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- Binde, Per, 1956
(författare)
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Bodies of vital matter: Notions of life force and transcendence in traditional southern Italy
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Bodies of Vital Matter presents an innovative study that explores folk beliefs relating to the vital force of the human body and to the transcendence of the corporal. The time frame is the period from the unification of Italy to the Second World War. There are three principal themes of investigation. A first theme is loss of vital force believed to result from the influence of other persons and beings. Topics discussed in this context are folk medicine and ideas concerning the humours of the human body, as well as beliefs relating to "thefts" of mother’s milk, the evil eye, blood-sucking witches and the harmful influences of menstruating women. A second theme is imageries of how life energy can be replenished from external sources. Here the focus is on popular cults of grace-giving martyrs and saints, on rural sanctuaries that connect with creative natural forces, and on the celebration of Easter and the Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Roman Catholic Mass. The third principal theme is the denial of death as expressed in practices of entombment and by ideas about regeneration of new life from death; among the topics discussed are death and burial practices, the celebration of All Souls Day, and natural symbols of renewal and rebirth. Bodies of Vital Matter is based on data extracted from a comprehensive body of texts written by South Italian ethnographers and folklorists in the decades around the turn of the century, complemented by the author’s field observations in contemporary Italy. Interpretative social anthropology constitutes the theoretical framework. The comparision of customs and beliefs from hundreds of South Italian villages and towns reveals patterns of cultural meaning that could hardly be discerned in a study focusing on a single local community. The systemic cultural approach used in the study has a remarkable power of explanation. A wide variety of seemingly unrelated beliefs, practices and myths are shown to be generated by a core set of cultural presuppositions. Features of social organization are crucial to the interpretation of the ethnography. In particular, various forms of reciprocity in social interaction are seen as fundamental in shaping ideas about transference of vital force, both between individuals and from divine beings to human beings. The notion of "la famiglia" as a social unit of paramount importance is a key to the understanding of representations of corporal transcendence and family continuity.
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- Djup, Annica, 1966
(författare)
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Personhood and human-spirit relations among the Yuracaré of the Bolivian Amazon
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This anthropological dissertation is based on fieldwork carried out among Yuracaré people in the Bolivian Amazon. The study explores local conceptions of personhood and human-spirit relations by looking into Yuracaré life cycle practices and associated ideas, particularly in connection with birth, girls’ initiation (menarche), illness and death. I also consider forms through which men and women, in their daily life, take account of and interrelate with numerous spirit agencies that are thought to inhabit the surrounding environment. Principal among these are the various kinds of Owner spirits that live in the forest, the river, the ground, as well as in trees and certain other plants. Analytically, the study addresses ideas about soul, body, gender, and human-spirit interactions. It develops a particular perspective on human personhood which emphasises the corporal shaping of individuals – effected through food and behavioural proscriptions and life cycle rituals – for the insurance of health and for the endowment of the physical, social and moral qualities essential to attaining ideal male and female Yuracaré persons in adulthood. A corollary of this perspective is that gender differentiation to a significant extent is construed as actively created and constituted “within” the bodies of children. The study also explores the fact that this particular understanding of personhood is combined with a conception that individuals, especially children, are highly vulnerable to spirit predation, in the form of Owner spirits capturing and carrying away the souls of their victims. In the human world, such soul captures by spirits manifest themselves as illness and death. In the dissertation it is proposed that these two ideological features – the importance given to body-shaping practices, and the constant concern for soul loss – form part of a cosmology, widespread in Amazonia, which posits bodies and persons’ sociocosmological identities as intrinsically transformable and mutable.
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