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As one of their great figures, the Dogon of Mali honor Abirɛ, a singer and prophet from the nineteenth century who composed the principal mourning songs. This book examines how these prophecies and songs form a poignant expression of ethnic Dogon philosophy.
Explores the dynamics of African masquerades and mask performances on the continent, linking performative expressions to societal characteristics. What is the meaning of masks and masquerades in African traditions and how can we understand their role in rituals and performances? Why do we find masks in some African regions and not in others, and what does this 'mask habitat' say about the general dynamics of masquerades in Africa? Though masks are among the most famous art icons of Africa, exploration of their uses and the way in which they articulate social characteristics of African societies has been underexamined. This book takes an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of masquerades on the African continent to show how mask rituals are an integral part of African indigenous religions and societies, and are informed by and linked to specific types of social and ecological conditions. Having established the commonalities of mask rituals and a mask typology, the authors look at the varieties of mask performances and the types of rituals in which masks function in rites of passage and in rituals of gender, power, and identity. The following chapters focus on different types of rituals featuring masks, from initiation and death ceremonies to secrecy, kingship, law and war. With its broad examination of the use of masks on the continent, from Angola to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DRC, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, this well illustrated book will stand as an authoritative study of the use of masks, of interest not only to those in African Studies but to anthropologists and ethnographers worldwide.
An eleven-volume guide to the geography, history, economy, government, culture and daily life of countries of the Middle East, western Asia and northern Africa.
"What The Singing Prophet Saw" Determines The Destiny of Humanity. Not just the destiny of humanity in general but our destiny, yours and mine. The-Singing-Prophet-Saw what was taking place during three hours of darkness where the sun and the moon, the keepers of time, were submerged in an Eternal Realm where time becomes like a drop in the ocean. When The-Lights went out the physical eyes of men could not see what was happening in The-Darkness; neither when it happened nor while we are reading what he saw. "What The Singing Prophet Saw" can only be seen like he saw it, with The-Eyes of The-HEART. A never ending tsunami of books bombard the intellects of men with unending opinions, theories and speculations on what we must know and believe in order to become who we were created to be. "What The Singing Prophet Saw" describes the awesome vision that provides the One-True-Answer, The-Only-Answer that removes the veil of darkness over Our-HEARTS. When we see "What The Singing Prophet Saw" we are changed. We don't change ourselves, We-Are-Changed. When we see What The Singing Prophet Saw" our destiny is determined. We don't determine our destiny; Our-Destiny is Determined by What We See. When you open Your-HEART to See "What The-Singing- Prophet Saw" you will see The-Vision that will free you from the blind opinions, theories and speculations of men with veils over their hearts. When we see "What The Singing Prophet Saw" we see The-Vision that is unlike any other vision that has been revealed to men; The-Vision that is cosmic, climatic and eternal. When you see it, you will know it. It Will Change YOUR-LIFE Forever. Heart to Heart, Larry
Ritual trance has always been closely associated with music—but why, and how? Gilbert Rouget offers and extended analysis of music and trance, concluding that no universal law can explain the relations between music and trance; they vary greatly and depend on the system of meaning of their cultural context. Rouget rigorously examines a worldwide corpus of data from ethnographic literature, but he also draws on the Bible, his own fieldwork in West Africa, and the writings of Plato, Ghazzali, and Rousseau. To organize this immense store of information, he develops a typology of trance based on symbolism and external manifestations. He outlines the fundamental distinctions between trance and ecstasy, shamanism and spirit possession, and communal and emotional trance. Music is analyzed in terms of performers, practices, instruments, and associations with dance. Each kind of trance draws strength from music in different ways at different points in a ritual, Rouget concludes. In possession trance, music induces the adept to identify himself with his deity and allows him to express this identification through dance. Forcefully rejecting pseudo-science and reductionism, Rouget demystifies the so-called theory of the neurophysiological effects of drumming on trance. He concludes that music's physiological and emotional effects are inseparable from patterns of collective representations and behavior, and that music and trance are linked in as many ways as there are cultural structures.
From hard-hitting New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi comes Book of Judas, a riveting religious thriller featuring beloved protagonist Alessandra Russo. When her infant son is placed in mortal danger, New York City reporter Alessandra Russo is forced to save him by tracking down the missing pages of the Gospel of Judas, a heretical manuscript that was unearthed in Al-Minya, Egypt, in the 1970s. The manuscript declares that Judas was the beloved, not the betrayer, of Jesus. The Gospel disappeared for decades before being rediscovered, rotted beyond repair, in a safety deposit box. Rumors insist that the most important pages had been stolen—pages that Alessandra now must find, if they even exist. Do the lost pages contain a secret that will challenge Christianity's core beliefs about the creation of life, or that might hold the power to unleash Armageddon? What if such explosive documents fell into the hands of modern-day terrorists, dictators, or religious fanatics? Alessandra plunges into a dark world of murder, conspiracy, and sexual depravity...and most importantly, a race against the clock to save her own child. In this exciting follow-up to The Sixth Station, award-winning journalist Linda Stasi brings her formidable investigative skills, big city street smarts, and fast-flying pen to a thriller that will leave readers breathless. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
In “When Malindy Sings” the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about the power of African American music, the “notes to make the sound come right.” In this book T. J. Anderson III, son of the brilliant composer, Thomas Anderson Jr., asserts that jazz became in the twentieth century not only a way of revising old musical forms, such as the spiritual and work song, but also a way of examining the African American social and cultural experience. He traces the growing history of jazz poetry and examines the work of four innovative and critically acclaimed African American poets whose work is informed by a jazz aesthetic: Stephen Jonas (1925?–1970) and the unjustly overlooked Bob Kaufman (1925–1986), who have affinities with Beat poetry; Jayne Cortez (1936– ), whose work is rooted in surrealism; and the difficult and demanding Nathaniel Mackey (1947– ), who has links to the language writers. Each fashioned a significant and vibrant body of work that employs several of the key elements of jazz. Anderson shows that through their use of complex musical and narrative weaves these poets incorporate both the tonal and performative structures of jazz and create work that articulates the African journey. From improvisation to polyrhythm, they crafted a unique poetics that expresses a profound debt to African American culture, one that highlights the crucial connection between music and literary production and links them to such contemporary writers as Michael Harper, Amiri Baraka, and Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as young recording artists—United Future Organization, Us3, and Groove Collection—who have successfully merged hip-hop poetry and jazz.
"Pitch and Revelation is the first book-length study of the poetry, prose, and dramatic literature of the African American poet Jay Wright (1934-). The authors premise their reading on joy as a foundational philosophical concept. In this, they follow Spinoza, who understood joy as that affect necessary for the construction of an intellectual love of God, leading into the infinite univocity of everything. Similarly, with Wright, joy leads to a visceral sense of what the authors call the great weave of the world. This weave is akin to the notion of entanglement made popular by physicists and contemporary scholars of Science Studies, such as Karen Barad, which speaks of the always ongoing, mutually constitutive connections of all matter and intellectual processes. By exhibiting and detailing the joy of reading Wright, Pitch and Revelation intends to help others chart their own paths into the intellectual, musical, and rhythmical territories of Wright's world so as to more fully experience joy in the world generally. Although the exhibitions of meaning making presented are instructive, they do not follow the "do as I do" or "do as I say" model of instructional texts. Instead,they invite the reader to "do along with us" as the authors make meaning from selections across Wright's erudite, dense, rhythmically fascinating, endlessly lyrical, highly structured, and seemingly hermetic body of work."--publisher's website.
Taking a unique anthropological apprach, Bush Base: Forest Farm explores the management of resources in third would development programmes. The contributors, all distinguished anthropologists with practical experience of development projects, focus on the role of human cultural imagination in the use of environmental resources. They challenge the traditional sharp distinction between human settlement and natual environment (farm or camp, forest or bush), and argue that development programmes should place at their centre an appreciation of people's cosmologies and cultural understandings.
