In this article, I analyze the under-citation of Black and/or Latine scholars—especially those located disciplinarily within religious studies—in the anthropology of religion. I draw from my own ...experience as an editorial assistant at History of Religions, manuscript reviewer, and Latine ethnographer of religion to speculate on the reasons why researchers might refuse to cite them, preferring either to neglect their contributions or to “plagnore” them, to borrow a term coined by legal scholar, law professor, and activist Lolita Buckner Inniss. I then expand on Chicana and Boricua feminist and race scholar Nichole Margarita Garcia’s theorization of under-citation as “spirit-murdering.” I invoke philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics to make the case that citation is a matter of life and death for Black and Latine women scholars in particular. In the absence of institutional accountability for editors and authors, I conclude with recommendations for the diversification of our scholarship and syllabi.
Diverse processes of democratic participation - and exclusion - are closely bound by ritual acts and complexes. This collection is the result of collaborations and conversations between international ...researchers who have focused on the use of those cultural resources identifiable as “ritual” as they reassemble democracy. The main question integrating the collection concerns the ways in which the performative qualities of ritual resources achieve their potential as forms of personal and political empowerment in our changing and challenging world.
To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in ...the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’Of Revelation and Revolutionillustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away the Christian elements of their cultures. Christian assertions about change are hard for anthropologists to credit because anthropological and Christian models of change are based on different models of time and belief. Unless anthropologists reconsider their nearly exclusive commitment to continuity thinking and the models of time and belief that ground it, the anthropology of Christianity will continue to face handicaps to its development.
Since their advent, geographies of religions have emerged as a kaleidoscopic, vital, yet often misunderstood subset of social and cultural geography. In this article, I respond to Kong's call (2010) ...for geographers to turn to the often neglected functional, mythic, and symbolic dimensions of religion. First, I offer a brief disciplinary biography, outlining seminal currents of research over the past century. In doing so, I identify two scalar poles of analysis around which the emergent literature is oriented – the individual/affective and the collective/structural. At the interface of these poles is a rich, albeit under‐theorised, field of geographic analysis. To address this, I turn to Turner's theory on ritual performance as a way for geographers to better approach this interface and engage with the fundamentality of rituals in the (re)generation of religious worlds.
This article develops the concept of community lore, initially devised by the social learning theorists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991). In extending this promising but hitherto neglected aspect ...of their work, this article sheds light on how and why community lore sustains and propels teaching and learning in the contemporary esoteric society Sodalitas Rosae Crucis (SRC). Ethnographic findings illuminate how the situated, informal community lore becomes a pervasive learning device that underwrites individual and collective learning, as it emerges in small talk, gossip, and cautionary tales, told and shared among members. Furthermore, a dynamic of tradition and innovation is at play within the community lore, as it sustains tradition while also providing a breeding ground for new ideas and practices that lead to innovation. Within the constructive tension between tradition and innovation, I delineate how community lore works as an educational resource, with explanatory value for situated learning, especially within esoteric communities of practice.
This review explores the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology. We spell out the motives and implications inherent in such approaches, chronicle ...their historical dimensions and precursors, and address the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology. This article canvasses phenomenologically oriented research in anthropology on a number of topics, including political relations and violence; language and discourse; neurophenomenology; emotion; embodiment and bodiliness; illness and healing; pain and suffering; aging, dying, and death; sensory perception and experience; subjectivity; intersubjectivity and sociality; empathy; morality; religious experience; art, aesthetics, and creativity; narrative and storytelling; time and temporality; and senses of place. We examine, and propose salient responses to, the main critiques of phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and we also take note of some of the most pressing and generative avenues of research and thought in phenomenologically oriented anthropology.
Towards the East, Towards Jerusalem Mudrik, Armando
Journal of skyscape archaeology (Online),
02/2024, Letnik:
9, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this paper, archaeo- and ethnoastronomical methods are used to investigate the orientation of synagogues, graves and prayer among Ashkenazi Jewish communities in the central-northern part of the ...Argentinian Province of Santa Fe, in the southern Gran Chaco region of South America. These communities have their origin in Jewish agricultural colonies, which were established by immigrants from central and eastern Europe who arrived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study shows the complexity of the logics involved in the construction of the meaning of spatial orientations in local Jewish religious practices, and also the necessity of ethnographic surveys as a complement to quantitative studies of orientations.
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