A01=Peter Geschiere
africa
anthropology
Author_Peter Geschiere
betrayal
borders
brazil
cameroon
Category=JHMC
Category=QRYX5
charlatans
domesticity
doubt
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
europe
family
folk religion
healers
history
home
intimacy
islam
java
kinshasa
kinship
magic
maka
melanesia
migration
nation
national identity
nganga
nonfiction
oceania
pentecostalism
purity
satan
social relationships
sociality
sociology
spirituality
transgression
trust
uncanny
witchcraft
Product details
- ISBN 9780226047584
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 09 Aug 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Dante's Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere sketches it as a central ember at the core of human relationships, one brutally revealed in the practice of witchcraft. Examining witchcraft in its variety of forms throughout the globe, he shows how this often misunderstood practice is deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords. In doing so, he offers not only a comprehensive look at contemporary witchcraft but also a fresh - if troubling - new way to think about intimacy itself. Geschiere begins in the forests of southeast Cameroon with the Maka, who fear "witchcraft of the house" above all else. Drawing a variety of local conceptions of intimacy into a global arc, he tracks notions of the home and family - and witchcraft's transgression of them - throughout Africa, Europe, Brazil, and Oceania, showing that witchcraft provides powerful ways of addressing issues that are crucial to social relationships.
Indeed, by uncovering the link between intimacy and witchcraft in so many parts of the world, he paints a provocative picture of human sociality that scrutinizes some of the most prevalent views held by contemporary social science. One of the few books to situate witchcraft in a global context, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust is at once a theoretical tour de force and an empirically rich and lucid take on a difficult-to-understand spiritual practice and the private spaces it so greatly affects.
Peter Geschiere is professor of African anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of many books, including, most recently The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
