Hume,Bishop Butler,and the Revival of Ritual in Anglophone Protestantism

A sweeping reassessment of the role of ritual, ceremony, and aesthetics took place in anglophone Protestantism between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. While the nineteenth‐century developments themselves have been extensively studied, little scholarly attention has been paid to the importance of the earlier emergence of philosophical language capable of explaining and justifying, in a Protestant context, the ritual and aesthetic dimensions of religious practice. I argue that this language, paradoxically, grew out of a symbiosis of sceptical modernity, traditional religious apologetics, and the religious “enthusiasm” of the early eighteenth century. I approach the topic through the interconnected oeuvres (and careers) of David Hume and Joseph Butler, presenting the first synoptic account of their ideas about the psychological underpinnings of religious worship, and the use made of their ideas by later generations of anglophone Protestants. As mainstream Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians confronted the challenges presented by Methodism and Evangelicalism, they found support in a synthesis of Butler's and Hume's ideas. Eventually, the beneficial role of ritual and aesthetics in religious worship came to be widely accepted throughout the anglophone Protestant world.     

Powerful Pots,Humbling Holes,and Regional Ritual Processes: Towards an Archaeology of Huedan Vodun,ca. 1650–1727

Situated along the “Slave Coast” of West Africa, the international coastal trading entrepôt of Ouidah is infamous as the point of embarkation for hundreds of thousands of people spirited into the Middle Passage. Accordingly, scholars have looked to it and the surrounding region as a font of culture and history for diasporic groups. In scholarly narratives, the larger Gbe-speaking region surrounding Ouidah is characterized as the homeland of Vodun, a religious tradition that influenced diasporic religions throughout the Atlantic world. This paper explores early Huedan Vodun at a local level and works to bolster, and at the same time problematize, the project of addressing Vodun at increasing geographic scales and temporal depths. It builds on longstanding research which recognizes that context is critical for interpreting possible ritual or religious significance of archaeological material.     

Matter,Places, and Persons in Cahokian Depositional Acts

Artifact caching, soil layering, and other intentional depositional practices—archaeologically defined “ritual deposits” of the past—are especially prevalent during the Mississippian period. Employing a perspective of relational ontology, however, we interrogate the validity of a past partitioned into religious, political, and daily spheres. Rather, this perspective emphasizes the multi-experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of social life. Meaning, intentional depositional acts can no longer be usefully described as simply “sacred” or “ritual” practices. Rather, these deposits should be explored as experiences tied to multiple layers of social life, investigating the relationships constructed through such deposits between humans, nonhuman agents, and the landscape.     

湘西苗族巫傩文化的人神关系伦理意蕴探析

湘西苗族巫傩文化的人神关系伦理意蕴,主要表现在：既相信自己又相信神灵的宗教观念,娱人娱神、以人为上的宗教情感,仪式模拟“难题考验”的宗教活动三个方面,其中凸显了人的主体地位。     

日本国民宗教信仰的现状、特点及其影响

宗教作为一部分人解决个人终极关怀的唯一手段和实践体系,它在使人们保持心理和谐方面的积极作用是不容忽视的。了解日本国民宗教信仰的现状、特点及其影响,不仅对认识日本社会文化的特点大有裨益,而且对我国当前的社会主义文化建设亦具有重要的参考意义。     

太湖流域史前社会的礼器与礼制

史前太湖流域,礼器出现在社会初步分化的崧泽文化时期;良渚文化时期已经是一个分层的复杂社会,社会成员分化成为不同的等级、阶层,与此相适应,太湖流域史前社会出现了陶质、石质和玉质三种不同质地的礼器,并有着比较严格的使用制度,太湖流域史前社会的礼仪制度初步形成。     

Petrography as a technique for investigating Iroquoian ceramic production and smoking rituals

Petrographic data and macroscopic observations are used to examine some of the social contexts and functional considerations underlying the production of pottery containers and smoking pipes at Antrex, a Middle Ontario Iroquoian village site located in southern Ontario. Results suggest that while pottery was produced by small groups of people for widespread consumption within the community, pipes were made by individuals for their own personal use. Overall, this research supports the hypothesis that by the beginning of the Late Woodland period, a shift away from communal ritual practices led by ritual specialists or shamans had occurred. Smoking might have, in some contexts, become a solitary religious experience.     

Exploring Roman Ritual Behaviours Through Plant Remains from Pannonia Inferior

The recovery of new plant remains from eastern Croatia are discussed here in order to determine their ritual significance and how this evidence may fit into chronological and regional observations on ritual plant offerings in the Roman world. Samples collected from inhumations, cremations and an altar dedicated to Silvanus Domesticus, dating from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD, are presented and show that a range of more ‘common’ plant remains, such as cereals and pulses, were an important part of ritual life. These results are also compared to the growing archaeobotanical data collected from shrine and cremation burials across Europe. Although the archaeobotanical data from the Croatian sites are limited, the increasing evidence of ritual plant use allows observations regarding the wider context of Roman social and religious change.     

Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices Concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol'niki Region,Pskov Province,Russia, 1995. Part II: Death in Natural Circumstances

This article, based on fieldwork but drawing on other contemporary and historical material, examines some aspects of the present state of mortuary ritual and associated beliefs among a mixed population of official Russian Orthodox and the religious group known as Old Believers, about whose funerary practices little has been written. The ritual emerges as a complex balance of Christian and pagan elements, a clinging to archaic tradition combined with modern pragmatism and accommodation to changing socio-economic conditions.     

In Praise of the Ordinary Man: Popular Media,Social Hierarchy and Identity in a North Indian Text

This article recounts a story found in a popular genre of religious literature known as vrat katha[ritual storytelling]. The narrative is of an “ordinary” low-caste man and his everyday struggles. It tells of the social and economic suffering experienced by the poor man upon encountering god (called Trilokinath/Vishnu) and receiving his blessing, mediated through a series of miraculous events. However, the transformative power of the events and fortunes that follow is undermined by a Brahmin who refuses to acknowledge the poor devotee, rebuffing his ritual gift [prasad] as polluted and considering him untouchable. The ambiguous nature of the gift and the ideology and practice of devotion [Bhakti] present an intriguing and complex picture of Hinduism, revealed in the multiple social roles and social contexts in which subalterns operate in the course of their day-to-day lives.

?I offer a critical reading of this fascinating story. What seems like a straightforward, standardised ritual text is analysed in terms of its competing and sometimes subversive views of “dominant” Hinduism. By examining the tensions and ambivalence in the text I argue for a more nuanced rendition of subaltern power and agency which cannot be reduced to that of resistance and opposition alone.     

Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

Women's Devotional Bequests of Textiles in the Late Medieval English Parish Church,c. 1350–1550

This article examines evidence of self‐determination and independent action in the practice, among a significant group of late medieval English women, of donating their own clothing and household linens to parish churches for use in sacred ritual.
The argument is presented that clothworking in a domestic environment was a highly valorised activity closely connected with women, for which the spindle and distaff acted as an index, and that against this background women used textiles as a site for expressing their personal, social and religious concerns.     

Standing Posts and Special Substances: Gathering and Ritual Deposition at Feltus (22Je500), Jefferson County,Mississippi

Because it immediately precedes the Mississippi period, Coles Creek (A.D. 700–1200) culture is often viewed through the lens of Mississippian social organization. In particular, early platform mound-and-plaza complexes have long been understood as elite compounds due to their physical similarities with later sites. However, evidence regarding the construction and use of the monumental landscape at the Feltus site (22JE500) in Jefferson County, MS, suggests that platform mound construction was but one aspect of a broader ritual sequence aimed at gathering the dispersed Coles Creek community. In addition to mound building, this sequence included the setting and removal of freestanding posts, ritual feasting, and burial of the dead and focused on explicit deposition of meaningful objects and substances. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic analyses of the objects and substances included in the ritual deposits at Feltus suggest that they helped forge relationships between an extended kin network, including non-human fictive kin and non-living human kin. In this context, we find a metaphor of gathering to be useful in understanding the archaeological remains of a ritual sequence focused on bringing together social, cosmological, and temporal domains. This provides a distinctly different take on the meaning and use of platform mounds based on a review of Native beliefs and practices that looks beyond the traditionally relied upon sources.     

Nietzsche as Deep Historian

The recent biocultural turn in evolutionary and neurological research suggests that prior efforts to combine historical and biological thinking, often dismissed as crude biological determinism, warrant a second look. In this essay, I show how a number of Nietzsche’s main ideas about historiography anticipate these developments. Nietzsche insisted that the study of history could assimilate the natural sciences by overcoming fixed disciplinary assumptions about when history begins, thereby extending the historical timeline deep into our species’ past. He also described the ongoing transformations in human mental structure that have been generated through the complex historical interaction of human biology and culture. Nietzsche viewed this interaction as crucial to understanding historical phenomena such as the power of religious organization and ritual, the emergence of democratic egalitarianism, and the formation of entrenched social hierarchies.     

Anthropology,Festival, and Spectacle

This article weaves together analyses of three recent books which, despite their being compiled primarily by scholars outside of the discipline of anthropology, make theoretical and methodological contributions useful to the anthropology of festivals and ritual, both religious and secular. These works demonstrate that spectacle has been ritualized into festive practices of modernity and identity in multiple places, times, and cultural contexts. Greater attention to how this works from a general anthropological perspective is needed.     

Archaeology and Folklore of Material Culture, Ritual, and Everyday Life

Archaeologists often make distinctions between ritual material culture and everyday or utilitarian material culture. I examine this differentiation model for understanding the complex relationships among material culture, ritual, and everyday life. Using folklore recorded in Scotland in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, I suggest another, continuum-based model, and suggest how this model can enrich archaeological understanding of the meanings and beliefs that form the cultural contexts for the artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes we study.     

印度加尔各答华人的生存困境及其原因探析--心理文化学的视角

论文从印度加尔各答华人社区的衰落与生存困境、印度文明传统环境下华人的生存适应与社会融入障碍、中国文化传统影响下印度华人心理文化调适的局限等方面,探讨了华人在印度社会中的心理调适过程及其心理社会均衡的实现情况。华人在印度社会遇到的是种姓制度、宗教认同和单惠型为主的交换模式,与华人的家族及宗族认同、信用借贷型为主的交往模式产生了较大冲突。这种冲突使华人与印度社会形成隔绝,并难以实现社会地位、安全、情感等方面的满足。印度华人根据生存环境调整生存策略,以符合华人基本人际状态的方式,实现心理与社会的内外交互平衡,却又加剧了其封闭性、保守性,使其未能成功利用印度社会的制度和文化谋求自我发展、实现自我革新,因而诉诸外部世界,通过再移民来寻求解决这些问题的途径和新的发展机会。这是造成印度华人社会持续衰落的内在根源。     

西方文化史研究的现状与趋势

当代国外的西方文化史研究具有实用性、多元化、国际化的特点,研究内容从单纯的政治文化、军事文化、宗教文化扩展到经济文化、社会文化、比较文化、心理发展文化以及影视文化等领域,研究视角大体包括概览性研究、分类性研究、阶段性研究、国别性研究、比较性研究、理论性研究。中国的西方文化史研究是随着西方文化在近代中国的扩张和传播而兴起的,上个世纪90年代以来成为一门重要的学科并取得了丰硕的成果,有关的著述大体可分为综述性、专门性、比较性和理论性四类。无论是国外的还是国内的西方文化史研究,许多涉及“西方文化史”本体的问题迄今仍未得到很好的解决。     

From invisibility to visibility? The appropriation of public space through a religious ritual: the Filipino procession of Santacruzan in Padua,Italy

Mainly employed as domestic workers and care providers since the 1980s, Filipino migrants have been, and still are, largely invisible in Italian public space. Since 1991, once a year, on the last Sunday of May, they transform the streets of Padua, city of Saint Anthony, into their own temporary ‘sacred space’ celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz). Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the paper analyses the preparation of the ritual and the embodied performance as a means to interpret the Filipino local and transnational territorialisation in the Italian context. The discussion underlines how the Italian setting affects the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in the urban texture. Urban space being the symbolic arena where identity and the process of boundary making are inscribed, we consider public space as a social process constituted by three levels: accessibility, temporary appropriation and visibility. Drawing on this immigrant religious ritual, we apply this perspective to look at the interactions between local society and newcomers and the blurring boundaries between religious and non-religious in the ambiguous Italian public space.     

Dorsetshire Numismatics; The Ancient Mints,with Notices of Some Medals Connected with the County

For several years, studies of popular religion within pre-Reformation England have tended to emphasize that religious practice within the medieval parish church had become increasingly privatized and exclusive, as a result of the foundation of so-called ‘private’ chantry chapels. In many cases, these works have neglected the wider role of the chantry in shared religious experience at parish level, a deficit that has only recently been challenged by historians. This paper sets out to consider how the structural analysis of surviving above-ground evidence for former chantry chapels can uncover a wider context for chantry foundation in the medieval parish church. This paper based on recent research in the south and west of England discusses how the analysis of church space, light and, particularly, vision enables the reconstruction of aspects of chantry chapel foundation and can illustrate their wider social dimension. It examines the nature of the architectural feature known as the ‘squint’ and discusses how it can help in the analysis of former ritual topography and shed light on the level of private and communal piety. Furthermore, this paper shows how the use of archaeological approaches can illuminate aspects of medieval religious practice only hinted at in historical documents.