Ritual kinship and godparenthood Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Liturgy, Baptism, Sacramental Theology, Ritual kinship and godparenthood

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive) that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.

- by Don Seeman
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- Religion, Abrahamic Religions, Comparative Religion, Social Theory
- by Cena Bussey
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- Asian Studies, Japanese Studies, Gender Studies, Art History
- by Andrew Vidali
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- Religion, History, Social Networks, Early Modern History
- by Thalia Brero
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- Baptism, Ritual kinship and godparenthood, History of Savoy's Duchy
- by vincent gourdon
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- European Catholicism, History of Roman Catholicism, History of Childhood, Baptism

A trajetória de vida de uma criança abandonada demanda uma série de reflexões sobre a estruturação de sistemas relacionais em sociedades altamente hierarquizadas. Ao envolver a casa de um grande proprietário de escravos, possibilita, ainda, ponderar sobre as negociações ocasionadas por um contexto no qual a mobilidade social era parte da norma vigente. Assim, este artigo traz algumas considerações sobre a reprodução social e o papel desempenhado pela família no passado brasileiro.

- by Mateus Andrade
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- Historical Demography, History of Childhood, History of the Family, Social History
- by Klavs Sedlenieks
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- Social Change, Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Ethnography

The article discusses historical and current qualitative empirical data on godparentship in Norway, focusing on the concepts of gift, grace and care, and discusses them in light of Scandinavian Creational Theology represented by Svein... more

- by Birgitte Lerheim
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- Theology, Practical theology, Systematic Theology, Baptism

Sažetak: Analizom podataka o 110 krštenja iz matičnih knjiga grada Dubrovnika za 1770. godinu rekonstruira se korištenje kumstva kao instrumenta kojim se obitelji nastoje što bolje pozicionirati unutar društvene zajednice te povezati s osobama koje imaju znatan “društveni kapital”. Usporedbom s izvorima koji se odnose na predtridentski Dubrovnik i podacima iz matičnih knjiga za 1870. s jedne strane, a uzimanjem u obzir rezultata inozemnih rasprava s druge strane, istražuju se specifičnosti društvenih veza stvaranih kumstvom u suton Dubrovačke Republike

A partir do estudo do compadrio em quatro paróquias rurais na Bahia, entre 1613 e 1700, são examinadas as especificidades do período de consolidação da escravidão na principal capitania açucareira do Estado do Brasil. Por meio de uma análise quantitativa, demonstra-se a reduzida relevância demográfica dos forros, o prestígio de pardos e mulatos dentro do próprio cativeiro e a raridade do matrimônio oficializado pela Igreja Católica, em comparação com outras regiões e períodos. Por outro lado, também são realizados estudos de caso, de modo a atentar para o envolvimento - direto ou indireto - das elites no compadrio com os cativos: tais momentos podiam servir, por exemplo, para ampliar a rede de relações dos maiores potentados com livres subalternos - que, por sua vez, buscavam ascender socialmente.

- by Thiago Krause
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- History of Slavery, Colonial Brazil, Colonial Brazilian History, Historia Social

This book deals with the thematic of godparenthood practices in Europe and America since the XVIth century and its social, economic and political uses in past and present populations. It contains 18 chapters on Italy, Spain, France, Finland, Greece, Romania, USA, French West indies, Mexico, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Germany. This is the third collective book of the Patrinus network (the network for the social and cultural history of baptism and godparenthood).

- by Guido Alfani and +2
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- Social Anthropology, Social Networks, Historical Demography, Romanian History
- by vincent gourdon and +1
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- French History, Social Networks, History of Religion, Italian Studies

Data analysis of 110 baptisms from the parish registers of the City of Dubrovnik for the year 1770 is used to reconstruct godparenthood as an instrument of the families’ social betterment within community and a means of establishing ties with the individuals of considerable ‘social capital’. Correlating the data with the sources from the pre-Tridentine Dubrovnik and those from parish registers for the year 1870 on the one hand, and taking into account the results of foreign debates on this topic on the other, this article examines distinctive features of the social alliances created by godparenthood at the sunset of the Dubrovnik Republic.

- by vincent gourdon
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- History, European History, Economic History, Social Networking

English summary of my monograph on papal clientelism in Bologna under pope Paul V (1605-1621)

- by Nicole Reinhardt
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- European History, Social Networks, Early Modern History, Seventeenth Century

The problem of godparental relations in the Bohemian rural space during the 19 th century is exemplified by the Nový Rychnov parish. The analysis is based on a sample of 7229 children, born in the studied area between 1800 and 1899, at the time of modernisation. Godfather and godmother usually represented close relatives, mostly a married couple; this habit enabled to invite the same godparents for all children in the family, regardless of their sex. The focus on particular families validates, that siblings usually had the same godparents. Some particular cases show the same godparents used to be chosen even in the case of half-siblings. About one-third of all children were biologically related with at least one of their godparents and the familiarisation trend in godparenthood grew stronger in the course of the 19 th century. The family relationship with godmothers was not so usual, whereas biologically related godfathers appeared very often. Among them, we can identify a predominance of matrilineal relatives.

After founding the Italian Ethnological Mission in Mexico in 1973, which he directed for over 20 years, Italo Signorini carried out his ethnographic research among Mexican natives, studying in depth the results of the evangelization process which started with the Conquest, the syncretic dynamics and the peculiar forms of Catholic native religion, as well as the negotiations carried out by the representatives of the clergy and the native ritual specialists. His characteristically balanced approach to the study of the Catholic Church’s pastoral work enabled him to propose penetrating and innovative analyses on the categories and interpretations of scholars who had tackled the same themes from positions characterized by a strong ideological opposition, and he was able to provide original and well argued interpretations about indigenous religiosity. His long lasting experience in Mexico was of great help in the decade in which he covered teaching assignments at the Pontifical Urbaniana University (1984-1993), allowing him to adapt the teaching of ethnology to this peculiar educational context and to the needs of a missiology clearly oriented towards the enculturation of the Gospel.

- by Alessandro Lupo
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- Medical Anthropology, Ethnology, Religious Syncretism, Mexico

This article examines the impact of clan division within the Ragusan noble rank on the choice of godparents in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The here established clan affi liation of the baptised children and godparents elucidates as to what extent informal social divisions manifested through the institution of godparenthood, and to what point, if any, clan affi liation spilt from the political domain over into that of inter-family relations based on godparenthood.

- by Vedran Stojanovic and +1
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- Nobility, Baptism, 18th Century, Ritual kinship and godparenthood

This version is Chapter Five in: The Gypsy-American: An Ethnogeographic Study. 2002. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, pps, 67-77, but was originally published earlier as: "Gypsy Taskmasters, Gentile Slaves," in Matt T. Salo (ed.), The... more

- by vincent gourdon and +1
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- French History, Social Networks, History of Religion, Italian Studies

Resumen: Las constituciones sinodales suponen una fuente de información de gran riqueza para el conocimiento de la práctica religiosa cotidiana, pues en su contenido y formulación dan vida al conflicto que surge del choque entre la moral y la religiosidad que desea ser impuesta desde las altas autoridades eclesiásticas y la realidad manifestada desde la vivencia popular de la religión. En este artículo se pone el foco precisamente en estas tensiones a partir del estudio de las disposiciones relativas a la administración del sacramento del bautismo y los vínculos de padrinazgo en el marco temporal de la Castilla bajomedieval y moderna.
Summary: Synodal statutes constitute a rather rich and useful kind of source so as to improve our knowledge in relation to common daily religious practices as, in their phrasing and context, they portray the conflict regarding the understanding of moral and religious behavior between the higher ecclesiastical hierarchies and that of the rest of the population. In this article, the focus is pointed mainly to these tensions through the analysis of the statutes meant to regulate the administration of baptism and godparenthood kinship links that came after it in the context of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Castilian communities.

- by Héctor Fernando Sánchez Diego
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- Early Modern History, Baptism, Historia Social, Historia Urbana
- by vincent gourdon and +1
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- European History, Sociology of Families, Sociology of Religion, French History
- by vincent gourdon
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- European History, Historical Anthropology, French History, Social Networks

The dominance of classic political history for many years led to the disregarding of “relatives’ letters” as a crucial source for understanding the formation of the Soviet state and society. These were letters to Soviet officials from ordinary people who perceived the state as a family and imagined its leaders as their close relatives. Broadening a dominant concept in recent Soviet studies, that of speaking Bolshevik, I explore “relatives’ letters”, analysing the fact that their authors were speaking kinship as evidence that reveals the premodern foundations of modern states and uncovers a social practice for generating power in everyday routines. Freed from the constraints of Weberian-modernisationist and Burkhardtian paradigms, I reflect on the ways that seemingly opposed ideas about tradition and modernity, power and kinship, status and marginality, the licit and the illicit infused representations of “Soviet citizenship” and analyse how letter writers justified their connections with the abstract concept of “the state”. “Relatives’ letters” show that the state lived in and through its subjects: Imagining a state as a political family and leaders as close relatives provided a source of identity and contributed to social cohesion in the Soviet empire but also explains the very nature of contemporary informal relationships. Consequently, speaking kinship became a universal political language of governance and the language of ordinary people’s emotional attachment to the paternalistic state.

- by Alexey Tikhomirov
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- History, European History, Cultural History, Asian Studies
- by Isabelle Robin and +1
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- Social Networks, Early Modern History, Catholic Studies, Children and Families
- by vincent gourdon
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- French Revolution, 19th century France, History of Roman Catholicism, Baptism

Revista Electrónica "Tiempos Modernos". Vol. 29, Nº 2, 2014.

- by vincent gourdon and +2
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- Ritual, French colonialism, Baptism, History of the Family

RÉSUMÉ: Située à proximité de Paris, Aubervilliers, au cours du XIX e siècle, connaît une forte croissance de sa population et une transformation de son tissu social avec l'arrivée de migrants et l'orientation des activités économiques vers l'industrie au détriment de l'agriculture traditionnelle. Dans le cadre d'une réflexion générale concernant la place du parrainage dans la construction des liens sociaux et particulièrement de la sociabilité communautaire à l'échelle locale, la distribution spatiale des parrains et marraines des enfants baptisés dans l'unique église paroissiale de la localité a été analysée sur trois siècles, afin de montrer la fin progressive du parrainage entre voisins appartenant à une même communauté, la paroisse, entre XVIII e siècle et XIX e siècle, et l'élargissement du bassin de recrutement des parents spirituels, celui-ci témoignant du recul de l'esprit communautaire ancien. Au XIX e siècle, quand les choix dans la parenté n'amènent pas à aller quérir des parrains loin d'Aubervilliers, d'autres types de parrains voisins apparaissent: les gens du quartier, voire les voisins d'immeuble, prennent alors une place importante, notamment dans le quartier ouvrier peuplé de migrants de Quatre Chemins-Champ Blanc, au sud de la commune. Il ressort ainsi de l'analyse détaillée des baptêmes de 1881 que l'espace de la banlieue était loin d'être uniforme. Par beaucoup d'aspects dont le parrainage, Aubervilliers était bien une «périphérie» de Paris (cf. la proportion de parrains et marraines vivant dans la capitale), mais en son sein plusieurs quartiers, où des logiques de choix différentes étaient mises en oeuvre au moment des baptêmes, coexistaient.

- by Isabelle Robin and +1
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- French History, Social Networks, Catholic Studies, Urban History
- by Nicole Reinhardt
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- Seventeenth Century, State Building, history of Bologna, Political Clientelism

- by Irena Ipšić
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- Nobility, Baptism, Historical Studies, Ritual kinship and godparenthood

Fazendo uso dos Registros de Batismo de filhos de açorianos na Vila do Rio Grande, no intervalo transcorrido entre os anos de 1738 e 1763, observou-se o estabelecimento de redes de relações interpessoais entre os migrados das ilhas e destes com membros de outros grupos sociais da região, através do compadrio. O desafio consiste em cruzar as informações destes registros com demais fontes disponíveis para a localidade e período, buscando detectar efeitos deste parentesco fictício nas trajetórias familiares e individuais, quer para a criança batizada e sua família, quer para os padrinhos e seus parentes.

- by vincent gourdon and +1
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- Social Networks, Baptism, History of the Family, Early Modern Catholicism