Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else – symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do".The Social Life of Spirits" challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities – with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions – providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents.
The contributors tour the spiritual globe – the globe of nonthings – in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the "people of the streets" in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.
About the Author
Ruy Blanes is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bergen and associate researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon. He is co-editor of "Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections". He lives in Bergen, Norway.
Diana Espirito Santo is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Center in Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon. She lives in Lisbon, Portugal.
Reviews
"'The Social Life of Spirits' makes the argument of the 'social life of things' go full circle, cogently arguing that immaterial spirits, just like material things, should be approached as social beings with a life and trajectory. Going beyond beliefs or representations, it proposes to describe spirits through their effects, asking how are spirits made to happen and what do they make happen. This is a brilliant book" – Roger Sansi, University of London
"This is a great volume of essays, a real testament to the subtleties that emerge out of empirical research – even when on something so ostensibly 'un-empirical' as spirits. It makes signal contributions to classic and contemporary debates on presence, evidence, mediation, and materiality that have animated the anthropology of religion ever since E. B. Tylor's Victorian heyday" – Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics and Political Science
"What might the world look like if it were to contain all of those things – 'entities' – that are meant, in one way or another, not to exist? How might an anthropology of 'non-entities' – spirits, dreams, histories, ethers, utopias – proceed without doing violence to its objects' peculiar manners of (non-)disclosure? A vertiginous exercise in anthropological 'abduction' – thinking backwards, from effects to plausible causes – this book grounds conceptions of the ineffable in a meticulous survey of its traces, on people, in moments, at places. More than just a 'social life of spirits', the volume offers us glimpses of the irreducibly spiritual life of the social" – Martin Holbraad, University College London
