Was Dust Their Food and Clay Their Bread? Grave Goods, the Mesopotamian Afterlife, and the Liminal Role of Inana/Ishtar

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlín Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Literary Narrative ◽  
Grave Goods

AbstractMany literary texts portray the Mesopotamian netherworld as unrelievedly bleak, yet the archaeological evidence of grave goods suggests that there may also have existed an alternative way of thinking about the afterlife. An analysis of the types of objects found in burials indicates that many people may have anticipated a less harsh form of existence after death. Furthermore, iconographic allusions to the goddess Inana/Ishtar in certain burials raise the possibility that this deity may have been associated with the descent of human dead to the netherworld. The occasional presence of her image and iconography in funerary contexts does not necessarily imply a belief that Inana/Ishtar would personally grant the deceased a happy afterlife, but it may provide an allusion to her own escape from the undesirable netherworld of literary narrative. Inana/Ishtar's status as a liminal figure and breaker of boundaries also may have encouraged Mesopotamians to associate her with the transition between life and death.

scholarly journals From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Corinne Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Margery Kempe ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Spiritual Autobiography ◽  
Popular Romance ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Physical Responses ◽  
Physiological Theory

AbstractBreath and breathlessness are flashpoints in medieval literary texts. Medieval medical theories, rooted in classical thought, emphasise the bodily spirits and in particular, the ways that motions of the ‘vital spirit’—closely connected with breath—cause powerful physical responses that write emotions on the body in sighs, swoons, and even death. Physiological theory was complemented by theological notions of pneuma, the Spirit of divinity and life. The movement of breath plays a key role in depictions of emotion from love to grief, and in visionary or mystical experience. This essay explores breath and breathlessness in a range of English secular and devotional literary texts: popular romance writing, the medically alert fictions of Chaucer, and visionary works including the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich and the spiritual autobiography of Margery Kempe. In all these works, concepts of the vital spirits and the role of breath in emotion are central. The play of breath underpins and shapes depictions of romantic love, explorations of the boundary between life and death, and ideas of spiritual revelation, creating narratives of profoundly embodied, affective experience.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

‘Does Law Matter to Anthropology?’

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-91
Author(s):  
Sally Engle Merry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
American Anthropological Association ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Relevant Question ◽  
Law Faculty ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Legal Training

This provocative question became the basis for a spirited discussion at the 2017 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. My first reaction, on hearing the question, was to ask, does anthropology care whether it matters to law? As a discipline, anthropology and the anthropology of law are producing excellent scholarship and have an active scholarly life. But in response to this forum’s provocation article, which clearly outlines the lack of courses on law and anthropology in law schools, I decided that the relevant question was, why doesn’t anthropology matter more to law than it does? The particular, most serious concern appears to be, why are there not more law and anthropology courses being offered in law schools? It is increasingly common for law faculty in the United States to have PhDs as well as JDs, so why are there so few anthropology/law PhD/JD faculty? Moreover, as there is growing consensus that law schools instil a certain way of thinking but lack preparation for the practice of law in reality and there is an explosion of interest in clinical legal training, why does this educational turn fail to provide a new role of legal anthropology, which focuses on the practice of law, in clinical legal training?

Becoming Zarathustra

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Kellens
Keyword(s):  
Complex Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking

This chapter examines the role of ritual and sacrifice in the most sacred Zoroastrian literature, the Gâthâs in order to explore the complex relationship between the figure of Zarathustra and the human ritual officiant. The chapter presents a very Lincoln-ian sort of history of the field of Zoroastrian studies itself, interrogating the contexts and biases of particular scholars in their various readings and misreadings of the tradition. At the same time, it offers a new way of thinking about the figure of Zarathustra himself, who is best understood not as the semi-historical “founder” of Zoroastrianism but rather as the mythical personality into which the human officiant is himself transfigured through the ritual operations.

Theology and the Knowledge of Persons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump
Keyword(s):  
Propositional Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Knowledge Of Persons

This chapter is concerned with the question of the difference between philosophy and theology. It rejects certain prevalent ways of thinking about this difference. It argues that a more promising way of thinking about these disciplines is to be found in their names: “philosophy” in its etymology means something like the love of wisdom; “theology” in its etymology means something like the word with regard to God. God, unlike wisdom, is not an abstract universal. Rather, and by virtue of being characterized by mind and will, God is more nearly a person. The chapter spells out the implications of this difference, arguing that the knowledge at issue when we do theology is irreducible to propositional knowledge. Rather, it is a knowledge of persons. The chapter illuminates the role of the knowledge of persons in theological discussion and draws some conclusions about the methodology which will be useful to theology.

Writing and Ritual in Deuteronomy 28

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Quick
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Ritual Process ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Ritual Context

This chapter argue that ritual behaviours might be just as good a source as literary texts for the diffusion of traditional cursing and treaty material across different cultures in the ancient Near East. In particular, the role of ad hoc oral Targum in the ritual process could have been an important means by which traditions were shared between different language communities. Recognition of the ritual context of this material also provides insights for the comparative method, the dating and authorship of Deuteronomy 28, and the subversive impetus thought to have stood behind its composition. Ultimately, the function of the written word in a largely oral world is shown to be fundamental to understanding the composition, function and the early history of the curses in the book of Deuteronomy.

Children’s Lives and Deaths in Merovingian Gaul

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-213
Author(s):  
Émilie Perez
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
New Method ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Grave Goods

The role of children in Merovingian society has long been downplayed, and the study of their graves and bones has long been neglected. However, during the past fifteen years, archaeologists have shown growing interest in the place of children in Merovingian society. Nonetheless, this research has not been without challenges linked to the nature of the biological and material remains. Recent analysis of 315 children’s graves from four Merovingian cemeteries in northern Gaul (sixth to seventh centuries) allows us to understand the modalities of burial ritual for children. A new method for classifying children into social age groups shows that the type, quality, quantity, and diversity of grave goods were directly correlated with the age of the deceased. They increased from the age of eight and particularly around the time of puberty. This study discusses the role of age and gender in the construction and expression of social identity during childhood in the Merovingian period.

Time for (a Reading) Community? The Border Literary Field(s) in the 1980s and 1990s

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-70
Author(s):  
Paul Fallon
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Critical Regionalism ◽  
Literary Narrative ◽  
National Literatures

This essay analyzes how, marginalized by national literatures and threatened by the rise of regional mass media in the 1980s and 1990s, northern Mexican border authors and their texts consistently concerned themselves with the temporalities of representation——particularly in literary narrative. Through their treatment of temporal issues, these writers directed themselves toward a local, transnational reading community and enacted a critical regionalism that articulates local signification within larger processes reshaping the role of literature in contemporary Latin America.

scholarly journals News-Driven Business Cycles: Insights and Challenges

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 993-1074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Beaudry ◽  
Franck Portier
Keyword(s):  
Business Cycles ◽  
Business Cycle ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Economic Fluctuations ◽  
Aggregate Fluctuations ◽  
Business Cycle Fluctuations ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Many

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival of news, can cause business cycle fluctuations driven by expectational change, and we review the empirical evidence aimed at evaluating their relevance. In particular, we highlight how the literature on news and business cycles offers a coherent way of thinking about aggregate fluctuations, while at the same time we emphasize the many challenges that must be addressed before a proper assessment of the role of news in business cycles can be established. (JEL D83, D84, E13, E32, O33)

scholarly journals On the Ethics of Interpretation: are Young Readers to Blame?

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 264
Author(s):  
Indrė Žakevičienė
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Literary Ethics ◽  
Mental Spaces

The author of the article will discuss the problem of validity thinking about the basic statements of Literary Ethics. Though the problems Literary Ethics emphasizes are global and at the same time rather abstract, the efforts of literary researchers to educate readers with the help of novels are understandable but seem ineffectual. Young readers are not capable of understanding complicated texts of the previous century because of the different contents of their mental spaces or the different schemes of thinking. Literary Ethics speaks about the importance of the role of emotions while reading novels, but the spectrum of primary emotions young readers experience while reading complicated literary texts blocks all the ways to deeper understanding and the ability to analyze specific ethical issues encoded in the novels. The theory of emotions explains the situation and in a way rehabilitates young readers. Nevertheless, particular transformations of genres or of the original form of literary texts could evoke the readers’ interest and make them think deeper or extend the realm of interpretations by relating particular “genre markers” and rethinking their codes.

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