Peter Pels
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Pels |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Pels |
| SIGNATURE | PELS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 10 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Johannes Fabian (1937–2026) and the critique of anthropology
This brief essay memorializes Johannes Fabian and his contribution to Critique of Anthropology by reviewing his contribution to the journal and his conception of critique in anthropology. It highlights not just Fabian’s role in keeping the journal going after the untimely death of Bob Scholte in 1987, but also how they collaborated in producing a epistemological revolution in anthropology. While most anthropologists today would associate this wit…
Spirit of Matter
The Spirit of Matter
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 C…
Embedding Ethics
A Politics of Presence
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,…
Entries
Magic and Modernity
Magic and Modernity is the first book to explore comparatively how magic—usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern—is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social scie…
Colonial Subjects
It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.The essays in this volume sha…
Preliminary Material
Studies in the History of Religions Numen Book Series
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Emerging Disciplines
Institutionalization
A Politics of Presence
The Microphysics of Colonial Contact. The Mission As Movement, or: Creating and Crossing the Boundaries of Home and Mission. Kizungu Rhythms: Luguru Christianity as Ngoma. Luguru Woman or Lawful Wife: Mwali, Marriage and the Mission o Mkubwa to Mwalimu: Mission School and the Commodification of Knowledge. White Magic: The Missionary in the Field of Uganga and Uchawi. Conclusion: The Underdevelopment of Revelation
Religion in the Making
This volume explores the ways in which religion became the object of scientific research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most obvious is the development of an increasingly autonomous science of religion (with founding fathers like Max Müller and C.P. Tiele). However, within anthropology (Tylor, Frazer), sociology (Durkheim, Max Weber), and psychology (William James), religion also came to be seen as a separate entity to be studie…
Constructing knowledge
Colonial Subjects
It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.The essays in this volume sha…
A Politics of Presence
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,…
Constructing knowledge
Constructing knowledge
Preliminary Material
Studies in the History of Religions Numen Book Series
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Emerging Disciplines
Institutionalization
A Politics of Presence
The Microphysics of Colonial Contact. The Mission As Movement, or: Creating and Crossing the Boundaries of Home and Mission. Kizungu Rhythms: Luguru Christianity as Ngoma. Luguru Woman or Lawful Wife: Mwali, Marriage and the Mission o Mkubwa to Mwalimu: Mission School and the Commodification of Knowledge. White Magic: The Missionary in the Field of Uganga and Uchawi. Conclusion: The Underdevelopment of Revelation
Religion in the Making
This volume explores the ways in which religion became the object of scientific research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most obvious is the development of an increasingly autonomous science of religion (with founding fathers like Max Müller and C.P. Tiele). However, within anthropology (Tylor, Frazer), sociology (Durkheim, Max Weber), and psychology (William James), religion also came to be seen as a separate entity to be studie…
Colonial Subjects
It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.The essays in this volume sha…
Magic and Modernity
Magic and Modernity is the first book to explore comparatively how magic—usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern—is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social scie…
Entries
A Politics of Presence
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,…
Embedding Ethics
Spirit of Matter
The Spirit of Matter
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 C…
Johannes Fabian (1937–2026) and the critique of anthropology
This brief essay memorializes Johannes Fabian and his contribution to Critique of Anthropology by reviewing his contribution to the journal and his conception of critique in anthropology. It highlights not just Fabian’s role in keeping the journal going after the untimely death of Bob Scholte in 1987, but also how they collaborated in producing a epistemological revolution in anthropology. While most anthropologists today would associate this wit…
History (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · MAGIC (telescope) (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Institutionalisation (5 works) · Religious studies (5 works)