Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency

“Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon’s event-centered ethnography shows how people recover a sense of purpose and agency in the face of violence, climate change, and radical uncertainty. Particularly compelling is Manzon’s empathetic and immersive fieldwork, and her insights into how the world of the wild (the more-than-human) affords Mande people oblique and imaginative strategies for coping with recurring crises of comprehension and control.”

-- — Michael Jackson, author of "Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want"

“Combining careful ethnographic description with captivating portraits, Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency is a landmark study that brings together three domains of non-Islamic practice among Mande in West Africa—hunters’ rituals, the use of power objects (“fetishes”), and spirit possession—into the same analytical frame, something no scholar has attempted before. A penetrating analysis of the ways in which religious phenomena, their agents, and selves are made within an “episteme of doubt,” this excellent book disrupts conventional ways African “traditional religion” has been studied and misunderstood. — Benjamin Soares, author of Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town.”
 

-- — Benjamin Soares, author of "Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town"

“In her striking ethnography of the Mande religious landscape, Kedzierska Manzon revisits an “old” anthropological theme, ritual, and reinvigorates it. This book is a luminous account of human and nonhuman relations that provides fresh insights into the knowledges and technologies deployed by ritual specialists in contexts of epistemic uncertainty.”

-- — Adeline Masquelier, author of "Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Ni