scholarly journals Reassessing Shamanism and Animism in the Art and Archaeology of Ancient Mesoamerica

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 394
Author(s):  
Eleanor Harrison-Buck ◽  
David A. Freidel
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Vital Matter ◽  
Analytical Tools

Shamanism and animism have proven to be useful cross-cultural analytical tools for anthropology, particularly in religious studies. However, both concepts root in reductionist, social evolutionary theory and have been criticized for their vague and homogenizing rubric, an overly romanticized idealism, and the tendency to ‘other’ nonwestern peoples as ahistorical, apolitical, and irrational. The alternative has been a largely secular view of religion, favoring materialist processes of rationalization and “disenchantment.” Like any cross-cultural frame of reference, such terms are only informative when explicitly defined in local contexts using specific case studies. Here, we consider shamanism and animism in terms of ethnographic and archaeological evidence from Mesoamerica. We trace the intellectual history of these concepts and reassess shamanism and animism from a relational or ontological perspective, concluding that these terms are best understood as distinct ways of knowing the world and acquiring knowledge. We examine specific archaeological examples of masked spirit impersonations, as well as mirrors and other reflective materials used in divination. We consider not only the productive and affective energies of these enchanted materials, but also the potentially dangerous, negative, or contested aspects of vital matter wielded in divinatory practices.

The Oxford Handbook of Secularism

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
International Studies ◽  
Traditional Religions ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The World ◽  
Dramatic Rise ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Criticism ◽  
State Separation

The Oxford Companion to Secularism provides a timely overview of the new multidisciplinary field of secular studies. This field involves philosophy, the humanities, intellectual history, political theory, law, international studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, education, religious studies, and additional disciplines, all showing an increasing interest in the multifaceted phenomenon known as secularism. Conflicts and debates around the world more and more frequently involve secularism. National borders and traditional religions cannot keep people in tidy boxes anymore, as political struggles, doctrinal divergences, and demographic trends are sweeping across regions and entire continents. Simultaneously, there is a resurgence of religious participation in the politics of many countries. How might these diverse phenomena be interrelated, and better understood? As the history of the term “secularism” shows, it has long been entangled with many related issues, such as unorthodoxy, blasphemy, apostasy, irreligion, religious criticism, agnosticism, atheism, naturalism, earth-centered -isms, humanism (and trans- and posthumanisms), rationalism, skepticism, scientism, modernism, human rights causes, liberalism, and various kinds of church–state separation all around the world. Secularism’s relevance also continues to grow due to the dramatic rise of irreligion and secularity in most regions of the world. These trends are leading more and more scholars from a variety of disciplines to investigate secular life and culture in all its varied forms.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Zuckerman ◽  
John R. Shook
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Dramatic Rise ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Criticism ◽  
State Separation

The Oxford Companion to Secularism provides a timely overview of the new multidisciplinary field of secular studies. This field involves philosophy, the humanities, intellectual history, political theory, law, international studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, education, religious studies, and additional disciplines, all showing an increasing interest in the multifaceted phenomenon known as secularism. As the history of the term “secularism” shows, it has long been entangled with many related issues, such as unorthodoxy, blasphemy, apostasy, irreligion, religious criticism, agnosticism, atheism, naturalism, earth-centered -isms, humanism (and trans- and posthumanisms), rationalism, skepticism, scientism, modernism, human rights causes, liberalism, and various kinds of church–state separation all around the world. Secularism’s relevance also continues to grow due to the dramatic rise of irreligion and secularity in most regions of the world. These trends are leading more and more scholars from a variety of disciplines to investigate secular life and culture in all its varied forms.

The problem of periodization of the history of religion

1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Religion

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.

Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea Region

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Baltic Sea ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Baltic Sea ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
The Third ◽  
Baltic Sea Region ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Baltic

Since prehistoric times, the Baltic Sea has functioned as a northern mare nostrum — a crucial nexus that has shaped the languages, folklore, religions, literature, technology, and identities of the Germanic, Finnic, Sámi, Baltic, and Slavic peoples. This anthology explores the networks among those peoples. The contributions to Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea Region: Austmarr as a Northern mare nostrum, ca. 500-1500 ad address different aspects of cultural contacts around and across the Baltic from the perspectives of history, archaeology, linguistics, literary studies, religious studies, and folklore. The introduction offers a general overview of crosscultural contacts in the Baltic Sea region as a framework for contextualizing the volume’s twelve chapters, organized in four sections. The first section concerns geographical conceptions as revealed in Old Norse and in classical texts through place names, terms of direction, and geographical descriptions. The second section discusses the movement of cultural goods and persons in connection with elite mobility, the slave trade, and rune-carving practice. The third section turns to the history of language contacts and influences, using examples of Finnic names in runic inscriptions and Low German loanwords in Finnish. The final section analyzes intercultural connections related to mythology and religion spanning Baltic, Finnic, Germanic, and Sámi cultures. Together these diverse articles present a dynamic picture of this distinctive part of the world.

scholarly journals Pierre Monbeig and the Formation of Geography in Brazil (1925-1957): Geohistory of Knowledge, Intellectual History and the Insertion of Brazilian Geography into the World-Science

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Alves de Lira
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
World Science ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
The World ◽  
University Professor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context

This paper aims to present the exemplarity of an intellectual meeting between a French intellectual, trained in history and geography at the Sorbonne, France (before spending time in Spain during the beginning of his doctorate), and the “Brazilian terrain”. From his training to his work as a university professor in Brazil, what I want to characterize is a transnational intellectual context in the domain of the history of science, using geographical reasoning as a reference. However, before becoming aware of these intellectual processes, it should be said that at the base of this context lies the Brazilian space. This kind of reasoning as a proposed methodology is named here the geohistory of knowledge. In this paper, I seek to present this methodology and its theoretical and empirical results, focusing on how the construction of contextualization can be related to space.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Historical Past

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.

American Foreign Policy

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Clash Of Civilisations

This book brings together international relations scholars, political theorists, and historians to reflect on the intellectual history of American foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. It offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America’s engagement with the world during this period: nation-building, exceptionalism, isolationism, modernisation, race, utopia, technology, war, values, the ‘clash of civilisations’ and many more.

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