Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community

Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community PDF Author: Gary Gossen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780292041103
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Seeks to identify patterns in Mesoamerican symbolic representation that have persistence and coherence across the boundaries of time, space, culture, and language. This book also includes consideration of the arrivals on the Mesoamerican stage, notably, European political, economic, and religious systems.

Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community

Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community PDF Author: Gary Gossen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780292041103
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
Seeks to identify patterns in Mesoamerican symbolic representation that have persistence and coherence across the boundaries of time, space, culture, and language. This book also includes consideration of the arrivals on the Mesoamerican stage, notably, European political, economic, and religious systems.

Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community

Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community PDF Author: Gary H. Gossen
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This innovative volume seeks to identify patterns in Mesoamerican symbolic representation that have persistence and coherence across the boundaries of time, space, culture, and language. The collection also includes consideration of recent and powerful arrivals on the Mesoamerican stage, notably, European political, economic, and religious systems.

Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community

Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community PDF Author: Allen J. Christenson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292789831
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
A study of a major piece of modern Mayan religious art.

Renewing the Maya World

Renewing the Maya World PDF Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Each year in the Highland Guatemala town of Santiago Momostenango, Maya religious societies, dance teams, and cofradías perform the annual cycle of rituals and festivals prescribed by Costumbre (syncretized Maya Christian religion), which serves to renew the cosmic order. In this richly detailed ethnography, Garrett Cook explores how these festivals of Jesucristo and the saints derive from and reenact three major ancient Maya creation myths, thus revealing patterns of continuity between contemporary expressive culture and the myths, rituals, and iconography of the Classic and Postclassic Maya. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s and renewed in the 1990s, Cook describes the expressive culture tradition performed in and by the cofradías and their dance teams. He listens as dancers and cofrades explain the meaning of service and of the major ritual symbols in the cults of the saints and Jesucristo. Comparing these symbols to iconographic evidence from Palenque and myths from the Popol Vuh, Cook persuasively argues that the expressive culture of Momostenango enacts major Maya creation myths—the transformative sunrise, the representation of the year as the life cycle of anthropomorphized nature, and the erection of an axis mundi. This research documents specific patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the communal expression of Maya religious and cosmogonic themes. Along with other recent research, it demonstrates the survival of a basic Maya pattern—the world-creating vegetative renewal cycle—in the highland Maya cults of the saints and Jesucristo.

Exploring Ancient Skies

Exploring Ancient Skies PDF Author: David H. Kelley
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 038726356X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 623

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Book Description
Exploring Ancient Skies brings together the methods of archaeology and the insights of modern astronomy to explore the science of astronomy as it was practiced in various cultures prior to the invention of the telescope. The book reviews an enormous and growing body of literature on the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, the Far East, and the New World (particularly Mesoamerica), putting the ancient astronomical materials into their archaeological and cultural contexts. The authors begin with an overview of the field and proceed to essential aspects of naked-eye astronomy, followed by an examination of specific cultures. The book concludes by taking into account the purposes of ancient astronomy: astrology, navigation, calendar regulation, and (not least) the understanding of our place and role in the universe. Skies are recreated to display critical events as they would have appeared to ancient observers - events such as the supernova of 1054, the 'lion horoscope' or the 'Star of Bethlehem.' Exploring Ancient Skies provides a comprehensive overview of the relationships between astronomy and other areas of human investigation. It will be useful as a reference for scholars and students in both astronomy and archaeology, and will be of compelling interest to readers who seek a broad understanding of our collective intellectual history.

Re-Enchanting the World

Re-Enchanting the World PDF Author: C. Mathews Samson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817354271
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, this work documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to different forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes.

Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon

Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon PDF Author: Brant A. Gardner
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
Stop looking for the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica and start looking for Mesoamerica in the Book of Mormon! Second Witness, a new six-volume series from Greg Kofford Books, takes a detailed, verse-by-verse look at the Book of Mormon. It marshals the best of modern scholarship and new insights into a consistent picture of the Book of Mormon as a historical document. Taking a faithful but scholarly approach to the text and reading it through the insights of linguistics, anthropology, and ethnohistory, the commentary approaches the text from a variety of perspectives: how it was created, how it relates to history and culture, and what religious insights it provides. The commentary accepts the best modern scholarship, which focuses on a particular region of Mesoamerica as the most plausible location for the Book of Mormon’s setting. For the first time, that location—its peoples, cultures, and historical trends—are used as the backdrop for reading the text. The historical background is not presented as proof, but rather as an explanatory context. The commentary does not forget Mormon’s purpose in writing. It discusses the doctrinal and theological aspects of the text and highlights the way in which Mormon created it to meet his goal of “convincing . . . the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God.”

Star Gods of the Maya

Star Gods of the Maya PDF Author: Susan Milbrath
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778511
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
“A prodigious work of unmatched interdisciplinary scholarship” on Maya astronomy and religion (Journal of Interdisciplinary History). Observations of the sun, moon, planets, and stars played a central role in ancient Maya lifeways, as they do today among contemporary Maya who maintain the traditional ways. This pathfinding book reconstructs ancient Maya astronomy and cosmology through the astronomical information encoded in Pre-Columbian Maya art and confirmed by the current practices of living Maya peoples. Susan Milbrath opens the book with a discussion of modern Maya beliefs about astronomy, along with essential information on naked-eye observation. She devotes subsequent chapters to Pre-Columbian astronomical imagery, which she traces back through time, starting from the Colonial and Postclassic eras. She delves into many aspects of the Maya astronomical images, including the major astronomical gods and their associated glyphs, astronomical almanacs in the Maya codices and changes in the imagery of the heavens over time. This investigation yields new data and a new synthesis of information about the specific astronomical events and cycles recorded in Maya art and architecture. Indeed, it constitutes the first major study of the relationship between art and astronomy in ancient Maya culture. “Milbrath has given us a comprehensive reference work that facilitates access to a very broad and varied body of literature spanning several disciplines.” ―Isis “Destined to become a standard reference work on Maya archeoastronomy . . . Utterly comprehensive.” —Andrea Stone, Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics

Contemporary Indigenous Cosmologies and Pragmatics PDF Author: Françoise Dussart
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 177212592X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In this timely collection, the authors examine Indigenous peoples’ negotiations with different cosmologies in a globalized world. Dussart and Poirier outline a sophisticated theory of change that accounts for the complexity of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with Christianity and other cosmologies, their own colonial experiences, as well as their ongoing relationships to place and kin. The contributors offer fine-grained ethnographic studies that highlight the complex and pragmatic ways in which Indigenous peoples enact their cosmologies and articulate their identity as forms of affirmation. This collection is a major contribution to the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and Indigenous studies worldwide. Contributors: Anne-Marie Colpron, Robert R. Crépeau, Françoise Dussart, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Frédéric Laugrand, C. James MacKenzie, Caroline Nepton Hotte, Ksenia Pimenova, Sylvie Poirier, Kathryn Rountree, Antonella Tassinari, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

The Woman in the Shaman's Body

The Woman in the Shaman's Body PDF Author: Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D.
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307571637
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
A distinguished anthropologist–who is also an initiated shaman–reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world’s oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition, from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today. Shamanism was not only humankind’s first spiritual and healing practice, it was originally the domain of women. This is the claim of Barbara Tedlock’s provocative and myth-shattering book. Reinterpreting generations of scholarship, Tedlock–herself an expert in dreamwork, divination, and healing–explains how and why the role of women in shamanism was misinterpreted and suppressed, and offers a dazzling array of evidence, from prehistoric African rock art to modern Mongolian ceremonies, for women’s shamanic powers. Tedlock combines firsthand accounts of her own training among the Maya of Guatemala with the rich record of women warriors and hunters, spiritual guides, and prophets from many cultures and times. Probing the practices that distinguish female shamanism from the much better known male traditions, she reveals: • The key role of body wisdom and women’s eroticism in shamanic trance and ecstasy • The female forms of dream witnessing, vision questing, and use of hallucinogenic drugs • Shamanic midwifery and the spiritual powers released in childbirth and monthly female cycles • Shamanic symbolism in weaving and other feminine arts • Gender shifting and male-female partnership in shamanic practice Filled with illuminating stories and illustrations, The Woman in the Shaman’s Body restores women to their essential place in the history of spirituality and celebrates their continuing role in the worldwide resurgence of shamanism today.