The Avatar Faculty Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games

Reviews

"Scholars and social scientists of religion will find much of interest in this book, because it explores the increasingly uncertain borders of 'religion,' when secularization may be obscuring the meaning of the concept without actually satisfying the human need for sacred norms and profound meanings."—Nova Religio

"In this book, Jeffrey Snodgrass realizes and extends some of the best in anthropological research. One of the things that is particularly appealing about this book is that it provides instructors with an ethnography written explicitly from the standpoint of cognitive culture theory. I have taught cognitive anthropology for over twenty years, and it is difficult to find an ethnography that explicitly adopts the perspective. Not only does this work build directly on cognitive culture theory, it deals with subject matter that I anticipate will be really engaging for students."—William W. Dressler, author of Culture and the Individual: Theory and Method of Cultural Consonance

"In the best ethnographic tradition, Snodgrass’s book brings together two seemingly unlikely bedfellows—online gaming and spirit possession—to draw conclusions about their astonishing similarity and, more importantly, their relevance to us all—even those who will never have direct experience of either one. Beyond the book's direct contributions to cultural anthropological theory and method, it engages the timely public concerns of online immersion and gaming disorders in a manner that would be deeply engaging to popular, undergraduate, and graduate audiences alike."—Lesley Jo Weaver, author of Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India