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Mediums and Magical Things

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Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enliven...
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  • 25 May 2021
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Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.

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Price: $95.00
Pages: 280
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 25 May 2021
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520298668
Format: Hardcover
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"Mediums and Magical Things makes a valuable contribution to the study of material religion, anthropology of religion, and religion in modernity. It is a timely volume that will no doubt fulfill Kendall’s hope that it ‘propel others down similar paths’."
Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Conventions 

1. MacGuffins and Magical Things
2. Ensoulments
3. Materiality, Making, and Magic
4. Agency and Assemblage 
5. The Ambiguities of the Unsacred
6. Afterlives 
Conclusion

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index