Notes and Queries on Totemism.

The Tribal System in Wales, being part of an Inquiry into the Structure and Methods of Tribal Society. By Frederic Seebohm, L. L. D., F. S. A. London: Longmans, Green &; Co., 1895 By Laurence Gomme.

Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri. Second Series, XVIIIth to XIXth Dynasty. Edited by W. M. Flinders Petrie, Hon. D. C. L., LL. D. London: Methuen &; Co., 1895

Kilns, Mills, Millers, Meal, and Bread. By the Rev. Walter Gregor, M. A., LL. D. London: David Nutt, 1894.

Legends of Florence Collected from the People, and retold by C. G. Leland. First Series. D. Nutt, 1895. By W. H. D. R.     

Religion,society, and culture

Morris, Brian. Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ix + 369 pp. including chapter notes and references, selected bibliography, and index. $42.50 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Webster, Graham. Celtic Religion in Roman Britain. Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1987. 205 pp. including chapter notes and references, photographs and illustrations, abbreviations, classical sources, selected bibliography, and index. $30.00 cloth.

Weller, Robert P. Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987. viii + 215 pp. including appendices, notes, references, and index. $22.50 cloth.     

The Gender of the Cosmos: Totemism,Society and Embodiment in the Sepik River

This article contributes to recent research on the foundations of society in Melanesia, both in terms of local representation and actual social practice, as well as body imagery and gender. I have three interrelated objectives. First, I present new data on the symbolism and politics of Eastern Iatmul cosmology and totemism (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea). Second, I engage Harrison's distinction between magical and material, or realist and nominalist, polities in Melanesia. Eastern Iatmul society is represented by totemic names and categories. Yet society also requires human agents to embody named entities: men rarely assert the existence of cosmological categories that are divorced entirely from the realm of human action. This is a key difference between Eastern Iatmul and other Sepik societies such as Manambu. Finally, I argue that there is a symbolic homology between the gendered human body, the body politic and the cosmos, an important perspective that has been lacking in Melanesian comparative studies. Totemism for Eastern Iatmul is largely a realm of male ritual-politics. Nevertheless, an idiom of maternal fertility and reproduction is salient in the local cosmology. For this reason, the gender of the cosmos, to invoke Marilyn Strathern, is androgynous.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

Sociology,Religion, and Historians Revisited: Towards an Historical Sociology of Religion

Abstract

Two great movie directors were both born in 1930. One of them, Jean-Luc Godard, revolutionized filmmaking during his 30s and declined in creativity thereafter. In contrast, Clint Eastwood did not direct his first movie until he had passed the age of 40 and did not emerge as an important director until after he was 60. This dramatic difference in life cycles was not accidental, but was a characteristic example of a pattern that has been identified across the arts: Godard was a conceptual innovator who peaked early, whereas Eastwood was an experimental innovator who improved with experience. This article examines the goals, methods, and creative life cycles of Godard, Eastwood, and eight other directors who were the most important filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg, and François Truffaut join Godard in the category of conceptual young geniuses, while Woody Allen, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Martin Scorsese are classed with Eastwood as experimental old masters. In an era in which conceptual innovators have dominated a number of artistic activities, the strong representation of experimental innovators among the greatest film directors is an interesting phenomenon.     

蓝毗尼——佛祖诞生地

<正>在尼泊尔旅行期间,中国驻尼使馆的朋友为我们策划线路时,建议我们一定要去蓝毗尼,说蓝毗尼如同圣城麦加、耶路撒冷的地位,是佛祖释迦牟尼诞生地。这样的诱惑当然让我们难以拒绝,于是,怀揣一颗虔诚之心,我们踏上了蓝毗尼的朝圣之旅。世界文化遗产:蓝毗尼蓝毗尼位于尼泊尔南部特莱平原的鲁潘德希县,从首都加德满都到蓝毗尼的公路约300公里,是尼泊尔的主要交通干道,虽然许多路段崎岖难行,但是路两侧     

Religion, Society, and the Historian

In a secularized age, the study of past religion encounters problems both of empathy and categorization, and the student who derives his understanding from current belief and practice may be in a worse position than the detached observer. Yet historians have never before taken religion so seriously, while wider interest in the history of Christianity is growing. "Religious History" is sometimes said to have taken the place of "Ecclesiastical History." But both disciplines flourish, and the difference between them has been overstated. Historians can learn from social scientists questions about religion which, confined within the safe boundaries of period, they have not always had to face. The social functions of religion have been threefold, religion acting as a precipitant, a bond, and a source of legitimation. It has been said (by an anthropologist) that the study of religion has recently lived off the conceptual capital of its ancestors. The understandings of the social meaning of religion advanced by three of these "ancestors," Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, are examined. Only Max Weber is found to provide helpful guidance to the social historian of religion, particularly with his key concept of "elective affinity."     

Moche Politics,Religion, and Warfare

In this essay I briefly review the history of Moche studies, the essential features of this archaeological culture of the North Coast of Peru (ca. 1900–1100 B.P.), and its general economy. I then present current issues, discussions, and debates on Moche regional political organization, religion, warfare, and their interrelations. I suggest that the interpretation of Moche art has been and the interpretation of archaeology has lacked nuance. I question the proposal of warfare as ritual, that the temple mound complexes were centers of political power, that the elite buried in them were rulers, that the compounds and streets near them were cities, and whether proposals for a conquest Moche state are plausible. I suggest that these and other interpretations about the Moche are becoming accepted as facts without considering alternative interpretations of the data and that much information is lacking. Rather than having reached a stage when we can synthesize concepts about Moche culture we are only just beginning to understand it.     

阿克顿史学思想初探

阿克顿勋爵是19世纪英国最著名的史学家之一。他认为,人类社会的历史是一部自由史,道德法则是最终的历史评判标准,确定性和超然性是历史研究不可或缺的原则。他的思想超越了同时代的史家。但由于对史料的过分重视阻碍了他取得应有的学术成就,对于道德标准的执着使得他把复杂的历史过程看得过于简单化了。