Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective PDF Download

Author: Chris Hann
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520260562
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
"This collection of essays is a welcome and refreshing gift in a virtual desert. There has been very little comparative anthropological research on the Eastern churches, and this volume will fill that gap."—Michael Herzfeld, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome "At long last there is a book on the anthropology of Christianity that devotes direct and sustained attention to the diverse Eastern Christian Churches—both Orthodox and Catholic. This book should be read by anyone who thinks anthropologically about Christianity. Scales will fall from their eyes and they will behold an entire wing of Christianity that has, until now, gone mostly unnoticed and practically untheorized."—Douglas Rogers, author of The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals

Author: Tom Boylston
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520296494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Introduction : prohibition and a ritual regime -- A history of mediation -- Fasting, bodies, and the calendar -- Proliferations of mediators -- Blood, silver, and coffee -- Spirits in the marketplace -- Concrete, bones, and feasts -- Echoes of the host -- The media landscape -- The knowledge of the world -- Conclusion

Author: Andreas Bandak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000358208
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book brings the theme of prayer into anthropological discussion. Across diverse significant ethnographic case studies, five anthropologists attend to prayers and how they are performed and seen to intervene in the social world. The studies include Pentecostals in Zambia, Charismatic Christians in Ghana, Protestants in Scotland, Eastern Orthodox Christians in Romania, and Catholics in Syria. Across these ethnographic cases, the book argues that focusing on the social life of prayer offers a significant way to engage with matters close to people. Prayers are a way to map affect and the affective relationships people hold in what they are oriented towards and care about. Taking its cue from Marcel Mauss, the book invites us to go beyond the individual and see how prayers always point to a broader social landscape of obligation and affective investment. Focusing on the social life of prayers, the book posits, accordingly entices a particular form of situated comparison of diverse Christian traditions that pushes the scholarly conversation on Christianity to consider central questions of agency, responsibility and subjectivity. Taking up prayer as the object of study, this book offers novel anthropological perspectives on Christian life and practice. The chapters in this book were originally published a special issue of Religion.

Author: Brian M. Howell
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493418068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
What is the role of culture in human experience? This concise yet solid introduction to cultural anthropology helps readers explore and understand this crucial issue from a Christian perspective. Now revised and updated throughout, this new edition of a successful textbook covers standard cultural anthropology topics with special attention given to cultural relativism, evolution, and missions. It also includes a new chapter on medical anthropology. Plentiful figures, photos, and sidebars are sprinkled throughout the text, and updated ancillary support materials and teaching aids are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.

Author: Andrew J. Strathern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131704410X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 863

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Book Description
This companion provides an indispensable overview of contemporary and classical issues in social and cultural anthropology. Although anthropology has expanded greatly over time in terms of the diversity of topics in which its practitioners engage, many of the broad themes and topics at the heart of anthropological thought remain perennially vital, such as understanding order and change, diversity and continuity, and conflict and co-operation in the reproduction of social life. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the contributors to this volume provide us with thoughtful and fruitful ways of thinking about a number of contemporary and long-standing arenas of work where both established and more recent researchers are engaged. The companion begins by exploring classic topics such as Religion; Rituals; Language and Culture; Violence; and Gender. This is followed by a focus on current developments within the discipline including Human Rights; Globalization; and Diasporas and Cosmopolitanism. It provides an interesting and challenging look at the state of current thinking in anthropology, serving as a rich resource for scholars and students alike.

Author: Lucian N. Leustean
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317818660
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 867

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Book Description
This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of Eastern Christian churches in Europe, the Middle East, America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it examines both Orthodox and Oriental churches from the end of the Cold War up to the present day. The book offers a unique insight into the myriad church-state relations in Eastern Christianity and tackles contemporary concerns, opportunities and challenges, such as religious revival after the fall of communism; churches and democracy; relations between Orthodox, Catholic and Greek Catholic churches; religious education and monastic life; the size and structure of congregations; and the impact of migration, secularisation and globalisation on Eastern Christianity in the twenty-first century.

Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse

Author: Milena Benovska
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000203859
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Orthodoxy has achieved a large scale revival in Russia following the collapse of Communism. However, paradoxically, although there is a high level of identification with Orthodoxy, there is in fact a low level of church attendance. This book, based on in depth ethnographic fieldwork, explores the social background and moral attitudes of the "little flock" of believers who actively participate in religious life. It reveals that the complex moral beliefs of the faithful have a disproportionately high impact on Russian society overall; that among the faithful there is a strong emphasis on striving for personal perfection; but that also there are strong collective ideas concerning religious nationalism and the synergy between the secular and the religious.

Author: Vibha Joshi
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
‘Nagaland for Christ’ and ‘Jesus Saves’ are familiar slogans prominently displayed on public transport and celebratory banners in Nagaland, north-east India. They express an idealization of Christian homogeneity that belies the underlying tensions and negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. This religious division is intertwined with that of healing beliefs and practices, both animistic and biomedical. This study focuses on the particular experiences of the Angami Naga, one of the many Naga peoples. Like other Naga, they are citizens of the state of India but extend ethnolinguistically into Tibeto-Burman south-east Asia. This ambiguity and how it affects their Christianity, global involvement, indigenous cultural assertiveness and nationalist struggle is explored. Not simply describing continuity through change, this study reveals the alternating Christian and non-Christian streams of discourse, one masking the other but at different times and in different guises.

Author: Vlad Naumescu
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253031672
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
“These essays advance the understanding of Eastern Orthodox spiritual practices from a religious studies perspective.”—Reading Religion How do people experience spirituality through what they see, hear, touch, and smell? In this book, Sonja Luehrmann and an international group of scholars assess how sensory experience shapes prayer and ritual practice among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Prayer, even when performed privately, is considered as a shared experience and act that links individuals and personal beliefs with a broader, institutional, or imagined faith community. It engages with material, visual, and aural culture including icons, relics, candles, pilgrimage, bells, and architectural spaces. Whether touching upon the use of icons in the age of digital and electronic media, the impact of Facebook on prayer in Ethiopia, or the implications of praying using recordings, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, these timely essays present a sophisticated overview of the history of Eastern Orthodox Christianities. Taken as a whole they reveal prayer as a dynamic phenomenon in the devotional and ritual lives of Eastern Orthodox believers across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. “Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility―and durability―of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age.”—Nadieszda Kizenko, author of A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People