Traveling Spirit Masters

Author : Deborah Kapchan
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819501360
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Traveling Spirit Masters written by Deborah Kapchan and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance—and indeed all sacred music—is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Author : Edward E. Curtis IV
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469618125
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Call of Bilal written by Edward E. Curtis IV and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do people in the African diaspora practice Islam? While the term "Black Muslim" may conjure images of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, millions of African-descended Muslims around the globe have no connection to the American-based Nation of Islam. The Call of Bilal is a penetrating account of the rich diversity of Islamic religious practice among Africana Muslims worldwide. Covering North Africa and the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Europe, and the Americas, Edward E. Curtis IV reveals a fascinating range of religious activities--from the observance of the five pillars of Islam and the creation of transnational Sufi networks to the veneration of African saints and political struggles for racial justice. Weaving together ethnographic fieldwork and historical perspectives, Curtis shows how Africana Muslims interpret not only their religious identities but also their attachments to the African diaspora. For some, the dispersal of African people across time and space has been understood as a mere physical scattering or perhaps an economic opportunity. For others, it has been a metaphysical and spiritual exile of the soul from its sacred land and eternal home.

Author : Daniel Fischlin
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472128647
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Sound Changes written by Daniel Fischlin and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound Changes responds to a need in improvisation studies for more work that addresses the diversity of global improvisatory practices and argues that by beginning to understand the particular, material experiences of sonic realities that are different from our own, we can address the host of other factors that are imparted or sublimated in performance. These factors range from the intimate affect associated with a particular performer’s capacity to generate a distinctive “voicing,” or the addition of an unexpected sonic intervention only possible with one particular configuration of players in a specific space and time. Through a series of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania, Sound Changes offers readers an introduction to a range of musical expressions across the globe in which improvisation plays a key role and the book demonstrates that improvisation is a vital site for the production of emergent social relationships and meanings. As it does this work, Sound Changes situates the increasingly transcultural dimensions of improvised music in relation to emergent networks and technologies, changing patterns of migration and immigration, shifts in the political economy of music, and other social, cultural, and economic factors. Improvisation studies is a recently developed, but growing, interdisciplinary field of study. The discipline—which has only truly come into focus in the early part of the twenty-first century—has been building a lexicon of key terms and developing assumptions about core practices. Yet, the full breadth of improvisatory practices has remained a vexed, if not impossibly ambitious, subject of study. This volume offers a step forward in the movement away from critical tendencies that tend to homogenize and reduce practices and vocabularies in the name of the familiar. Chapter authors include John Corbett, Jason Robinson, Kirstie Dorr, Beverley Milton-Edwards, Sally MacArthur, Waldo Garrido, Jemma Decristo, Mike Heffley, Monica Dalidowicz, and Hafez Modirzadeh.

Author : Lizzie Ogle
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040039014
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Rhythm, Ancestrality and Spirit in Maracatu de Nação and Candomblé written by Lizzie Ogle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhythm, Ancestrality and Spirit in Maracatu de Nação and Candomblé: Repercussions examines how the highly percussive carnival practice of Maracatu de nação – an Afro-Brazilian musical and spiritual tradition originating in the north- eastern state of Pernambuco – has evolved in relation to the cosmology of Candomblé Nagô in the urban centres of Recife and Olinda, Brazil. Offering one of the first detailed ethnographic explorations into maracatu de nação, Candomblé Nagô and the connections between them, this book is a collaborative enquiry into frequently negated sacred and ancestral knowledge systems central to Afro-Brazilian musical-spiritual practices. Using an innovative research framework which integrates musical and rhythmic practices with spiritual, ancestral and ecological knowledge systems, readers are provided with an intimate ethnography based on eight years of friendship and learning with the oldest continuously active maracatu group in the world, Nação Leão Coroado, and its most recent leader, Mestre Afonso Aguiar (1948– 2018). This is a valuable text for those interested in ethnomusicology, performance studies, religious and cultural anthropology, decolonial research methods and writing styles, eco- musicology and Afro-diasporic, Brazilian and Latin American studies.

Author : Joseph Chetrit
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793624933
Total Pages : 507 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Jews and Muslims in Morocco written by Joseph Chetrit and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multiple traditions of Jewish origins in Morocco emphasize the distinctiveness of Moroccan Jewry as indigenous to the area, rooted in its earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the region. The creative interaction of Moroccan Jewry with the Arab and Berber cultures was noted in the Jews’ use of Morocco’s multiple languages and dialects, characteristic poetry, and musical works as well as their shared magical rites and popular texts and proverbs. In Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds historians, anthropologists, musicologists, Rabbinic scholars, Arabists, and linguists analyze this culture, in all its complexity and hybridity. The volume’s collection of essays span political and social interactions throughout history, cultural commonalities, traditions, and halakhic developments. As Jewish life in Morocco has dwindled, much of what is left are traditions maintained in Moroccan ex-pat communities, and memories of those who stayed and those who left. The volume concludes with shared memories from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual from Morocco, a Moroccan Muslim scholar, an analysis of a visual memoir painted by the nineteenth-century artist, Eugène Delacroix, and a photo essay of the vanished world of Jewish life in Morocco.

Author : Éva Pócs
Publisher : Central European University Press
ISBN 13 : 9633864143
Total Pages : 556 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Spirit Possession written by Éva Pócs and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possession, a seemingly irrational phenomenon, has posed challenges to generations of scholars rooted in Western notions of body-soul dualism, self and personhood, and a whole set of presuppositions inherited from Christian models of possession that was “good” or “bad.” The authors of the essays in this book present a new and more promising approach. They conceive spirit possession as a form of communication, of expressivity, of culturally defined behavior that should be understood in the context of local, vernacular theories and empiric reflections. With the aim of reformulating the comparative anthropology of spirit possession, the editors have opened corridors between previously separate areas of research. Together, anthropologists and historians working on several historical periods and in different European, African, South American, and Asian cultural areas attempt to redefine the very concept of possession, freeing it from the Western notion of the self and more clearly delineating it from related matters such as witchcraft, devotion, or mysticism. The book also provides an overview of new research directions, including novel methods of participant observation and approaches to spirit possession as indigenous historiography

Author : Masters of the Spirit World (Spirit)
Publisher : Celestial Voices Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 9780979891762
Total Pages : 58 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Masters' Reincarnation Handbook written by Masters of the Spirit World (Spirit) and published by Celestial Voices Incorporated. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Masters, a large group of spirit guides on the other side give their definitive account of the journey of the soul over many human lifetimes.

Author : Christopher Walker
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book What's Next written by Christopher Walker and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Robert Lebling
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0857730630
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Legends of the Fire Spirits written by Robert Lebling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-30 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'An energy, a pulse form of quantum physics perhaps, alive at the margins of sleep or madness, and more often in the whispering of a single unwelcome thought.' The Economist According to Islamic tradition, Allah created three types of beings: angels, made of light; humans, made of earth; and jinn, made of smokeless fire. Supernatural, shape-shifting, intelligent and blessed with free will and remarkable powers, jinn have over the ages been given many names - demon, spirit, ghoul, genie, ifrit and shaitan. Neither human nor immortal, they roam the earth inhabiting dark and empty places, luring humans to their deaths or demonically possessing them if harmed or offended. Despite the fact they cannot be seen, jinn are said to be strangely human-like - marrying, bearing children, forming communities and tribes, eating, sleeping, playing and facing judgement like any other human. They are ever-present partners in the human experience, causing endless mischief, providing amazing services and sometimes inducing sheer terror. Believed in by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and from all faiths, jinn have played a particularly central role in the literature, culture and belief systems of the Middle East and the Islamic world. Legends of the Fire Spirits explores through time and across nations the enduring phenomenon of the jinn. From North Africa to Central Asia, from the Mediterranean to sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, this riveting, often chilling, yet reasoned book draws on long-forgotten ancient testimonies, medieval histories, colonial records, anthropologist's reports and traveller's tales to explore the different types of jinn, their behaviour, society, culture and long history of contact with humankind. It documents their links with famous figures in history such as King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and illustrates the varied and vivid portrayals of jinn in world literature. In essence Legends of the Fire Spirits demonstrates the colourful diversity of human culture and the durability of faith and is a magnificent and indispensable portrayal of the rich folklore of the Islamic world.

Author : Chouki El Hamel
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139620045
Total Pages : 534 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Black Morocco written by Chouki El Hamel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.