An intriguing exploration of the role and significance of the body in the world of a Pacific Islands People, the Lelet of New Ireland (Papua New Guinea). In vivid ethnographic detail, the monograph captures the fluidity and complexity of Lelet conceptions of corporeality and their significance to identity as they encounter the influences of modernity, in the form of colonialism, Christianity and cash-cropping. The author examines the importance of the body to constructions of identity and difference, and its role in the constitution of place and space. The book provides a richly detailed ethnographic study of magical belief and the body whilst paying particular attention to the polyvalent meanings of bodily images and metaphors as they are used in numerous contexts of magic.

The Nasser D. Khalili Collection contains an enormous number of historically important objects relating to the fields of Islamic science in astrology, astronomy, medicine, and magic. This volume brings all these subjects together, and provides fascinating insight into the traditions and innovations of scholars and scientists in Islamic cultures. An intriguing and beautiful array of instruments and artefacts are presented here, accompanied by complete descriptions and authoritative essays.

"The Miracle of Health is for everyone who wants to live better and longer."--Dr. John Ratey, MD, author of Spark, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Everyone has heard the "hows" and the "whys" when it comes to health and fitness, so why don't we all look and feel the way we truly desire? Good question! Our answer: Because knowledge alone does not inspire change. In The Miracle of Health, we will show you how to uncover your own private, powerful reasons to take action. You will learn the secrets to lifelong health, and how to start looking and feeling better immediately! The Miracle of Health applies the psychology of success to fitness. Learn how to create joy on your journey to fitness, find meditation in movement, and see for yourself how one positive choice for greater health will create a ripple effect across every area of your life! Simple strategies will show you how you really can end your struggle with weight, low self-esteem, lack of energy, and poor health: start by choosing just one action step. Our book is packed with sound nutritional strategies that show how you can enjoy eating out and traveling without the usual guilt and worry about weight gain. New topics like mindful eating, de-junking your house, and our Top Foods Nutrition Plan will give you all the tools you need for lifelong successbut more importantly, after reading The Miracle of Health, you will WANT to take action today!

Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and practices are these early modern narratives embedded? What ideologies shape and contain them? The collection deliberately incorporates a period range which encompasses considerable cultural and ideological shifts that impact upon perceptions of the body. The choice of essays in the volume recognizes both continuities and discontinuities between perceptions of the body in the medieval and early modern periods.