A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead: Representing the Body in Popular Media [Hardcover]

This book focuses on debates surrounding the body, soul, and spirit, and addresses other aspects of theological anthropology in service to that angle.

What unseen forces govern fictional settings across films, television, and print? Are the bodies they portray useless, evil, spirited, or maybe soulless? This book interrogates the body in examples like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Castlevania, Get Out, Pan's Labyrinth, and Watchmen. While theological anthropology examines the body and soul, human agency, evil, and the image of God in reality, a new method of analysis, spirited anthropology, explores how these concepts operate in fictional worlds. From Captain America's virtue and Clayface's fluid body to Mike Myers' evil shape and transcendence in virtual reality and digital avatars, world-building across media elevates, diminishes, redefines, and mutates the body. The book contends that these spirited anthropologies present worlds occasionally injected with politics and social concerns from this reality, regardless of how ghosts, aliens, or virtual simulations try to strange the matter on display in each story.

Do you love pop culture? Does the witness of Stephen King and Jordan Peele and Guillermo del Toro and the Marvel Cinematic Universe overlap with your own? There's a word for someone like you. You're a spirited anthropologist. Good news: You are not alone. WithA Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead, Tim Posada invites us to go deep with our obsessions and to think harder about what our pop culture artisans are showing us about ourselves, others, and God. Turns out there's data in our binge-watching. Take a look and see. David Dark, author of Everyday ApolÓ-