Sacred forest groves in the Western Ghats of India are small fragments of tropical forest that have received protection due to religious beliefs and cultural practices. These forest fragments are an example of community-based conservation and they serve as refugia for many forest-dwelling species in otherwise highly anthropogenic tropical forest-agriculture landscapes of the Indian Western Ghat...

Duran Bell and Cynthia Werner From the earliest days of the field, economic anthropologists have observed that material objects often are imbued with sacred qualities whose values can never be reduced to material necessity or monetary equivalent. In 2002, the Society for Economic Anthropology hosted a conference to reconsider these ideas in the world today. We invited Professor Maurice Godelier...

the main sources of all natural light are the sun, the moon and the stars. in other words, the principle source of illumination is the light as mediated by atmosphere. according to some philosophers, spiritual or holy light includes not only material and quantified aspect, but being non-physical properties it treats as a spiritual connector between god and man. the light is the main part of exi...

The theory of ritual presented in this article is based on the notion “territory.” Ritual performance encompasses a set of techniques to affect the identity of participants: away from individuality and by communal demarcation of a symbolic territorial model in space or time. The form of ritual is seen as autonomous, i.e. as relatively independent of meaning. As a set of identity-affecting techn...