scholarly journals FUKUURA Atsuko, A Temple in Urbanity: Anthropological Study of Sacred Spaces in Singapore, Yokohama: Shumpusha Publishing, 2018.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (48) ◽  
pp. 122-126
Author(s):  
Tatsuki KATAOKA
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Anthropological Study

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Rome’s Loca Sancta

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galit Noga-Banai
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Local Bonding ◽  
The Creation

This chapter focuses on the creation of holy sites in Rome that are comparable in their significance to those in Jerusalem—that is, touched by past sacred events and/or sacred bodies. It maps the reasons for the change of attitude toward Jerusalem in Rome, and makes the argument that once the locally connected holy sites projected into the urban space, especially the local bonding of the sites related to Peter and Paul, it was possible to include Jerusalem in the Roman decorative programs. The discussion concentrates on the dynamic involved in the commemoration of sacred spaces in Rome, from the architecture of the holy sites (Basilica Apostolorum, S. Paolo fuori le mura) to portable objects related to them.

scholarly journals A Maximal Understanding of Sacrifice: Bataille, Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage and the Bayreuth Festival

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Philip Smith ◽  
Florian Stoll
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Paradigm Case ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Classical Work

This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth “Wagner” Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semi-structured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more ‘everyday’, can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.

What being an owner can also mean: A socio-anthropological study on the development of a forgotten relationship to objects

2021 ◽  
pp. 205157072110144
Author(s):  
Isabelle Dabadie ◽  
Philippe Robert-Demontrond
Keyword(s):  
Economic Models ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Possessive Individualism ◽  
The One

In a context of ecological crisis, new economic models have developed based on the replacement of ownership by access. While they have been studied at length, the very idea of ownership, which is supposed to be abandoned in this process, has rarely been questioned. This is the aim of our research, which investigates the meanings of the concept of ownership for consumers. A socio-anthropological investigation and an ethnographic study on various sharing systems (for houses, boats and clothes) reveals the development of a relationship to ownership, which differs from the one that prevails in the society. In this paradigm, which questions possessive individualism, the owner appears as the ‘custodian’ of his possessions. The identification of his expectations opens managerial and societal perspectives to build the offers that will enable him to fulfil this role.

scholarly journals “His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 687
Author(s):  
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
The City

This is a historical anthropological study of a period of social and religious tensions in a Calvinist city in the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the 18th century. The last and greatest plague epidemic to devastate Hungary and Transylvania between cca. 1738 and 1743 led to a clash of different opinions and beliefs on the origin of the plague and ways of fighting it. Situated on the Great Hungarian Plain, the city of Debrecen saw not only frequent violations of the imposed lockdown measures among its inhabitants but also a major uprising in 1739. The author examines the historical sources (handwritten city records, written and printed regulations, criminal proceedings, and other documents) to be found in the Debrecen city archives, as well as the writings of the local Calvinist pastors published in the same town. The purpose of the study is to outline the main directions of interpretation concerning the plague and manifest in the urban uprising. According to the findings of the author, there was a stricter and chronologically earlier direction, more in keeping with local Puritanism in the second half of the 17th century, and there was also a more moderate and later one, more in line with the assumptions and expectations of late 18th-century medical science. While the former set of interpretations seems to have been founded especially on a so-called “internal” cure (i.e., religious piety and repentance), the latter proposed mostly “external” means (i.e., quarantine measures and herbal medicine) to avoid the plague and be rid of it. There seems to have existed, however, a third set of interpretations: that of folk beliefs and practices, i.e., sorcery and magic. According to the files, a number of so-called “wise women” also attempted to cure the plague-stricken by magical means. The third set of interpretations and their implied practices were not tolerated by either of the other two. The author provides a detailed micro-historical analysis of local events and the social and religious discourses into which they were embedded.

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