Popular memorial practices, including traditional jazz funeral processions, are continually being refashioned and re-appropriated for devotional, commercial, and political purposes in New Orleans. Belying nostalgic representations of the jazz funeral as a "dying tradition," neighborhood-based parades produced by working-class African Americans continue to provide a space for the articulation of local subjectivities, particularly for those most affected by the violence of contemporary urban life. [blackness, memory, New Orleans, urban space, performance, violence, heritage]

In 1948, John Gillin published the first sustained account of a ritual healing ceremony for soul loss as performed in the highlands of Guatemala. Reprinted in Lessa and Vogt’s Reader in Comparative Religion (1958, 1965), this article played a foundational role for later work in ethnomedicine and the anthropology of religion. Gillin’s analysis centered on the way relations between Indian and ladino populations were renegotiated within the ritual imaginary. Newly available archival materials show that Gillin underestimated the fear and animosity dividing these groups, misconstrued the political situation of the curandero (traditional healer), and effaced the extent to which gender and domestic violence were at issue in both illness and healing. These materials also afford glimpses into the system of power and knowledge in which Gillin participated and that helped shape his research agenda. An epilogue extends this discussion into the Cold War context. [ritual, susto, curanderismo, Mesoamerica, John Gillin, history of anthropology, Cold War]

In this article, I situate a seemingly fantastic series of events in Nigeria in a context that renders them meaningful and acknowledges their intimate connection to everyday issues of wealth, power, and inequality. Focusing on popular stories of the occult circulating in the wake of a widely publicized case of ritual killing, I argue that these stories depict popular discontent over inequality, but also Nigerians’ ambivalence about and critical awareness of their own role in maintaining patron-clientism. [Nigeria, patronage, inequality, witchcraft]

In the anthropology of ritual, one productive area of debate has focused on how the formal and conventional character of ritualized behavior is linked to, or distinct from, informal, routine, and pragmatic activity. In this article, I engage and extend this debate by analyzing various understandings of the Muslim act of prayer (salat) among a women’s piety movement in contemporary Cairo, Egypt. Rather than assume a priori that conventional gestures and behaviors necessarily accomplish the same goals, I inquire into the variable relationships assigned to rule-governed behavior within different conceptions of the self under particular regimes of truth, power, and authority. In the second half of the article, I link my analysis of ritual to issues of embodiment, emotions, and individual autonomy, examining parallel conceptions of salat that coexist in some tension in contemporary Egypt. [ritual, embodiment, emotions, discipline, subject formation, Islam]

In the northern Japanese memorial practice of "bride-doll marriage," which emerged during World War II, the soul of a dead child is married to a spirit spouse embodied in a consecrated figurine. These marriages stimulate limited exchange relationships between the living and dead by building on old and new modes of gifting and circulation, including the prestation of Bodhisattva statues, affinity, transmigration, and the abstraction of social relations made possible by modern commodity forms. Motivated by a strong sense of unfulfilled obligation toward the deceased, these restricted acts of exchange culminate in the cessation of exchange transactions between the living and specific dead persons. In this respect, spirit marriage is profoundly unlike conventional marriage among the living, which leads to ramifying exchange relations between a growing number of persons over time. [Japan, memorialization, mortuary ritual, commodities, Buddhism]

In this article, I analyze how the Maasai of Kenya are presented in three different tourist performances--postcolonial, postindependence, and postmodern. Each site tells a different story, an alternate version of history, with its own perspective on the role of ethnicity and heritage within the nation-state and in the world community. Using a method of controlled comparison, I expand the theoretical dialogue in tourism debates by departing from the monolithic discourse that has characterized so much of tourism scholarship. [ethnic tourism, Maasai, globalization, performance, authenticity, ethnography, media images]

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even in Sweden: racism, racialized spaces, and the popular geographical imagination (Pred)
Uli Linke