Review by Choice Review
Decades ago, Georges Bataille wrote that people need the strange to escape strictures of culture and attain freedom of expression. Anthropologist Gilmore (SUNY, Stony Brook) echoes Bataille in asserting that "the mind needs monsters" as "sources of identification and awe as well as of horror." Gilmore offers a hybrid text surveying theoretical positions but concentrating on popular storytelling. Neither side is altogether satisfying, for references to ritual theorists like Mary Douglas and Victor Turner are overridden by pop Freudian psychology and a bow to Joseph Campbell's mythologies, while engaging accounts of "monsters" (with Gilmore at his best describing Native American lore) are trumped by occasional dubious sources (e.g., Rory Nugent's Drums along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur, 1993) rather than grounded in political economy and other deeper discourses (e.g., Luise White's Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, 2000). One is left wondering if Gilmore's category "monster" can cut across the ethnographic diversity he marshals when whole religious systems revolve around the knowledge--rather than "imagination"--that things go bump in the night. Still, his engaging book suggests a universal need to extend perceptions of evil far beyond the obvious. Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate collections. A. F. Roberts University of California, Los Angeles
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
