Remains of Ritual

Remains of Ritual
Author: Steven M. Friedson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010-07-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226265064

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

Remnants of Ritual

Remnants of Ritual
Author: Arthur Paul Bourgeois
Publisher: Ethnos Enterprises Incorporated
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780972773119

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women
Author: Isaac Jack Lévy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002
Genre: Europe
ISBN: 9780252026973

Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003. Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.

Traces 3

Traces 3
Author: Thomas LaMarre
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9622096468

"Impacts of Modernities, the third volume of the Traces series, explores the problem of modernity, with an emphasis on the impact of Western modernity on East Asia. While the essays generally acknowledge modernity as a problem or even failure, in order to challenge modernization and modernization theory, the volume presents a number of different approaches to, and evaluations of, modernity in historical and contemporary frameworks. One group of essays looks at the complex relations between modernity and production of space, place and identity. Contributors consider the spatializing tendencies of modernity, looking at how resistance to modernization has tended to rely on the production of national and local identities, which may serve to reproduce and reinforce the logic of modernization in new registers. Of particular importance is the legacy of comparativism in our contemporary disciplines. Other essays explore the historically specific relations that arise between nation, empire and representation. Contributors reconsider the alleged particularity of national languages and scripts, asking whether the insistence on the particular does not already entail an access to the universal and thus maybe to empire. Still other essays question whether the prime characteristics of modern power -- subjection and sovereignty -- continue to define power relations within the contemporary world order. To what extent is it now possible to think power formations and resistance beyond the modern, otherwise than modernity?" -- Back cover.

Divine Consumption

Divine Consumption
Author: Stephen A. Dueppen
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 195044631X

Kirikongo is an archaeological site composed of thirteen remarkably well-preserved discrete mounds occupied continually from the early first to the mid second millennium AD. It spans a dynamic era that saw the growth of large settlement communities and regional socio-political formations, development of economic specializations, intensification in interregional commercial networks, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic. The extraordinary preservation of architectural units, activity areas and industrial zones provides a unique opportunity to discern the cultural practices that created stratified mounds (tells) in this part of West Africa. Building from a new detailed zooarchaeological analysis and refinements in stratigraphic precision, this book argues that repeated ritual activity was a significant factor in the accumulation of stratified archaeological deposits. The book details consistencies in form and content of discrete loci containing animal bones, food remains, and broken and unbroken objects and suggests that these are the remnants of sequential ancestor shrines created when domestic spaces were converted to tombs or dedicated mortuary monuments were constructed. Continuities and transformations in ancestral rituals at Kirikongo inform on earlier West African ritual practices from the second millennium BC as well as political and social transformations at the site. More broadly, this case study provides new insights on anthropogenic mound (tell) formation processes, social zooarchaeology, material culture theory, historical ontology, and the analysis of ritual and religion in the archaeological record.

New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice and Ritual Body Treatments in Ancient Maya Society

New Perspectives on Human Sacrifice and Ritual Body Treatments in Ancient Maya Society
Author: Vera Tiesler
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2007-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0387488715

This book examines Maya sacrifice and related posthumous body manipulation. The editors bring together an international group of contributors from the area studied: archaeologists as well as anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, art historians and bioarchaeologists. This interdisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive perspective on these sites as well as the material culture and biological evidence found there

The Aesthetic Imperative

The Aesthetic Imperative
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 074569988X

In this wide-ranging book, renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk examines art in all its rich and varied forms: from music to architecture, light to movement, and design to typography. Moving between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, his analyses span the centuries, from ancient civilizations to contemporary Hollywood. With great verve and insight he considers the key issues that have faced thinkers from Aristotle to Adorno, looking at art in its relation to ethics, metaphysics, society, politics, anthropology and the subject. Sloterdijk explores a variety of topics, from the Greco-Roman invention of postcards to the rise of the capitalist art market, from the black boxes and white cubes of modernism to the growth of museums and memorial culture. In doing so, he extends his characteristic method of defamiliarization to transform the way we look at works of art and artistic movements. His bold and original approach leads us away from the well-trodden paths of conventional art history to develop a theory of aesthetics which rejects strict categorization, emphasizing instead the crucial importance of individual subjectivity as a counter to the latent dangers of collective culture. This sustained reflection, at once playful, serious and provocative, goes to the very heart of Sloterdijk’s enduring philosophical preoccupation with the aesthetic. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and aesthetics and will appeal to anyone interested in culture and the arts more generally.

Memory Traces

Memory Traces
Author: Laura M. Amrhein
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2015-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1457196336

"In Memory Traces, art historians and archaeologists come together to examine the nature of sacred space in Mesoamerica. Through five well-known and important centers of political power and artistic invention in Mesoamerica—Tetitla at Teotihuacan, Tula Grande, the Mound of the Building Columns at El Tajín, the House of the Phalli at Chichén Itzá, and Tonina—contributors explore the process of recognizing and defining sacred space, how sacred spaces were viewed and used both physically and symbolically, and what theoretical approaches are most useful for art historians and archaeologists seeking to understand these places.Memory Traces acknowledges that the creation, use, abandonment, and reuse of sacred space has a strongly recursive relation to collective memory and meanings linked to the places in question, and reconciles issues of continuity and discontinuity of memory in ancient Mesoamerican sacred spaces. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Mesoamerican studies and material culture, art historians, architectural historians, and cultural anthropologists."

The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic

The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic
Author: Ralph Merrifield
Publisher: New Amsterdam Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1988
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN:

Ralph Merrifield systematically examines the evidence from prehistoric times to the present and demonstrates that all through the fundamental changes of belief--from primitive animism to Christianity to scientific rationalism--the same kinds of simple ritual have survived because they answer deep human needs.

Cannabis

Cannabis
Author: Robert Clarke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0520292480

Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the natural origins and early evolution of this famous plant, highlighting its historic role in the development of human societies. Cannabis has long been prized for the strong and durable fiber in its stalks, its edible and oil-rich seeds, and the psychoactive and medicinal compounds produced by its female flowers. The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. As interest in cannabis grows and public debate over its many uses rises, this book will help us understand why humanity continues to rely on this plant and adapts it to suit our needs.