Reciprocity and Ritual

Reciprocity and Ritual

Author: Richard Seaford

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 9780198149491

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All Greek is translated."--BOOK JACKET.


Cosmology and the Polis

Cosmology and the Polis

Author: Richard Seaford

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139504878

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This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure, and uncovers various such chronotopes in Homer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Presocratic philosophy and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual and monetised exchange. In particular, the Oresteia of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth. This argument includes the first ever demonstration of the profound affinities between Aeschylus and the (Presocratic) philosophy of his time.


Money and the Early Greek Mind

Money and the Early Greek Mind

Author: Richard Seaford

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-03-11

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780521539920

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How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage, which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system, fundamental to Presocratic philosophy, and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods, as found in tragedy.


Emotion, Identity, and Religion

Emotion, Identity, and Religion

Author: Douglas J. Davies

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-03-10

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0199551529

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Religions manage human emotions by coupling them with core cultural values, and particular religious traditions favour a distinctive pattern or syndrome of emotions and values. Douglas J. Davies uses insights from anthropology-sociology, cognitive science, and psychology, to explore the dynamics of emotional life that forge our human identity.


King of Sacrifice

King of Sacrifice

Author: Sarah Hitch

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

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Descriptions of animal sacrifice in Homer offer detailed accounts of this attempt at communication between man and gods. Hitch explores the structural and thematic importance of animal sacrifice as an expression of the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon through the differing perspectives of the primary narrative and character speech.


Serving Athena

Serving Athena

Author: Julia L. Shear

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 1108618022

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In ancient Athens, the Panathenaia was the most important festival and was celebrated in honour of Athena from the middle of the sixth century BC until the end of the fourth century AD. This in-depth study examines how this all-Athenian celebration was an occasion for constructing identities and how it affected those identities. Since not everyone took part in the same way, this differential participation articulated individuals' relationships both to the goddess and to the city so that the festival played an important role in negotiating what it meant to be Athenian (and non-Athenian). Julia Shear applies theories of identity formation which were developed in the social sciences to the ancient Greek material and brings together historical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence to provide a better understanding both of this important occasion and of Athenian identities over the festival's long history.


The Hidden Powers of Ritual

The Hidden Powers of Ritual

Author: Bradd Shore

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-12-12

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0262546582

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An illuminating overview of the development, benefits, and importance of ritual in everyday life, written by a leading cognitive anthropologist. The Hidden Powers of Ritual is an engaging introduction to ritual studies that presents ritual as an evolved form of human behavior of almost unimaginable significance to our species. Every day across the globe, people gather to share meals, brew caffeinated beverages, or honor their ancestors. In this book, Bradd Shore, a respected anthropologist, reaches beyond familiar “big-R” rituals to present life’s humbler, overshadowed moments, exploring everything from the Balinese pelebon to baseball to family Zoom sessions in the age of Covid to the sobering reenactment rituals surrounding the Moore’s Ford lynchings. In each ritual, Shore shows how our capacity to ritualize behavior is a remarkable part of the human story. Encompassing both the commonly unlabeled “interaction rituals” studied by sociologists and the symbolically elaborated sacred rituals of religious studies, Shore organizes his conception around detailed case studies drawn from international research and personal experience, weaving scholarship with a memoir of a life encompassed by ritual. A probing exploration that matches breadth with accessibility, The Hidden Powers of Ritual is a provocative contribution to ritual theory that will appeal to a wide range of readers curious about why these unique repetitive acts matter in our lives.


Ritual in Its Own Right

Ritual in Its Own Right

Author: Don Handelman

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781845450519

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Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.


Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities

Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities

Author: Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317094999

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Exploring how people from Andean communities seek progress and social mobility by moving to the cities, Cecilie Ødegaard demonstrates the changing significance of kinship, reciprocity and ritual in an urban context. Through a focus on people ́s involvement in land occupations and local associations, labour and trade, Ødegaard examines the dialectics between popular practices and neoliberal state policies in processes of urbanization. The making and un-making of notions of the Indigenous, communal work, and gender is central in this analysis, and is discussed against the historical backdrop of the land occupations in Peruvian cities since the 1930s. Through its close ethnographic description of everyday life in a new urban neighbourhood, this book reveals how social and spatial categories and boundaries are continually negotiated in people ́s quest for mobility and progress. Cecilie Ødegaard argues that conventional meanings of prosperity and progress are significantly altered in interaction with Andean understandings of reciprocity. By combining a unique ethnographic account with original theoretical arguments, the book provides new insight into the cultural, cosmological and political dimensions of mobility, progress and market participation.


Reciprocity in Ancient Greece

Reciprocity in Ancient Greece

Author: Christopher Gill

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780198149972

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Reciprocity has been seen as an important notion for anthropologists studying economic and social relations, and this volume examines it in connection with Greek culture from Homer to the Hellenistic period.