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Can I read War and Shadows : The Haunting of Vietnam on EtoBox?
War and Shadows : The Haunting of Vietnam by Mai Lan Gustafsson is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.
What is War and Shadows : The Haunting of Vietnam about?
Vietnamese culture and religious traditions place the utmost importance on dying well: in old age, body unblemished, with surviving children, and properly buried and mourned. More than five million people were killed in the Vietnam War, many of them young, many of them dying far from home. Another 300,000 are still missing. Having died badly, they are thought to have become angry ghosts, doomed to spend eternity in a kind of spirit hell. Decades after the war ended, many survivors believe that the spirits of those dead and missing have returned to haunt their loved ones. In War and Shadows, the anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson tells the story of the anger of these spirits and the torments of their kin. Gustafsson's rich ethnographic research allows her to bring readers into the world of spirit possession, focusing on the source of the pain, the physical and mental anguish the spirits bring, and various attempts to ameliorate their anger through ritual offerings and the intervention of mediums. Through a series of personal life histories, she chronicles the variety of ailments brought about by the spirits' wrath, from headaches and aching limbs (often the same limb lost by a loved
Who reads War and Shadows : The Haunting of Vietnam?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Mai Lan Gustafsson
- Publisher
- Cornell Univercity Press
- Published
- 2009
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780801457456
- Category
- nonfiction
- Subjects
- History, Religion, Science