Jonathan Z. Smith
Imagining Religion
From Babylon to Johnestown
The University of Chicago Press 1982
Stron 179
Język: angielski
Książka jest bez śladów używania.
With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological.
Making use of examples äs apparently diverse and exotic äs the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed äs conven-tional, anthropological, historical, and äs an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges äs the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity —simply put, äs the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them.
"These seven essays display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most method- ologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy
and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories äs canon and ritual. and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay. on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre." —Richards. Sarason, Religious Studies Review
"The treatment of each of these topics, although not beyond disagree-ment or criticism, is brilliant and insightful. . This book ought to be an influential force in the study of religion and in the discussion of the academic study of religion." —Donald Wiebe, Anglican Theological Review
"Should be given serious attention by any Scholar who is interested in the study of religion äs an autonomous intellectual discipline." —Hans H. Penner, History of Religions
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
l Fences and Neighbors. Some Contours of Early Judaism l
2. In Comparison a Magic Dwells 19
3. Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon 36
4. The Bare Facts of Ritual 53
5. The Unknown God: Myth in History 66
6. A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams 90 7 The Devil in Mr. Jones 102
Appendixes 121
Notes 135
Index 163
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