To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Ritual makers.
Books on the topic 'Ritual makers'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 books for your research on the topic 'Ritual makers.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse books on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Embracing the witch and the goddess: Feminist ritual-makers in New Zealand. London: Routledge, 2003.
Find full text
2
Salvarani, Renata. The Body, the Liturgy and the City. Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-364-9.
Full textAbstract:
The body and the space are the fulcrums of dynamic relationships creating cultures, identities, societies. In the game of interactions between individuals, groups and space, religions play a crucial role. During a ritual performance takes place a true genesis of a sacred space. This work analyzes the theme from a historical point of view, with a focus on Christian medieval Latin liturgies. Indeed, for Christian theology, related with the dogma of the Incarnation, the chair is itself the place of the manifestation of the sacred. Liturgy makes present and gives with life a new body. Together it generates a space, that interacts with the entire urban society, inside the eschatological dialectic between earthly and heavenly city.
3
Lewis-Williams, David. Image-Makers: The Social Context of a Hunter-Gatherer Ritual. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Find full text
4
Klassen, Pamela. Ritual. Edited by John Corrigan. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195170214.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
This essay discusses politically motivated contests over the authenticity of ritualized emotion, such as weeping or visionary bliss, which can be contests internal to a community or between different communities, as in the context of charges of appropriation across traditions. It also examines scholarly debates over cognition and culture, or the relative importance of neurophysiological versus social and cultural influences on the origin, function, and meaning of ritual. It argues that the study of ritual and emotion needs to attend to embodiment and physicality, as well as to the social, historical, and cultural networks within which ritualized emotions “make sense.” But first it looks at various definitions of ritual before commenting on crocodile tears and the authenticity of ritual emotion.
5
Blidstein, Moshe. Baptism as Purification in Early Christian Texts. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791959.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
Chapter 5 discusses baptism as a ritual of purification and as marking the community’s external boundaries. Most authors who wrote about baptism in the second and third centuries described it as an act of purification, an understanding which is supported by the imagery of the ritual itself and by the Jewish and pagan parallels. This understanding made baptism dangerously similar to Jewish ritual, and the first section of the chapter therefore focuses on the efforts of Christian authors to differentiate between Christian baptism and Jewish rituals. Furthermore, this chapter investigates what exactly baptism was thought to purify. The identification of baptism—a physical act of washing—with purification from what would seem to be non- or semi-physical entities makes it a major site for addressing the relationship between external and internal purity, the role of conscious intention as opposed to ritual action, and the place of spiritual entities.
6
Stephenson, Barry. 6. Ritual as performance. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199943524.003.0007.
Full textAbstract:
Cross-culturally, ritual typically includes elements commonly associated with performance events: music or rhythmic accompaniment; dance or other stylized bodily movements; and masking, costuming, and makeup. ‘Ritual as performance’ considers performance theory and performance studies and some of the work of significant theorists in these fields: J. L. Austin and Richard Schechner. By looking at the kōan tradition of Zen Buddhism, Schechner's approach to ritual can be better understood. Schechner places performance on a continuum that runs from efficacy to entertainment. The notions of embodiment and inscription in ritual studies are also considered along with the noetic implications of ritual action, such as pilgrimage.
7
Geslani, Marko. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190862886.003.0008.
Full textAbstract:
The conclusion reviews how a history of śānti rituals complicates our sense of the relationship between Vedism and Hinduism. Despite the drammatic religious changes that took hold in the post-Vedic period, Vedic orthopraxy, at least in the endurance of its ritual structures, nonethless constrained Hindu practice, especially in its highly public temple setting. The study also connects the medieval Brahmanical world to the ethnographic present. While relatively taciturn at the level of theoretical discourse, the ritual and astrological cultures of the royal and temple cults pose a striking countertext to the better-known Brahmanical discourses of Dharmaśāstra, and tend to align with recent ethnographic and ethnohistorical work on auspiciousness, kingship, and materiality. Finally, the study makes possible a critique of the well-known term, darśan (viewing an image), based on the priestly view of the royal body, arguing for a recontextualized and repoliticized view of image worship in Hinduism.
8
Phelan, Helen. Singing Belonging in the Ritual Lab. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190672225.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
Chapter 4 explores the introduction of Ronald Grimes’s ritual laboratory as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of a ritual song module within the context of a Master’s in Ritual Chant and Song at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. An examination of feedback and correspondence on the lab from students over the last decade and a half supports a view of the lab as a space of welcome, hospitality, and belonging. A central aspect of singing, explored in the lab, is its relationship with temporality. It suggests that it is the ability of music to collapse the clear boundaries between time and space that makes singing (particularly in ritual contexts) so successful in facilitating a sense of belonging.
9
Tallgren, Immi. The Faith in Humanity and International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805878.003.0015.
Full textAbstract:
International criminal law is at times taken to manifest fundamental consensual boundaries against violence and destruction of the human species. The faith in law is celebrated in a cult with rituals, symbols, and mythologies where law is saving humans from evil. This chapter takes issue with the transcendental reference in ‘humanity’ by situating it within discussions on religion, the non-deist religions in particular. Three French thinkers: Henri Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Emile Durkheim are stimulating intellectual figures—often neglected or caricatured. They developed new visions for society as religions–creating dogmas, symbolism, and ritual practices. Yet they declared the transcendental divinities dead. The human individual and ‘humanity’ were further elevated yet declared ‘positive’, victorious over superstition. Their religions aimed to capture the best of two worlds: secular and religious, rational and affective. But what difference does it make to see ideas, beliefs, faith, or commitment as religious or as something else, such as politics or ideology?
10
D’Alessio, Giambattista. Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0002.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter offers an analysis of the ways in which the language of Sappho’s poems makes use of pragmatic elements that evoke a link to an extratextual world. Through this analysis, the dominant interpretative paradigm is questioned that sees Sappho’s poetry as primarily embedded within a ritual performance context, as well as the alternative reading that explains some of its most salient features as due to strategies enabled by the adoption of writing as a medium of communication. While emphasizing the centrality of performance as a theme and a concern in Sappho’s poems, the chapter shows how the texts often locate themselves outside a proper performative frame, providing a look at ritual from a marginal, personal, and yet powerfully exemplary perspective.
11
Dacome, Lucia. Malleable Anatomies. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736189.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Malleable Anatomies examines the early stages of the practice of anatomical modelling. It investigates the ‘mania’ for anatomical displays that swept the Italian peninsula in the mid-eighteenth century, and traces the fashioning of anatomical models as important social, cultural, and political as well as medical tools. Anatomical models offered special insights into the inner body. Being coloured, soft, and malleable, they fostered anatomical knowledge in delightful ways. But how did anatomical models inscribe and mediate bodily knowledge? How did they change the way in which anatomical knowledge was created and communicated? And how did they affect the lives of those involved in their production, display, viewing, and handling? Examining the circumstances surrounding the making and early viewing of anatomical displays in Bologna, Naples, and Palermo, Malleable Anatomies addresses these questions by reconstructing how anatomical modelling developed at the intersection of medical knowledge, religious ritual, antiquarian and artistic cultures, and Grand Tour display. While doing so, it investigates the development of anatomical modelling in the context of the diverse visual and material practices that characterized the representation and display of the body. Drawing attention to the artisanal dimension of anatomical practice, and the role of women as both makers and users, it considers how anatomical models lay at the centre of a composite world of social interactions that led to the fashioning of modellers as anatomical celebrities. Moreover, it examines how anatomical displays transformed the proverbially gruesome practice of anatomy into an enthralling experience that engaged audiences’ senses and affects.
12
Sizemore, Michelle. American Enchantment. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190627539.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book investigates the post-revolutionary rituals and discourses of enchantment, a category of mystical experience uniquely capable of producing new forms of popular power and social affiliation. American Enchantment views this phenomenon as a response to a signature problem in post-revolutionary culture: how to represent the people in the absence of the king’s body and other traditional monarchical forms. In the early United States, this absence inaugurates new attempts to conjure the people and to reconstruct the symbolic order. For many in this era, these efforts converge on enchantment. This pattern appears in works by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as in the rites of George Washington’s presidency, the religious prophecy of the Second Great Awakening, the tar and featherings of the Whiskey Rebellion, and other ritual practices such as romance reading. Recognizing the role of enchantment in constituting the people overturns some of our most commonsense assumptions: above all, the people are not simply a flesh-and-blood substance but also a supernatural force. This project makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on the symbolic foundations of sovereignty by arguing that the new popular sovereignty is no longer an embodied presence fixed in space—in a king, nor even in a president, an individual, a group of persons, or the state—but a numinous force dispersed through time. That is, the people, counter to all traditional thought, are a supernatural and temporal process.
13
Halperin, Ehud. The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess. Edited by Robert Yelle. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190913588.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Haḍimbā is a major village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a mountainous, rural area known as the Land of Gods. This book is an ethnographic study of Haḍimbā and her dynamic, mutually formative relationship with her community of followers. It explores the part played by the goddess in her devotees’ lives, particularly in their encounters with players, powers, and ideas both local and external, such as invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and, more recently, modernity, capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Haḍimbā is revealed as a complex social agent, a dynamic ritual and conceptual compound, which both mirrors her devotees and serves as a platform for them to reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and sometimes resist their changing realities. The goddess herself, it emerges, also changes in the process. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and textual materials gathered during periods of extensive fieldwork from 2009 to 2017, this study is rich with myths, accounts of dramatic rituals, and descriptions of everyday life in the region. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Haḍimbā from the ground up, or rather from the center out, portraying the goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The resulting account makes an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses, lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field of religion and ecology.
14
Wellman, James, Katie Corcoran, and Kate Stockly. High on God. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199827718.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Humans are homo duplex, seeking to be individuals but knowing this is only possible in communities. Thus, humans struggle to integrate these two sides of their nature. Megachurches have been enormously successful at resolving this struggle. How do they do it, and what is it about their structure and rituals that makes so many feel as if they are high on God? The affective energies and emotional valences that characterize religious ecstasy are the primary focus of our study of megachurches. Empirically, humans want and desire forms of what Randall Collins calls “emotional energy.” Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative data on twelve nationally representative megachurches, we identify six desires that megachurches evoke and meet: acceptance, awe and spiritual stimulation, reliable leadership, deliverance, purpose, and solidarity in a community of like-minded others. Megachurches satisfy these desires through co-presence—being in the presence of other desiring people—a shared mood achieved through powerful musical worship services, a mutual focus of attention on the charismatic senior pastor who acts as an emotional charging agent, transformative altar calls, service opportunities, and small-group participation. This interaction ritual chain solidifies attendees’ commitment and group loyalty, and keeps them coming back to be recharged. Megachurches also have a dark side: they are known for their highly publicized scandals often involving malfeasance of the senior pastor. After examining the positive and negative sides to megachurches, we conclude that they successfully meet the desire of humans to flourish as individuals and to do so in a group.
15
Osborne, Robin. Imaginary Intercourse. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649890.003.0012.
Full textAbstract:
In this chapter, Robin Osborne reexamines what Kenneth Dover called “intercrural intercourse.” Following Dover’s lead, scholars have constructed a history of Greek homosexuality in which penetration was taboo and instead older lovers enjoyed only intercourse in which their pleasure came from rubbing their penis between a boy’s thighs. This has been taken to support a model of sexual behavior in which penetration and power stand at the center. Osborne argues instead that intercrural intercourse is a modern fantasy. On the basis of a close examination of the corpus of relevant images, he makes the case that the scenes should be read not as literal representation of some curious homosexual ritual, but as ways of exploring the nature of homoerotic desire. The point of these pictures is not to show what was visible in life, but to find a visible way of allowing the viewer to fantasize about men’s homoerotic pleasures.
16
Duff, Andrew I., Judith A. Habicht-Mauche, and M. Steven Shackley. Minerals. Edited by Barbara Mills and Severin Fowles. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199978427.013.41.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter discusses the procurement of clay, temper, and mineral pigments (including lead) used to make pottery, as well as tool stone, salt, and turquoise, by people in the Southwest. This chapter also discusses the distribution of these minerals and the analytical means used by archaeologists to source them. Some of these materials were available near residences, while others were located at greater distances, requiring trade relationships or sojourns to acquire. When resources were procured from considerable distances, their procurement was often enmeshed in ritual. The procurement and circulation of these resources are critical to models of social, political, and economic interaction in Southwest archaeology.
17
Brick, David. Penance. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198702603.003.0025.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter examines the intimately connected conceptions of sin (pāpa) and penance (prāyaścitta) developed within the Dharmaśāstra tradition. Its primary aim is to demonstrate how numerous features of the Dharmaśāstra theory of sin and penance reflect a pervasive concern with two fundamentally different human activities: (a) the personal quest to avoid an undesirable life after death and (b) the process of excommunicating and readmitting members of a given social community. This chapter, therefore, highlights the rather stark distinction that Dharmaśāstra texts make in their treatment of ritual expiation between social and soteriological concerns. To this end, close attention is paid to the traditional distinction made between public and private sins and penances.
18
Proust, Joëlle, and Martin Fortier. Metacognitive diversity across cultures. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198789710.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book collects essays on linguistics, on anthropology, on philosophy, on developmental, experimental, and social psychology, and on the neurosciences, with the aim of integrating knowledge about the variability of metacognitive skills across cultures, and of identifying the potential factors accounting for such variability—such as childrearing practices, linguistic syntax and semantics, beliefs about the self, and rituals. In this introductory chapter, the main reasons that make this topic scientifically and culturally important are presented.
19
Nagarajan, Vijaya. Feeding a Thousand Souls. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195170825.003.0011.
Full textAbstract:
The Hindu notion of “feeding a thousand souls” each day as a ritual duty is central to the creation of the kōlam. This chapter traces this idea of “feeding a thousand souls” to ancient Sanskrit literature, Manu’s Code of Law, and the Mahabharata. There are five sacrifices or offerings that a householder should perform daily to alleviate the karmic debt of daily living: feed the animals, give food away until there is none left, feed the ancestors, feed the gods and goddesses, and offer hospitality to unexpected guests. In recent times, the material used to make the kōlam has changed from edible rice flour to inedible stone flour and acrylic stick-ons. This chapter explores the consequences of this change.
20
Bronner, Simon J., ed. Jews at Home. Liverpool University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781904113461.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The questions at the heart of this book are: what things make a home ‘Jewish’, and what is it that makes Jews feel ‘at home’ in their environment? The material dimensions are explored through a study of the symbolic and ritual objects that convey Jewishness and a consideration of other items that may be used to express Jewish identity in the home. The discussion is geographically and ethnically wide-ranging, and the transformation of meaning attached to different objects in different environments is contextualized. For diasporic Jewish culture, the question of feeling at home is an emotional issue that frequently emerges in literature, folklore, and the visual and performing arts. The phrase ‘at-homeness in exile’ aptly expresses the tension between the different heritages with which Jews identify, including that between the biblical promised land and the cultural locations from which Jewish migration emanated. The chapters take a closer look at the way in which ideas about feeling at home as a Jew are expressed in literature originating in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, and also at the political ramifications of these emotions. The question is further explored in a series of exchanges on the future of Jews feeling ‘at home’ in Australia, Germany, Israel, and the United States. The book examines the theme of the Jewish home materially and emotionally from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. It uses the theme of home and the concept of domestication to revise understanding of the lived (and built) past, and to open new analytical possibilities for the future.
21
Stohr, Karen. The Etiquette of Eating. Edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199372263.013.29.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter explores and defends the idea that the etiquette conventions governing dinner parties, whether formal or informal, have moral significance. Their significance derives from the way that they foster and facilitate shared moral aims. I draw on literary and philosophical sources to make this claim, beginning with Isak Dineson’s short story, “Babette’s Feast.” I employ the concept of ritual from Confucius and Xunzi, as well as Immanuel Kant’s detailed discussion of dinner parties in the Anthropology. Kant’s account, in particular, helps illuminate how properly conducted dinners can enhance our understanding and promote moral community among the people who attend. I conclude that dinner parties play an important role in the moral life, and that the etiquette conventions governing them derive their binding force from their contribution to that role.
22
Phillips, Tom. Polyphony, Event, Context. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter argues that Pindar’s Paean 9 creates a complex relationship between enunciative and performative situations. This complexity is pragmatic, but is also informed by the poem’s intertextuality, its construction of voice, and its self-consciousness about its status as an aesthetic artefact. Paean 9 positions itself in a tradition of poems about eclipses; doing so reinforces its control over the event it memorializes. Its opening utterance is meant to be understood simultaneously as a spontaneous response to the eclipse and a crafted authorial utterance, and attunes audiences both to the gods’ ineffable power and man’s capacities for meaningful if provisional understanding of it. The poem’s capacity to make itself understood as separable from its performance context inflects the specific way in which it discharges its ritual aims.
23
Wynn, Jonathan. Country Music and Fan Culture. Edited by Travis D. Stimeling. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190248178.013.10.
Full textAbstract:
As this chapter suggests, country music’s success can be measured not just in records sales, but as based in nurturing an elaborate and committed fan culture. Through characteristic rituals and using new media and technology, the distance between production and consumption expands and contracts. The historical and close collaboration between the industry and country fandom makes the genre distinctive. The chapter also discusses country fan club culture, which assures inclined fans some chance for communalism and possible contact with artists themselves. The complex and changing relationship between the more formal media and trade organizations and the more informal club culture is another unique aspect to country music’s fandom. In addition, there is perhaps no better way to understand country fandom than two forms of interactions: “meet-and-greets” and the interactions in and around the annual CMA festival.
24
Brick, David. Sati. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190656485.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter examines the history of the traditional Hindu practice of widow self-immolation, commonly known as sati, which is one of the mostly widely known and discussed forms of ritual suicide in world religions. The chapter begins by briefly placing sati within the context of other historically practiced forms of “following into death” (in German, Totenfolge), and discussing those features of sati that make it unique among these practices. Then, in three separate sections, it provides an account of the earliest surviving sources on sati, which likely date as far back as the fourth century BCE; outlines an important medieval debate on the validity of the practice that took place within the orthodox Hindu legal tradition known as Dharmaśāstra; and, lastly, notes some major later developments regarding sati, including especially its legal prohibition by the British colonial government in India in 1829.
25
McDaniel, Justin Thomas. Conclusions and Comparisons. University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824865986.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
Starting off with the unique story of the Buddha and leisure park designed in rural Louisiana, the conclusion argues that despite many problems with large comparative projects Buddhist Studies, the amusement parks, memorials, museums, and gardens described in the book as a whole share many qualities. They generally lack formal, formidable, ritual, ecclesiastical, or sectarian boundaries. They make little sustained effort to be “authentic.” These sites emphasize display, performance, and juxtaposition and anachronistic mixing (not systematic reconstruction) of various Buddhist cultures, teachings, languages, objects, and symbols. This is important, because it provides us with a completely different image of contemporary Buddhism that emphasizes innovation and ecumenism instead of purity and authenticity. These sites present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise—a gathering not a movement. By eschewing the local and authentic in favor of the timeless, ecumenical, and universal, they become difficult to categorize. They make visual statements for sure, even if they don’t attempt to create single messages or provide coherent teachings.
26
Fredericks, Sarah E. Environmental Guilt and Shame. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198842699.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Bloggers confessing that they waste food, nongovernmental organizations naming corporations selling unsustainably harvested seafood, and veterans apologizing to Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for environmental and social devastation caused by the United States government all signal the existence of action-oriented guilt and identity-oriented shame about participation in environmental degradation. Environmental Guilt and Shame demonstrates that these moral emotions are common among environmentally friendly segments of the United States but have received little attention from environmental ethicists though they can catalyze or hinder environmental action. Concern about environmental guilt and shame among “everyday environmentalists” reveals the practical, emotional, ethical, and existential issues raised by environmental guilt and shame and ethical insights about guilt, shame, responsibility, agency, and identity. A typology of guilt and shame enables the development and evaluation of these ethical insights. Environmental Guilt and Shame makes three major claims: First, individuals and collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including collectives, should feel guilt and/or shame for environmental degradation if they hold environmental values and think that their actions shape and reveal their identity. Third, a number of conditions are required to conceptually, existentially, and practically deal with guilt and shame’s effects on agents. These conditions can be developed and maintained through rituals. Existing rituals need more development to fully deal with individual and collective guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.
27
Nagarajan, Vijaya. Embodied Mathematics. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195170825.003.0007.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter introduces ethnomathematics and discusses the multiple relationships between the kōlam and mathematics. Some of these mathematical properties align with women’s implicit framing knowledge of the kōlam. These ritual patterns are relevant to four key mathematical aspects: symmetry, fractals, array grammars and picture languages, and infinity. This chapter presents the concept of embodied mathematics and argues that Chandralekha’s choreographies embody the three dimensional kōlam. The dot kōlams and the square kōlams are symmetrical. Using geometric algorithms, mathematicians have found that the kōlam is created by transforming and superimposing basic subunits into fractals. Picture languages use sets of basic units combined with formal rules to make larger and seemingly infinite patterns, which computer scientists use for programming computer languages. The kōlam’s connection to infinity serves as a vehicle for auspiciousness. This chapter also discusses how Chandralekha’s choreographies expand the two-dimensional kōlam into three dimensions.
28
Clark, Sharri R., and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. South Asia—Indus Civilization. Edited by Timothy Insoll. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199675616.013.024.
Full textAbstract:
Figurines of the Indus Civilization (c.2600–1900 BC) provide unique insights into technological, social, and ideological aspects of this early urban society. The Indus script has not yet been deciphered, so figurines provide one of the most direct means to understand social diversity through ornament and dress styles, gender depictions, and various ritual traditions. This chapter focuses on figurines from the site of Harappa, Pakistan, with comparative examples from other sites excavated in both India and Pakistan. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic terracotta figurines, and special forms with moveable components or representing composite or fantastic creatures, are found at most sites of the Indus Civilization, with rare examples of figurines made of bronze, stone, faience, or shell. The raw materials and technologies used to make figurines are discussed, along with the archaeological contexts in which they have been discovered. These figurines provide an important line of evidence regarding Indus society and religion.
29
Burkert, Walter. Sacrificial Violence. Edited by Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199759996.013.0031.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter investigates the sacrificial violence that is a problem of ancient religions, paying attention only to those civilizations which form the basis of Near Eastern-European tradition. The suicidal murderer regards himself as homo religiosus. Religion is committed in an arena of death, nay of killing. The shadow of death appears most noticeable when sacrifice reaches its violent peak in human sacrifice. There have been a few examples of substitution sacrifice in rituals and legends. The themes of violence and killing make tragedy. Religion admits danger, fear, and violence, while presenting rules concerning how to deal with these, one of which includes the risk and the triumph of killing.
30
England, Samuel. Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425223.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts helped shape imperial thought in the Middle Ages. Its analysis covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE. Scholars of premodern cultures have struggled to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era’s Islamic and Christian empires. This book argues that medieval thinkers’ most pressing cultural challenge was neither to demonize the foreign, “heathen” other, nor to reverse that trend with an ethos of tolerance. Instead it was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war. The ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups’ rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal.
31
Eichler-Levine, Jodi. Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660639.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Exploring a contemporary Judaism rich with the textures of family, memory, and fellowship, Jodi Eichler-Levine takes readers inside a flourishing American Jewish crafting movement. As she travelled across the country to homes, craft conventions, synagogue knitting circles, and craftivist actions, she joined in the making, asked questions, and contemplated her own family stories. Jewish Americans, many of them women, are creating ritual challah covers and prayer shawls, ink, clay, or wood pieces, and other articles for family, friends, or Jewish charities. But they are doing much more: armed with perhaps only a needle and thread, they are reckoning with Jewish identity in a fragile and dangerous world. The work of these crafters embodies a vital Judaism that may lie outside traditional notions of Jewishness, but, Eichler-Levine argues, these crafters are as much engaged as any Jews in honoring and nurturing the fortitude, memory, and community of the Jewish people. Craftmaking is nothing less than an act of generative resilience that fosters survival. Whether taking place in such groups as the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework or the Jewish Hearts for Pittsburgh, or in a home studio, these everyday acts of creativity—yielding a needlepoint rabbi, say, or a handkerchief embroidered with the Hebrew words tikkun olam—are a crucial part what makes a religious life.
32
Peckruhn, Heike. Orienting Familiar Body Theologies. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190280925.003.0007.
Full textAbstract:
Chapter 7 constructively applies body theology to the works of Carter Heyward and Marcella Althaus-Reid, and provides the author’s own god-talk based in bodily experiences. It explains that to do body theology is to talk about our bodily perceptual orientations, our body-sense in and of the world, connected to specific contexts, locations, and experiences. Body theology can be done while pursuing other overarching theological goals, for example, within a systematic approach or a contextual/sexual theology. Or it can be done as constructive body theology “on its own,” focusing on the specific ways in which bodily experiences make sense and create meaning, without connecting it to specific theistic concepts or commonly associated religious artifacts such as scripture or rituals.
33
Farriss, Nancy. Adoptions and Adaptations. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190884109.003.0010.
Full textAbstract:
The double bind between orthodoxy and intelligibility is examined further through the translating tool of semantic extension. Efforts to make the Christian message more accessible by expanding or extending the meaning of an “inherited” word confronted vast cultural differences in the realms of cosmology and morality that lay behind the linguistic gaps. Christian concepts such as heaven and hell were so far removed from the way that the Zapotec and other Mesoamericans conceived of the afterlife that no degree of semantic expansion could bridge the gap. Conversely, attempts to convey a Christian concept of God in such doctrines as the Trinity and the Eucharist by incorporating indigenous terms for the divinity and sacrifice risked contamination from pagan symbols and rituals.
34
Wimbush, Vincent L. “We Have Fallen Apart”. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190664701.003.0004.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter is exploration of the conditions and reasons for the near destruction of the villagers who are ensnared by the colonial project and its forms of violence. Beyond expropriation of their land, the villagers face erasure of their local customs and traditions, their rituals, their language, their rhythms, and so forth, as the colonial power commandeers discourse itself. We are presented a frightening picture of the destructive work that scriptures—texts, yes, but more broadly, textual and discursive politics—can be made to do. The new religion and its government—the British colonials—effectively tear Umuofians from their own world. Such rupture is evident to most Umuofians. Beyond honest recognition of things having fallen apart, the challenge is to figure out what to make of the rupture.
35
Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jews and Jewesses. Edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199754281.013.019.
Full textAbstract:
In the 1930s, “Jewish dance” emerged in the United States as a category that drifted between ethnic and modern dance. Although some Jewish choreographers were able to transcend their ethnicity through the universalism of modern dance, others, like Belle Didjah and Dvora Lapson, were ghettoized by their overtly Jewish characterizations of Hasidic Jews or exotic Jewesses. Despite their exclusion from modern-dance history, Didjah and Lapson identified with modern dance, reinvented cultural traditions and rituals for the stage, and used the solo form to imagine expanded roles for women. Although some of their dances emphasized Jewish difference over assimilation, they aimed to make a place for Jewish expression on the American concert stage, and to expand possibilities for constructing Jewish-American identities through a mode of performance that was both ethnic and modern.
36
Weinstock, Daniel M. How the Interests of Children Limit the Religious Freedom of Parents. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794394.003.0016.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter argues that parents have a right to raise their children according to the tenets of the religions that they profess. That right can be seen as grounded in the interest that children have in enjoying the kind of intimacy within the family context that is facilitated by participation in practices and rituals rooted in comprehensive conceptions of the good. It also argues, however, that children have a right to be raised in a manner that does not foreclose their future autonomy. These two rights can be reconciled if we distinguish acceptable and unacceptably asymmetrical upbringings. Parents can incline their children toward certain values and practices in accordance with their comprehensive conceptions, on condition that they also provide children with the conditions that will allow them to make autonomous decisions in the future.
37
Lozada, María Cecilia, ed. Andean Ontologies. University Press of Florida, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813056371.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Andean Ontologies is a fascinating interdisciplinary investigation of how ancient Andean people understood their world and the nature of being. Exploring pre-Hispanic ideas of time, space, and the human body, these essays highlight a range of beliefs across the region’s different cultures, emphasizing the relational aspects of identity in Andean worldviews. Studies included here show that Andeans physically interacted with their pasts through recurring ceremonies in their ritual calendar and that Andean bodies were believed to be changeable entities with the ability to interact with nonhuman and spiritual worlds. A survey of rock art describes Andeans’ changing relationships with places and things over time. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence reveals head hair was believed to be a conduit for the flow of spiritual power, and bioarchaeological remains offer evidence of Andean perceptions of age and wellness. Andean Ontologies breaks new ground by bringing together an array of renowned specialists including anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, historians, linguists, ethnohistorians, and art historians to evaluate ancient Amerindian ideologies through different interpretive lenses. Many are local researchers from South American countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and this volume makes their work available to North American readers for the first time. Their essays are highly contextualized according to the territories and time periods studied. Instead of taking an external, outside-in approach, they prioritize internal and localized views that incorporate insights from today’s indigenous societies. This cutting-edge collection demonstrates the value of a multifaceted, holistic, inside-out approach to studying the pre-Columbian world.
38
Evangelista, Matthew, and Nina Tannenwald, eds. Do the Geneva Conventions Matter? Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199379774.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The book offers a comparative analysis of state practice with regard to the Geneva Conventions. It seeks to answer three questions of critical importance to understanding their role and impact: (1) How have the Geneva Conventions been incorporated into the laws and practices governing armed forces in particular countries? (2) In what ways has the Geneva regime constrained the behavior of states facing situations such as guerrilla warfare and terrorism, where one would expect the Conventions to come under the greatest pressure? (3) What factors have contributed to the successes and failures of the Geneva Conventions to protect human rights in wartime? An overarching theme is to what extent, and under what conditions, does symbolic or “ritual” compliance (for example, incorporation into military manuals and military training) translate into actual compliance on the battlefield? The project draws on insights from and makes contributions to the law and society literature in sociology on compliance within organizations, the constructivist literature in international relations on persuasion and socialization, and legal scholarship on “internalization.” The book includes studies of the Algerian War for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s; the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s; Russia’s wars against Chechnya; the US wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; Iranian and Israeli approaches to the laws of war; and the legal obligations of private security firms and peacekeeping forces. The book should be of interest to students and teachers of international relations, human rights, and international law, particularly international humanitarian law.
39
Steffen, Lloyd. Religion and Violence in Christian Traditions. Edited by Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199759996.013.0005.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter investigates the theological justifications for violence within the sources of the Christian traditions, and also reports the symbolic representations of violence in the history of the tradition. It then presents a consideration of some specific issues that have provoked Christian people, to condone or even resort to violence while believing themselves faithful to Christian teachings and values. The chapter introduces the theological justifications of St. Paul, Jesus of Nazareth, just war, Crusades, inquisition and heresy trials, and missionary movements. Christian people have acted in ways opposed to violence, and have also warranted violence over the centuries by referring to scripture and by developing theological interpretations. Additionally, they preserve connection to its history of involvement of violence in a variety of symbols, rites, and rituals. In general, Christian people are moral agents who have to make decisions about how to act and how to act religiously.
40
Ritzinger, Justin. Anarchy in the Pure Land. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491161.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Anarchy in the Pure Land investigates the cult of Maitreya, the future Buddha, promoted by the Chinese Buddhist reform movement spearheaded by Taixu as an avenue through which to consider the formation of alternative modernities. The cult presents an apparent anomaly: It shows precisely the kind of concern for ritual, supernatural beings, and the afterlife that much scholarship contends the reformers rejected in the name of “modernity.” This book shows that rather than a concession to tradition, the reimagining of ideas and practices associated with Maitreya was an important site for formulating a Buddhist vision of modernity. To make sense of this it develops a new perspective on alternative modernities by drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of moral frameworks, arguing that the cult of Maitreya represents an attempt to articulate a new constellation of values that integrates novel understandings of the good clustered around modern visions of utopia with the central Buddhist value of Buddhahood. Part I traces the roots of this constellation to Taixu’s youthful career as an anarchist. Part II examines its articulation in the “Maitreya School’s” theology and the cult’s development from its inception to World War II. Part III examines its subsequent decline and its contemporary legacy within and beyond orthodox Buddhism.
41
Wagoner, Brady, ed. Handbook of Culture and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190230814.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book is about the ways in which culture matters to memory. It explores how memory is deeply entwined with social relationships, stories in film and literature, group history, monuments, ritual practices, material artifacts, and a host of other cultural devices. Culture in this account is not a bounded group of people or variable to be manipulated but, rather, the medium through which people live and make meaning of their lives. The focus of analysis becomes one of understanding the mutual constitution of people’s memories and the social–cultural worlds to which they belong. An interdisciplinary team of leading scholars has been brought together in this volume to offer new theoretical models of memory as both a psychological and a social–cultural process. The following themes are explored: the concept of memory and its relation to evolution, neurology, culture, and history; the particular dynamics of different cultural contexts of remembering, such as families, commemorations, giving testimony, and struggling with difficult memories such as in therapy; life course changes in memory from its development in childhood, through its anticipatory function in emerging adulthood, to managing its decline in old age; and the national and transnational organization of collective memory and identity through narratives propagated in political discourse, the classroom, and media. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the complex and interconnected relationship between culture, mind, and memory.
42
Patterson, Sara M. Pioneers in the Attic. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190933869.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book argues that as the Latter-day Saint community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space transformed. Initially, nineteenth-century Mormons believed that they must literally gather together in their new Salt Lake Zion—their center place. They believed that Zion was a place you could point to on a map, a place you should dwell in to live a righteous life. Later Mormons had to reinterpret these central theological principles as their community spread around the globe. They began to make such claims as “We should spiritually gather together” and “Zion is wherever the people of God are.” But to say that they simply spiritualized concepts that had once been understood literally is only one piece of the puzzle. Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel these principles. And so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone. They develop rituals that allow them not only to learn the history of the nineteenth-century journey West but also to engage it with all of their senses. This book examines the ways contemporary Mormons first spiritualized and then reliteralized and concretized several central theological concepts in order to emphasize and make meaningful a center place even as they become an increasingly place-less community.
43
Davis, Donald R. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198702603.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Between 1930 and 1962, the eminent Sanskritist and lawyer Pandurang Vaman Kane (pronounced KAH-nay) produced a five-volume monograph entitled History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law), published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India. This work of over 6,500 pages provides much more than a narrow focus on law or the special genre of Sanskrit literature devoted to religious and legal duties, the Dharmaśāstra. It contains rather something close to an intellectual history of Hinduism, from its origins in the Vedic texts to contemporary debates about the “reform” of Hinduism in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kane understood his task as presenting the broadest possible survey of the role legal, religious, and ethical thought in the history of Hinduism, with regular incursions into other religious traditions as well. A modern scholar of Dharmaśāstra, Richard Lariviere, is fond of saying, “We all make our living from Kane’s footnotes.” Indeed, Kane’s work has become a constant source of reference and orientation in South Asian studies of law, religion, ritual, literature, history, and more. It is a work that has perhaps literally launched a thousand dissertations because it is so easy to refer a student or a colleague to the appropriate section of Kane as a way to get their bearings in relation to hundreds of topics in the fields of Hindu studies or Indian social and intellectual history....
44
Oberlin, Heike, and David Shulman, eds. Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199483594.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. The actors and drummers create an entire world in the empty space of the stage by using spectacular costumes and make-up and by an immensely rich interplay of words, rhythms, mime, and gestures. This volume focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Authored by scholars and active Kūṭiyāṭṭam performers, this is the first attempt to bring together a set of sustained, multi-faceted interpretations of these masterpieces-in-performance. With an aim to open up this ancient art form to readers interested in South Indian culture, religion, theatre and performance studies, philology, as well as literature, this volume offers a new way to access a major art form of pre-modern and modern Kerala. The University of Tuebingen in Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel were partners in a long-term project studying and documenting Kūṭiyāṭṭam performances, including initiating full-scale performances of major works in the classical repertoire. We have been, in particular, focusing on the study of the two major, complex and ancient works, Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, both of which we have seen and recorded in full. The articles in this volume are one of the results. They are supplemented with video-clips of lecture demonstrations provided online.
45
Appleby, R. Scott, Atalia Omer, and David Little, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731640.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the scholarship on religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. Extending that inquiry beyond its traditional parameters, the volume explores the legacies of colonialism, missionary activism, secularism, orientalism, and liberalism. While featuring case studies from diverse contexts and traditions, the volume is organized thematically, beginning with a mapping of scholarship on religion, violence, and peace. The second part scrutinizes challenges to secularist theorizing of questions of conflict transformation and broadens the discussion of violence to include an analysis of its cultural, religious, and structural forms. The third part engages contested issues such as religion’s relations to development, violent and nonviolent militancy, and the legitimate use of force; the protection of the freedom of religion in resolving conflicts; and gender as it relates to religious peacebuilding. The fourth part highlights the practice of peacebuilding through exploring constructive resources within various traditions, the transformative role of rituals, spiritual practices in the formation of peacebuilders, interfaith activism on American university campuses, the relation of religion to solidarity activism, and scriptural reasoning as a peacebuilding practice. It also offers extended reflections on the legacy of missionary peacebuilding activism and the neoliberal framing of peacebuilding schemes and agendas. The volume is innovative because the authors grapple with the tension between theory and practice, cultural theory’s critique of the historicity of the very categories informing the discussion, and the challenge that the justpeace frame makes to the liberal peace paradigm, offering elicitive, elastic, and context-specific insights for strategic peacebuilding processes.
46
Johnson, Andrew. If I Give My Soul. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238988.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Prisons and jails in Rio de Janeiro are violent and crowded; they are governed by narco-gangs and are also intensely religious spaces. Rio's penal institutions reflect the social world of the poor neighborhoods where most of the inmates lived before their arrests. They are places where the state has a weak presence and residents organize around nonstate entities, primarily gangs like the Comando Vermelho or the Pentecostal churches. Inside of prison Pentecostal inmates form churches that resemble the gangs in organization and leadership structure. The gangs allow the churches to function autonomously, even allowing inmates to renounce their gang affiliation and join the churches as long as their religious commitments are deemed genuine. To gather data on the incarcerated Pentecostal groups, I spent two weeks living inside a prison in Brazil and then collected ethnographic data by regularly visiting one prison and one jail in Rio de Janeiro over a year to observe church activities and interview inmates, guards, and the Pentecostal volunteers visiting from outside churches. This book is a lived religion study of prison Pentecostalism, and I emphasized the rituals and embodied daily practice of the faith. From the data collected, I argue that the ganglike structure of the churches and the rigorous and visible practice of the faith enable the churches to thrive in prison. The churches provide protection, which makes them an attractive option to inmates whose lives may be at risk, but more important the churches allow members the opportunity to live moral and dignified lives in the midst of horrendous circumstances.
47
Rapoport-Albert, Ada. Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666 - 1816. Liverpool University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906764807.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Women are conspicuously absent from the Jewish mystical tradition. The chance survival of scant evidence suggests that, at various times and places, individual Jewish women did pursue the path of mystical piety or prophetic spirituality, but it appears that they were generally censured, and efforts were made to suppress their activities. This contrasts sharply with the fully acknowledged prominence of women in the mystical traditions of both Christianity and Islam. It is against this background that the mystical messianic movement centred on the personality of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) stands out as a unique and remarkable exception. Sabbatai Zevi addressed to women a highly original liberationist message, proclaiming that he had come to make them 'as happy as men' by releasing them from the pangs of childbirth and the subjugation to their husbands that were ordained for women as a consequence of the primordial sin. This redemptive vision became an integral part of Sabbatian eschatology, which the messianists believed to be unfolding and experienced in the present. Their New Law overturned the traditional halakhic norms that distinguished and regulated relations between the sexes. This book traces the diverse manifestations of this vision in every phase of Sabbatianism and its offshoots. These include the early promotion of women to centre-stage as messianic prophetesses; their independent affiliation with the movement in their own right; their initiation in the esoteric teachings of the kabbalah; and their full incorporation, on a par with men, into the ritual and devotional life of the messianic community.
48
Mullaney, Steven. ‘Do You See This?’ The Politics of Attention in Shakespearean Tragedy. Edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198724193.013.10.
Full textAbstract:
Affective agency, popular and performative sovereignty, the dissemination of a wide range of information and perspectives to the large part of the populace that could not access them through the written or the printed word—these are some of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a genuine public sphere, composed of multiple and conflictual publics and counter-publics, in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In theatre, however, it is the cognitive and affective agency of the audience that produces the critical social thought necessary for those publics to emerge. Tragedy is good to think with, as Rita Felski said of Greek tragedy. It is a form of embodied social and affective thought, produced at moments of ‘attention’ when an audience member might realize, make-real as well as make-conscious, that ‘I am involved’—a necessary participant in the political and public sphere.
49
Rothstein, Mikael. Hagiography. Edited by James R. Lewis and Inga Tøllefsen. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190466176.013.29.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter deals with sacred biographies, hagiographies, and their function in the formation of religious leaders and ritually venerated persons. It is argued that the status of any Master, Teacher, Prophet, guru, Seer and Channel is partly based on sacred biographies, and that the narrative construction of religious authority is crucial to our understanding of leadership in new religions, sects etc. Distinctions are made between doctrinal and popular hagiographies; doctrinal narratives promote the exalted leader according to theologically well-defined standards, while popular narratives cover a wider span, as they seek to draw a picture of the perfected human in many different ways. Counter-hagiographies, finally, serve to deconstruct the ideal person and are typically employed by ex-devotees or members of counter-groups. Hagiographies are seen as very ancient social strategies (there are references to old new religions including early Christianity and the cult of Christ), but also a very lively and important mechanisms in the current make of religious leaders. Examples are derived from Catholic cults of saints, the Mormon Church, Scientology, TM and several other groups.
50
Faflik, David. Urban Formalism. Fordham University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823288045.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.