Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters

In this book, the human-monster relationship is explored in a variety of contexts. When technological innovation brings forth new monsters, or when extinction becomes ever more monstrous as even monsters themselves perish, then, the contributors argue, a focus on monsters opens up pressing new perspectives on change and social transformation. Each chapter in the book presents an ethnographically grounded analysis of monsters as they emerge or vanish in the context of social change.
Topics examined include the evil skulking the roads in ancient Greece, the terror in post-socialist Laos territorial cults, the most fanciful flights of the colonial imagination, the monsters prowling through neo-colonial central Australia and on to the ghosts lingering in Pacific villages in the aftermath of environmental disasters. The monsters captured here herald, drive, experience, enjoy and suffer the transformations of the worlds they beleaguer. The contributors take seriously the premise that monsters and the humans they haunt and harass are intricately and intimately entangled, so that they show us how we perceive the world and our place within it.