scholarly journals Art and Influence, Presence and Navigation in Southern African Forager Landscapes

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1099
Author(s):  
Sam Challis ◽  
Andrew Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Religious Systems ◽  
Full Swing

With earlier origins and a rebirth in the late 1990s, the New Animisms and the precipitate ‘ontological turn’ have now been in full swing since the mid-2000s. They make a valuable contribution to the interpretation of the rock arts of numerous societies, particularly in their finding that in animist societies, there is little distinction between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, the sacred and the profane. In the process, a problem of perspective arises: the perspectives of such societies, and the analogical sources that illuminate them, diverge in more foundational terms from Western perspectives than is often accounted for. This is why archaeologists of religion need to be anthropologists of the wider world, to recognise where animistic and shamanistic ontologies are represented, and perhaps where there is reason to look closely at how religious systems are used to imply Cartesian separations of nature and culture, religious and mundane, human/person and animal/non-person, and where these dichotomies may obscure other forms of being-in-the-world. Inspired by Bird-David, Descola, Hallowell, Ingold, Vieiros de Castro, and Willerslev, and acting through the lens of navigation in a populated, enculturated, and multinatural world, this contribution locates southern African shamanic expressions of rock art within broader contexts of shamanisms that are animist.

The problem of sex in the religions of the Abrahamic tradition

2001 ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
N. Nedzelska
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
First Person ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Systems

The paradox of the existence of the species Homo sapiens is that we do not even know: Who are we? Why are we? Where did you go from? Why? At all times - from antiquity to our time - the philosophers touched on this topic. It takes an important place in all religions of the world. These eternal questions include gender issues. In the religious systems of the religions of the Abrahamic tradition there is no single answer to the question of which sex was the first person. Recently, British scientists have even tried to prove that Eve is 84 thousand years older Adam

Palaeolithic Cave Art at Creswell Crags in European Context

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Pleistocene ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Southern France ◽  
European Context ◽  
The World ◽  
Cave Art ◽  
Illustrated Book

Cave art is a subject of perennial interest among archaeologists. Until recently it was assumed that it was largely restricted to southern France and northern Iberia, although in recent years new discoveries have demonstrated that it originally had a much wider distribution. The discovery in 2003 of the UK's first examples of cave art, in two caves at Creswell Crags on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, was the most surprising illustration of this. The discoverers (the editors of the book) brought together in 2004 a number of Palaeolithic archaeologists and rock art specialists from across the world to study the Creswell art and debate its significance, and its similarities and contrasts with contemporary Late Pleistocene ("Ice Age") art on the Continent. This comprehensively illustrated book presents the Creswell art itself, the archaeology of the caves and the region, and the wider context of the Upper Palaeolithic era in Britain, as well as a number of up-to-date studies of Palaeolithic cave art in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy which serve to contextualize the British examples.

Creation, Time, and Eternity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. Rudavsky
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Infinite Divisibility ◽  
Time Function ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Acceptable Model ◽  
The Many

Of the many philosophical perplexities facing medieval Jewish thinkers, perhaps none has challenged religious belief as much as God’s creation of the world. No Jewish philosopher denied the importance of creation, that the world had a beginning (bereshit). But like their Christian and Muslim counterparts, Jewish thinkers did not always agree upon what qualifies as an acceptable model of creation. Chapter 6 is devoted to attempts of Jewish philosophers to reconcile the biblical view of creation with Greek and Islamic philosophy. By understanding the notion of creation and how an eternal, timeless creator created a temporal universe, we may begin to understand how the notions of eternity, emanation, and the infinite divisibility of time function within the context of Jewish philosophical theories of creation.

scholarly journals Speech-Breath: Mapping the Multisensory Experience in Pecos River Style Pictography

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Carolyn E. Boyd ◽  
Ashley Busby
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
The World ◽  
Application Techniques ◽  
Graphic Device ◽  
Pecos River ◽  
Lower Pecos ◽  
Multisensory Experience

Archaic period hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created complex rock art murals containing elaborately painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. These figures are frequently portrayed with dots or lines emanating out of or into their open mouths. In this article, we discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that artists used this graphic device to denote speech, breath, and the soul. They communicated meaning through the image-making process, alternating brushstroke direction to indicate inhalation versus exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect measured versus forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging the iconographic data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, we suggest that speech and breath expressed in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

Can Animism Save the World? Reflections on Personhood and Complexity in the Ecological Crisis

Sociologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92
Author(s):  
Guido Sprenger
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Moral Commitment ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Communicative Processes ◽  
Politics Of Life

The term “animism” is at once a fantasy internal to modernity and a semiotic conduit enabling a serious inquiry into non-modern phenomena that radically call into question the modern distinction of nature and culture. Therefore, I suggest that the labelling of people, practices or ideas as “animist” is a strategic one. I also raise the question if animism can help to solve the modern ecological crisis that allegedly stems from the nature-culture divide. In particular, animism makes it possible to recognize personhood in non-humans, thus creating moral relationships with the non-human world. A number of scholars and activists identify animism as respect for all living beings and as intimate relationships with nature and its spirits. However, this argument still presupposes the fixity of the ontological status of beings as alive or persons. A different view of animism highlights concepts of fluid and unstable persons that emerge from ongoing communicative processes. I argue that the kind of attentiveness that drives fluid personhood may be supportive of a politics of life that sees relationships with non-humans in terms of moral commitment.

scholarly journals Reply to Doing Indigenous Epistemology: Internal Debates About Inside Knowledge in Māori Society’, by Toon Van Meilj

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sissons
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Indigenous Epistemology ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ways Of Being

Van Meijl is right to insist that epistemology must be about active, socially contested ‘ways of knowing’ and that understanding the relationship between such ways and their products is as much an ethnographic problem as it is a philosophical one. Ways of knowing, as social practices, are also, more generally, ways of being or becoming and so are not, in my view, radically distinct from the ontologies they produce and reproduce. Phillipe Descola argues strongly that his four ‘ontologies’ are also schemas of practice, fundamental ways that people know, experience and inhabit the world. I think Van Meijl is mistaken, therefore, when he characterises the ontological turn in anthropology as being about different relations between mind and matter. For me, it is most significantly about the different ways that personhood or subjectivity can be understood and embodied.<br>

scholarly journals Metaphysics and the Existential Problematic of Human Finitude

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Nutter
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Finite Horizon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intentional Structure ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Human Finitude

Rather than being of little practical importance, the metaphysical underpinnings of a given horizon determine the character of its existential problematic. With the breakdown of classical metaphysics concomitant with the modern turn to the subjective, the existential problematic of finitude as ultimate horizon arose. According to this subjective turn, the human person can no longer engage the world as though it were in itself constituted by transcendently grounded meaning and value. Standing within this genealogical lineage, Martin Heidegger undertook a phenomenological investigation into the existential constitution of the human person which defines authenticity in terms of finitude. For the early Heidegger, human life is essentially ‘guilty’. This guilt, however, is not the traditional cognizance of one’s sinfulness, but the foundational Nichtigkeit (‘nullity’) of life and its attendant possibilities in the light of the ultimate finality of death. Authenticity, then, consists of a resolute working out of one’s life in the face of such inevitable finality. For the later Heidegger, the finite horizon of a particular epochal disclosure gifts Being to thought and determines it thereby. Authenticity in this case consists of giving oneself over to be appropriated by an event of Being. In contrast, Lonergan understands authenticity as being true to that primordial love which beckons us to intellectual probity and responsibility in working out life’s possibilities. This essay will illustrate how Lonergan’s analysis of the intentional structure of human conscious operations stands as a corrective to Heidegger’s early existential analysis of human being-in-the-world and later thought about Being. While Lonergan defines authenticity as loving openness to transcendent Being, Heidegger, because of his forgetfulness of the subject in her conscious operations, does not allow for a transcendence which stands beyond any finite horizon. 

scholarly journals Educating to Forgive as an Expression of Concern for Order in a Person's Natural Environment. Part. 1: Evil and Harm in the Life of a Human Person and the Source of the Need to Forgive

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-139
Author(s):  
Michał Wyrostkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Climate ◽  
Good And Evil

The paper defines philosophical categories of good and evil in the process of upbringing and development of the personality. People are good by nature. That is why they tend towards the good, they desire what is good, they feel bad and do not function well when they are touched by evil. Goodness is part of the natural environment of the human being; goodness is the natural climate of the human person. At the same time, however, people perform bad deeds. They create evil. They often harm others. This is the cause of disorder in a person's environment. It turns out that the only effective and reasonable means of restoring such order is forgiveness. It is the only thing that has a chance to realistically stop the potential avalanche of evil that appears to be the obvious result of wrongdoing and “nurturing” harm or planning revenge. The evil that “insidiously” enters the world creates the need for forgiveness as the only way to respond to harm; as a way that leads to real order in a person's environment

scholarly journals On Time and Other Things: Some Cartesian Dichotomies in Antarctica

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Sarah de Barros Viana Hissa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Internal Time ◽  
Time Consciousness ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way ◽  
Global Relations

Antarctica differs from all other regions in the world, not only from its unique geography, but also in the way humans understand it and have incorporated it into global relations. Considering Antarctica's distinctive landscapes and human relations, this paper discusses aspects of how time is humanly perceived in Antarctica. Basing on elements from different human occupations, nineteenth-century sailor-hunters and current incursions, this discussion approximates different historical groups in their experiences of Antarctica, connecting their personal lives, past and present. Meanwhile, also put into issue are the dualities that separate nature and culture, physical and relative time, and past and present, as well as the related notions of time in itself, perceived time speed and internal time consciousness.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document