Download or read book Fabrications of the Greek Past Religion Tradition and the Making of Modern Identities written by Vaia Touna and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking seriously critiques of historiography produced in recent decades, Vaia Touna advocates for an alternative approach to the way the past is studied. From Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus, to the notion of voluntary associations in the Greco-Roman world, to the authenticity of traditional villages in Greece, Fabrications of the Greek Past argues that meanings (and thus identities) do not transcend time and space, and neither do they hide deep in the core of material artifacts, awaiting to be discovered by the careful interpreter. Instead, this book demonstrates that meanings are always relative to their present-day context; they are historical products created by social actors through their ever-contemporary acts of identification. ---- "By disturbing the notion of an easily knowable Greek past, Touna makes an invaluable contribution to critical scholarship regarding ancient cultures and to contemporary theory about ideological uses of history." - Naomi Goldenberg, University of Ottawa "From an insider to Greek tradition, expert in its modern appropriations and translations, Fabrications is an important stimulus to metatheory and self-reflexivity in the study of religion, ancient and contemporary." - Gerhard van den Heever, University of South Africa "Vaia Touna expertly dissects modern discourses on the past, arguing that our contemporary interests don't just color our accounts of the past, they constitute them. A fantastic book." - Brent Nongbri, author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

Download or read book Fabricating Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.

Download or read book Religion in 50 More Words written by Aaron W. Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in 50 More Words: A Redescriptive Vocabulary provides a succinct historical, social, and political examination of some of the key words used in the modern study of religion. Differing from the first volume’s more theoretical focus, this volume analyzes more common first order descriptive terms that are used throughout the field, inviting readers to theorize their traditional vocabulary. Topics covered include: • Atheism/Theism • Conversion • Cult • Evil • Fundamentalism • Idol • Magic • Pilgrimage • Ritual • Sacrifice Religion in 50 More Words submits such terms to a critical interrogation and subsequent redescription. This paves the way for a collective and more critical reframing of the field. The volume, along with Religion in 50 Words, provides an indispensable resource for students and academics working in the field of religious studies and cognate disciplines.

Download or read book Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion written by Vaia Touna and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-18 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to them today. Scholars discussed include Muller, Durkheim, Freud and Eliade. Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists therefore offers a novel way into writing both a history and ethnography of the discipline, helping readers to see how it has changed and inviting them to consider what-if anything-endures and thereby unites these diverse authors into a common field.

Download or read book On Making a Shift in the Study of Religion and Other Essays written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many would today argue that the onetime dominance of the phenomenology of religion has receded, and with it the traditional approach to studying religion as a unique and deeply-felt experience that defies explanation, the essays collected here take quite the opposite stand: that this approach has merely been re-branded and continues to characterize much work being done in the field today. Offering a different way forward—one that is based on experiences gained by the members of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, a program that has successfully reinvented itself over the past 20 years—the book includes a variety of practical suggestions for how members of Religious Studies departments can revise their approach to studying and teaching about religion. Seeing religion instead as mundane but always exemplary of basic social elements found all across cultures, the volume argues that the way forward for this field lies not in the specialness of its object of study but, instead, the fact that thinking and acting as if something is special is itself an ordinary aspect of history and culture. Making just this shift helps the scholar of religion to contribute to wide, interdisciplinary conversations all across the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrating the practical relevance of their work.

Download or read book Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature written by Meredith J. C. Warren and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New research that transforms how to understand food and eating in literature Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms hierophagy, a specific type of transformational eating where otherworldly things are consumed. Multiple ancient Mediterranean, Jewish, and Christian texts represent the ramifications of consuming otherworldly food, ramifications that were understood across religious boundaries. Reading ancient texts through the lens of hierophagy helps scholars and students interpret difficult passages in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, Revelation 10, and the Persephone myths, among others. Features: Exploration of how ancient literature relies on bending, challenging, inverting, and parodying cultural norms in order to make meaning out of genres Analysis of hierophagy as social action that articulates how patterns of communication across texts and cultures emerge and diverge A new understanding of previously confounding scenes of literary eating

Download or read book American Examples written by Michael J. Altman and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume One is the first in a series of annual anthologies published in partnership with the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. The American Examples initiative gathers scholars from around the world for a series of workshops designed to generate big questions about the study of religion in America. Bypassing traditional white Protestant narratives in favor of new perspectives on belief, social formation, and identity, American Examples fellows offer dynamic perspectives on American faith that challenge our understandings of both America and religion as categories. In the first volume of this exciting academic project, five topically and methodologically diverse scholars vividly reimagine the potential applications of religious history. The five chapters of this inaugural volume use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask larger theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars beyond the subfield of American religious history. Prea Persaud's chapter explores the place of Hinduism among the "creole religions" of the Caribbean, while Hannah Scheidt captures what atheist parents say to each other about value systems. Travis Warren Cooper explains how the modernist church architecture of Columbus, Indiana, became central to that city's identity. Samah Choudhury dissects how Muslim American comedians navigate Western ideas of knowledge and self to make their jokes, and their own selves legible, and Emily D. Crews uses ethnographic fieldwork to read the female reproductive body among Nigerian Pentecostal congregations. Editor Michael J. Altman also provides a brief, rich introduction assessing the state of the discipline of religious history and how the American Examples project can lead the field forward.

Download or read book Teaching in the Study of Religion and Beyond written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on their wide experience in the undergraduate classroom, the contributors address basic but current issues in university teaching. This book provides practical commentary and invites instructors to consider how to address the learning needs of their students, while taking into account the wider structural requirements of administrations, governments, or credentialing agencies. Consisting of about forty, readable, short entries – on topics ranging from curriculum, grading, group work, digital humanities and large lectures, to learning management systems, office hours, online/remote courses, recruiting and seminars – this book provides a wealth of practical help and reassurance to teachers working with undergraduate students. This book is a valuable tool for early instructors in universities and colleges, showing them how to impact a class's success. It provides a critical background on the issues involved whilst also offering suggestions on how to navigate the competing demands on teachers.

Download or read book Group Survival in the Ancient Mediterranean written by Philip A. Harland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip A. Harland and Richard Last consider the economics of early Christian group life within its social, cultural and economic contexts, by drawing on extensive epigraphic and archaeological evidence. In exploring the informal associations, immigrant groups, and guilds that dotted the world of the early Christians, Harland and Last provide fresh perspective on the question of how Christian assemblies and Judean/Jewish gatherings gained necessary resources to pursue their social, religious, and additional aims. By considering both neglected archaeological discoveries and literary evidence, the authors analyse financial and material aspects of group life, both sources of income and various areas of expenditure. Harland and Last then turn to the use of material resources for mutual support of members in various groups, including the importance of burial and the practice of interest-free loans. Christian and Judean evidence is explored throughout this book, culminating in a discussion of texts detailing the internal financial life of Christian assemblies as seen in first and second century sources, including Paul, the Didache, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian. In shedding new light on early Christian financial organisation, this volume aids further understanding of how some Christian groups survived and developed in the Greco-Roman world.

Download or read book Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity written by Vaia Touna and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Acts of Identification and the Politics of the Greek Past written by Vaia Touna and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is about a series of operational acts of identification, such as interpretations, categorizations, representations, classifications, through which past materials have acquired their meaning and therefore identity. Furthermore, this meaning-making will be demonstrated always to be situational and relational in the sense that the meaning of past material is a historical product created by strategic historic agents through their contemporary acts of identification and, as situated historical products, they are always under scrutiny and constant re-fabrication by yet other historical agents who are on the scene with yet other goals. It will also be evident throughout this study that meanings (identities) do not transcend time and space, and neither do they hide deep in the core of material artifacts awaiting to be discovered. The Introduction lays the theoretical and methodological framework of the study, situating its historiographical and sociological interests in the study of identities and the past, arguing for an approach that looks at the processes and techniques by which material and immaterial artifacts acquire their meaning. In Chapter 1 I look at scholarly interpretations as an operational act of identification; by the use of such anachronisms (which are inevitable when we study the past) as the term religion and the idea of the individual self, a certain widely-shared, and thoroughly modern understanding of Euripides' play Hippolytus was made possible. Chapter 2 is concerned with the process of categorization, as another act of identification, which allows scholars to identify, and thereby describe (or better construct) the ancient Greek world by dividing it between what appeared to be naturally occurring private and public zones, through the use of categories such as "mystery cults," "voluntary associations," and "mystery religions." Although Chapter 3 is mainly on representations, it is evident that interpretations and categorizations are both effectively used in the restoration of a pitted iconography of a small church in Thessaloniki, Greece, which is often explained as an act of iconoclasm. Instead of focusing on the pitted iconography as an instance of iconoclasm, the chapter once again exemplifies the shift of this project by looking at how a new symbol was fabricated by commentators by means of the representation, interpretation and categorization of material from the archive of the fragmented past. In Chapter 4 it is made evident how all of the intersecting processes of the previous chapters are in place in the construction of "traditional villages" in Greece. Although classification has been an important operational act of identification, it would not be enough without the way with which representation, interpretation and categorization have been used by strategic social actors in order to constitute what counts as a "traditional village," doing so for their own social, economic, and political needs and thus contemporary interests. The Epilogue summarizes and exemplifies the shift of approach that the project is advocating by demonstrating how all of these operational acts, each of which have been identified in the previous chapters, are all working together in the construction of our view of the past and its relation to present interests.

Download or read book Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England written by Lauren Horn Griffin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key religious resources, Griffin shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding figures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.

Download or read book A Local History of Greek Polytheism written by Irene Polinskaya and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first comprehensive and detailed study of the deities and cults of the important Greek island-state of Aigina from the Geometric to Classical periods (800-400 BCE). It rests on a thorough first-hand reconsideration of the archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence. The development of the local cults is reconstructed, along with their interrelationships and how they responded to the social needs of the Aiginetans. Revising other recent models of interpretation, the author proposes a distinctive approach, informed by anthropology and social theory, to the study of the religious life of the ancient Greeks. On this basis, she uses the case of Aigina to explore fundamental issues such as the nature and variety of local religious worlds and their relationship to the panhellenic concepts and practices of Greek religion.

Download or read book Greek Religion and Its Survivals written by Walter Woodburn Hyde and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives written by David Dodd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and tragedy. In this books an international group of experts including Gloria Ferrari, Fritz Graf and Bruce Lincoln, critique many of these past studies, and challenge strongly the tradition of privileging the concept of initiation as a tool for studying social performances and literary texts, in which changes in status or group membership occur in unusual ways. These new modes of research mark an important turning point in the modern study of the religion and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, making this a valuable collection across a number of classical subjects.

Download or read book Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion written by Andrej Petrovic and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Ancient Greek religion really 'mere ritualism'? Early Christians denounced the pagans for the disorderly plurality of their cults, and reduced Greek religion to ritual and idolatry; protestant theologians condemned the pagan 'religion of form' (with Catholicism as its historical heir). For a long time, scholars tended to conceptualize Greek religion as one in which belief did not matter, and religiosity had to do with observance of rituals and religious practices, rather than with worshipers' inner investment. But what does it mean when Greek texts time and again speak of purity of mind, soul, and thoughts? This book takes a radical new look at the Ancient Greek notions of purity and pollution. Its main concern is the inner state of the individual worshipper as they approach the gods and interact with the divine realm in a ritual context. It is a book about Greek worshippers' inner attitudes towards the gods and rituals, and about what kind of inner attitude the Greek gods were envisaged to expect from their worshippers. In the wider sense, it is a book about the role of belief in ancient Greek religion. By exploring the Greek notions of inner purity and pollution from Hesiod to Plato, the significance of intrinsic, faith-based elements in Greek religious practices is revealed - thus providing the first history of the concepts of inner purity and pollution in early Greek religion.

Download or read book Greek Religion and Culture the Bible and the Ancient Near East written by Jan Bremmer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decades there has been an increasing interest in the relationship between Greek religion & culture and the Ancient Near East. This challenging book contributes greatly to this interest by studying the Near Eastern background of important Greek myths, such as those of the creation of the world and the first woman, the Flood, the Golden Fleece, the Titans and travelling seers, but also of the births of Attis and Asclepius as well as the origins of the terms ‘paradise’ and ‘magic’. It also shows that, in turn, Greek literature influenced Jewish stories of divine epiphanies and that the Greek scapegoat myths and rituals contributed to the central Christian notion of atonement.