Author: Morris Berman Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 0791493245 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 367
Book Description
The third book in Morris Berman's much acclaimed trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness, Wandering God continues his earlier work which garnered such praise as "solid lessons in the history of ideas" (KIRKUS Reviews), "filled with piquant details" (Common Boundary), and "an informative synthesis and a remarkably friendly, good-natured jeremiad" (The Village Voice). Here, in a remarkable discussion of our hunter-gatherer ancestry and the "paradoxical" mode of perception that it involved, Berman shows how a sense of alertness, or secular/sacred immediacy, subsequently got buried by the rise of sedentary civilization, religion, and vertical power relationships. In an integrated tour de force, Wandering God explores the meaning of Paleolithic art, the origins of social inequality, the nature of cross-cultural child rearing, the relationship between women and agriculture, and the world view of present-day nomadic peoples, as well as the emergence of "paradoxical" consciousness in the philosophical writings of the twentieth century.
Author: Edwin M. Yamauchi Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1592442145 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 149
Book Description
Are there any biblical references to territories in what is today the country of Russia? The author's answer is yes, but Ezekiel's reference to Rosh and Meshech is not one of them. In a thoroughly documented discussion, the author describes the Uratrians, Manneans, Cimmerians, and Scythians. Three of these northern foes of Israel are referred to by Jeremiah (in 51:27), the Cimmerians by Ezekiel (38:6). ...with the exception of Egypt, writes the author, almost all of Israel's enemies came from the north, though from the viewpoint of a modern map, many of these came ultimately from the east. The Urartians occupied what is now Soviet Armenia, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. The Manneans lived south of Lake Urmia, between Urartu and Assyria. The Cimmerians first appeared in the steppes north of the Caucasus, then crossed the Caucasus, and eventually invaded Asia Minor. The Scythians were nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes, some of whom settled in the Ukraine north of the Black Sea, others east of the Caspian. But what of Rosh, Messhech, and other names in Ezekiel 38:2? Is Rosh, Russia and Meshech Moscow? Rosh cannot possibly be related to Russia, insists the author. Nor can the terms Gog and Magog, no proposed identification for which has yet to win universal consent. Meshech and Tubal, on the other hand, have been located for certain - in central and eastern Anatolia.
Author: Carlo Ginzburg Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226839443 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Weaving early accounts of witchcraft—trial records, ecclesiastical tracts, folklore, and popular iconography—into new and startling patterns, Carlo Ginzburg presents in Ecstasies compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across Europe and in England for thousands of years.
Author: Enric Aguilar I Matas Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004644687 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 183
Book Description
It is generally supposed that the Vedic tradition emerged from certain Brahmanic circles of poets, priests and theoreticians who depended economically very much on a kind of pastoral aristocracy. As against this point of view the book maintains the theory that the Vedic tradition was mainly connected with the warrior world, in particular with certain groups of seers that surrounded the warrior chiefs called sûris and strongly opposed the pastoral aristocracy and their priesthood. What emerges from this approach is that the Vedic tradition, in spite of its apparent unity of themes, images and even sentences, is not a tradition based on consensus or on a harmonious development of thought from one end to the other, but rather a tradition that reveals a troubled background, a background of passionate rivalries. The book reconsiders the debate surrounding the antagonistic ideologies of pastoral and agricultural peoples and represents a new contribution to the discussion about similarities and differences between the Iranian and the Indo-Aryan cultures.
Author: James Forsyth Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521477710 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
This is the first ethnohistory of Siberia to appear in English, tracing the history of the native peoples from the Russian conquest onwards. James Forsyth compares the Siberian experience with that of the Indians and Eskimos in North America and the book as a whole will provide readers with a vast corpus of ethnographic information previously inaccessible to Western scholars.
Author: Adrian Leftwich Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135025908 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This book challenges conventional conceptions of politics which focus largely on the institutions of government and the associated struggles for power around them. It argues that politics is involved in all the activities of cooperation and conflict whereby people organize the use, production and distribution of human, natural and material resources. Found in all human groups, institutions and societies, politics everywhere influences and reflects the structures of power, social organization, culture and ideology. These central themes are illustrated by drawing on a wide range of societies, including the !Kung hunter-gatherers, the pre-Columbian Aztecs and the Pastoral Maasai, as well as modern Britain and Third World societies from Chile to China. Other examples - of village communities, a typical university department and the World Bank - show how institutions may also be analyzed in terms of the definition of politics used here. It is equally central to the argument that many of the most critical problems occurring in societies can be attributed to their politics, and this theme is explored looking at such problems as poverty, famines, epidemics, violence and unemployment in Britain and throughout the world.
Author: Anthony Pagden Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351937421 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 744
Book Description
The perception of Europeans of the world and of the peoples beyond Europe has become in recent years the subject of intense scholarly interest and heated debate both in and outside the academy. So, too, has the concern with how it was that those peoples who were variously ’discovered’, and then, as often as not, colonised, understood the strangers in their midst. This volume attempts to cover both these topics, as well as to provide a number of crucial articles on the difficulties faced by modern historians in understanding the complex, relationship between ’them’ and ’us’. Inevitably such relationships not only changed over time, they also varied greatly from culture to culture. The articles, therefore cover most of the areas with which the European world came into contact from the earliest Portuguese incursions into Africa in the mid fifteenth century until the explorations of Cook and Bougainville in the Pacific in the late eighteenth. It ranges, too, from Brazil to Russia, from Tahiti to China.