Religious Ritual and Wari State Expansion

Author(s):  
Patrick Ryan Williams ◽  
Donna J. Nash

The role of ritual and religion in the expansion of archaic states is often overlooked in favor of militaristic or economic explanations. In chapter 6, Williams and Nash explore religious ritual practice in the reproduction of social order at the Wari (600–1000 CE) colony in Moquegua, Peru, focusing on ritually important activities in three architecturally distinctive ceremonial structures around Cerro Baúl: Wari D-shaped temples; huaca shrines; and Titicaca Basin–inspired platform-sunken court complexes. Activities in all these structures take place contemporaneously on and around the Wari citadel situated on the 600-meter-tall mesa on the southern Wari frontier. According to the authors, the diverse rites in these complexes promoted the promulgation of distinct elite identities within the cosmopolitan sphere of what constituted Wari provincialism. However, it is the inclusiveness of ritual practice in the Wari centers that is most distinctive of Wari doctrine. It is through this incorporation of elite diversity in particular places on the landscape that Wari was able to weave together the foundations for pluralism that constituted Wari religious hegemony.

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (30) ◽  
pp. 9202-9209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Goldstein

The south central Andes is known as a region of enduring multiethnic diversity, yet it is also the cradle of one the South America’s first successful expansive-state societies. Social structures that encouraged the maintenance of separate identities among coexistent ethnic groups may explain this apparent contradiction. Although the early expansion of the Tiwanaku state (A.D. 600–1000) is often interpreted according to a centralized model derived from Old World precedents, recent archaeological research suggests a reappraisal of the socio-political organization of Tiwanaku civilization, both for the diversity of social entities within its core region and for the multiple agencies behind its wider program of agropastoral colonization. Tiwanaku’s sociopolitical pluralism in both its homeland and colonies tempers some of archaeology’s global assumptions about the predominant role of centralized institutions in archaic states.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Rais

Local religious beliefs termed as animism and dynamism by Giddens are still found in the religious practices of Indonesian communities. One of such practices occured in Bugis Ujung-Bone society, South Sulawesi. People’s faith in supernatural beings which are mythically believed as giving something meaningful for them is reflected by performing certain rituals in their daily lives. This ritual is performed at home and in a special place called Addewatang. This local belief system was firstly conceived and conceptualized by Sanro Maggangka. It grew into a local ritual tradition in Ujung-Bone society. This local ritual tradition were then acculturated with some formal religion’s activities. In the meantime, the figure of sanro becomes very important as a mediator in every religious ritual practiced by the society. Finally, hegemonic domination by the sanro can be observed in every thoughts and actions of the society, especially in their religious practices. In this research, the phenomenon were analyzed with the phenomenological-constructionist analysis. There are two findings of this research. First, there is a public perception that the practice of religious ritual done so far is believed as a part of their formal religion’s belief system. Second, there is a strong hegemony and dominance of the sanro’s role in conceptualizing this local ritual practice into their formal religion’s activities. The impact of this mythical belief of the role of sanro and “Putta Sereng” can be seen in the faithfulness of the people to act based on sanro’s instructions, the decrease of the people’s faith in their own formal religion, and the occurrence of theological confusions in the younger generations of Ujung-Bone society.


1993 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Goldstein

Until recently, an entrenched view of Tiwanaku expansion in the south-central Andes as a primarily cultic phenomenon precluded discussion of state-built ceremonial facilities outside of Tiwanaku’s immediate hinterland of the Bolivian altiplano. However, recent research in the Tiwanaku periphery has found specialized ceremonial architecture that reflects the solidification of central control and the development of a provincial system. Excavation at the Omo M10 site, in Moquegua, Peru, has exposed the only Tiwanaku sunken-court temple structure and cut-stone architecture known outside of the Titicaca Basin. A reconstruction of the Omo temple complex demonstrates direct parallels with Tiwanaku ceremonial centers of the altiplano in architectural form and ceremonial activities. This suggests that patterns of state-centered ceremony and peripheral administration underwent a dramatic transformation with the explosive expansion of the Tiwanaku state during the period known as Tiwanaku V (A. D. 725–1000).


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (17) ◽  
pp. 8233-8238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christophe Delaere ◽  
José M. Capriles ◽  
Charles Stanish

Considerable debate surrounds the economic, political, and ideological systems that constitute primary state formation. Theoretical and empirical research emphasize the role of religion as a significant institution for promoting the consolidation and reproduction of archaic states. The Tiwanaku state developed in the Lake Titicaca Basin between the 5th and 12th centuries CE and extended its influence over much of the south-central Andes of South America. We report on recent discoveries from the first systematic underwater archaeological excavations in the Khoa Reef near the Island of the Sun, Bolivia. The depositional context and compositional properties of offerings consisting of ceramic feline incense burners, killed juvenile llamas, and sumptuary metal, shell, and lapidary ornaments allow us to reconstruct the structure and significance of cyclically repeated state rituals. Using new theoretical tools, we explain the role of these rituals in promoting the consolidation of the Tiwanaku polity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Gubara Said Hassan ◽  
Jabal M. Buaben

The role of Islamic intellectuals is not confined to elaborating on the religious ideology of Islam. Equally important is their role in setting this religious ideology against other ideologies, sharpening and clarifying their differences, and thereby developing and intensifying one’s commitment to Islam as a distinct, divinely based ideology. Islam, as both a religion and an ideology, simultaneously mobilizes and transforms, legitimizes and preserves. It can be an instrument of power, a source and a guarantee of its legitimacy, as well as a tool to be used in the political struggle among social classes. Islam can also present a challenge to authority whenever the religious movement questions the existing social order during times of crisis and raises a rival power, as the current situation in Sudan vividly demonstrates. Throughout his political career, Hassan al-Turabi has resorted to religious symbolism in his public discourse and/or Islamic rhetoric, which could often be inflammatory and heavily reliant upon the Qur’an. This is, in fact, the embodiment of the Islamic quest for an ideal alternative. Our paper focuses on this charismatic and pragmatic religio-political leader of Sudan and the key concepts of his religious discourse: faith (īmān), renewal (tajdīd), and ijtihād(rational, independent, and legal reasoning).


Author(s):  
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra ◽  
Adrian Masters

Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Van Schoelandt

AbstractLibertarianism upholds individual liberty as of primary political importance. The concern for liberty leads to support for highly limited government, and sometimes even anarchism. Sometimes people come under the mistaken impression that libertarians have such a myopic concern for individual liberty that they must oppose social rules and social order. While that is too extreme, libertarianism does seem to have significant tensions with social rules, and the role of social rules within libertarianism is complex and contentious. This work aims to bring out some of this complexity and to clarify the important place of social rules in libertarian thought.


Public Choice ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Hamlin

AbstractRules are central to the constitutional political economy (CPE) approach. On this approach, rules, of a variety of types and forms, are necessary for the emergence of a political and social order, so that all genuine political order is rule-based. The central role of rules within the CPE approach is examined starting from an explicit definitional discussion of the concept of a rule and including discussion of the nature of rule-following behavior, the supply of rules, and rule enforcement.


1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian

The Banias of eighteenth-century Surat, whom Michelguglielmo Torri earlier treated with indifference if not innocence, have invited his wrath since they were brought into focus by the publication of my essay on the Banias and the Surat riot of 1795. In his ‘rejoinder’ to my article, he seeks to wish away their existence altogether (to him there was no specific Bania community, the term merely signifying traders of all communities engaged in the profession of brokerage), and seeks to provide what he regards as an ‘alternative’ explanation of the Muslim–Bania riot of 1795. the Muslim-Bania riot of 1795. It shall be my purpose in this reply to show that his alternative explanation is neither an alternative nor even an explanation, and is based on a basic confusion in his mind about the Banias as well as the principal sources of tension in the social structure of Surat. I shall treat two main subjects in this reply to his misdirected criticisms. First, I shall present some original indigenous material as well as European documentation to further clarify the identity, position and role of the Banias, whom Irfan Habib in a recent article has identified as the most important trading group in the trading world of seventeenth and eighteenth-century India. It is also my purpose to show how the social order of Surat operated under stress by presenting some archival material, the existence of which Torri seems to be completely unaware of, on the Parsi-Muslim riot of 1788.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-253
Author(s):  
C. D. MAY

This monograph is one of a series resulting from studies by the Committee on Medicine and the Changing Order of the New York Academy of Medicine. The objective in this report was to trace the historical development of medical research and to define and describe the role of medical research in the social order particularly as regards support for research from government agencies. The comprehensive grasp of the complexities of medical research which Dr. Shryock reveals commands genuine admiration and respect from anyone engaged in such research. Indeed, few engaged in various aspects of medical research could claim anything like his familiarity with the broad outlines of this field.


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