Ritual Theory and Attitudes to Agency in Brazilian Spirit Possession 1
نویسنده
چکیده
This article works with theory of ritual in order to begin addressing a series of questions raised by Brazilian spirit possession rituals (in Kardecism and Umbanda). Four contributions to theory of ritual highlight relevant conceptual issues: Humphrey and Laidlaw on non-intentionality; Bloch on deference; Houseman and Severi on social relations; and Kapferer on virtuality. Strawson’s philosophical distinction between objective and reactive attitudes toward intentionality is used to make a case (i) that certain formal aspects of ritual (indexicals) serve to (ii) mark culturally-variable attitudes to agency within rituals, which are related to, but fundamentally distinct from, non-ritual attitudes to agency.
منابع مشابه
Conceptualizing Spirit Possession: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence
We report the findings of a programmatic series of studies designed to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of cross-culturally recurrent forms of possession belief. Possession phenomena are frequently portrayed in the anthropological literature as incompatible with common cultural assumptions and biases guiding Western notions of ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘personhood’’ and as resisting generalization a...
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