Author: Richard SeafordPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198149491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455
Book Description
All Greek is translated."--BOOK JACKET.
Reciprocity and Ritual
Author: Richard SeafordPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198149491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455
Book Description
All Greek is translated."--BOOK JACKET.
Performing the Community
Author: Cora GoversPublisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 9783825897512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
Economic liberalization, modern mass media, and new religious and political movements have touched even the most remote areas in Mexico, and the Northern Highlands of the state of Puebla are no exception. When this coincides with recent infrastructures such as roads and electricity and new income sources from cash crop production and urban migration, the nature of rural communities rapidly changes. This study shows how the people of the Totonac mountain village of Nanacatln deal with their increasingly pluriform and differentiated local world. By performing stories, rituals, and exchanges they have countered centrifugal cultural and social forces. Rather than leading to the demise of the community, modernization and globalization thus seem to have reinforced the sense of local belonging. How is this possible? This anthropological analysis points at the simultaneous efforts of new and old cultural brokers--ritual specialists and healers as well as young migrants--who recreate the community by linking the outside world to local customs. Their initiatives are taken up by women, crucial for community building through elaborate food exchanges, and men, whose involvement is central to public ritual life. Their combined efforts create a living community and link the village past to its rural- urban present and future, as a place of belonging in times of change. Cora Govers is a senior staff member at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Cosmology and the Polis
Author: Richard SeafordPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139504878
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure, and uncovers various such chronotopes in Homer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Presocratic philosophy and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual and monetised exchange. In particular, the Oresteia of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth. This argument includes the first ever demonstration of the profound affinities between Aeschylus and the (Presocratic) philosophy of his time.
Money and the Early Greek Mind
Author: Richard SeafordPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521539920
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage, which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system, fundamental to Presocratic philosophy, and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods, as found in tragedy.
Ritual in Its Own Right
Author: Don HandelmanPublisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450519
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.
Reciprocity, Status and the Korean Shamanistic Ritual
Author: Hyun-key Kim HogarthServing Athena
Author: Julia L. ShearPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108618022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555
Book Description
In ancient Athens, the Panathenaia was the most important festival and was celebrated in honour of Athena from the middle of the sixth century BC until the end of the fourth century AD. This in-depth study examines how this all-Athenian celebration was an occasion for constructing identities and how it affected those identities. Since not everyone took part in the same way, this differential participation articulated individuals' relationships both to the goddess and to the city so that the festival played an important role in negotiating what it meant to be Athenian (and non-Athenian). Julia Shear applies theories of identity formation which were developed in the social sciences to the ancient Greek material and brings together historical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to provide a better understanding both of this important occasion and of Athenian identities over the festival's long history.
The Hidden Powers of Ritual
Author: Bradd ShorePublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262376555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
An illuminating overview of the development, benefits, and importance of ritual in everyday life, written by a leading cognitive anthropologist. The Hidden Powers of Ritual is an engaging introduction to ritual studies that presents ritual as an evolved form of human behavior of almost unimaginable significance to our species. Every day across the globe, people gather to share meals, brew caffeinated beverages, or honor their ancestors. In this book, Bradd Shore, a respected anthropologist, reaches beyond familiar “big-R” rituals to present life’s humbler, overshadowed moments, exploring everything from the Balinese pelebon to baseball to family Zoom sessions in the age of Covid to the sobering reenactment rituals surrounding the Moore’s Ford lynchings. In each ritual, Shore shows how our capacity to ritualize behavior is a remarkable part of the human story. Encompassing both the commonly unlabeled “interaction rituals” studied by sociologists and the symbolically elaborated sacred rituals of religious studies, Shore organizes his conception around detailed case studies drawn from international research and personal experience, weaving scholarship with a memoir of a life encompassed by ritual. A probing exploration that matches breadth with accessibility, The Hidden Powers of Ritual is a provocative contribution to ritual theory that will appeal to a wide range of readers curious about why these unique repetitive acts matter in our lives.
King of Sacrifice
Author: Sarah HitchPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. Hitch explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech.
Cults and Rites in Ancient Greece
Author: Michael H. JamesonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316123197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.