Book picks similar to
Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande by E.E. Evans-Pritchard
anthropology
non-fiction
nonfiction
ethnography
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer
Diane Wolkstein - 1983
Illustrated with visual artifacts of the period. With the long-awaited publication of this book, we have for the first time in any modern literary form one of the most vital and important of ancient myths: that of Inanna, the world's first goddess of recorded history and the beloved deity of the ancient Sumerians.The stories and hymns of Inanna (known to the Semites as Ishtar) are inscribed on clay tablets which date back to 2,000 B.C. Over the past forty years, these cuneiform tablets have gradually been restored and deciphered by a small group of international scholars. In this groundbreaking book, Samuel Noah Kramer, the preeminent living expert on Sumer, and Diane Wolkstein, a gifted storyteller and folklorist, have retranslated, ordered, and combined the fragmented pieces of the Cycle of Inanna into a unified whole that presents for the first time an authentic portrait of the goddess from her adolescence to her completed womanhood and godship. We see Inanna in all her aspects: as girl, lover, wife, seeker, decision maker, ruler; we witness the Queen of Heaven and Earth as the voluptuous center and source of all fertile power and the unequaled goddess of love.Illustrated throughout with cylinder seals and other artifacts of the period, the beautifully rendered images guide the reader through Inanna's realm on a journey parallel to the one evoked by the text. And the carefully wrought commentaries providing an historical overview, textual interpretations, and aannotations on the art at once explicate and amplify the power, wonder, and mystery embedded in these ancient tales.Inanna--the world's first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible--is tender, erotic, frightening, and compassionate. It is a compelling myth that is timely in its rediscovery."A great masterpiece of universal literature."--Mircea Eliade
Orientalism
Edward W. Said - 1978
This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.
Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
Pierre Clastres - 1974
How then could our own "societies of the State" ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why?Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called "primitive societies," and especially on the discourses with which "civilized" (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that the State is the ultimate and logical density of all societies. On the contrary, Clastres develops a whole alternate and always affirmative political technology based on values such as leisure, prestige, and generosity.Through individual essays he explores and deftly situates the anarchistic political and social roles of storytelling, homosexuality, jokes, ruinous gift-giving, and the torturous ritual marking of the body, placing them within an economy of power and desire very different from our own, one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible. Though power itself is shown to be inseparable from the richest and most complex forms of social life, the State is seen as a specific but grotesque aberration peculiar only to certain societies, not least of which is our own.Not for sale in the U.K. and British Commonwealth, South Africa, Burma, Jordan, and Iraq.
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
Starhawk - 1999
This bestselling classic is both an unparalleled reference on the practices and philosophies of Witchcraft and a guide to the life-affirming ways in which readers can turn to the Goddess to deepen their sense of personal pride, develop their inner power, and integrate mind, body, and spirit. Starhawk's brilliant, comprehensive overview of the growth, suppression, and modern-day re-emergence of Wicca as a Goddess-worshipping religion has left an indelible mark on the feminist spiritual consciousness.In a new introduction, Starhawk reveals the ways in which Goddess religion and the practice of ritual have adapted and developed over the last twenty years, and she reflects on the ways in which these changes have influenced and enhanced her original ideas. In the face of an ever-changing world, this invaluable spiritual guidebook is more relevant than ever.
The World's Religions
Huston Smith - 1958
He convincingly conveys the unique appeal and gifts of each of the traditions and reveals their hold on the human heart and imagination.
Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (Anthropology, Culture and Society)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen - 1995
A revised and updated edition of this unique best-selling guide to social and cultural anthropology.
Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom
Marshall Sahlins - 1981
for Social Anthropology in Oceania, Special Pubs. No. 1Hawaiian culture as it met foreign traders and settlers is the context for Sahlins's structuralist methodology of historical interpretation.
Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman - 1999
This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meanaing.Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny
Amartya Sen - 2006
Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war.
The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
Robert Graves - 1948
In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.
Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
Manfred B. Steger - 2003
A growing number of scholars and political activists have invoked the term to describe a variety of changing economic, political, cultural, ideological, and environmental processes that are alleged to have accelerated in the last few decades. Rather than forcing such a complex social phenomenon into a single conceptual framework, Manfred Steger presents globalization in plain, readable English as a multifaceted process encompassing global, regional, and local aspects of social life. In addition to explaining the various dimensions of globalization, the author explores whether globalization should be considered a good or bad thing--a question that has been hotly debated in classrooms, boardrooms, and on the streets.
Sociology
Anthony Giddens - 1982
The fifth edition preserves the lucid, lively and comprehensive qualities which marked the book in its earlier versions. Numerous student learning aids are provided.
The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion
Daniel McCoy - 2016
As you’d expect from Daniel McCoy, the creator of the enduringly popular website Norse Mythology for Smart People, it’s written to scholarly standards, but in a simple, clear, and entertaining style that’s easy to understand and a pleasure to read. It includes gripping retellings of no less than 34 epic Norse myths – more than any other book in the field – while also providing an equally comprehensive overview of the fascinating Viking religion of which Norse mythology was a part. You’ll learn about the Vikings’ gods and goddesses, their concept of fate, their views on the afterlife, their moral code, how they thought the universe was structured, how they practiced their religion, the role that magic played in their lives, and much more. With its inclusion of the latest groundbreaking research in the field, The Viking Spirit is the ultimate introduction to the timeless splendor of Norse mythology and religion for the 21st Century.
From Ritual to Romance
Jessie Laidlay Weston - 1920
S. Eliot as one of the chief sources for his great poem "The Waste Land," Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance remains a landmark of anthropological and mythological scholarship. In this book she explores the origins of the Grail legend, arguing that it dates back to a primitive vegetation cult and only later was shaped by Celtic and Christian lore.To prove her thesis, Weston unites folkloric and Christian elements by using printed texts to prove the parallels existing between each and every feature of the legend of the Holy Grail and the recorded symbolism of the ancient mystery cults. Specifically, she finds the origin of the Grail legend in a Gnostic text that served as a link between such cults and later Celtic and Christian elaborations of the myth.With erudition and critical acumen, the author provides illuminating insights into diverse aspects of the legend: the task of the hero; the freeing of the waters; medieval and modern forms of nature ritual; the symbols of the cult (cup, lance, sword, stone, etc.); the symbolism of the fisher king; the significance of such deities as Tammuz, Adonis, Mithra, and Attis; the meaning of the adventure of the Perilous Chapel in Grail romances; and much more.Awarded the Crawshay Prize in 1920, this scholarly yet highly readable study will interest any student of the Arthurian legends, mythology, ancient religion, and Eliot's poetry.
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
Carol F. Karlsen - 1987
A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events at Salem.More than three hundred years later, the question "Why?" still haunts us. Why were these and other women likely witches—vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession? Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.