エピソード

  • Erika Engelhaupt, "Go to Hell: A Traveler's Guide to Earth's Most Otherworldly Destinations" (National Geographic, 2024)

    Erika Engelhaupt, "Go to Hell: A Traveler's Guide to Earth's Most Otherworldly Destinations" (National Geographic, 2024)
    2024/11/01
    With Go to Hell: A Traveler's Guide to Earth's Most Otherworldly Destinations (National Geographic, 2024) by Erika Engelhaupt, you can go to hell and back with the help of this one-of-a-kind illustrated travel guide to real-life underworld destinations around the globe. Full of intrigue, lore, and plenty of brimstone and fire, each of the 54 destinations—from Antarctica's Blood Falls to a tropical hell on Grand Cayman island—will be worth adding to your devilish bucket list. The world over, humans have been fascinated by hell in some form or another for thousands of years and across cultures. Now, with this illustrated collection, you can add hell to your travel bucket list with more than 50 one-of-a-kind underworld destinations, from ghost towns where Halloween is always in season, to ancient caves long viewed as entrances to Hades, to volcanoes that brim with fire and legend. Don’t be scared: Along with the fascinating history of each location, star author Erika Engelhaupt also offers practical tips to make the most of your visit to the underbelly of the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    56 分
  • Cami D. Agan, "Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium" (Mythopoeic Press, 2024)

    Cami D. Agan, "Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium" (Mythopoeic Press, 2024)
    2024/10/12
    The 13 essays collected in Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium (Mythopoeic Press, 2024) foreground processes of making and constructing Arda -- either within the Secondary world or for readers/viewers -- and thus continually assert that the habitations form a vital part of the tales within that world. Because they assume a complex arrangement complete with social, familial, artistic, and political relations, cities and strongholds often define their inhabitants as crafting boundaries between themselves and the outside, the visitor, and the unknown. These essays reveal that all cities and strongholds of the legendarium function as makers of meaning, containers of relations, outposts of history, and evocations of the Past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    39 分
  • Jason Ramsey, "Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda" (Routledge, 2023)

    Jason Ramsey, "Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda" (Routledge, 2023)
    2024/09/17
    A perpetual tension exists between history and change, which is an issue long explored by historians and social scientists. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda (Routledge, 2023) engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating local belonging and a force of transformation in its own right. For residents of Chunchucmil, a historic rural community in Yucatán, Mexico, history is anything but straightforward. Living in what is both a defunct 19th-century hacienda estate and a vibrant Catholic pilgrimage site, Chunchucmileños reckon past, present, and future in radically different ways. For example, while some use the aging estate buildings to weave a history of economic decline and push for revitalization by hotel developers, others highlight the growing fame of the Virgin of the Rosary in the attached church and vow to defend the site from developer interference. By exploring how past and future are channeled through changing built environments, landscapes, sacred relics, and legal documents, this ethnographic study details how the politics of change provide Chunchucmileños with a common language for debating commitments to place and each another in the present. Against Western notions of ‘History’ as a relatively coherent account of change, Jason Ramsey suggests we reframe it as an ongoing performance that is always fractured, democratic, and morally tinged. Jason Ramsey is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Based on fieldwork in Yucatan among former plantation laborers, he publishes on topics such as semiotics, ruination, value, and the anthropology of history. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    1 時間 33 分
  • Greg Eghigian, "After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Greg Eghigian, "After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    2024/09/11
    Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal. In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as "flying saucers." Over the course of that summer, Americans reported seeing them in the skies overhead. News quickly spread, and within a few years, flying saucers were being spotted across the world. The question on everyone's mind was, what were they? Some new super weapon in the Cold War? Strange weather patterns? Optical illusions? Or perhaps it was all a case of mass hysteria? Some, however, concluded they could only be one thing: spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived. Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world's fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths. After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (Oxford UP, 2024) traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities. It examines how descriptions, theories, and debates about unidentified flying objects and alien abduction changed over time and how they appeared in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. And it explores the impact UFOs have had on our understanding of space, science, technology, and ourselves up through the present day. Replete with stories of the people who have made up the ufology community, the military and defense units that investigate them, the scientists and psychologists who have researched these unexplained encounters, and the many novels, movies, TV shows, and websites that have explored these phenomena, After the Flying Saucers Came speaks to believers and skeptics alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    1 時間 2 分
  • David Zeitlyn, "Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers" (Routledge, 2021)

    David Zeitlyn, "Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers" (Routledge, 2021)
    2024/09/07
    Professor David Zeitlyn’s book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison considers different kinds of explanation for different features of social organization, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism. Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2021) will be of interest to area specialists and scholars concerned with religion, rationality, and decision-making from disciplines including anthropology, African studies, and philosophy. Additional links and information mentioned in the recording: Professor Zietlyn’s old spider divination simulations Online spider divination site for consultations and additional information Forthcoming exhibition mentioned in the show: Oracles, Omens and Answers, 6 December 2024 - 27 April 2025, S.T. Lee Gallery, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. Related publications from Bodleian Library Publishing Divination: Oracles and Omens, Edited by Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn (5 December) David Zeitlyn has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985. He taught at the University of Kent, Canterbury, for fifteen years before moving to Oxford as Professor of Social Anthropology in 2010. His recent books include Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2020) and An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (Berghan Books, 2022) Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    1 時間 5 分
  • Julia Kindt, "The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Julia Kindt, "The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    2024/09/04
    What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed to our own intrinsic animal nature. Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to classical antiquity. The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human (Cambridge UP, 2024) boldly reveals how the ancient world mobilised concepts of 'the animal' and 'animality' to conceive of the human in a variety of illuminating ways. Through ten stories about marvelous mythical beings - from the Trojan Horse to the Cyclops, and from Androcles' lion to the Minotaur - Julia Kindt unlocks fresh ways of thinking about humanity that extend from antiquity to the present and that ultimately challenge our understanding of who we really are. Julia Kindt is Professor of Ancient History, ARC Future Fellow (2018-22), a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, and elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is a contributor to TLS, the Australian Book Review, Meanjin, History Today, The Conversation, and other magazines. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    47 分
  • Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

    Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
    2024/09/02
    In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight the “agency of the intangible.” The contributors of this edited volume approach spirits and animism in contemporary Japan from diverse perspectives. Satō Hiroo opens the book with a chapter on the transformation in Japanese visions of the afterlife, the status of the dead, and regional traditions of memorialization. Andrea De Antoni looks further into the ontology of spirits via an investigation into recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki, hyōi) that is treated at the Kenmi Shrine in Shikoku. Jason Josephson-Storm traces both the European and Japanese genealogies of theorizing “primitive” civilizations and their beliefs in spirits, magic, and an animated nature. In Fabio Rambelli’s chapter, a unique type of epistemological system for understanding the existence of spirits is introduced: Minataka Kumagusu’s “Minakata mandala,” which involves Buddhist philosophy, Western science, and an awareness of the Japanese folk tradition all at the same time. In Ellen Van Goethem’s chapter, she explores how and why there were widespread assumptions about how the city of Kyoto was animated by invisible agencies such as guardian spirits and the flow of qi (Jp. Ki). Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by drawing our attention to “power spots” (pawā supotto) and “healing” forests as recent developments in contemporary Japanese religiosity. Focusing on the role of media in the public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic positions, Ioannis Gaitanidis shows how the media paradoxically both helps to normalize animism as part of “traditional” Japanese culture while chastising animistic NRM’s egregious behaviors. Concerning spirits in modern Japanese fiction, another type of powerful media in contemporary Japanese society, Rebecca Suter identifies in her chapter a “fantastic hesitation” that authors take on, which opens doors to the “undecidability of reality” that seems to be a main gateway to the spirit world. Centering on the media arts scene in Japan, Mauro Arrighi in his chapter highlights how animism serves as one of the main creative sources for contemporary artists. Then, Jolyon Thomas turns our focus to anime and their depictions of humanity’s connection with nature. In doing so, he invites us to reflect on the term “animism” and how the spirits of anime are really rooted in late capitalist modernity with its attendant pleasures and woes. In the closing chapter, Andrea Castiglioni points out a growing tendency in recent Japanese films to focus on violent spirit entities (araburugami), rather than benign figures. He argues that this perhaps is related to the emergence of a new kind of national identity for Japan as a country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability of nature and malignant invisible agencies. In this podcast episode, I spoke with the editor of this edited volume, Dr. Fabio Rambelli. Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    57 分
  • James P. Leary, “Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946” (U Wisconsin Press, 2015)

    James P. Leary, “Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946” (U Wisconsin Press, 2015)
    2024/09/01
    Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 (University of Wisconsin Press) first appeared in 2015 when it comprised of a hardback book, five CDs, and one DVD. It went on to win the “Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music” award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Notes,” received universally superlative reviews, and sold out within a year. The project has now been re-issued as a paperback, albeit without any accompanying discs; instead the related tracks and film footage are now available for online access care of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library. It’s not hard to fathom why this monumental work received so much acclaim. A groundbreaking multimedia endeavor, Folksongs of Another America is the product of decades of work by the distinguished folklorist, James P. Leary. Leary is, amongst other things, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies and Cofounder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a former editor of the Journal of American Folklore, and a native of rural Wisconsin, which is one of the three states – along with Michigan and Minnesota – whose rich musical bounty is explored in this study. Leary sifted through over 2,000 field recordings, made by fieldworkers Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas during the 1930s and 40s, to select the 187 tunes and songs that feature here. Together the chosen pieces create the impression of a region populated by immigrants from a host of different lands, as well as by Native Americans, all with their own musical traditions. For every track, Leary offers extensive documentation, information about the performers, and full lyrics (including in the original language with English translation as necessary which, given that the collection includes twenty-five languages, is often the case). The recordings themselves, which have been wonderfully restored and remastered, provide vivid aural experiences. Folksongs of Another America is, as noted by a reviewer for Deutschlandradio Kultur, “an exceptional achievement that demonstrates for the first time the full worth and cultural wealth of the Upper Midwest for music listeners.” Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    58 分