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This chapter discusses the constitution of Annang society and the intersections of corporate and individual modes of identification. It outlines the key elements of Annang personhood in relation to lineage, initiation and conceptions of the soul. It links the genealogy of shape-shifting beliefs and a shifting symbolic landscape to gendered and generational tensions wrought by a succession of changes from yams to slaves, and from slaves to palm oil, in local modes of production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, it examines the relationship between Christianity and colonialism in patterns of conquest and conversion within Annang society at the turn of the twentieth century.

Movement traces the ways in which fluid bodies actually move through the world. A composite image of the one legged trickster god from the few and brief allusions to Mesoamerican culture in Castillo's work and from anthropological studies of Tezcatlipoca and argue a shape-shifting inspired Castillo model. On the contrary, value of leg braces, medication, and public transportation as means of moving beyond has a body limit. Moreover, “Rethinking Body Politics” serves as consideration by feminist politics that might look like the movement is fore grounded and permeability over identity serves as the conclusion.

This chapter examines the popular belief about weretigers in the Malay world. There were two main types of weretiger beliefs in areas where tigers were present during historical times. One was the belief in shamans who had a tiger familiar (tiger spirit), who could turn themselves into tigers and would become tigers after their death. The macan gadhungan, the Javanese weretiger, was literally a mock tiger, and with that phenomenon comes the second type of weretiger beliefs. It comprises the harimau jadi-jadian of Malaya, the Cindaku people of Sumatra, the maung kajajadén of western Java, and the macan gadhungan of central and eastern Java. In Sumatra, shamanistic practices and experiences were much more part of everyday life. In Malay, people without a groove in their upper lip were supposed to be weretigers. In Malaya, many medicine men also claimed the ability to change themselves into tigers.

This chapter focuses on Miles Davis, a figure of major artistic importance for almost forty years, who has also become, in the words of fellow musician Chico Hamilton, “jazz's only superstar,” a bona fide celebrity whose every move is news. The chapter describes how the author's feelings about Miles Davis have shifted over time—largely in response to the shape-shifting aspect of Davis's music. In fact, it would be safe to say that no jazz musician of note presented us with more varied sorts of music than Davis did, though it certainly could be argued that at least one key element of Davis's personality, his will to change, remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, no matter how diverse, and at times artistically wayward, the musical results turned out to be.

A recurring scenario in Kuranko folktales involves a woman who assumes the form of a cunning and alluring animal in order to seduce a man. This identification of women’s emotional unpredictability with the capriciousness of bush spirits is common in rural West Africa. The shape-shifting motif is a metaphor for the allegedly fickle and wanton ways of women, the sole exception being one’s mother who, in the tales, often intervenes to prevent her son being snared by a temptress. Sometimes, women’s wiles are explained by reference to Mama Hawa (Eve), who allowed herself to be tempted by Satan, thereby bringing God’s wrath down on all women, giving rise to enmity between the sexes, women’s subservience to men, and women’s suffering in childbirth. Such assumptions explain the alacrity with which men will blame women for their troubled marriages, or cite examples of women who betrayed their husbands’ secrets, neglected their children, or brought ruin to their marriages through adulterous affairs.

This chapter focuses on the series of vituperative attacks which were launched against the prince by Parliamentarian polemicists during the opening months of the Civil War (by which time Rupert had been appointed as general of the Royalist cavalry). It concentrates, in particular, on the reports that sought to imply that Rupert possessed supernatural powers, and demonstrates that, in late 1642, a group of anonymous Parliamentarian pamphleteers in London made a concerted effort to tar the prince with the brush of diabolism, by repeating the earlier claims that he was ‘shot-free’, by hinting that he was a shape-shifter’ and even by implying that – after Rupert had, allegedly, been killed in battle – his corpse had been possessed and reanimated by the devil. [120 words]

The famous statue of Nike of Samothrace is introduced as an illustrative example of the image of the winged female—a figure that is found as far back as the Paleolithic era, and as recently as the twentieth century, across the world’s geographical, religious, and cultural regions. Examples from these varied sources will be discussed in depth throughout the book. The motif of the flying female or winged woman, and the tales told about them, embody themes including heroism and womanhood; the conflict between freedom and domesticity; understandings of transcendence versus immanence; and ancient fears about shape-shifting, especially from animal to human and back again.

This chapter enters the realm of Asian mystical women purported to have levitated, moved through the air, or flown. Three major religious traditions are examined: Islam, Daoism, and Buddhism. In Islam, Ṣūfīsm is the mystical strain of the religion. Here, the life and example of the female Ṣūfī mystic Rābi’ah al-’Adawiyya of Baṣra is explored, as are other aerial Ṣūfī women. Sun Bu’er and He Xiangu are women who illustrate Daoists paths toward enlightenment and immortality. In Buddhism, the figure of the iddhi is explored: these holy people are described as performing numerous aerial feats, including flying, touching the sun and the moon, and ascending to the highest heavens. None of the women’s lives examined here were easy, even by the standards of religious devotion and asceticism. A recurrent theme across the religious traditions is denying women the same religious opportunities as men.

Faith in an invisible, intrusive spirit world necessarily shapes how early moderns understood the various and constant transactions between self and place. A Midsummer Night’s Dream not only stages the unseen spirit world for its audience, but it also suggests that the embodied minds of Demetrius, Bottom, and even Theseus have been unknowingly breached and altered by invisible spirituous entities. Cognition and affect in A Midsummer Night’s Dream prove to be ecological. However, our understanding of how early moderns perceived this ecology should encompass their belief in indiscernible, nonhuman agents. As scholars have observed, the distribution of cognitive and affective processes across brain, body, and world extends the human mind into the environment. A Midsummer Night’s Dream helps us see how early moderns also discerned this process in reverse, where an animated, and surprisingly motivated, spirit world extends through brains and bodies.