SPIRITUAL BONDS TO THE DEAD IN CROSS-CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: COMPARATIVE RELIGION AND MODERN GRIEF

Death Studies ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 547-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Klass, Robert Goss
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
The Dead

Weaving a Transnational Narrative: Yellow Woman and Orature in Almanac of the Dead

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Shannon Toll
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Transnational Narrative ◽  
Colonial Oppression

This article identifies parallels between Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller and Almanac of the Dead, focusing on the recurrence of Yellow Woman, a figure of Keresan orature. Yellow Woman embodies female sensuality and its potential to incite social or structural change within communities, and I argue that in Almanac, Silko employs textual reinterpretations of Yellow Woman to demonstrate the importance of cross-cultural, indigenous-led movements toward decolonization. Finally, I compare Almanac to the current Idle No More movement, noting their similarities as vast transnational, transindigenous, and even transracial campaigns that model beneficial Native and non-Native ally relationships within the struggle against colonial oppression.

Women’s Journeys in the Study of Religion

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Morny Joy
Keyword(s):  
International Association ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Decisive Influence ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women Scholars ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Way

In 1995, Professor Ursula King published an edited volume, Religion and Gender. This volume comprised a collection of essays that had been presented at the International Association of the History of Religions (IAHR) conference in Rome, 1990. As such, it marked a milestone: it was the first published volume that featured work undertaken solely by women in the history of the IAHR. In her own Introduction, Professor King drew attention to a number of important topics, such as ‘gender’, ‘postmodernism’, that were being debated at that time. The volume remains a testament to Professor King, and her dedication to, as well as support of women’s scholarship in the discipline on the Study of Religions, and to what was then called Comparative Religion. A subsequent volume, edited together with Tina Beattie, Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross Cultural Perspectives (2004), addressed more complex issues that had emerged in the intervening years. This later volume provided another platform from which to explore not only developments in gender, but a number of other crucial topics, including postcolonialism and globalization. In this essay, I propose to follow the effects of such issues as addressed or acknowledged by Professor King in her various works, as well as to examine the further expansion and qualification of these topics in more recent years. This essay will thus explore issues that have had a formative and even decisive influence on the way that women scholars in the Study of Religions today approach the discipline. I will look to certain of my own essays that appeared in Professor King’s edited volumes as well as essays by other contemporary women scholars in order to illustrate these developments.

The Psychedelic Book of the Dead

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Erik Davis
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
The Core ◽  
Psychological Transformation ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Book Of The Dead

In 1964, Timothy Leary and a few colleagues published The Psychedelic Experience, a manual for “tripping” explicitly based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the core of the Tibetan materials lies the concept of the bardo, the “in between” realm of the afterlife. While acknowledging the problematic nature of Leary’s radical appropriation, this essay argues that his application of these materials to the orchestration and regulation of psychedelic experience reflected a productive reframing of the phantasmagoria common to strong psychedelic experience. Using tools of comparative religion and secular psychology, Leary constructed a model of psychological transformation that rejected religious or transcendental meaning while creatively expanding the bardo concept already evident in Tibetan Buddhism.

Exploring Near-Death Experiences across Cultures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Shushan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Body ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Common Elements ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
Extraordinary Experiences ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Near Death Experiences

Near-death experiences (NDEs) share many common elements worldwide, indicating that they originate in phenomena that are independent of culture. They also have many elements unique to the individual experiencers and their cultures, demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between experience and belief. There are numerous examples worldwide of religious beliefs originating in NDEs and other extraordinary experiences. This is in contradiction to widely accepted notions that all experiences and beliefs are generated entirely by culture or language. Such paradigms not only fail to explain the origins of religious beliefs or the nature of related experiences but also fail to take seriously the testimonies of their sources. Near-death experiences provide perfectly rational grounds for beliefs that the soul can leave the body, and that it can survive death and join spirits of the dead in another world. As such, the phenomenon helps to demonstrate the cross-cultural process of reasoning based on evidence.

In My Time of Dying

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Over Time

This book is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, the book explores mortuary cultures and the relationship between the living and the dead over a 400-year period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The book considers many questions from the African historical perspective, including why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth century, the book shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one of the world's most vibrant cultures of death. The book explores the unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. The book reconstructs a vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and oral sources, the book richly adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.

Performing ‘The Duty of Discontent’ in Dialogue with Christian Strecker: A Plea for Cross-Cultural Historical Jesus Research

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-299
Author(s):  
Pieter F. Craffert
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Model ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Alternative Framework ◽  
Historical Figure

This article is a response to the critical evaluation by Christian Strecker of my book, The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological- Historical Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008; hereafter LGS). Anthropological historiography is set as an alternative framework to historical criticism for the discussion about Jesus as an historical figure. The dialogue with Strecker follows the three main categories of his evaluation; namely, the feasibility of a new historiographical paradigm for historical Jesus research, the shamanic complex as a cross-cultural analytical model and the testing of the shamanic hypothesis against the Gospel traditions.

scholarly journals Comparative vs. Hagiology: Two Variant Approaches to the Field

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Keune
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Study ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
Cross Cultural Study ◽  
The Cross

There is a basic tension within the idea of Comparative Hagiology, because the two terms that constitute its name are incongruous. To formulate a comparative hagiological project, we must choose at the outset which term will take priority. Prioritizing the comparative in comparative hagiology orients us to focus more on the basic disciplinary approaches to gather compare-able data, leaving hagiology as a placeholder whose content will be defined by the results of the comparison. Prioritizing hagiology requires first defining hagio- and reckoning with the European and Christian baggage that it brings to cross-cultural and inter-religious comparison. Holding that definition in mind, we then locate examples to compare by whatever approach seems fruitful in that case. Different choices of priorities lead to potentially different results. I argue that a path that prioritizes comparative is more likely to inspire experimental and innovative groupings, unconventional definitions of hagiology, and new perspectives in the cross-cultural study of religion. An approach that prioritizes hagiology runs a greater risk of repeating the same provincial and conceptual biases that doomed much of 20th-century comparative religion scholarship.

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