Download or read book Mana A History of a Western Category written by Nicolas Meylan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mana: A History of a Western Category Nicolas Meylan proposes a critical account of Western imaginations of mana, a word belonging originally to Oceanic languages but borrowed by European languages in which it acquired the meaning ‘supernatural power.’ While mana is best known for its tenure in the disciplines studying religion, Nicolas Meylan situates such academic uses in a wider context, analyzing the ways Westerners conceptualized mana in the earlier colonial context as well as its mobilizations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by (video)game designers and Neo-Pagan witches. This focus on various Western uses of mana allows for the critical investigation of the ways power has been mystified in conjunction with religion.
Download or read book The Social Origins of Thought written by Johannes F.M. Schick and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By studying how different societies understand categories such as time and causality, the Durkheimians decentered Western epistemology. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the “category project” which did not only stir controversies among contemporary scholars but paved the way for other theories exploring how the thoughts of individuals are prefigured by society and vice versa.
Download or read book Sovereignty and the Sacred written by Robert A. Yelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.
Download or read book Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic written by Jesper Sørensen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic ten leading scholars of religion provide up-to-date investigations into these classic domains from historical, anthropological, cognitive, philosophical and theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions written by Annelies Lannoy and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph studies the professionalization of History of religions as an academic discipline in late 19th and early 20th century France and Europe. Its common thread is the work of the French Modernist priest and later Professor of History of religions at the Collège de France, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), who participated in many of the most topical debates among French and international historians of religions. Unlike his well-studied Modernist theology, Loisy’s writings on comparative religion, and his rich interactions with famous scholars like F. Cumont, M. Mauss, or J.G. Frazer, remain largely unknown. This monograph is the first to paint a comprehensive picture of his career as a historian of religions before and after his excommunication in 1908. Through a contextual analysis of publications by Loisy and contemporaries, and a large corpus of private correspondence, it illuminates the scientification of the discipline between 1890-1920, and its deep entanglement with religion, politics, and society. Particular attention is also given to the role of national and transnational scholarly networks, and the way they controlled the theoretical and institutional frameworks for studying the history of religions.
Download or read book Contested Concepts in the Study of Religion written by George D. Chryssides and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a clear, concise introduction to the meaning of problematic terms, and the ways in which they should legitimately be used. Each entry considers the following: – Why is this concept problematic? – What are the origins of the concept? – How is it used or misused, and by whom? – Is it still a legitimate concept in the study of religion and, if so, what are its legitimate uses? – Are there other concepts that are preferable when writing on religion? Concepts covered include: – Belief – Religion – Magic – Secularisation – Violence This is a jargon-free indispensable resource for students and scholars that encourages the critical use of terms in the study of religion.
Download or read book The Soul in Soulless Psychology written by Robert Kugelmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although modern psychology rejected the concept of the 'soul', it has thrived over the past 150 years, in surprising areas.
Download or read book The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion written by Adam Possamai and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 2320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion takes a three-pronged look at this, namely investigating the role of religion in society; unpacking and evaluating the significance of religion in and on human history; and tracing and outlining the social forces and influences that shape religion. This encyclopedia covers a range of themes from: • fundamental topics like definitions • secularization • dimensions of religiosity to such emerging issues as civil religion • new religious movements This Encyclopedia also addresses contemporary dilemmas such as fundamentalism and extremism and the role of gender in religion.
Download or read book New Mana written by Matt Tomlinson and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Mana’, a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai‘i, and French Polynesia—and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana’s complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways.
Download or read book Simple Lives Cultural Complexity written by Steen Bergendorff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Simple Lives, Cultural Complexity explores how people manage to live relativey simple lives while seemingly unaware of the cultural complexity they produce while doing so. Using complexity thoery, this book reconceptualizes culture as a complex dynamic system called "cultural complexity" and argues that cultural complexity arises from persistent interactions among people and groups who act according to simple rules. The order produced is different from, and not reducible to, the interactions that created it. People only need simple rules of engagement in order to cope with their surroundings: rules that can be enacted through all kinds of strategies, and that together produce very complex emergent properties. Steen Bergendorff argues that people do not need to know their entire "cultural order" and its formal logics to cope with everyday life. They do not need to be enculturated; they only need to be enskilled to act in everyday situations."--Pub. desc.
Download or read book Transgender History Geography Crossdressing in Context written by Bolich and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-09-28 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third in a landmark five volume study of transgender realities, with a focus on crossdressing, this fascinating volume offers a tour through history and around the world. Within these pages are found the most famous crossdressers of history and information as to what it means to be a transgender person in the various countries of the world today.
Download or read book Witchcraft in Romania written by Ioan Pop-Curşeu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a history of witchcraft in the territories that compose contemporary Romania, with a focus on the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The first part presents aspects of earthly justice, religious and secular, analysing the codes of law, trials and verdicts, and underlining the differences between Transylvania on one hand, and Moldavia and Wallachia on the other. The second part is concerned with divine justice, describing apocalyptic texts that talk about the pains of witches in hell, but also the ensembles of religious painting where, in vast compositions of the Last Judgment, various punishments for the sin of witchcraft are imagined.
Download or read book Categories and Classifications written by N. J. Allen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From reflections on such works in translation as the 1938 essay, The Person, by seminal French sociocultural anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), and Primitive Classification (1903), which Mauss coauthored with his uncle-mentor sociologist Emile Durkheim, Allen offers his Maussian-influenced ideas on the origins of human society, magic, religion, and Indo- European ideology. Only the last chapter is original to this text. The titles and dates of Mauss' lectures are appended. The author acknowledges the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book History of Services of the Officers of the Engineer and State Railway Revenue Establishments written by India. Railway Board and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book God Is Samoan written by Matt Tomlinson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands see culture as the grounds on which one understands God. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson engages in an anthropological conversation with the work of “contextual theologians,” exploring how the combination of Pacific Islands culture and Christianity shapes theological dialogues. Employing both scholarly research and ethnographic fieldwork, the author addresses a range of topics: from radical criticisms of biblical stories as inappropriate for Pacific audiences to celebrations of traditional gods such as Tagaloa as inherently Christian figures. This book presents a symphony of voices—engaged, critical, prophetic—from the contemporary Pacific’s leading religious thinkers and suggests how their work articulates with broad social transformations in the region. Each chapter in this book focuses on a distinct type of culturally driven theological dialogue. One type is between readers and texts, in which biblical scholars suggest new ways of reading, and even rewriting, the Bible so it becomes more meaningful in local terms. A second kind concerns the state of the church and society. For example, feminist theologians and those calling for “prophetic” action on social problems propose new conversations about how people in Oceania should navigate difficult times. A third kind of discussion revolves around identity, emphasizing what makes Oceania unique and culturally coherent. A fourth addresses the problems of climate change and environmental degradation to sacred lands by encouraging “eco-theological” awareness and interconnection. Finally, many contextual theologians engage with the work of other disciplines— prominently, anthropology—as they develop new discourse on God, people, and the future of Oceania. Contextual theology allows people in Oceania to speak with God and fellow humans through the idiom of culture in a distinctly Pacific way. Tomlinson concludes, however, that the most fruitful topic of dialogue might not be culture, but rather the nature of dialogue itself. Written in an accessible, engaging style and presenting innovative findings, this book will interest students and scholars of anthropology, world religion, theology, globalization, and Pacific studies.
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 Religious Authority in South Asia written by István Keul and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on genealogies of religious authority in South Asia, examining the figure of the guru in narrative texts, polemical tracts, hagiographies, histories, in contemporary devotional communities, New Age spiritual movements and global guru organizations. Experts in the field present reflections on historically specific contexts in which a guru comes into being, becomes part of a community, is venerated, challenged or repudiated, generates a new canon, remains unique with no clear succession or establishes a succession in which charisma is routinized. The guru emerges and is sustained and routinized from the nexus of guruship, narratives, performances and community. The contributors to the book examine this nexus at specific historical moments with all their elements of change and contingency. The book will be of interest to scholars in the field of South Asian studies, the study of religions and cultural studies.
