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Ancestor Stones

Author: Aminatta Forna

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0802191967

From the award-winning author: A “wonderfully ambitious” novel of West Africa, told through the struggles and dreams of four extraordinary women (The Guardian). When a cousin offers Abie her family’s plantation in the West African village of Rofathane in Sierra Leone, she leaves her husband, children, and career in London to reclaim the home she left behind long ago. With the help of her four aunts—Asana, Mariama, Hawa, and Serah—Abie begins a journey to uncover the past of her family and her home country, buried among the neglected coffee plants. From rivalries between local chiefs and religious leaders to arranged marriages, manipulative unions, traditional desires, and modern advancements, Abie’s aunts weave a tale of a nation’s descent into chaos—and their own individual struggles to claim their destiny. Hailed by Marie Claire as “a fascinating evocation of the experience of African women, and all that has been gained—and lost—with the passing of old traditions,” Ancestor Stones is a powerful exploration of family, culture, heritage, and hope. “This is [Forna’s] first novel, but it is too sophisticated to read like one.” —The Guardian

Ancestor Stones

Author: Aminatta Forna

Publisher:

Published: 2008-02-01

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9780753178515

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Abie has followed the arc of a letter from London back to the coffee groves of the plantation formerly owned by her grandfather. It is a place she remembers from childhood and which now belongs to her - if she wants it. So begins her gathering of the family's history through the tales of her aunts.This is the story of four lives: Asana, Mariama, Hawa and Serah Kholifa, born to the different wives of a wealthy plantation owner in an Africa where change is just beginnning to arrive. Stretching across generations, Ancestor Stones is the story of a nation, a family and four women's attempts to alter the course of their own destiny.

Religions of India in Practice

Author: Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 0691216266

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The inaugural volume of Princeton Readings in Religions brings together the work of thirty scholars of the religions of India in a new anthology designed to reshape the ways in which the religious traditions of India are understood. The book contains translations of forty-five works, most of which have never before been available in a Western language. Many of these highlight types of discourse (especially ritual manuals, folktales, and oral narratives) and voices (vernacular, esoteric, domestic, and female) that have not been sufficiently represented in previous anthologies and standard accounts of Indian religions. The selections are drawn from ancient texts, medieval manuscripts, modern pamphlets, and contemporary fieldwork in rural and urban India. They represent every region in South Asia and include Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and Muslim materials. Some are written texts reflecting elite concerns, while others are transcriptions of oral narratives told by nonliterate peasants. Some texts are addressed to a public and pan-Indian audience, others to a limited coterie of initiates in an esoteric sect, and still others are intended for a few women gathered in the courtyard for a household ceremony. The editor has reinforced this diversity by arranging the selections within several overarching themes and categories of discourse (hymns, rituals, narratives, and religious interactions), and encourages us to make our own connections.

Ancestor Trouble

Author: Maud Newton

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2023-06-20

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0812987497

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“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Unseen City

Author: Ankhi Mukherjee

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-09

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1316517586

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Reconfiguring the lines between literature and psychoanalysis, this book argues that to alleviate poverty we engage with its psychic life.

The Love of Thousands

Author: Christine Valters Paintner

Publisher: Ave Maria Press

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 193205734X

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Is it possible that angels, saints, and even our departed ancestors support and inspire us throughout our lives? How can we connect with them in a real way? Christine Valters Paintner, popular spiritual writer and abbess of the online Abbey of the Arts, says these sacred beings are paving the way for our journey toward God’s love, even as we pass through a world rife with struggle, discord, and violence. In The Love of Thousands, she helps us open up our spiritual imagination to encounter our heavenly helpers, allowing us to become everyday mystics. Paintner describes saints, angels, and our ancestors as sacred beings who surround us like concentric circles, watching over us with compassion and offering us spiritual guidance throughout our lives. In The Love of Thousands, she guides us to see the ways these beings support us, from the care of our guardian angels, to the wisdom of the mystics, to the witness of our loved ones who have crossed the threshold to the light of God’s presence. Paintner’s gentle guidance reveals that we can be inspired and sustained when we are open and attentive in exploring our connections to these holy companions walking alongside us. Transformed by the encounter, we can grow into the kinds of ancestors—part of the Communion of Saints—who offer spiritual support and wisdom to others in turn. Throughout The Love of Thousands, we are led to explore and better understand the teachings from scripture and tradition about the four archangels, the protection offered by our guardian angels, and what it might look like to wrestle with angels as Jacob did in the Old Testament; the witness of the saints and mystics, with an exploration of how we are all called to be mystics; the tradition of relics and the practice of pilgrimage; the presence of our ancestors, inviting us first to claim the blessings of our family heritage and then to embrace grief and explore healing the wounds of our lineage. Each chapter includes a reflection, practice, meditation, and creative exercise that will help cultivate an ongoing relationship with angels, saints, and our ancestors. Paintner also suggests various ways to engage with this book to reflect more deeply on the spiritual content, such as reading it over the course of a year or with others as a form of spiritual pilgrimage.

Who's Your Hoosier Ancestor?

Author: Mona Robinson

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1992-08-22

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780253207319

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Who's Your Hoosier Ancestor is written by a Hoosier genealogist for Hoosiers and for the descendants of anyone who ever lived in Indiana. Mona Robinson provides methods for locating elusive ancestors, describing what records are available to the Indiana researcher, where they can be found, and how to use them most effectively. Robinson details the many usual and unusual sources that can be employed in genealogical searches—histories, atlases, directories, maps, and sources found in the home. She offers helpful hints and clues, explains the value of each type of record and the problems associated with using it. Valid sources, documentation, primary and secondary sources, and the many avenues of research are all detailed in this book, written especially for Hoosier ancestor hunters.

Fossil Man in Spain

Author: Hugo Obermaier

Publisher:

Published: 1924

Total Pages: 582

ISBN-13:

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Animism

Author: Graham Harvey

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005-10-26

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780231510271

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How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.