- Description
- x, 272 pages : illustrations; 23 cm
- Summary
- "Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, a Jesuit priest and proto-ethnographer of the "New World" who compared the lives of the Iroquois to the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of spirits of the dead? Where do genomics and "ancestry projects" converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the US took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecué onto the streets of Philadelphia? Can we consider Afro-Cuban spirit possession as an extreme form of historical knowledge production? By writing about Afro-Cuban ritual in relation to Western scientific practice, and vice versa, Palmié hopes to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices, revealing the logics that bring together enchantment and experiment. Throughout, Palmié is also levelling a specific anthropological challenge: he takes issue with the much-discussed "ontological turn," especially with those thinkers who promote notions of radical alterity and utter incommensurability. Instead, Palmié suggests that radical comparison with "boundary objects" can offer something new to the ethnographic enterprise"--
- Subject
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Contents
- EP and the Problem of Other Worlds -- Thinking with Ngangas about Transplant Surgery, Personhood, and the Limits of "Objectively Necessary Appearances" -- Thinking with Ifá about Genomic Ancestry Profiles and "Racecraft" -- Thinking with Abakuá about Early Analog Acoustic Technology and the "Dialectics of Ensoniment" -- Thinking with the Cajón pa' los Muertos about Historicist Knowledge and Its Conditions of Impossibility -- Thinking with Otanes about Mid-Twentieth-Century American Anthropology -- Epilogue : Thinking with Tomás about My Own Work.
- ISBN
- 9780226825922
- 0226825922
- 9780226825946
- 0226825949
- 9780226825939 (canceled/invalid)
- LCCN
- 2023001532
- OCLC
- YBP 2023001532
- Author
Palmié, Stephan, author.
- Title
Thinking with ngangas : what Afro-Cuban ritual can tell us about scientific practice and vice versa / Stephan Palmié.
- Publisher
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023.
- Copyright Date
©2023
- Type of Content
text
- Type of Medium
unmediated
- Type of Carrier
volume
- Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.