Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia (Asian Anthropologies, 5)
Brand: Berghahn Books
Categories: Books, Religion & Spirituality, New Age & Spirituality



Dimensions: 6 x 0.63 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0857453587
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0857453580
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Print length: 238 pages
Publication date: March 1, 2012
subtitle: Hardcover – March 1, 2012
author: Kirsten W. Endres Andrea Lauser
review: Editorial Reviews Review “ This rich, articulate volume builds on and extends earlier explorations of the intricate connections between popular religious practices and modernity in the region. It offers fascinating insights into the diverse and endlessly creative transformations of Southeast Asian spirit worlds in the late 1990s and 2000s – a period of capitalist growth and widening affluence but also great social, political, and economic instability. ” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute “… a great volume that represents a remarkable contribution to the anthropological debate on ‘popular religion’ in contemporary Southeast Asia. ” · Anthropos “… the editors have carefully selected papers that not only present engrossing ethnographic reports but also show theoretical sophistication. We are treated to explorations of theoretical issues spanning from materiality and ontology to an anthropological critique of modernity and rationality…Overall, this volume as a whole has presented a highly spirited argument against the modernity-secularization thesis. Insights have been provided to under-explored issues in anthropological studies…This has been an enlightening read. ” · Asian Anthropologist About the Author Kirsten W. Endres is a Senior Research Fellow and Head of Research Group at Department II, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale. Her monograph, Performing the Divine: Mediums, Markets and Modernity in Urban Vietnam (2011), examines the flourishing of urban spirit mediumship as part of the recent revival of popular religion in Vietnam. Andrea Lauser is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Georg-August-University, Göttingen, Germany. She is a member of and lecturer in a new area studies network “Dynamics of Religion in Southeast-Asia,” composed of the Southeast Asia departments of Hamburg, Berlin, Muenster, Heidelberg and Göttingen, and funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).