From sickness to history
Evil spirits, memory and responsibility in an Ethiopian market village
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2103226 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tom Boylston (0000-0003-2722-1463, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 87 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 387-406 |
| Publication date | 2017-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0001972016001017 |
| OpenAlex | W2594641907 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 52 |
This article discusses contemporary anxieties aboutbudaspirit attacks around a marketplace in Amhara region, Ethiopia. It asks how we get from the immediate experience of abudaattack - an emotionally intense scene of sickness, fear and uncertainty - to a reflexive situation in whichbudabecomes a vehicle for discussing and understanding deep historic concerns about market exchange. I make two main arguments: first, that apparent connections between spiritual attack and the spread of capitalism in fact reflect a deeper-lying opposition, on the part of landed elites, between moral hospitality and immoral exchange. Second, I show how this historical consciousness develops from processes of verification and questioning through which immediate experiences of sickness and fear become interpretable asbudaattacks associated with particular human agents and historical relationships. It is only by following this local epistemological work that we can understand how spirits become identifiable as historical agents within a web of other social relations
Aesthetics · Capitalism · Consciousness · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Hospitality · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Tourism · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions
Economic history of Ethiopia, 1800-1935
Women's medicine
The Intestines of the State
The modernity of witchcraft
Modernity and its malcontents
Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations
Affect
Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction
Les îles de la mémoire
The Mande Blacksmiths
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities
Social Stratification in Africa
Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia
Gender, development and identity
Who is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf? Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate
Scotland Yard in the Bush
Perceptions of Consumption
The Early History of Ethiopia's Coffee Trade and the Rise of Shawa
Ethiopian evil eye belief and the magical symbolism of iron working
The Social Construction of What
Provisional notes on the postcolony
Thinking Through Things
EthiopianBudaas Hyenas
I'm not evil
African sacred groves
The Spirit and the Drum
Social Stratification in Africa
The Mande Blacksmiths
Lake Tana and the Blue Nile
Women's Medicine, the Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and beyond
Priest Planters and Slavers of Zage (Ethiopia), 1900-1935
The evil eye as synthetic image and its meanings on the Island of Pantelleria, Italy
Culture, Globalization, Mediation
The hermeneutics of ethical encounters
The Evil Eye Belief among the Amhara of Ethiopia
Eating (and Feeding)
Anthropology and What There Is
The Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews
Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia. The Dynamics of Cognatic Descent
Occult economies and the violence of abstraction
"Radical alterity is just another way of saying "reality
Of words and fog
Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld
Spiritual Border Crossings
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |