Teaching Maya art history

30 a?os de experiencia instructiva han llevado al autor a reconocer temas importantes que surgen al presentar la historia del arte Maya. Realizando las ramificaciones políticas de sus esfuerzos, el ha comenzado a tomar responsabilidad por ellos involucrando al pueblo Maya en su instrucción y en sus reconstrucciones del pasado, que él argumenta han mejorado tando la calidad de su instrucción como la ética de su práctica.

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Résumé 30 ans d'expérience dans l'enseignement ont mené l'auteur à identifier les questions importantes que soulèvent la présentation de l'Histoire de l'Art Maya. Réalisant les implications politiques de ses efforts, il a commencé à assumer sa démarche en associant des Mayas à son enseignement et à ses reconstructions du passé, ce qui, selon lui, a amélioré à la fois la qualité de son enseignement et l'éthique de sa pratique.

     

Religion and Realpolitik

Abstract

Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheim's totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.     

Priestley on materialism and the essence of God

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on Priestley’s complex views on the essence of God in connection with his materialism, elaborated in the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777/ 1782). This issue is crucial if one wishes to get a clear idea of what Priestley’s materialism amounts to; whether it is mainly a thesis about the material grounds of the human mind (“psychological materialism”), or a more far-reaching one about what kind of substances exist in the world (a version of “ontological materialism”). The claim that God may be material allows for the most radical version of ontological materialism according to which everything in the world is material, without altogether denying that God exists. In fact, Priestley considers and partially defends at least three different views on the potential materiality of God: (1) an agnostic stance that is his official view, (2) materialism about God based on his own theory of matter, and (3) “gross” materialism about God. The aim of the paper is to analyze these three views, in particular concerning what kind of materialism they support and whether they can contribute to the consistent Christian materialism Priestley envisaged.