Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do."The Social Life of Spirits"challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but...