Book Description
This book examines the continuing emphasis, in modern times, on sacrifice. The author takes a close look at Nazi Germany and discusses the ways in which sacrifice was distributed and structured within that society.
Author : David Pan
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 15,12 MB
Release : 2012-09-24
Category : History
ISBN : 0810128160
This book examines the continuing emphasis, in modern times, on sacrifice. The author takes a close look at Nazi Germany and discusses the ways in which sacrifice was distributed and structured within that society.
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 43,57 MB
Release : 2016-09-27
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004335536
In Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity it is demonstrated how sacrificial themes remain an essential element in our post-modern society.
Author : Vincent James Stanzione
Publisher : UNM Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 32,37 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780826329172
Living and working among the Tz'utujil Maya people of Santiago Atitlán in highland Guatemala for some fifteen years, Vincent Stanzione has observed, photographed, and participated in their ritual and ceremonial life, which he describes with unique authority in this account of the continuities in Mayan culture from pre-Columbian times to the present. "This book represents both a confirmation and an innovation in the scholarship and field work about the religious imagination and rites of passage of Maya peoples. I know of no book that is as able to a) link the pre-Hispanic, colonial and contemporary religious practices of these peoples into a coherent narrative, b) combine anthropological/religious studies theory with linguistics and ongoing field work as creatively and c) illuminate the debate between models of 'syncretism' and 'transculturation' about a contemporary ritual cycle as Stanzione's beautifully illustrated work."--David Carrasco, Harvard University
Author : Jan N. Bremmer
Publisher : Peeters Publishers
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 20,28 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 9789042918436
The Strange World of Human Sacrifice is the first modern collection of studies on one of the most gruesome and intriguing aspects of religion. The volume starts with a brief introduction, which is followed by studies of Aztec human sacrifice and the literary motif of human sacrifice in medieval Irish literature. Turning to ancient Greece, three cases of human sacrifice are analysed: a ritual example, a mythical case, and one in which myth and ritual are interrelated. The early Christians were the victims of accusations of human sacrifice, but in turn imputed the crime to heterodox Christians, just as the Jews imputed the crime to their neighbours. The ancient Egyptians rarely seem to have practised human sacrifice, but buried the pharaoh's servants with him in order to serve him in the afterlife, albeit only for a brief period at the very beginning of pharaonic civilization. In ancient India we can follow the traditions of human sacrifice from the earliest texts up to modern times, where especially in eastern India goddesses, such as Kali, were long worshipped with human victims. In Japanese tales human sacrifice often takes the form of self-sacrifice, and there may well be a line from these early sacrifices to modern kamikaze. The last study throws a surprising light on human sacrifice in China. The volume is concluded with a detailed index
Author : Maria Louro Berbara
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 14,43 MB
Release : 2022
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780674278806
When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions--expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images--and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.
Author : Alberdina Houtman
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 494 pages
File Size : 39,32 MB
Release : 2014-11-27
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004284230
Sacrifice is a well known form of ritual in many world religions. Although the actual practice of animal sacrifice was largely abolished in the later history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it is still recalled through biblical stories, the ritual calendar and community events. The essays in this volume discuss the various positions regarding the value of sacrifice in a wide variety of disciplines such as history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, art and gender and post-colonial studies. In this context they examine a wide array of questions pertaining to the 'actuality of sacrifice' in various social, historical and intellectual contexts ranging from the pre-historical to the post-Holocaust, and present new understandings of some of the most sensitive topics of our time.
Author : Karel Innemée
Publisher :
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 20,72 MB
Release : 2022-04-20
Category :
ISBN : 9789464260571
Experts from different disciplines present new insights into the subject of ritual homicide in various regions of the ancient world.
Author : Christopher A. Faraone
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 43,24 MB
Release : 2012-03-22
Category : History
ISBN : 1107011124
The first general critique of the interpretations of animal sacrifice established by Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne.
Author : J. C. Heesterman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 28,47 MB
Release : 1993-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226323015
In this book, J. C. Heesterman attempts to understand the origins and nature of Vedic sacrifice—the complex compound of ritual practices that stood at the center of ancient Indian religion. Paying close attention to anomalous elements within both the Vedic ritual texts, the brahmanas, and the ritual manuals, the srautasutras, Heesterman reconstructs the ideal sacrifice as consisting of four moments: killing, destruction, feasting, and contest. He shows that Vedic sacrifice all but exclusively stressed the offering in the fire—the element of destruction—at the expense of the other elements. Notably, the contest was radically eliminated. At the same time sacrifice was withdrawn from society to become the sole concern of the individual sacrificer. The ritual turns in on the individual as "self-sacrificer" who realizes through the internalized knowledge of the ritual the immortal Self. At this point the sacrificial cult of the fire recedes behind doctrine of the atman's transcendence and unity with the cosmic principle, the brahman. Based on his intensive analysis Heesterman argues that Vedic sacrifice was primarily concerned with the broken world of the warrior and sacrificer. This world, already broken in itself by the violence of the sacrificial contest, was definitively broken up and replaced with the ritrualism of the single, unopposed sacrificer. However, the basic problem of sacrifice—the riddle of life and death—keeps breaking too surface in the form of incongruities, contradictions, tensions, and oppositions that have perplexed both the ancient ritual theorists and the modern scholar.
Author : Jeremiah L. Alberg
Publisher : MSU Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 14,96 MB
Release : 2013-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1609173643
Jeremiah Alberg’s fascinating book explores a phenomenon almost every news reader has experienced: the curious tendency to skim over dispatches from war zones, political battlefields, and economic centers, only to be drawn in by headlines announcing a late-breaking scandal. Rationally we would agree that the former are of more significance and importance, but they do not pique our curiosity in quite the same way. The affective reaction to scandal is one both of interest and of embarrassment or anger at the interest. The reader is at the same time attracted to and repulsed by it. Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses describes the roots out of which this conflicted desire grows, and it explores how this desire mirrors the violence that undergirds the scandal itself. The book shows how readers seem to be confronted with a stark choice: either turn away from scandal completely or become enthralled and thus trapped by it. Using examples from philosophy, literature, and the Bible, Alberg leads the reader on a road out of this false dichotomy. By its nature, the author argues, scandal is the basis of our reading; it is the source of the obstacles that prevent us from understanding what we read, and of the bridges that lead to a deeper grasp of the truth.