Böcker av Brian Morris

Leaving school at fifteen, Brian Morris has had a and varied career in Malawi, before becoming a university teacher. Now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, he is the author of numerous articles and books on anthropology, religion and symbolism, hunter gatherer societies, concepts of the individual and radical politics. His most recent books are Homage to Peasant Smallholders (Luviri Press 2022) and Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism (Black Rose 2022).After writing much about Anthropology, Brian Morris finally shares about his life. While in his youth the academic future seemed very dim, an all consuming interest in nature was already there. The author does not only share the formative experiences in Malawi and India, but he also shares his intellectual development to become a Dialectical Anthropologist. His travel and research experiences are fascinating, and it is amazing how much fits into one life.

This fast moving and sometimes disturbing book starts at the point where Brian is about to be arrested for smuggling a kilogram of cocaine into the country in 1995 worth a police estimate of one and a half million pounds, earning him a prison sentence of 12 years.The book continues by telling how he arrived at that point - his disadvantaged life, growing up in Wales in impoverished circumstances with a number of brothers and sisters, all with the same mother but several different fathers. He tells of his first experience with drugs at the tender age of 16, and how by the time he was 19 he had met a Dutch girl and moved to Holland. The book continues to chart his descent into drugs and drug dealing, and how after his break-up with the Dutch girl, he decides to go to Sri Lanka to start a new life, only to get involved in drug smuggling between Sri Lanka and India, whilst living with a poor fisherman and his family who showed him great kindness.He describes life as a dealer and the many smuggling trips to and from different countries, before he was finally arrested in Swansea, the point at which the book starts.The rest of the book deals with his Christian conversion, and the difficulties experienced by him and other prisoners who tried to live out their Christian lives in a harsh and hostile prison environment, and how, in spite of the pressures temptations and setbacks, including seeing fellow believers take their own lives whilst in prison or very shortly after release, because of good behavior his prison term is vastly reduced, and he is finally released. He starts to train to help others overcome the horror which drug involvement brings into a persons life, showing them how they can receive new life in Jesus. Although the book deals with very real and sometimes harrowing situations it is not without a wry humour.The book will appeal to all those who have ever wondered what life is really like in some of Britain's best known high security jails, those who have loved ones who are still dependent on drugs, those who want to better understand why people are attracted to drugs in the first place, and those who enjoy a good story, well told, with all the emotional highs and lows that one would expect from such a tale. Author and Broadcaster David Waite¿

This book offers the reader a portrait - a representation no less - of the social life and culture of the peasant-smallholders of the Shire Highlands, situated in Southern Malawi. It explores the relationship between the people of the Shire Highlands and the natural landscape - in all its diversity and dynamic complexity. It is an ethnographic study focussing specifically on the peasant-smallholders of the Highlands, who constitute around 80 per cent of the current population and their complex, multi-faceted relationship to the land and its diverse biota.

The Eight Pillars of Survival

Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision provides an illuminating account of one of Britain's best-loved nature writers, the incomparable Richard Jefferies. Lucid and comprehensive the book critically explores the diversity of Jefferies' literary talents, for this Wiltshire naturalist was without doubt a many sided and comprehensive genius. As a prose poet of nature Jefferies, like Thoreau, attempted to combine a vivid empirical naturalism with an extraordinary poetic imagination. He was indeed, as Brian Morris demonstrates, a pioneer ecologist. Although blessed with some insightful early biographers, Jefferies has been very much a neglected figure, and this study attempts to re-affirm his importance and relevence as a literary naturalist. Given the diversity of the Jefferies talents the structure of the book largely follows, and critically explores, the many different genres that Jefferies expressed in his writing. An initial chapter outlines Jefferies biography the history of a short life, for Jeffries, like Keats, died of tuberculosis and at the early age of thirty-eight.

Presents the ethnographic study of a community with structured trading relationships, the nomadic forest community of the Hill Pandaram.

The life and thought of Bakunin has contemporary relevance, particularly for his definitions of freedom. This book confirms Bakunin as an important and influential political theorist whose anarchism was dominated by a desire to achieve a unity of theory and practice. Everything about him is colossal...

Western cultures tend to view animals either as pets or food, and often overlook the vast number of roles that they may play within a culture and in social life more generally: their use in medicine, folk traditions and rituals. This study focuses on Malawi people and their relationship with animals - from hunting through to their use as medicine.

Like animals, insects may be revered or reviled - and in some tribal communities insects may be the only source of food available. This work looks at the importance of insects to culture, and provides information on the role of insects in cultural production.

An investigation of the Malawi people's sacramental attitude to animals, particularly the role that animals play in life cycle rituals, their relationship to the divinity and to the spirits. It shows that a range of rituals are informed by, and even dependent upon, human-animal relations.

This book is a pioneering and comprehensive study of the environmental history of Southern Malawi.

In this important, scholarly and wide-ranging text, Brian Morris provides a lucid outline of explanations of religious phenomena offered by such great thinkers as Hegel, Marx, and Weber. In doing so he also unravels theoretical strategies in the study of religion that have been developed and explored by later anthropologists.

Western society is individualised; we feel at ease talking about individuals and we study individual behaviour through psychology and psychoanalysis. Yet anthropology teaches us that an individual approach is only one of many ways of looking at ourselves. *BR**BR*In this wide-ranging text Morris explores the origins, doctrines and conceptions of the self in Western, Asian and African societies passing though Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confuscism, Tao and African philosophy and ending with contemporary feminism. *BR**BR*Scholarly and written in a lucid style, free of jargon, this work is written from an anthropological perspective with an interdisciplinary approach. Morris emphasises the varying conceptions of the self found cross-culturally and contrasts these with the conceptions found in the Western intellectual traditions.

This important textbook provides a critical introduction to the social anthropology of religion, focusing on more recent classical ethnographies. Comprehensive, free of scholastic jargon, engaging, and comparative in approach, it covers all the major religious traditions that have been studied concretely by anthropologists - Shamanism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and its relation to African and Melanesian religions and contemporary Neopaganism. Eschewing a thematic approach and treating religion as a social institution and not simply as an ideology or symbolic system, the book follows the dual heritage of social anthropology in combining an interpretative understanding and sociological analysis. The book will appeal to all students of anthropology, whether established scholars or initiates to the discipline, as well as to students of the social sciences and religious studies, and for all those interested in comparative religion.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction And Acknowledgements -- How To Use This Book -- Europe 1990 - Member States Of The European Community -- The European Community Framework -- A-Z of Community Issues -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z -- Directory of Community Institutions -- Directory of Representative Organisations -- Index

A comprehensive study of the varying conceptions of the human subject in the Western intellectual tradition. Although informed by an anthropological perspective, the author draws on material from major intellectual disciplines that have contributed to this tradition, and offers biographical and theoretical vignettes of major Western scholars.