A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead

Representing the Body in Popular Media

Tim Posada (Author)

Online Access / Resources

A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead

Representing the Body in Popular Media

Tim Posada (Author)

Online Access / Resources

Hardback ~~£85.00~~ £76.50 Ebook (PDF) ~~£76.50~~ £61.20 Ebook (Epub & Mobi) ~~£76.50~~ £61.20

Quantity

In stock

£61.20 RRP £76.50 Website price saving £15.30 (20%)

Add to basket

Add to wishlist

Read on any device, including Android, Apple & Kindle

Description

This book focuses on debates surrounding the body, soul, and spirit, and addresses other aspects of theological anthropology in service to that angle.

What unseen forces govern fictional settings across films, television, and print? Are the bodies they portray useless, evil, spirited, or maybe soulless? This book interrogates the body in examples like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Castlevania, Get Out, Pan's Labyrinth, and Watchmen. While theological anthropology examines the body and soul, human agency, evil, and the image of God in reality, a new method of analysis, spirited anthropology, explores how these concepts operate in fictional worlds. From Captain America's virtue and Clayface's fluid body to Mike Myers' evil shape and transcendence in virtual reality and digital avatars, world-building across media elevates, diminishes, redefines, and mutates the body. The book contends that these spirited anthropologies present worlds occasionally injected with politics and social concerns from this reality, regardless of how ghosts, aliens, or virtual simulations try to strange the matter on display in each story.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

EPUB 3.0
Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
WCAG level AA
WCAG v2.2 compliant
accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
Has alternative text descriptions for images

Visual adjustments

Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)

Navigation

Page list to go to pages from the print source version
Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
Purposes of all links are made clear

Rich content

Language tagging provided

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Imprisoned Body: Key Terms for a Spirited Anthropology
Chapter 1: The Perfect Body: Captain America in the Realm of Forms
Chapter 2: The Soulless Body: Watchmen, American Gods, and the Divine Unconscious
Chapter 3: The Spirited Body: Pan's Labyrinth Confronts the Tyranny of Dualism
Chapter 4: The Evil Body: A Good Villain is Hard to Define
Chapter 5: The Racialized Body: Get Out as Analogy and Inverted Commentary
Chapter 6: The Gendered Body: Imago Dei versus the Male Gaze
Chapter 7: The Fluid Body: Physical Mutation, Psychic Evolution
Chapter 8: The Transcendent Body: Ascension, Digital Avatars, and Ghosts in the Machine
Chapter 9: The Communal Body: The Powers That Be Waltz with Pennywise the Dancing Clown
Conclusion: The Whole Body: Bending Through Material Reality and the Spirit World
Epilogue: The Useless Body: Finding Human Value Amidst a (Zombie) Pandemic
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Product details

Published	11 Dec 2025
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Pages	224
ISBN	9798216354154
Imprint	Fortress Academic
Series	Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Tim Posada

Tim Posada is chair of journalism and new media at…

Do you love pop culture? Does the witness of Stephen King and Jordan Peele and Guillermo del Toro and the Marvel Cinematic Universe overlap with your own? There's a word for someone like you. You're a spirited anthropologist. Good news: You are not alone. With A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead, Tim Posada invites us to go deep with our obsessions and to think harder about what our pop culture artisans are showing us about ourselves, others, and God. Turns out there's data in our binge-watching. Take a look and see.

David Dark, author of Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons and The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea
Tim Posada develops a distinctive method he calls spirited anthropology to explore how heroes, deities, monsters, computers, clowns, and fauns are brought to life in a wide range of cultural texts, including Pan's Labyrinth, Get Out, Watchmen, and American Gods. In A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead, he considers world-building as a form of artistic creation that is analogous to divine creation, paying close attention to the implicit and explicit theological concepts that animate so many cultural texts. Posada demonstrates time and time again, through his deeply engaging method of spirited anthropology, how some of the most popular movies, novels, short stories, and television shows of our time are actually asking profound questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of human life.

Mark Eaton, author of Religion and American Literature since 1950 and co-editor of Historical Fiction Now
Good stories come in all sizes and shapes, but they share one thing in common-they scratch at truth, beauty, or goodness. In Tim Posada's terminology, the 'spirited anthropology' of many popular culture narratives invites dialogue with both our understanding of our own bodily existence and with our beliefs as to what our bodily existence ultimately means. A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead is more than a page turner. It is public theology at its best, an opportunity for popular culture to stir our own thinking about what it means that we are our bodies.

Robert K. Johnston, Senior Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary and co-author of Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue