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? If this is the case, would it raise another more supernatural reason for the Mexican state and the soldiers to watch over the corpse of Beltrán Leyva? What if the forensic staff did desecrate his corpse for a joke and later made the military afraid of the cosmological consequences of their act? Or, to put it differently, what if the symbolic ‘force’ of his corpse, which shows his and his rivals’ ‘will to kill and be killed’, was closely interlinked with the material life of the dead corpse? The substance of dead bodies To approach this line of investigation of the
-Botherers he is wholly engaged with also understanding what they think, and in how what they think – and how they get others to think those same things – inspires political behaviour. Freddy defines religion as blind faith in some unassailable Truth, not as something necessarily anchored in supernaturalism or belief in supernatural beings. He calls this non-supernaturally
entire human heritage could, on the basis of a supposed mal-pronunciation, be wiped out. The reference here is to a passage in Australian Aborigines concerning a certain ‘clever old witch’: ‘The aborigines had among them sorcerers and doctors, whom they believed to possess supernatural powers. In the Kolor tribe there was a sorceress well known in the Western district under the name of White Lady, who was the widow of the chief, and whose supernatural influence was much dreaded by all. 18 According
with Western psychiatric models that posited schizophrenia as a cross-culturally universal phenomenon linked to brain biology, he vehemently objected to the idea that the culture of the ‘normal’ African exhibited psychotic tendencies that paved a short, easy path to a schizophrenic break. Reacting to the body of literature claiming that African beliefs in the mystical properties of things and of the omnipresence of supernatural forces represented the kind of ‘logical’ break characteristic of European schizophrenics, Lambo noted that ‘primitive man's magic is no sign
harnessing of it. If the Kurumba were sorcerers, and had supernatural abilities, as their reputation had clearly indicated, then the harnessing of these powers for clients suggested that powers were there to be controlled. With the breakdown of clientage, ritual practices, and even the training of healers, these powers had become diffuse, hard to contain, and unleashed, so to speak
either of ‘trickery’ or ‘superficiality’. With it went an incurable love of the concrete, the empirical, and the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural – in short, an early tendency to a scientific attitude and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, and metaphysics’ (Berlin
( 1 ), 27–41 . Bass , Thomas ( 1997 ) ‘ Traditional African psychotherapy: An interview with Thomas Adeoye Lambo ’, in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural, ed. A. C. Lehmann and J. E. Myers , pp. 165–170 . Paolo Alto : Mayfield Publishing Company . Brodwin , Paul and
not related to the fear of spiritual contagion as in Hertz’s case, but rather to the fear of contagious violence. Obsessed as he is with ‘the fine line between repulsion and desire’ (Posel and Gupta 2009), Bataille notes that the violence of death constitutes ‘a supernatural peril which can be “caught” from the dead body’ and that the ‘desire to kill may take hold of us’ (Bataille 2006: 46–7). Therefore the dead body is subjected to taboo. Within the community, but less so when the dead body belongs to a stranger, the ‘taboo which lays hold on the others at the
their demarcated enclosures. They domesticate and sublimate it in ritual. I ask Lam and other people who have placed their parents’ urns in Buddhist temples why they did so. Echoing what others said, Lam replies: ‘I travel a lot for work. I worry that I may miss important dates in the ritual calendar.’ She means that monks’ prayers and the supernaturally potent milieu of the Buddhist temple provide ritual protection to her mother’s remains, even if she is absent. Her recently widowed father joins in the conversation and adds, ‘I worry about the neglect and abandonment
arrest him, he summoned the spirit of Dom Boaventura, leader of the 1912 Manufahi uprising against the Portuguese colonial power. With the aid of the spirit, Reinado gained invisibility and escaped past the SAS (Agence France-Presse 2007; Nygaard-Christensen 2011: 220–1). Various other groups, such as the martial arts groups (MAGs) and ritual arts groups (RAGs) that have mushroomed in the country but also allegedly the Sagrada Familia, regularly use ancestral worship in rituals to give them supernatural strengths and skills (Myrttinen 2010; Scambary et al. 2006). The