The Chamorro people inhabit an archipelago known as the Mariana Islands located in the western Pacific Ocean. Seventeenth-century Chamorros took ancestral skulls into warfare against the Spanish in the period of the Spanish conquest. The possession of such skulls manifested profound symbolic power. In the aftermath of the war, the survivors converted to Catholicism, amalgamating their ancient religious practices with that faith. Resistance through the centuries against Spanish, Japanese, and American colonial power has been anchored in Chamorro cultural continuity, albeit in an ostensibly fragmented and augmented form. A site of strategic US military bases, Guam now anticipates further military build-up. War magic and warrior religion are lenses that enable the study of colonial domination where the battle lines fault across military, economic, and political frames toward cultural fronts.
Search Results
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 123 items for :
- "enchantment" x
- Refine by Access: All content x
- Refine by Content Type: All x
Chants of Re-enchantment
Chamorro Spiritual Resistance to Colonial Domination
D. S. Farrer and James D. Sellmann
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 127–148 (22 total)
Britain, Brexit and Euroscepticism
Anthropological Perspectives on Angry Politics, Technopopulism and the UK Referendum
Cris Shore
should see it instead in terms of ‘kinship, spirits, ancestor worship and the circulation of cultural treasures’ ( Verdery 1999: 26 ). In short, politics is about ‘enchantment’; about narratives that animate and enliven people, and much of this is located
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–22 (22 total)
Pragmatic Action and Enchanted Worlds
A Black Tiger Rite of Commemoration
Michael Roberts
Since Weber's time, it has been believed that 'enchantment' progressively gave way to secular rationalism and its disenchanted ways. This essay breaks the twinning of enchantment with 'irrationality' in developing the argument that enchanted practices and pragmatic methods co-exist fruitfully in the activities of the LTTE. Circumstantial evidence, arising from pictures and descriptions of hero rituals sponsored by the LTTE, provides the foundation for this argument. It is suggested that the Saivite universe of being has nourished these symbolic compositions. A photograph of Black Tigers paying homage to their dead with guns in the left hand and flowers in the right provides a condensed demonstration as well as a point of departure for this suggestion. It is a moment of conjunctiveness that has the potential to fuse past, present, and future, thus achieving 'fusion force'.
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2006
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 73–102 (30 total)
The Enchanted North
Nature, Place and Gender in ‘Off the Grid’ Social Media Representations
Emelie Larsson and Jenny Ingridsdotter
have not collected any kind of data from followers. Theory When analysing the influencers’ social media content, we relied on theories on enchantment, place and gender. In social theory, the modern capitalist society has often been pictured as
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2023
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 45–67 (23 total)
Henry Miller Travels in Greece
Leonidas Sotiropoulos and
everywhere in little tumblers standing between the quiet, peaceful couples, gave me the feeling that there was something holy about the place, something nourishing and sustaining” (13). Enchantment It could be argued that nearly every page of Miller’s book
Speak softly to the dead
The uses of enchantment in American home funerals
Alexa Hagerty
Home funerals are a small social movement in which American families care for their dead at home. This article argues that home funerals offer a generative view of the tension between the body as biological and social construction, matter and meaning, object and subject. In home funerals, the dead body is enacted as possessing a fading spark of agency and subjectivity, animating the dead against the grain of medical and scientific conceptions of the corpse as inert object. Home funerals provocatively engage questions about the forms of care and communication available between the living and the dead.
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Nov 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 428–442 (14 total)
The Ecology of Images
Seeing and the Study of Religion
David Morgan
Opening with a review of leading accounts of the image as an object with agency, this article proposes to study religious images within the webs or networks that endow them with agency. The example of a well-known medieval reliquary serves to show how what I refer to as 'focal objects' participate in the creation of assemblages that engage human and non-human actors in the social construction of the sacred. Focal objects are nodal points that act as interfaces with the network, particularly with invisible agents within it. As participants in a network, images are like masks, offering access to what looks through the mask at viewers engaged in a complex of relations that constructs a visual field or the ecology of an image.
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 83–105 (23 total)
‘Sensuous Singularity’
Hamish Fulton’s Cairngorm Walk-Texts
Alan Macpherson
Bennett’s writing on enchantment in her 2001 book, The Enchantment of Modern Life . 7 The ability, or striving, to recognise things in their sensuous singularity is an integral component in the cultivation of an enchanted sensibility, which, for Bennett
A Ritual Demystified
The Work of Anti-wonder among Sufi Reformists and Traditionalists in a Macedonian Roma Neighborhood
Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
( djindjia ). On that occasion, a mixed audience of mainly reformists and some rival traditionalists was so unremittingly hostile to the deceased and his family that the mystical enchantment and ritual efficacy of zarf were refused from the start. This case
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 30–43 (14 total)
Contradictions in Tourism
The Promise and Pitfalls of Ecotourism as a Manifold Capitalist Fix
Robert Fletcher and Katja Neves
This article reviews an interdisciplinary literature exploring the relationship between tourism and capitalism focused on ecotourism in particular. One of this literature's most salient features is to highlight ecotourism's function in employing capitalist mechanisms to address problems of capitalist development itself by attempting to resolve a series of contradictions intrinsic to the accumulation process, including: economic stagnation due to overaccumulation (time/space x); growing inequality and social unrest (social x); limitations on capital accumulation resulting from ecological degradation (environmental x); a widespread sense of alienation between humans and nonhuman natures; and a loss of “enchantment“ due to capitalist rationalization. Hence, widespread advocacy of ecotourism as a “panacea“ for diverse social and environmental ills can be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of its potential as a manifold capitalist x as well. The article concludes by outlining a number of possible directions for future research suggested by this review.
In Environment and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 60–77 (18 total)