Sphere

By: Haim Hazan,Raquel Romberg

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

253

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000411591

ISBN 13

9781000411591

Book's by Raquel Romberg

Healing Dramas

Healing Dramas

Witchcraft and Welfare

Witchcraft and Welfare

Witchcraft and Welfare

Witchcraft and Welfare

Suicide Social Dramas

Suicide Social Dramas

Healing Dramas

Healing Dramas

Risk Work

Risk Work

Suicide Social Dramas

Suicide Social Dramas

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email