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Experiences of Place
Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world. The distinguished contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered, and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative, and ritual performance.
Mararoko
Mararoko describes the traditional and changing life of the South Kewa people of Papua New Guinea. Through discussion of story-telling, ritual performance and the power of pigs, the author suggests that an idiom of exchange integrates the various domains of Kewa cultural experience and provides a means of change. The work is accompanied by a collection of stories, historical accounts and songs.
Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: Rethinking Temporality and Community in Eurasian Archaeology
Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics re-examines the relationship between Eurasia’s past and its present by interrogating the social construction of time and the archaeological production of culture. Traditionally, archaeological research in Eurasia has focused on assembling normative descriptions of monolithic cultures that endure for millennia, largely immune to the forces of historical change. The papers in this volume seek to document forces of difference and contestation in the past that were produced in the perceptible engagements of peoples, things, and places. The research gathered here convincingly demonstrates that these forces made social life in ancient Eurasia rather more fitful and its publics considerably more unruly than archaeological research has traditionally allowed. Contributors are Mikheil Abramishvili, Paula N. Doumani Dupuy, Magnus Fiskesjö, Hilary Gopnik, Emma Hite, Jean-Luc Houle, Erik G. Johannesson, James A. Johnson, Lori Khatchadourian, Ian Lindsay, Maureen E. Marshall, Mitchell S. Rothman, Irina Shingiray, Adam T. Smith, Kathryn O. Weber and Xin Wu.
Shamanism
A guide to worldwide shamanism and shamanistic practices, emphasizing historical and current cultural adaptations. This two-volume reference is the first international survey of shamanistic beliefs from prehistory to the present day. In nearly 200 detailed, readable entries, leading ethnographers, psychologists, archaeologists, historians, and scholars of religion and folk literature explain the general principles of shamanism as well as the details of widely varied practices. What is it like to be a shaman? Entries describe, region by region, the traits, such as sicknesses and dreams, that mark a person as a shaman, as well as the training undertaken by initiates. They detail the costumes, ...
The Newark Earthworks
Considered a wonder of the ancient world, the Newark Earthworks—the gigantic geometrical mounds of earth built nearly two thousand years ago in the Ohio valley--have been a focal point for archaeologists and surveyors, researchers and scholars for almost two centuries. In their prime one of the premier pilgrimage destinations in North America, these monuments are believed to have been ceremonial centers used by ancestors of Native Americans, called the "Hopewell culture," as social gathering places, religious shrines, pilgrimage sites, and astronomical observatories. Yet much of this territory has been destroyed by the city of Newark, and the site currently "hosts" a private golf course, m...
Ethnographic Artifacts
Ethnographic Artifacts: Challenges to a Reflexive Anthropology examines anthropological practice and product, confronting issues of representation and the power of discourse in the lives and practice of both those doing research and of those being researched. Using eight case studies by ethnographers who share extensive research experience in the Pacific, the volume outlines "the trouble with ethnography" so representative of the end of this century, where ethnography itself is perceived as a codification of contested relations. Ethnographic Artifacts takes a unique approach to the social life of ethnography. The editors identify three domains in which ethnographic artifacts are given meanin...
Locating Religions
This collection of articles is an innovative contribution to religious studies, because it picks up concepts developed in the wake of the so-called "spatial turn". Religions are always located in a certain cultural and spatial environment, but often tend to locate (or translocate) themselves beyond that original setting. Also, many religious traditions are not only tied to or associated with the area its respective adherent live in, but are in fact "bi-local" or even "multi-local", as they closely relate to various spatial centers or plains at once. This spatial diversity inherent to many religions is a corollary to religious diversity or plurality that merits in-depth research. The articles in this volume present important findings from a series of settings within and between Asia and Europe. Contributors are: Anna Akasoy, Christopher I. Beckwith, Stephen C. Berkwitz, Alexandra Cuffel, Ana Echevarria, Reinhold F. Glei, Tsering Gonkatsang, Georgios T. Halkias, Nikolas Jaspert, Adam Knobler, Zara Pogossian, Henrik H. Sörensen, Knut Martin Stünkel, John Tolan, Dorothea Weltecke, and Michael Willis.
