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Brilliantly elucidating and weaving together the forces of indigenous sovereignty, colonialism, and personal health, Potent Mana offers a uniquely holistic and intimate portrait of the long-term effects of colonialism on an indigenous people., the kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiians). An ethnographic exploration based on fifteen months of research, the book moves the conversation on the dangerous effects of colonialism forward by exploring the theories and practices of Native Hawaiians engaged in decolonization. Decades of substance abuse, mental illness, depression, language loss, and the concomitant dispossession from sacred lands have accompanied colonialism. Consequently, healing, both mental and physical, are essential to decolonization and indigenous sovereignty in twenty-first century Hawai'i. Native Hawaiian-run treatment centers and clinics more than political rallies are centers for healing and decolonization on O'ahu today. The effects of colonialism and the measures taken to counter and move beyond it, as Wende Marshall convincingly argues, do not take place solely on a supralocal level but shatteringly involve the physical and emotional well-being of real individuals. Becoming decolonized is about overcoming the shame of colonialism, and requires a process of remembering the traditions of ancestors and reinterpreting and rewriting histories that have only been told from a colonial point of view. Decolonization is an indigenous perspective, and an understanding that health was impossible without political power and cultural integrity.
‘Mana’, a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai‘i, and French Polynesia—and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana’s complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways.
What allows certain individuals and groups to maintain control over the actions and lives of others? Linguistic anthropologist Elizabeth Keating went to the island of Pohnpei, in Micronesia, and studied how people use language and other semiotic codes to reproduce and manipulate status differences. The result is this inside view of how language works to create power and social inequality. This book challenges widely held theories on the nature of social stratification, including women's roles in creating hierarchy.
Examine the infinite variety of charms and fetishes found in every civilization, from the distant past to the present. Learn the entire history of these tools, their geography, how they are part of each man and woman's search for connection with spiritual forces, and how to make and use them. Loaded with hundreds of illustrations, this is the ultimate reference guide.
To learn to think like a shaman is to attune yourself to a magical spectrum of infinite possibilities, unseen truths, alternative realities, and spiritual support. When a shaman likes what’s happening, they know how to make it better, and when they don’t, they know how to change it. The Shaman’s Mind is a book that teaches the reader how to align and transform their own mind into one that sees the world through the lens of the indigenous healers of old. Based on the Omega workshop by the same name.
The ruler in the Indic States of Southeast Asia was seen not as the "head of state" but as the center or navel of the world. Like polities, persons and houses were and are viewed as centered spaces (locations) where spiritual potency can gather. Shelly Errington explores the politics of constituting and maintaining such centered socio-political spaces in a former Indic State called Luwu, which lies in South Sulawesi (Celebes), Indonesia. The meaning of political life and the ways its cultural forms were and are sustained depend on locally construed ideas of "power" or spiritual potency and "the person," which the author explores in detail. She views the polity neither as a frame in which political actors pursue advantage nor as a structure for extracting wealth but as a hierarchical system of signs ultimately backed by force--but force which was not fully centralized and whose import must be understood within ideas about spiritual potency widespread in the region. Although focused on Luwu, the book's theoretical scope is wide, and it ranges comparatively over a broad geographical area, making a contribution to ethnographic, historical, and regional studies as well as to the study of politics in nonsecular societies. Part One traces how the person, the house, and the polity are constituted symbolically in everyday practices as centered spaces. Part Two examines how centers can be de-centered, while Part Three explores the structure that tended to hold centers together in Luwu and other Indic States. The introduction and the three conclusions (each of the three being broader than the last in comparative scope) locate the author's views with respect to other current theoretical approaches to power and culture. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Roots of Power tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.
Essays mainly on pseudo-religious topics (spiritualism, mythical lore, art, origins of religion), partly taken from authors Custom and myth; includes p. 15-21; the bullroarer; p. 36-45; star myths; p. 62-75; the art of savages; pl 107-128; theories of the origins of religion; astronomy.
Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion, anthropology, sociology, and cultural history. Defining Magic is the first volume to assemble key texts that aim at determining the nature of magic, establish its boundaries and key features, and explain its working. The reader brings together seminal writings from antiquity to today. The texts have been selected on the strength of their success in defining magic as a category, their impact on future scholarship, and their originality. The writings are divided into chronological sections and each essay is separately introduced for student readers. Together, these texts - from Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology - reveal the breadth of critical approaches and responses to defining what is magic. CONTRIBUTORS: Aquinas, Augustine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Dennis Diderot, Emile Durkheim, Edward Evans-Pritchard, James Frazer, Susan Greenwood, Robin Horton, Edmund Leach, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Christopher Lehrich, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Plato, Pliny, Plotin, Isidore of Sevilla, Jesper Sorensen, Kimberley Stratton, Randall Styers, Edward Tylor
Taj Odin Xavier returns home to find his father dead and his king ready to surrender the key to the city-state he's always called home. His friends are all dead. But remnants from his travels and things found and earned along the way push the renegade army threatening Eternis to decimation. After saving the city from capture, Taj turns his aggression towards the city that let his father down; the same man that spent a lifetime serving it. He cast down the churches of all faiths, save those of Draconic origin. He allows the Draconic Order to remain prevalent in the city due to it being the dragons that come down to help him. After, he focuses his newfound aggression towards the Republic of New Magic, more specifically Marko Kane, the killer of King Gerear's eldest son. Taj tries to utilize what heart he has left to rekindle the romance between him and Destiny but an act he deems as betrayal is too much for him. With Destiny forcing him to stay out of it, he orders a newfound ally to execute the culprit. With matters settled in Eternis, he and his new allies set sail for the Republic of New Magic; Runethedian's first outpost against the unending ships and armies of the New Threat, sometimes called the Northern Threat. At first, he plans only to stay long enough to avenge his king's eldest son. But then the war begins to consume him and the things the Father Vampire left inside him begin to writhe in his chest once again. This proves to Taj he's not fully gone. But those powers prove useful in the fight against the New Threat. In the end, he ultimately decides to sail to the heart of the beast in hopes of either securing a truce or ending its life. With every passing day, Taj Odin Xavier loses more of his humanity. Will any of it remain once the war against the New Threat is over? That is, assuming he lives of course.