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The practices of Daoism – China’s indigenous religion – have become increasingly popular in the West over the past decades. But what does the Americanized “Tao” of healing, health, energy, sex and alchemical spirituality have to do with the ancient monastic tradition as it is practiced in China? Dream Trippers follows American spiritual tourists, practitioners and scholars as they journey to the land of Daoism’s birth, at the monasteries and caves of Huashan, one of China’s most sacred peaks. The book captures the encounters between them and the Chinese monks and hermits who host them and attempt to teach them the “true Dao,” as they interact with each other in obtuse, often humorous, and sometimes enlightening and transformative ways. At stake is the predicament of a globalized spirituality that wavers between an elusive traditional authenticity and a fragile individual autonomy. Dream Trippers untangles the anxieties, confusions, and ambiguities that arise as the Chinese and American practitioners attempt to work through the tensions between cosmological attunement and radical spiritual individualism.

From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label “obeah.” Connected to justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many nations of the anglophone Caribbean today. Experiments with Power addresses the complex question of what obeah is, providing the first book-length ethnography devoted to the subject. Instead of arguing for obeah’s decriminalization under terms of religious recognition enshrined in most modern constitutions, this work shows how obeah lays bare the moral and racial foundations of modern ideas of religious tolerance. Tracing these ideas back to the Enlightenment, this book examines how such tolerance was premised upon the idealized separation of religion and power. Although this separation has undergirded ideas of secularism for centuries, religion remains entangled with questions of power and justice in contemporary worlds. This entanglement is common, but the ways that it has been mobilized to criminalize or denigrate certain practices as “black magic” reveals the interrelation of religious and racial discourses. This book details how the exclusion of obeah and other racialized tropes of “black magic” have defined religion from the eighteenth century to the present. Rather than seeing Afro-Caribbean spiritual workers as overdetermined by these influential discourses, this monograph shows how they elaborate alternate theories, describing their practices with terms that are often taken as antonyms for religion—science, work, or criminal justice. Experiments with Power argues that these theories redefine popular and scholarly understandings of religion, offering new ways to theorize religious practice.

This book is a wide-ranging study of the efflorescence of apparitions and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines, from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the millennium. It examines not only the conditions of this efflorescence but also its effects, and charts the ways in which the cult of Mary has transformed the place of Filipinos in the greater Catholic world. Whereas most scholarship on the “Age of Mary” has understood this religious revival as resisting the social, political, and economic transformations wrought by modernity, this book demonstrates that much of nineteenth and twentieth century Filipino Marianism and Marian phenomena articulates with projects and practices of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Of particular emphasis in this book is the mass media, and the ways in which, in the Philippines, the proliferation of apparitions and miracles of Mary and the burgeoning of print and technological media are interdependent phenomena that mirror one another on numerous levels.

Mumbai is not usually considered a holy city. Yet for many, if not most, people who live there, the neighborhood streets are shared with local gods and guardian spirits. This innovative ethnography examines the link between territory and divinity in India’s most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled urban environment, where over half the population lives in unauthorized housing, or "slums," space is scarce and anxiety about housing pervasive. Consecrating space—first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition—is one way of staking a claim. But how do subaltern communities make their gods visible, and thus efficacious, in the eyes of others? And what are the implications for urban space when sacred icons exert powerful ideological effects in public? These are the questions at the heart of this book, which brings an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the “tribal art” practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. The book advances debates on postcolonial citizenship and urbanism in South Asia. And in proposing a new theory of darshan, or visual worship, it will stand as a creative intervention in the study of India's religious traditions—as well as of its modern ideological formations.

The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations' secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? This book tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, it delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts—the last courts in Egypt to use Shari'a law—the book shows that secularism is an historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, it highlights secularism's dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates.

Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, the author of this book encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Tooy is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With a blend of storytelling and scholarship, the book recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals. Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world's money supply. The book draws on the author's long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy's teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.