The word “possession” is anything but transparent, especially as it developed in the context of the African Americas. There it referred variously to spirits, material goods, and people. It served as a watershed term marking both transactions in which people were made into things—via slavery—and ritual events by which the thingification of people was revised. In Spirited Things, Paul Christopher Johnson gathers together essays by leading anthropologists in the Americas that reopen the concept of possession on these two fronts in order to examine the relationship between African religions in the Atlantic and the economies that have historically shaped—and continue to shape—the cultures that practice them. Exploring the way spirit possessions were framed both by material things—including plantations, the Catholic church, the sea, and the phonograph—as well as by the legacy of slavery, they offer a powerful new way of understanding the Atlantic world.

A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island. “Spirit things” are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual’s life. A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska’s coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.

"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--

Have you ever asked yourself what changed when you were "born again?" You look in the mirror and see the same reflection - your body hasn't changed. You find yourself acting the same and yielding to those same old temptations - that didn't seem to change either. So you wonder, Has anything really changed? The correct...

People do things for reasons, but what are reasons and how are they related to the resulting actions? Bittner explores this question and proposes an answer: a reason is a response to that state of affairs.

Boris could not resist anymore. He said, Enough already, then reached out and pulled Cecile into his arms. She held on to him, and he could feel her heart beating erratically in her chest, as was his. God, she felt good in his arms. He smiled down at her, ignoring her coworkers, whose mouths were gaped open in surprise. Since the day she had told him about her tragedy, he realized how much he wanted to hold her in his arms and comfort her, how much she had come to mean to him. The last time they had ran into each other in the hallway and he had stood towering over her and she had listened to him so intently, she seemed oblivious to all the others as they passed. He had leaned down so closely to her and he wanted to kiss her so badly it ached. He knew she had felt it too. Cecile was shocked that he would be so bold! And she loved it. She felt bereft when the elevator opened and he released her. One of her male coworkers said, I believe that he just staked his clam, Cecile.

The state of today’s modern world is triggering a deep, unavoidable desire to regain central balance within the hearts of many. Every day, we’re challenged with the questions: Who am I in this current world? What do I stand for? What is my purpose within it all? Many are seeking to understand our true natures and our purposes and we’re trying to embody that truth. Author Danielle Van de Velde is one of those people searching for answers. In Spirited, she shares her insights, observations and practices from her many years of teaching meditation and holding thousands of intuitive healing sessions. She speaks to those who are ready to claim their own natural spirituality, offering an upload of different perspectives for modern spirited living—ones that open access to our innate spiritual design and how to work with it. Spirited address three facets: • spirit self: an expanded perspective on the visible and invisible aspects of the self; • spirit dynamics: an expanded perspective on the nature of life and our engagement within it; and • spirit skills: an expanded perspective on meditation and working with your energy body. Van de Velde reframes meditation as an intentional practice to transform from reactive, to responsive, to expansive,and ultimately to creative living. She helps you remember who and what you really are, to live in active cohesion and cocreation with life and to operate creatively and intuitively in a state of flow. To remember this, is when we heal and come back to our true nature and design. This is being spirited.