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2 books match the query 'Multidisciplinary Approaches'

cover of Provincialising nature: multidisciplinary approaches to the politics of the environment in Latin America

Provincialising nature

multidisciplinary approaches to the politics of the environment in Latin America

Edited by Michela Coletta and Malayna Raftopoulos

University of London Press, 2016

Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America offers a timely analysis of some of the crucial challenges, contradictions and promises within current environmental discourses and practices in the region. This book shows both challenging scenarios and original perspectives that have emerged in Latin America in relation to the globally urgent issues of climate change and the environmental crisis. Two interconnected analytical frameworks guide the discussions in the book: the relationship between nature, knowledge and identity and their role in understanding recent and current practices of climate change and environmental policy. The different chapters in this volume contribute to this debate by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on particular aspects of these two frameworks and through a multidirectional outlook that links the local, national, regional and transnational levels of inquiry across a diverse geographical spectrum.
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cover of Spirit Possession: Multidisciplinary Approaches to a Worldwide Phenomenon

Spirit Possession

Multidisciplinary Approaches to a Worldwide Phenomenon

Éva Pócs

Central European University Press, 2022

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

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