Browse Entries

Blood is a polyvalent substance. Its dual nature as a vital physical entity and a potent symbolic medium makes it indispensable to medicine but also to ritual practice, symbolism, and...

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human...

Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which...

In anthropology, agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their...

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions...

The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman...

Haitian Vodou first took shape in the context of slavery. Once the religion of the royal family in Dahomey, in West Africa, it was then transformed by the slaves of the island of Haiti as a...

Vodou ayisyen an pran nesans nan kontèks esklavaj la. Yon relijyon fanmi Wa nan peyi Dawome, nan Afrik oksidantal, esklav sou lil Dayiti yo te tranfòme l kòm yon zouti pou yo rekonstui tèt...

Le vodou haïtien a été formé dans le contexte de l’esclavage. Culte de la famille royale au Dahomey, en Afrique Occidentale, il a été transformé par les esclaves de l’île d’Haïti en moyen de...

Monsters are not only key protagonists in myths, legends, fairy tales, fiction, and films; they also haunt cellars, cyberspace, and crossroads. Based on encounters with monsters in their...

There is something phenomenologically basic about the human experience of awareness, or consciousness. All ethnographies describe people who think, feel, imagine, hope, and are aware. Yet...

Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world...

Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But...

The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates...

Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational...

Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits...

Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The...

Islam is not an anthropological concept in the way, for example, culture, or even religion, are. People have thought about and discussed Islam long before anthropologists started thinking...

Cet article aborde la charité comme un terme «étique» qui facilite la comparaison entre des traditions différentes. Les bases théoriques en ont été posées par deux grands anthropologues au...

The variety of ways in which death has been handled in human societies has been a source of much scholarly fascination. In this brief overview, anthropological approaches to the study of...

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical...

Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention...

This entry considers charity as an ‘etic’ term that facilitates comparison between different traditions. Theoretical foundations were laid by two great anthropologists at the beginning of...

‘Culture’ is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline’s history, the...

It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both...

The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review the...