Let Your Spirit Free A Critique Of Janice Boddys Woman And Alien Spirits
Submitted by jac4be on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Let Your Spirit Free A Critique Of Janice Boddys Woman And Alien Spirits
Let the Spirit Set You Free
Critique of Janice Boddy?s, Wombs and Alien Spirits
Jason Carey
March 12, 2003
RELG 400B
On my honor, as a student of the University of Virginia, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized information on this paper.
Through religious experiences and beliefs, the cultural and social context can produce a system by which a society can be constructed. In Janice Boddy?s Wombs and Alien Spirits, the study of rituals and symbols takes the reader to the heart of the anthropology of experience, performance, and symbolism. Inextricably intertwined with specific histories and languages, the symbols, metaphors, and rituals of social groups provide shared compass points and references with which to express individual and group experiences. Rites that accompany birth, male and female initiation, marriage, death, calendrical events, pilgrimages and carnivals are sites that provide the reader rich and complex social textures with which to apply the theories of anthropology. Knowledge of the social power of symbols and their referents and the rituals that mark status changes for individuals within social groups helps with understanding and acceptance of the various and often quite different ways with which social groups mark and celebrate life changes and express their ethos systems.
As an ethnographer, Janice Boddy traced the cultural and social aspects of the Hofriyati people, especially those dealing with spirit possession. Throughout the book, Boddy evolves in her text, first dealing with the relations between men and women and flowing into exploring the spirit world apart from contexts of possession in Hofriyati humans. Boddy makes it quite clear that there are important differences between men?s and women?s versions of the Hofriyati culture, which I will discuss later on. These different perspectives are highly likely in a community such as the Hofriyati. The...
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