The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit - download pdf or read online

Feminist concept and postcolonial conception proportion an curiosity in constructing theoretical frameworks for describing and comparing subjectivity relatively, in particular in regards to non-autonomous types of employer. As a historian of religions, Mary Keller makes use of the determine of the "possessed girl" to research a subject matter that's spoken-through instead of conversing and whose will is the need of the ancestor, deity or spirit that wields her to have interaction the query of employer in a culturally and traditionally comparative learn that acknowledges the favourite position possessed girls play of their respective traditions.

Drawing from the fields of anthropology and comparative psychology, Keller brings the determine of the possessed lady into the center of up to date argument as an exemplary version that demanding situations many Western and feminist assumptions concerning enterprise. presenting a brand new theoretical framework that re-orients scholarship, Keller argues that the topic who's wielded or performed, the hammer or the flute, routines a paradoxical authority―"instrumental agency"―born in their radical receptivity: their energy derives from the groups' evaluate that they now not exist as self sufficient brokers.

For Keller, the possessed lady is immediately "hammer" and "flute," sarcastically strong simply because she has develop into an device of the overwhelming will of an ancestor, deity, or spirit. Keller applies the idea that of instrumental corporation to case experiences, supplying a brand new interpretation of every. She starts off with modern possessions in Malaysia, the place girls in production vegetation have been seized via spirits trying to resacralize the territory. She subsequent appears to wartime Zimbabwe, the place girl spirit mediums, the Nehanda mhondoro, declared the ancestors' will to struggle opposed to colonialism. eventually she presents an innovative rereading of the performative energy of ownership through analyzing performs, Euripides' Bacchae and S. Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, which characteristic possessed girls as primary characters. This e-book can function a good creation to postcolonial and feminist idea for graduate scholars, whereas grounding its idea within the research of domestically and traditionally particular moments of time that may be of curiosity to experts. It additionally offers an issue for the review of spiritual lives and their struggles for which means and tool within the modern panorama of severe concept.