Ethnographic Sorcery
eBook - PDF

Ethnographic Sorcery

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Ethnographic Sorcery

About this book

According to the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. While conducting research among these Muedans, anthropologist Harry G. West made a revealing discovery—for many of them, West's efforts to elaborate an ethnographic vision of their world was itself a form of sorcery. In Ethnographic Sorcery, West explores the fascinating issues provoked by this equation.

A key theme of West's research into sorcery is that one sorcerer's claims can be challenged or reversed by other sorcerers. After West's attempt to construct a metaphorical interpretation of Muedan assertions that the lions prowling their villages are fabricated by sorcerers is disputed by his Muedan research collaborators, West realized that ethnography and sorcery indeed have much in common. Rather than abandoning ethnography, West draws inspiration from this connection, arguing that anthropologists, along with the people they study, can scarcely avoid interpreting the world they inhabit, and that we are all, inescapably, ethnographic sorcerers.

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Yes, you can access Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Scienze sociali & Antropologia. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Misunderstanding
  5. In Search of the Forward-Looking Peasant
  6. “This Must Be Studied Scientifically”
  7. Belief as Metaphor
  8. “The Problem May Lie There”
  9. Whose Metaphors?
  10. Powers of Perspective and Persuasion
  11. Making Meaning, Making the World
  12. Masked and Dangerous
  13. Articulated Visions
  14. Bridging Domains
  15. Working with Indeterminacy
  16. Doctors Kalamatatu
  17. Ethnographic Sorcery
  18. Circular Arguments
  19. Notes
  20. References
  21. Index