The Social Life of Spirits

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else-symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. *The Social Life of Spirits* challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities-with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions-providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe-the globe of nonthings-in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the "people of the streets" in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.