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.     

Review article: Religion,modernization and Zionism

Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement (1882–1904), Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1988 (Originally published in Hebrew — Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 1985), xix + 365 pp.

Yosef Salmon, Religion and Zionism — First Encounters: Essays (Hebrew), Jerusalem, Hassifriya Hazionit, 1990, 366 pp.     

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.     

New World States and Empires: Politics, Religion, and Urbanism

The past decade has seen a veritable explosion in archaeological research on complex societies in Latin America. In 1993, Smith published an overview of research to that date; this article is one of two bringing that summary up to the present. Our first article, New World states and empires: Economic and social organization (Smith and Schreiber, 2005), dealt with issues regarding economic and social organization. The present article tackles political organization and dynamics, religion, urbanism, and settlement patterns. We also review recent research in the context of various theoretical perspectives, some traditional, some more contemporary, including approaches to history and process, cultural evolution, agency-based models, linguistic prehistory, migration theory, and the relationship between environmental change and cultural events. Our discussion blends empirical findings, methodological advances, and theoretical perspectives.     

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.     

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."     

Political science,the state and Marx

Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (translated by Timothy O'Hagan), New Left Books & Sheed and Ward, London, 1973, pp. 367, $15.25.     

Post‐communism and the Russian public

This book, based on a survey by the Sociology Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences completed in April 2011, provides, in the opinion of this reviewer, one of the most comprehensive accounts so far published of Russian opinion during the twenty years since the fall of communism. Based on a carefully weighted sample of respondents, it makes full allowance for the great variations of opinions according to age, income group and place of residence. It also allows for changes in opinion by drawing on surveys of earlier years. The finished product provides a wealth of information on subjects ranging from leisure to moral attitudes. The book sees little conclusive evidence of xenophobic attitudes towards the outside world, and suggests that ethnic hatred within Russia is a reflection of stress rather than racism. One salient finding is that very few Russians support the idea of the ‘minimum state’ or unregulated free market. Most Russians believe in some kind of a mixed economy in which the state nevertheless plays a key role. The idea of democracy, according to this book, is regarded with ‘benevolent scepticism’; that is, support in principle coupled with considerable doubts whether it would work in present‐day Russia. Given the impossibility of voting the present government out of office, Russians are increasingly resorting to other means of protest, including street demonstrations. The level of discontent is illustrated by the fact that only 10 per cent in the survey said they were better off as a result of the post‐communist reforms, while 25 per cent said they were worse off. Nevertheless, the majority of Russians have no wish for yet another upheaval and this may explain the continued public acceptance of President Putin's rule.     

Religion, Policy, and Secrecy: The Latter Day Saints and Masons

On a vanished secret order: "Had politics, as in Masonry, been its main object, it would have held on with tenacity to its principles, as to the threads of life, and, disregarding its departure from sound morals, or patriotism, would still have contended, with the infatuation of a Mormonite, for the enjoyment, in secret, of that which in the eye of the public would overwhelm its members in confusions.""A Traveller in the United States", A Ritual and Illustrations of Free-Masonry and the Orange and Odd Fellows' Societies, Accompanied by Numerous Engravings, and a Key to the Phi Beta Kappa , S. Thrne, Devon (Shebbear, near Hatherleigh, England), 1835, 251.