Author: Kathryn Rountree
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461433541
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Archaeology of Spiritualties provides a fresh exploration of the interface between archaeology and religion/spirituality. Archaeological approaches to the study of religion have typically and often unconsciously, drawn on western paradigms, especially Judaeo-Christian (mono) theistic frameworks and academic rationalisations. Archaeologists have rarely reflected on how these approaches have framed and constrained their choices of methodologies, research questions, hypotheses, definitions, interpretations and analyses and have neglected an important dimension of religion: the human experience of the numinous - the power, presence or experience of the supernatural. Within the religions of many of the world’s peoples, sacred experiences – particularly in relation to sacred landscapes and beings connected with those landscapes – are often given greater emphasis, while doctrine and beliefs are relatively less important. Archaeology of Spiritualities asks how such experiences might be discerned in the archaeological record; how do we recognize and investigate ‘other’ forms of religious or spiritual experience in the remains of the past?. The volume opens up a space to explore critically and reflexively the encounter between archaeology and diverse cultural expressions of spirituality. It showcases experiential and experimental methodologies in this area of the discipline, an unconventional approach within the archaeology of religion. Thus Archaeology of Spiritualities offers a unique, timely and innovative contribution, one that is also challenging and stimulating. It is a great resource to archaeologists, historians, religious scholars and others interested in cultural and religious heritage.
Author: Roberta Gilchrist
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108496547
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Forges innovative connections between monastic archaeology and heritage studies, revealing new perspectives on sacred heritage, identity, medieval healing, magic and memory. This title is available as Open Access.
Author: Philip Sheldrake
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191642436
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
It has been suggested that 'spirituality' has become a word that 'can define an era'. Why? Because paradoxically, alongside a decline in traditional religious affiliations, the growing interest in spirituality and the use of the word in a variety of contexts is a striking aspect of contemporary western cultures. Indeed, spirituality is sometimes contrasted attractively with religion, although this is problematic and implies that religion is essentially dogma, moralism, institutions, buildings, and hierarchies. The notion of spirituality expresses the fact that many people are driven by goals that concern more than material satisfaction. Broadly, it refers to the deepest values and sense of meaning by which people seek to live. Sometimes these values are conventionally religious. Sometimes they are associated with what is understood as 'the sacred' in a broader sense - that is, of ultimate rather than merely instrumental importance. This Very Short Introduction, written by one of the most eminent scholars and writers on spirituality, explores the historical foundations of the thought and considers how it came to have the significance it is developing today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Author: Diana Stein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000464768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 790
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Book Description
For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art. Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.
Author: Kathryn Rountree
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782386475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.
Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191663107
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1123
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Book Description
Figurines dating from prehistory have been found across the world but have never before been considered globally. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first book to offer a comparative survey of this kind, bringing together approaches from across the landscape of contemporary research into a definitive resource in the field. The volume is comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, with dedicated and fully illustrated chapters covering figurines from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia and the Pacific laid out by geographical location and written by the foremost scholars in figurine studies; wherever prehistoric figurines are found they have been expertly described and examined in relation to their subject matter, form, function, context, chronology, meaning, and interpretation. Specific themes that are discussed by contributors include, for example, theories of figurine interpretation, meaning in processes and contexts of figurine production, use, destruction and disposal, and the cognitive and social implications of representation. Chronologically, the coverage ranges from the Middle Palaeolithic through to areas and periods where an absence of historical sources renders figurines 'prehistoric' even though they might have been produced in the mid-2nd millennium AD, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a synthesis of invaluable insights into past thinking on the human body, gender, identity, and how the figurines might have been used, either practically, ritually, or even playfully.
Author: J. Grant Stauffer
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789258464
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This volume examines how pre-Columbian societies in the Americas envisioned their cosmos and iteratively modeled it through the creation of particular objects and places. It emphasizes that American societies did this to materialize overarching models and templates for the shape and scope of the cosmos, the working definition of cosmoscape. Noting a tendency to gloss over the ways in which ancestral Americans envisioned the cosmos as intertwined and animated, the authors examine how cosmoscapes are manifested archaeologically, in the forms of objects and physically altered landscapes. This book’s chapters, therefore, offer case studies of cosmoscapes that present themselves as forms of architecture, portable artifacts, and transformed aspects of the natural world. In doing so, it emphasizes that the creation of cosmoscapes offered a means of reconciling peoples experiences of the world with their understandings of them.
Author: Heather A. Lapham
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 168340145X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in Indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic. Bears charts the special relationship between the American black bear and humans in eastern Native American cultures across thousands of years. These essays draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Contributors explore the ways bears have been treated as something akin to another kind of human—in the words of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, “other than human persons”—in Algonquian, Cherokee, Iroquois, Meskwaki, Creek, and many other Native cultures. Case studies focus on bear imagery in Native art and artifacts; the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products such as meat, fat, oil, and pelts; bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies; and the use of bears as commodities in transatlantic trade. The case studies in Bears demonstrate that bears were not only a source of food, but were also religious, economic, and political icons within Indigenous cultures. This volume convincingly portrays the black bear as one of the most socially significant species in Native eastern North America. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Author: Mark Cobb
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199571392
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
Spirituality and healthcare is an emerging field of research, practice and policy. Healthcare organisations and practitioners are therefore challenged to understand and address spirituality, to develop their knowledge and implement effective policy. This is the first reference text on the subject providing a comprehensive overview of key topics.
Author: Stephen A. Dueppen
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
ISBN: 195044631X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological analysis and refinements in stratigraphic precision, this book argues that repeated ritual activity was a significant factor in the accumulation of stratified archaeological deposits. The book details consistencies in form and content of discrete loci containing animal bones, food remains, and broken and unbroken objects and suggests that these are the remnants of sequential ancestor shrines created when domestic spaces were converted to tombs or dedicated mortuary monuments were constructed. Continuities and transformations in ancestral rituals at Kirikongo inform on earlier West African ritual practices from the second millennium BC as well as political and social transformations at the site. More broadly, this case study provides new insights on anthropogenic mound (tell) formation processes, social zooarchaeology, material culture theory, historical ontology, and the analysis of ritual and religion in the archaeological record.
