Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond [Paperback]

Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, culture, and media, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world. These monsters hail from Aboriginal Australia, the Pacific, Asia, and Europe, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt.1. Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies; Yasmine Musharbash 2. Cave Men, Luminoids and Dragons: Monstrous Creatures Mediating Relationships between People and Country in Aboriginal Northern Australia; Joanne Thurman 3. Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia; Yasmine Musharbash 4. Specters of Reality; Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia; Ute Eickelkamp 5. A Murder of Monsters: Terror and Morality in an Aboriginal Religion; John Morton 6. Burnt Woman of the Mission: Gender and Horror in an Aboriginal Settlement in Northern New South Wales; Mahnaz Alimardanian 7. Demons Within: Maleficent Manifestations in the Hare Krishna Movement; Malcolm Haddon 8. Ghosts and the Everyday Politics of Race in Fiji; Geir Henning Presterudstuen 9. Entanglements Between Tao People and Anito and LAnyu Island, Taiwan; Leberecht Funk 10. When Goblins Come to Town: The Ethnography of Urban Hauntings in Georgia; Paul Manning 11. The Workings of Monsters: Of Monsters and Humans in Icelandic Society; Helena Onnudottir 12. Afterword: Strangerhood Pragmatics, and Place in the Dialectics of Monster and Norm; Rupert Stasch

This collection of twelve papers is the first anthropological volume bringing participant-observation-based accounts and analyses of disparate creatures together under the umbrella term monster & . I would describe this volume as a collection of ethnographically well-informed essays that should be of interest to anyone involved in the cross-cultural study of epistemology and ontology. (Gregory Forth, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 18 (2), February, 2017)