Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place (original) (raw)
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Springer eBooks, 2013
In 2013, Springer published a series of texts reunited under the name of 'Religion and Place. Landscape, Politics and Piety'. The editors, Peter Hopkins, Lily Kong and Elisabeth Olson, all of them renowned scholars in the field of geographic studies, gathered another twelve ones, belonging to the Anglophonic cultural and linguistic culture (with one exception, N. Luz from Israel). Obvious from the very beginning is the fact that the editors were not only concerned with the attempt to reach diversity and complexity through the studies reunited under their coordination, but especially a certain geographical equity among the 'locative' distribution of themes. Despite the geographic diversity, Europe, Middle East, South Africa or South America face in a proper manner the tensions implied by religion and religious beliefs and act in social-political contexts. Structured in eleven chapters, introduction and index section, the 222 pages of the book I hereby treat presents a noteworthy collection through the diversity of approaches of the nowadays religions and their new or traditional topoi. Moreover, despite the diversity, all the texts possess a certain common noyauthe geography of religion. It would most certainly be a mistake to neglect the fact that all the scholars involved in this collective editorial project are affiliated to departments of Geography. This apparently insignificant detail offers a valuable key to understand the core of this book and the main theoretical domain to which they are affiliated. In my opinion, the reader does not witness a mere collection of studies on the religious life and practices. It is, in fact, about the inextricable relation between religion and space. In this context, the space should not be interpreted in its decorative or 'objective' meaning, but especially as the social, political and spiritual context in which the human life is organized. The methodological architecture of the eleven studies presented on this editorial occasion reveals its particularities. The reader will appreciate the methodological composition between the classical approach of certain domains and the instruments used in producing the scientific 'offspring'. It is rather common in treating subjects such as religion, secularization, sacralization, expressions of religiosity, spirituality and so on, to pursue qualitative analysis, gravitating around theoretical approaches. Instead, the scholars construct
Anthropology of Religion-chapter
When you finish this chapter, you will be able to 1. Explain the relationships among the various institutions of expressive culture.
Religion als religiös-ethnische Gemeinschaft. Das Beispiel der Parsi Zoroastrier in Indien (2013)
This paper analyzes a form of religion that is characterized by a combination of religious and ethnic boundary-making. The articles discusses the typical properties of this form of religion and asks about its persistence under modern conditions. As an example, the community of the Parsi Zoroastrians in Mumbai is studied, an ethno-religious community that played a major role in the modernization of India and is also overproportionally confronted with the consequences of modernity. Despite the conflicts and challenges that the traditional religious and ethnic boundaries of the community in question were facing in the recent past, the community did not dissolve or change, but “centripetal” tendencies prevailed and the communal tradition was affirmed. The analysis of these developments allows to understand the specifity of the coupling of reliigon and ethnicity: The membership to such a religious community is primordialized and therefore beyond the reach of individual decisions. Further, because the boundaries are drawn by ethnic practice and not formal organization, collective actors that can implement collectively binding decision are missing. This impossibility to cross or change the communal boundaries by individual or collective decision results in a form of community that is by and large impervious to changes occuring in the society surrounding it. The traditional ethnic and ritual practice remains the only legitimate communal point of reference and renders it stable even under conditions of modernity.
Striating Difference : From “ Ceremonies and Customs ” to World Religions
2014
O bservers of the academic scene in the united states pertaining to the study of religion would doubtless recognize a curiously twinned structure of the field, represented by two learned societies that seem to couple and decouple on various occasions, engage and disengage regularly, and not infrequently quarrel. These two bodies, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL), are not symmetrical either in size or in scope. As with any deeply entrenched division of long standing, moreover, they do not agree on the nature of the difference that divides them. That said, one way of characterizing this division that might be deemed relatively uncontroversial may be that the former organization claims or aspires to be global and pluralistic in the coverage of the subject, whereas the latter is essentially monocentric, if not also centripetal, in the sense that it is focused on a particular legacy, namely, the biblical-broad, expansive, and diversified though it may be within itself. All this, to be sure, may be but a matter of local curiosity, a state of affairs sufficiently obscure and trivial for most outsiders, I presume, to feel perfectly at liberty to ignore or to remain confused about. It is certainly not my object here to discuss these scholarly bodies, explain their relation, or arbitrate between them. Rather, I draw attention to this regional condition as a backdrop to announcing my actual intention. This latter is, above all, to consider the dominant paradigm that governs our customary thinking about religious diversity today, or what I am inclined to call more generally the pluralist regime for organizing and regulating difference. In this essay I
International Handbook of Practical Theology
Anthropologya nd Religion 1C ulturea nd Religion Starting from the anthropologicallyorientatedc onception that culture, as the world of things, and of people'srelationships with them, "does make human subjects what they are" (Scharfe 2002,2 2; o.t.), the issue outlinest he most important theoretical tendencies,m ethodological specificities, and positions in scholarlyd iscussions about culturea nd religion. The focus is on the field of Cultural anthropology/European ethnologya nd in the German-languagef ield once called Volkskunde since the late 1950s. This historical view underlines subtextual implications of imprinting through internalised denominational, theological knowledge in the sciences of Religion. Foran ethnographic approach within culturala nthropology, and for analysis from the perspective of historical, social,a nd cultural studies, therei saneed to explore the terminological structures determining these disciplinest oseek to identify how religion becomes visibleasthe object of communication. In this way, we can understand and accept the polyphonya nd hybridity of academic discourse and its practicesi nc onnection with Religion. OpenAccess. ©2 022A ngela Treiber,p ublished by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsA ttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
2018 - Religious Agency, Sacralisation, Tradition - Istrazinvanja 29.pdf
Istrazinvanja, 2018
Starting from a discussion against the notions of a unified 'public religion' my focus during the past decade has been on 'religious individualization' and the fluidity of religion captured by the concepts of 'lived ancient religion' and 'religion in the making'. These concepts focus on the inherent dynamic qualities of those cultural products that I identify as religion in the course of historical analyses. And yet, the undeniable presence of traditions and even canones can be conceptualized beyond a world of individually fragmented religious practices and beliefs and incipient, ever-changing and also dissolving institutions that would be clustered together only in the form of narrative shorthand terms by historians. The paper offers a theoretical reflection on a concept of religion useful for the question of tradition and canonization, building on earlier proposals and developing those further by developing the notion of sacralisation. This will be framed by an historical assumption, namely that the processes of interest here are pushed in urban contexts. Here, my focus will be on the ancient Mediterranean.