LANCASTER, Pa. - Adeline Masquelier, associate professor of anthropology at Tulane University, will discuss "Witchcraft, Blood-Sucking Spirits, and the Demonization of Islam in a West African Town" on Thursday, Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. in Franklin & Marshall's Joseph International Center. The talk, sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Africana Studies, International Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, is free and open to the public. Masquelier received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1993. For the last 15 years, she has been doing research in rural Niger initially on spirit possession, and since 199 on reformist Islam. She has published extensively on bori practices in Dogondoutchi, a Hausaphone community of southern Niger. Her book Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town in Niger was recently published (2001, Duke University Press). Masquelier has also published articles on twinship, witchcraft and the pathology of consumption, and popular representations of healthcare in Niger and also contributed essays on healing, clothing and Islamic identities to edited books. Her interests include medicine, gender, commoditization and ritual processes in the postcolonial world and her current research focuses on a reformist Islamic movement known as Izala, and more specifically on issues of knowledge, tradition, and morality and the recent controversies surrounding worship, dress, and bridewealth among other things.
Masquelier is presently working on an edited book on nudity and dirt in cross-cultural perspective. -30- |
