Jane Parish
Biographic Data
| ID | 78321 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jane Parish |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jane |
| FAMILY NAME | Parish |
| SIGNATURE | PARISH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7932-3571 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reinventing renting? ESG investing and the new landlordism of build-to-rent housing financialization
This paper traces the social value and risk management strategies of a pension -backed build-to-rent (BtR) housing provider in the United Kingdom. Through these strategies, BtR is positioned as a 'new' socially and environmentally responsible model, appealing to institutional investors seeking to do 'good' while also filling fiduciary mandates to pay promised pensions. However, this paper reveals how the vision of a redefined rental market, advan…
Fiduciary Activism From Below
This article investigates the evolving concept of fiduciary duty and its role in Canadian public sector pension funds’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices. It contributes to the literature in the distinct but related fields of environmental gentrification and urban climate finance by bringing fiduciary debates into sharper focus. Engagement with issues surrounding investors’ legal and ethical duties to invest responsib…
The spectral material culture in ordinary life
In 2020 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the top-10 most disabling diseases. Today, it is the fourth most common mental disorder in the United Kingdom. This research is based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 in Merseyside and Cheshire, UK, which re-imagines obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals among women who self-diagnosed as having 'magical thinking OCD'. Referring to…
What is a river? A transnational meditation on the colonial city, abolition ecologies and the future of geography
This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim …
Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto
In 21st century Toronto, the labour of caring for urban trees is entangled with both gentrification processes and the social reproduction of settler colonial space. This paper contributes to the study of environmental gentrification through a study of the social reproduction of settler colonial relations to land in the Parkdale-High Park area of Toronto. Specifically, I take up the hyper-visibility of some forms of social reproduction, in order t…
Uncanny objects and the fear of the familiar
This article examines the cosmology and secret practices of West African traditional priests in New York City in preventing the spread of witchcraft, an evil invisible spirit transmitted between female members of the Akan matrilineage. Explored is an uncanny dynamic as everyday habitus becomes increasingly strange in the world of a young Ghanaian woman in the Bronx, who has become petrified of insinuations of witchcraft from close family members.…
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
This article is an ethnographic study of individuals self-diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in Liverpool, UK. While much research on OCD has concentrated upon superstitious belief, psychosis and anxiety provoking disorder, the article focuses upon the relationship between the familiar and the strange in ordinary life, the 'disquieting familiar', captured by the Freudian idea of the uncanny. It investigates how misfortune, as oppo…
The cosmology of economy
In this article, the relationship between cosmology and financial transactions via the sacred and deeply secret discourses of West African traditional priests in Europe is explored, who believe that they can spiritually manipulate the monetary pricing of stocks and shares. Of particular interest is how West African witchcraft discourses, while still embedded in kinship relationships, become symbolically caught up in the economy and in the volatil…
Adinkrah, Mensah
Anthropos , Seite 659 - 660
Resurrecting Cannibals
Beyond occult economies
While it has been extensively recorded how the West African occult economy allows for a metanarrative critique of modernity, this article analyzes a convergence between witchcraft discourses and the capitalist market, looking through the local lens of Akan spirit shrines in New York City. Rather than being in awe of the "mysterious workings" of the marketplace, Akan occult practices fully engage with American mass production and neoliberal orthod…
Mining morals, muck and Akan gold in New York City
Among Akan spirit preachers at shrines in New York, gold and gold weights are at the centre of the creation of new moral topographies in a fluid and contested context. In a get-rich-quick New York marketplace, the preachers appeal to an understanding of gold that is contained within Akan values and ethical codes surrounding economic responsibility and social obligation. Remaking Manhattan's ethical geographies from the standpoint of a transnation…
Chasing Celebrity
At Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in New York City shrine-priests incorporate into their sacred discourses revelatory knowledge drawn from the American mass-marketing of celebrities, their fashions and lifestyles. Attempting to capture this powerful commodity fetish Hollywood stardom is tacked onto Kente cloth imported from Ghana. Through a powerful act of mimesis, a new hybrid sacred object is created. Young African clients come to shrines desirin…
West African witchcraft, wealth and moral decay in New York City
This article is based on fieldwork from 2005 onwards among West African antiwitchcraft shrines in New York City amid the growing African diaspora. For many of the priests who have worked at shrines established since the 1980s, the recent economic recession was yet another blow to their love affair with New York high society and a distinct uptown neighbourhood of the city - the Upper East Side. The article dissects the social and economic relation…
Social suffering and anxiety
In treating illness and suffering, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine is often presented as a model of unchanging, tightly bounded and antiquated ideals. This fails to acknowledge the extensive repertoire of Ghanaian witchcraft discourses and contemporary divinatory practices uncovered at Akan anti-witchcraft shrines. This paper analyses how one of the most popular Akan anti-witchcraft shrine in Europe, in an eastern banlieue of Paris, diagnoses the…
Circumventing Uncertainty in the Moral Economy
This paper examines the moral economy of the African Diaspora through the illicit activities of secret Ghanaian gamblers in Europe. It follows a Ghanaian, Mr. Baba, a gambler, from North West England, who looks to the most unlikely of sources of information and certainty in a fast networked society, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine located not in Ghana but in the eastern suburbs of Paris, as global bookmaker extraordinaire. In this environment, th…
Locality, luck and family ornaments
Collecting ornaments is a popular pastime in Britain. This paper looks at cheaply produced collectables and the meanings and values attributed to private collections by their owners, who lovingly tend to them. Fieldwork consisted of ethnographic research conducted in 2004 and 2005 among people aged 60 and over in a town on the South Cheshire–North Staffordshire border, close to the heart of British ceramic production – Moorland, Wedgwood-Waterfor…
From Liverpool to Freetown
In this ethnography I examine the key features of occult discourses among middle-class Sierra Leoneans living in Britain, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Merseyside and Cheshire between 2001-2002. It is evident that the subjects of this study are quick to engage with the conspiracy-theorising besetting Euro-American popular culture in conveying their anxieties about the civil war, poverty and corruption that have ravaged Sierra Leone…
Witchcraft, riches and roulette
This article builds on research carried out at western Ghana's anti-witchcraft shrines and on post-1996 fieldwork among Ghanaian gamblers in a major UK city-port, here named Northington. Unemployed or in a low-paid job, the gambler's pursuit of excitement, financial respite and hope via his furtive endeavours tends, self-defeatingly, to add to his anxieties and, when he is lucky, guilt over accumulated 'bad' wealth. He is terrified that a witch, …
Kitsch Taste and the Consumption of Jackie 'O
In 1996, Sotheby's in New York held a four-day auction of many of the possessions Jackie Onassis purchased during her lifetime. This paper is an ethnography of a loose social circle of gay men, some of whom attended the pre-auction display of these objects and who regularly hold their own informal Jackie 'O' celebrations. It looks at what their worshipping of a female figure, Jackie 'O', means and how a distinctive cultural capital is espoused by…
The Age of Anxiety
1. The Age of Anxiety: Jane Parish (School of Social Relations, Keele University). 2. Iloveyou: Viruses, Paranoia and the Environment of Risk: Peter Knight (Staffordshire University). 3. The Obscure Politics of Conspiracy Theory: Mark Featherstone (Staffordshire University). 4. Conjuring Order: the new world order and conspiracy theories of globalization: Alisdair Spark (King Alfreda s College, Winchester, UK). 5. Militias, the Patriot Movement, …
Antiwitchcraft Shrines among the Akan
This article examines the epistemological certainties and uncertainties of Akan spirit possession and witchcraft knowledge. It is based on fieldwork carried out between 1990 and 1999 in Dormaa-Ahenkro, Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana. The article examines the transcendental knowledge found among antiwitchcraft shrine gods and their priests and how the sacred knowledge of gods is utilized to counter witchcraft in the modern postcolony. This, it is argue…
Consuming Averages
The Age of Anxiety
From the body to the wallet
This article focuses on the way that Akan witchcraft invokes imagery of new forms of modernity, especially a feature of the post-colonial monetary economy, the credit card. Credit card spending encodes relations within a technological monetary network, and it affects personal relations at home and abroad. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in 1990-1 at anti-witchcraft shrines in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana. It looks at young entrep…
From the body to the wallet
This article focuses on the way that Akan witchcraft invokes imagery of new forms of modernity, especially a feature of the post-colonial monetary economy, the credit card. Credit card spending encodes relations within a technological monetary network, and it affects personal relations at home and abroad. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in 1990-1 at anti-witchcraft shrines in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana. It looks at young entrep…
The dynamics of witchcraft and indigenous shrines among the Akan
This article deals with Akan perceptions of witchcraft at two different anti-witchcraft shrines. It is argued that contemporary fears about witchcraft symbolise moral uncertainties about identity, sociability and materialism. These ideas are expressed by means of a highly self-reflexive critique of the concepts of social admiration and transcultural consumption
Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto
In 21st century Toronto, the labour of caring for urban trees is entangled with both gentrification processes and the social reproduction of settler colonial space. This paper contributes to the study of environmental gentrification through a study of the social reproduction of settler colonial relations to land in the Parkdale-High Park area of Toronto. Specifically, I take up the hyper-visibility of some forms of social reproduction, in order t…
What is a river? A transnational meditation on the colonial city, abolition ecologies and the future of geography
This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim …
Antiwitchcraft Shrines among the Akan
This article examines the epistemological certainties and uncertainties of Akan spirit possession and witchcraft knowledge. It is based on fieldwork carried out between 1990 and 1999 in Dormaa-Ahenkro, Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana. The article examines the transcendental knowledge found among antiwitchcraft shrine gods and their priests and how the sacred knowledge of gods is utilized to counter witchcraft in the modern postcolony. This, it is argue…
West African witchcraft, wealth and moral decay in New York City
This article is based on fieldwork from 2005 onwards among West African antiwitchcraft shrines in New York City amid the growing African diaspora. For many of the priests who have worked at shrines established since the 1980s, the recent economic recession was yet another blow to their love affair with New York high society and a distinct uptown neighbourhood of the city - the Upper East Side. The article dissects the social and economic relation…
Exploring Self and Society
Circumventing Uncertainty in the Moral Economy
This paper examines the moral economy of the African Diaspora through the illicit activities of secret Ghanaian gamblers in Europe. It follows a Ghanaian, Mr. Baba, a gambler, from North West England, who looks to the most unlikely of sources of information and certainty in a fast networked society, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine located not in Ghana but in the eastern suburbs of Paris, as global bookmaker extraordinaire. In this environment, th…
From Liverpool to Freetown
In this ethnography I examine the key features of occult discourses among middle-class Sierra Leoneans living in Britain, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Merseyside and Cheshire between 2001-2002. It is evident that the subjects of this study are quick to engage with the conspiracy-theorising besetting Euro-American popular culture in conveying their anxieties about the civil war, poverty and corruption that have ravaged Sierra Leone…
Witchcraft, riches and roulette
This article builds on research carried out at western Ghana's anti-witchcraft shrines and on post-1996 fieldwork among Ghanaian gamblers in a major UK city-port, here named Northington. Unemployed or in a low-paid job, the gambler's pursuit of excitement, financial respite and hope via his furtive endeavours tends, self-defeatingly, to add to his anxieties and, when he is lucky, guilt over accumulated 'bad' wealth. He is terrified that a witch, …
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
This article is an ethnographic study of individuals self-diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in Liverpool, UK. While much research on OCD has concentrated upon superstitious belief, psychosis and anxiety provoking disorder, the article focuses upon the relationship between the familiar and the strange in ordinary life, the 'disquieting familiar', captured by the Freudian idea of the uncanny. It investigates how misfortune, as oppo…
Beyond occult economies
While it has been extensively recorded how the West African occult economy allows for a metanarrative critique of modernity, this article analyzes a convergence between witchcraft discourses and the capitalist market, looking through the local lens of Akan spirit shrines in New York City. Rather than being in awe of the "mysterious workings" of the marketplace, Akan occult practices fully engage with American mass production and neoliberal orthod…
Uncanny objects and the fear of the familiar
This article examines the cosmology and secret practices of West African traditional priests in New York City in preventing the spread of witchcraft, an evil invisible spirit transmitted between female members of the Akan matrilineage. Explored is an uncanny dynamic as everyday habitus becomes increasingly strange in the world of a young Ghanaian woman in the Bronx, who has become petrified of insinuations of witchcraft from close family members.…
Social suffering and anxiety
In treating illness and suffering, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine is often presented as a model of unchanging, tightly bounded and antiquated ideals. This fails to acknowledge the extensive repertoire of Ghanaian witchcraft discourses and contemporary divinatory practices uncovered at Akan anti-witchcraft shrines. This paper analyses how one of the most popular Akan anti-witchcraft shrine in Europe, in an eastern banlieue of Paris, diagnoses the…
The spectral material culture in ordinary life
In 2020 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the top-10 most disabling diseases. Today, it is the fourth most common mental disorder in the United Kingdom. This research is based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 in Merseyside and Cheshire, UK, which re-imagines obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals among women who self-diagnosed as having 'magical thinking OCD'. Referring to…
Chasing Celebrity
At Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in New York City shrine-priests incorporate into their sacred discourses revelatory knowledge drawn from the American mass-marketing of celebrities, their fashions and lifestyles. Attempting to capture this powerful commodity fetish Hollywood stardom is tacked onto Kente cloth imported from Ghana. Through a powerful act of mimesis, a new hybrid sacred object is created. Young African clients come to shrines desirin…
The Age of Anxiety
Exploring Self and Society
The dynamics of witchcraft and indigenous shrines among the Akan
This article deals with Akan perceptions of witchcraft at two different anti-witchcraft shrines. It is argued that contemporary fears about witchcraft symbolise moral uncertainties about identity, sociability and materialism. These ideas are expressed by means of a highly self-reflexive critique of the concepts of social admiration and transcultural consumption
The Age of Anxiety
From the body to the wallet
This article focuses on the way that Akan witchcraft invokes imagery of new forms of modernity, especially a feature of the post-colonial monetary economy, the credit card. Credit card spending encodes relations within a technological monetary network, and it affects personal relations at home and abroad. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in 1990-1 at anti-witchcraft shrines in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana. It looks at young entrep…
Consuming Averages
The Age of Anxiety
1. The Age of Anxiety: Jane Parish (School of Social Relations, Keele University). 2. Iloveyou: Viruses, Paranoia and the Environment of Risk: Peter Knight (Staffordshire University). 3. The Obscure Politics of Conspiracy Theory: Mark Featherstone (Staffordshire University). 4. Conjuring Order: the new world order and conspiracy theories of globalization: Alisdair Spark (King Alfreda s College, Winchester, UK). 5. Militias, the Patriot Movement, …
Antiwitchcraft Shrines among the Akan
This article examines the epistemological certainties and uncertainties of Akan spirit possession and witchcraft knowledge. It is based on fieldwork carried out between 1990 and 1999 in Dormaa-Ahenkro, Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana. The article examines the transcendental knowledge found among antiwitchcraft shrine gods and their priests and how the sacred knowledge of gods is utilized to counter witchcraft in the modern postcolony. This, it is argue…
Kitsch Taste and the Consumption of Jackie 'O
In 1996, Sotheby's in New York held a four-day auction of many of the possessions Jackie Onassis purchased during her lifetime. This paper is an ethnography of a loose social circle of gay men, some of whom attended the pre-auction display of these objects and who regularly hold their own informal Jackie 'O' celebrations. It looks at what their worshipping of a female figure, Jackie 'O', means and how a distinctive cultural capital is espoused by…
From Liverpool to Freetown
In this ethnography I examine the key features of occult discourses among middle-class Sierra Leoneans living in Britain, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Merseyside and Cheshire between 2001-2002. It is evident that the subjects of this study are quick to engage with the conspiracy-theorising besetting Euro-American popular culture in conveying their anxieties about the civil war, poverty and corruption that have ravaged Sierra Leone…
Witchcraft, riches and roulette
This article builds on research carried out at western Ghana's anti-witchcraft shrines and on post-1996 fieldwork among Ghanaian gamblers in a major UK city-port, here named Northington. Unemployed or in a low-paid job, the gambler's pursuit of excitement, financial respite and hope via his furtive endeavours tends, self-defeatingly, to add to his anxieties and, when he is lucky, guilt over accumulated 'bad' wealth. He is terrified that a witch, …
Locality, luck and family ornaments
Collecting ornaments is a popular pastime in Britain. This paper looks at cheaply produced collectables and the meanings and values attributed to private collections by their owners, who lovingly tend to them. Fieldwork consisted of ethnographic research conducted in 2004 and 2005 among people aged 60 and over in a town on the South Cheshire–North Staffordshire border, close to the heart of British ceramic production – Moorland, Wedgwood-Waterfor…
Circumventing Uncertainty in the Moral Economy
This paper examines the moral economy of the African Diaspora through the illicit activities of secret Ghanaian gamblers in Europe. It follows a Ghanaian, Mr. Baba, a gambler, from North West England, who looks to the most unlikely of sources of information and certainty in a fast networked society, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine located not in Ghana but in the eastern suburbs of Paris, as global bookmaker extraordinaire. In this environment, th…
West African witchcraft, wealth and moral decay in New York City
This article is based on fieldwork from 2005 onwards among West African antiwitchcraft shrines in New York City amid the growing African diaspora. For many of the priests who have worked at shrines established since the 1980s, the recent economic recession was yet another blow to their love affair with New York high society and a distinct uptown neighbourhood of the city - the Upper East Side. The article dissects the social and economic relation…
Social suffering and anxiety
In treating illness and suffering, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine is often presented as a model of unchanging, tightly bounded and antiquated ideals. This fails to acknowledge the extensive repertoire of Ghanaian witchcraft discourses and contemporary divinatory practices uncovered at Akan anti-witchcraft shrines. This paper analyses how one of the most popular Akan anti-witchcraft shrine in Europe, in an eastern banlieue of Paris, diagnoses the…
Chasing Celebrity
At Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in New York City shrine-priests incorporate into their sacred discourses revelatory knowledge drawn from the American mass-marketing of celebrities, their fashions and lifestyles. Attempting to capture this powerful commodity fetish Hollywood stardom is tacked onto Kente cloth imported from Ghana. Through a powerful act of mimesis, a new hybrid sacred object is created. Young African clients come to shrines desirin…
Resurrecting Cannibals
Beyond occult economies
While it has been extensively recorded how the West African occult economy allows for a metanarrative critique of modernity, this article analyzes a convergence between witchcraft discourses and the capitalist market, looking through the local lens of Akan spirit shrines in New York City. Rather than being in awe of the "mysterious workings" of the marketplace, Akan occult practices fully engage with American mass production and neoliberal orthod…
Mining morals, muck and Akan gold in New York City
Among Akan spirit preachers at shrines in New York, gold and gold weights are at the centre of the creation of new moral topographies in a fluid and contested context. In a get-rich-quick New York marketplace, the preachers appeal to an understanding of gold that is contained within Akan values and ethical codes surrounding economic responsibility and social obligation. Remaking Manhattan's ethical geographies from the standpoint of a transnation…
Adinkrah, Mensah
Anthropos , Seite 659 - 660
The cosmology of economy
In this article, the relationship between cosmology and financial transactions via the sacred and deeply secret discourses of West African traditional priests in Europe is explored, who believe that they can spiritually manipulate the monetary pricing of stocks and shares. Of particular interest is how West African witchcraft discourses, while still embedded in kinship relationships, become symbolically caught up in the economy and in the volatil…
Uncanny objects and the fear of the familiar
This article examines the cosmology and secret practices of West African traditional priests in New York City in preventing the spread of witchcraft, an evil invisible spirit transmitted between female members of the Akan matrilineage. Explored is an uncanny dynamic as everyday habitus becomes increasingly strange in the world of a young Ghanaian woman in the Bronx, who has become petrified of insinuations of witchcraft from close family members.…
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
This article is an ethnographic study of individuals self-diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in Liverpool, UK. While much research on OCD has concentrated upon superstitious belief, psychosis and anxiety provoking disorder, the article focuses upon the relationship between the familiar and the strange in ordinary life, the 'disquieting familiar', captured by the Freudian idea of the uncanny. It investigates how misfortune, as oppo…
What is a river? A transnational meditation on the colonial city, abolition ecologies and the future of geography
This short essay, flowing through Nairobi and Toronto, represents a transnational conversation on what the contemporary status of urban rivers can tell us about the endurance of coloniality in these two spaces. Against the hegemonic bids for their “revitalization,” we attend to these two rivers, both of which helped propel the growth of their respective urban agglomerations, as symbols of people-centered struggles for abolition ecologies. We aim …
Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto
In 21st century Toronto, the labour of caring for urban trees is entangled with both gentrification processes and the social reproduction of settler colonial space. This paper contributes to the study of environmental gentrification through a study of the social reproduction of settler colonial relations to land in the Parkdale-High Park area of Toronto. Specifically, I take up the hyper-visibility of some forms of social reproduction, in order t…
The spectral material culture in ordinary life
In 2020 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the top-10 most disabling diseases. Today, it is the fourth most common mental disorder in the United Kingdom. This research is based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 in Merseyside and Cheshire, UK, which re-imagines obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals among women who self-diagnosed as having 'magical thinking OCD'. Referring to…
Sociology (24 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Law (10 works) · History (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)