Hanging Without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland - Couverture souple

Steedly, Mary Margaret

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 069100045X ISBN 13 : 9780691000459

Editeur : Princeton University Press, 1993

Synopsis

When Mary Steedly went to North Sumatra, Indonesia, she intended to study the curing practices of Karo Batak spirit mediums, the gurus who keep a community in touch with its ancestors. She became fascinated by the stories these women and men told of their encounters with spirits in the ritual arena and on the borders of the everyday social world. In these stories, Karo mediums conveyed their sense of historical out-of-placeness, which they described as "hanging without a rope," in Indonesia's state-proclaimed Age of Development. Based on the author's three years of fieldwork in urban and rural Karoland, this account focuses on issues of experience, memory, and narrative plausibility. Steedly approaches mediums' stories not simply as reservoirs of information about "what happened" at a particular moment, but as efforts to map a pathway across the shifting landscape of historical memory.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Mary Margaret Steedly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date d'édition: 1993
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 069100045X
• ISBN 13: 9780691000459
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 332
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible