Search

A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their ‘life’. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of ‘mind over matter’. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.

Christian missions in Africa are commonly viewed as a blatant example of ethnocentrism. This stereotype partly exists because the day-to-day interaction between missionaries and Africans has so rarely been studied. This book shows how Africans and missionaries co-produced a Catholic Church in the Uluguru mountains of Eastern Tanzania in the late colonial period, thereby adapting each others' routines in the fields of initiation, education, magic, and religion. It explores how the presence of the mission resulted in a rift between spiritual and worldly magic, and in the underdevelopment of the capacity of Waluguru to manage their own practices of revelation.

The book's originality lies in subjecting to critical scrutiny a technology that is so often taken for granted in discussions on democracy. We know that the secret ballot was a good thing, and that it is an old technique, perhaps co-eval with modern procedures of voting. This book reveals that it was not so that the rise of such procedures is a historical accident andnovelty, and that the meaning and procedures of the secret ballot still vary enormously across different places.

List of Illustrations - vii -- 1. Introduction: In the Margins of Anthropology. Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall - 1 -- 2. George Grey in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Leigh Dale - 19 -- 3. Henry Ling Roth in Tasmania. Russell McDougall - 43 -- 4. Flora Annie Steel in the Punjab. Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston - 71 -- 5. Everard im Thurn in British Guiana and the Western Pacific. Rosamund Dalziell - 97 -- 6. Gertrude Lowthain Bell in Mesopotamia. Julia Emberley - 119 -- 7. Hugh Clifford in Malaya. Robert Hampson - 147 -- 8. Roger Casement in the Amazon, the Congo, and Ireland. Helen Carr - 169 -- 9. Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides and Bolton. Rod Edmond - 197 -- 10. Afterword: Writing in the Margins of a Marginal Discipline. Peter Pels - 221 -- List of Contributors - 237 -- Index - 239.

Fifty-two illustrations signed by Peter Newell, each with a comic verse.

Caring for our environment and understanding the amazing variety of wildlife in our backyards enables all of us to live together with minimal impact of fragile ecosystems. Let's read the book and enjoy it!

Writings that span his career as a polar explorer, fiction writer, underground fighter, and TV entertainer.