A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead

Representing the Body in Popular Media

Tim Posada

• Publisher: Fortress Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216262053
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book focuses on debates surrounding the body, soul, and spirit, and addresses other aspects of theological anthropology in service to that angle.

What unseen forces govern fictional settings across films, television, and print? Are the bodies they portray useless, evil, spirited, or maybe soulless? This book interrogates the body in examples like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Castlevania, Get Out, Pan's Labyrinth, and Watchmen. While theological anthropology examines the body and soul, human agency, evil, and the image of God in reality, a new method of analysis, spirited anthropology, explores how these concepts operate in fictional worlds. From Captain America's virtue and Clayface's fluid body to Mike Myers' evil shape and transcendence in virtual reality and digital avatars, world-building across media elevates, diminishes, redefines, and mutates the body. The book contends that these spirited anthropologies present worlds occasionally injected with politics and social concerns from this reality, regardless of how ghosts, aliens, or virtual simulations try to strange the matter on display in each story.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Imprisoned Body: Key Terms for a Spirited Anthropology
• Chapter 1: The Perfect Body: Captain America in the Realm of Forms
• Chapter 2: The Soulless Body: Watchmen, American Gods, and the Divine Unconscious
• Chapter 3: The Spirited Body: Pan’s Labyrinth Confronts the Tyranny of Dualism
• Chapter 4: The Evil Body: A Good Villain Is Hard to Define
• Chapter 5: The Racialized Body: Get Out as Analogy and Inverted Commentary
• Chapter 6: The Gendered Body: Imago Dei Versus the Male Gaze
• Chapter 7: The Fluid Body: Physical Mutation, Psychic Evolution
• Chapter 8: The Transcendent Body: Ascension, Digital Avatars, and Ghosts in the Machine
• Chapter 9: The Communal Body: The Powers That Be Waltz with Pennywise the Dancing Clown
• Conclusion: The Whole Body: Bending Through Material Reality and the Spirit World
• Epilogue: The Useless Body: Finding Human Value Amid a (Zombie) Pandemic
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author