9780226081809_

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something elsesymbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entitieswith their own histories, motivations, and social interactionsproviding a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents.

The contributors tour the spiritual globethe globe of nonthingsin essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the people of the streets in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.

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The Social Life of Spirits

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