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Author: Miguel Astor-Aguilera
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351356755
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Personhood and relationality have re-animated debate in and between many disciplines. We are in the midst of a simultaneous "ontological turn", a "(re)turn to things" and a "relational turn", and also debating a "new animism". It is increasingly recognised that the boundaries between the "natural" and "social" sciences are of heuristic value but might not adequately describe reality of a multi-species world. Following rich and provocative dialogues between ethnologists and Indigenous experts, relations between the received knowledge of Western Modernity and that of people who dwell and move within different ontologies have shifted. Reflection on human relations with the larger-than-human world can no longer rely on the outdated assumption that "nature" and "cultures" already accurately describe the lineaments of reality. The chapters in this volume advance debates about relations between humans and things, between scholars and others, and between Modern and Indigenous ontologies. They consider how terms in diverse communities might hinder or help express, evidence and explore improved ways of knowing and being in the world. Contributors to this volume bring different perspectives and approaches to bear on questions about animism, personhood, materiality, and relationality. They include anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and scholars of religion.
Author: Miguel Astor-Aguilera
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351356755
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book
Book Description
Personhood and relationality have re-animated debate in and between many disciplines. We are in the midst of a simultaneous "ontological turn", a "(re)turn to things" and a "relational turn", and also debating a "new animism". It is increasingly recognised that the boundaries between the "natural" and "social" sciences are of heuristic value but might not adequately describe reality of a multi-species world. Following rich and provocative dialogues between ethnologists and Indigenous experts, relations between the received knowledge of Western Modernity and that of people who dwell and move within different ontologies have shifted. Reflection on human relations with the larger-than-human world can no longer rely on the outdated assumption that "nature" and "cultures" already accurately describe the lineaments of reality. The chapters in this volume advance debates about relations between humans and things, between scholars and others, and between Modern and Indigenous ontologies. They consider how terms in diverse communities might hinder or help express, evidence and explore improved ways of knowing and being in the world. Contributors to this volume bring different perspectives and approaches to bear on questions about animism, personhood, materiality, and relationality. They include anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and scholars of religion.
Author: Graham Harvey
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231137003
Category : Animism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements of their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In his new book, Graham Harvey explores indigenous and environmentalist spiritualities in which people celebrate relationships with other-than-human beings. He examines present and past animistic beliefs and practices of the Ojibwe, the Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans, revealing the diverse ways of being animist and of living respectfully within natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of animist worldviews and lifeways. He argues that animist beliefs can contribute significantly to contemporary debates about consciousness, cosmology, and environmentalism. In addition, he examines the colonialist ideologies and methodologies that have caused many academics to exclude the term "animism" from their critical vocabularies.
Author: Kaj Arhem
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317336623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state. Shedding new light on Southeast Asian religious ethnographic research, the book is a significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.
Author: Graham Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317544501
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
The Handbook of Contemporary Animism brings together an international team of scholars to examine the full range of animist worldviews and practices. The volume opens with an examination of recent approaches to animism. This is followed by evaluations of ethnographic, cognitive, literary, performative, and material culture approaches, as well as advances in activist and indigenous thinking about animism. This handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars of Religion, Sociology and Anthropology.
Author: Marc Brightman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged 'western' understandings of man's place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also 'things' such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.
Author: Darrelyn Gunzburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350079901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.
Author: Chloe Germaine
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350167037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
Following the material turn in the humanities, this book brings perspectives from science and ecology into dialogue with children's fiction written and published in the UK and the USA in the 21st century. It develops the concept of entanglement, which originated in 20th-century quantum physics but has been applied to cultural critique, through a reading of Fantastika literature. Surveying a wide-ranging scope of literary texts, this book covers the gothic, fantasy, the Weird, and other forms of speculative fiction to argue that Fantastika positions entanglement as an ethical imperative that transforms our imaginative relationship with materiality. In so doing, it synthesizes perspectives from a similarly diverse range of areas, including ecology, physics, anthropology, and literary studies, to examine the storied matter of children's Fantastika as ground from which we might begin to imagine an as-yet-unrealised future that addresses the problems of our present.
Author: Nicola Laneri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009306642
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
This book traces the transformation of the belief systems that shaped life in ancient Near Eastern communities, from prehistoric times until the advent of religious monotheism in the Levant during the first millennium BCE. It offers new insights into the symbolic value embodied in the religious materiality produced in the ancient Near East.
Author: Robert Ford Campany
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176425
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.
Author: Nicola Laneri
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789259193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions is the second volume of the series Material Religion in Antiquity (MaReA). The book collects the proceedings of the international online workshop carrying the same title organized by CAMNES, SoRS on 20–21 May 2021. Sacred Nature brings together the perspectives of scholars from different disciplines (archaeology, anthropology, iconography, philology, history of religions) about the notions of nature, sacredness, animism and materiality in ancient religions of the Old and the New World. The contributions highlight various ways of understandings the relationships that occurred between human beings, animals, plants, rivers, deities and the land in the religious life of ancient societies. In particular, each chapter explores entangled aspects of the perception of nature and its other-than-human inhabitants, and contributes to readdress some notions about nature, personhood/agency, divinity/sacrality, and materiality/spirituality in ancient religions and cosmologies. In this line, the book seeks to promote a starkly inter-disciplinary and religious-anthropological approach to the definition of ‘sacred nature’, especially engaging with the analytical category of animism as a fruitful conceptual tool for the investigation of human-environmental relations in the ancient religious conceptions, representations and practices. Dialoguing with animism and drawing upon the question on how an ancient religion happened materially, the volume presents key case studies that explore how nature and its non-human inhabitants were understood, represented, engaged with and interwoven in the sacred and sensuous landscapes of ancients.
