Kirjahaku

Dancing with the Gods: Essays in Ga Ritual explores cosmological concepts and ritual actions of the Ga people of southeastern Ghana through case studies of calendrical agricultural rites, social status transition rites, and redressive rites. Based on fieldwork in the 1960s, the essays present descriptive analyses of verbal and non-verbal ritual action. While verbal ritual actions specify ideas pertinent to a particular rite, non-verbal ritual actions express more general concepts. Kilson’s analyses show how the same motifs of non-verbal ritual action recur in sacred and secular Ga rites. Whenever and wherever such motifs occur, they convey the same basic underlying Ga concepts, thereby creating a unified conceptual network of belief that is the foundation of the Ga ritual system. The essays in this collection previously appeared in Anthropos, Journal of African Studies, Journal of Religion in Africa, Parabola, and Sextant.

Born in the 1960s, the middle-class Biracial Americans of this study are part of a transitional cohort between the hidden biracial generations of the past and the visible blended generations of the future. As individuals, they have variously dealt with their ambiguous status in American society; as a generation, they share common existential realities in relation to White culture.During the last decade of the 20th century public awareness of mixed race Americans increased significantly, in no small part because there has been a substantial increase in interracial marriages and offspring since 1960. This study, based on ethnographic interviews, provides an historical overview of the study of Biracial Americans in the social sciences, a sociological profile of project participants, sociocultural discussions of family and race as well as racial identity choices, and examinations of racial realities in adult lives and of recurrent systemic and personal life themes. The textual part of the book demonstrates the diversity of perception and experience regarding race and identity of these biracial young adults. The Epilogue not only reviews major findings pertaining to this transitional generation of Biracial Americans but discusses biraciality and the deconstruction of race in contemporary American society. An extensive bibliography of popular and scholarly sources concludes the book.