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In Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity it is demonstrated how sacrificial themes remain an essential element in our post-modern society.
This book examines a variety of different forms of political self-sacrifice, including hunger strikes, self-burning, and non-violent martyrdom.
Discalced Carmelite convents are among the most influential wellsprings of female spirituality in the Catholic tradition, as the names of Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux and Edith Stein attest. Behind these ‘great Carmelites’ stood communities of women who developed discourses on their relationship with God and their identity as a spiritual elite in the church and society. This book looks at these discourses as formulated by Carmelites in the Netherlands, from their arrival there in 1872 up to the recent past, providing an in-depth case study of the spiritualities of modern women contemplatives. The female religious life was a transnational phenomenon, and the book draws on sources and scholarship in English, Dutch, French and German to provide insights on gendered spirituality, memory and the post-conciliar renewal of the religious life.
This is a volume about the life and power of ritual objects in their religious ritual settings. In this Special Issue, we see a wide range of contributions on material culture and ritual practices across religions. By focusing on the dynamic interrelations between objects, ritual, and belief, it explores how religion happens through symbolic materiality. The ritual objects presented in this volume include: masks worn in the Dogon dance; antique ecclesiastical silver objects carried around in festive processions and shown in shrines in the southern Andes; funerary photographs and films functioning as mnemonic objects for grieving children; a dented rock surface perceived to be the god’s footprint in the archaic place of pilgrimage, Gaya (India); a recovered manual of rituals (from Xiapu county) for Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, juxtaposed to a Manichaean painting from southern China; sacred stories and related sacred stones in the Alor–Pantar archipelago, Indonesia; lotus symbolism, indicating immortalizing plants in the mythic traditions of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia; lavishly illustrated variations of portrayals of Ravana, a Sinhalese god-king-demon; figurines made of cow dung sculptured by rural women in Rajasthan (India); and mythical artifacts called ‘Apples of Eden’ in a well-known interactive game series.
This compelling book argues that American patriotism is a civil religion of blood sacrifice, which periodically kills its children to keep the group together. The flag is the sacred object of this religion; its sacrificial imperative is a secret which the group keeps from itself to survive. Expanding Durkheim's theory of the totem taboo as the organizing principle of enduring groups, Carolyn Marvin uncovers the system of sacrifice and regeneration which constitutes American nationalism, shows why historical instances of these rituals succeed or fail in unifying the group, and explains how mass media are essential to the process. American culture is depicted as ritually structured by a fertile center and sacrificial borders of death. Violence plays a key part in its identity. In essence, nationalism is neither quaint historical residue nor atavistic extremism, but a living tradition which defines American life.
This textbook seeks to reclaim the bible for a Christianity that is open to society and keen on participating in conversation about today's major issues.
The present volume was made possible by the Norwegian Research Council’s generous funding of the Human Sacrifice and Value project (FRIPROHUMSAM 275947). It explores concepts of human sacrifice. This volume explores concepts of human sacrifice, focusing on its value – or multiplicity of values – in relative cultural and temporal terms, whether sacrifice is expressed in actual killings, in ideas revolving around ritualized, sanctioned or sanctified violence or loss, or in transformed and (often sublimated) undertakings. Bridging a wide variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, it analyses a spectrum of sacrificial logics and actions, daring us to rethink the scholarship of sacrifice by considering the oft hidden, subliminal and even paradoxical values and motivations that underlie sacrificial acts. The chapters give needed attention to pivotal questions in studies of sacrifice and ritualized violence – such as how we might employ new approaches to the existing evidence or revise long-debated theories about what exactly ‘human sacrifice’ is or might be, or why human sacrifice seems to emerge so often and so easily in human social experience across time and in vastly different cultures and historical contexts. Thus, the volume will strike a chord with scholars of sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, religious studies, political science and economics –wherever interest is focused on critically rethinking questions of sacred and sanctified human violence, and the values that make it what it is.
There have been few efforts to overcome the binary of China versus the West. The recent global political environment, with a deepening confrontation between China and the West, strengthens this binary image. Post-Chineseness boldly challenges the essentialized notion of Chineseness in existing scholarship through the revelation of the multiplicity and complexity of the uses of Chineseness by strategically conceived insiders, outsiders, and those in-between. Combining the fields of international relations, cultural politics, and intellectual history, Chih-yu Shih investigates how the global audience perceives (and essentializes) Chineseness. Shih engages with major Chinese international relations theories, investigates the works of sinologists in Hong Kong, Singapore, Pakistan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and other academics in East Asia, and explores individual scholars' life stories and academic careers to delineate how Chineseness is constantly negotiated and reproduced. Shih's theory of the "balance of relationships" expands the concept of Chineseness and effectively challenges existing theories of realism, liberalism, and conventional constructivism in international relations. The highly original delineation of multiple layers and diverse dimensions of "Chineseness" opens an intellectual channel between the social sciences and humanities in China studies.
Religion is a hot topic on the public stages of ‘secular’ societies, not in its individualized liberal or orthodox form, but rather as a public statement, challenging the divide between the secular neutral space and the religious. In this new challenging modus, religion raises questions about identity, power, rationality, subjectivity, law and safety, but above all: religion questions, contests and even blurs the borders between the public and the private. These phenomena urge to rethink what are often considered to be clear differences between religions, between the public and the private and between the religious and the secular. In this volume scholars from a range of different disciplines map the different aspects of the dynamics of changing, contesting and contested religious identities.
This book, the first of its kind, critically analyzes the conjunctions of 21st century food, faith and society. It aims to provide a fresh approach that theorizes the culinary sphere in its association with morality, identity, justice and the sublime. In a changing climate of food fads, diet plans, gastropolitics and fusion tastes, this edited volume interrogates, analyzes and critiques various situations in which food, the state, civil society, gender, race, and faith intersect and even transmute. Informed by emergent post-secularist views of religion(s) and novel approaches to twenty-first century forms of mobility and fixity, the book's primary aim is to ponder through ethnography the manifold meanings of food, eating and commensality as dynamic social and religious practices. The main goal of Eating Religiously: Food and Faith in the 21st Century is to present cutting-edge anthropological research that examines the causes, effects, meanings and repercussions of theoretical and real-world relationships between culinary practices and religion, identity politics and national pride. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Food, Culture, and Society.