台湾清华大学人类学研究所“宗教人类学”课指定读物
In this important, scholarly, and wide-ranging text, Brian Morris provides a lucid outline of the nature of the explanations of religious phenomena offered by such great thinkers as Hegel, Marx, and Weber. In doing so he also unravels the many theoretical strategies in the study of religion that have been developed and explored by later anthropologists. Besides discussing the classical authors and the debates surrounding their work, Morris presents perceptive accounts of more contemporary scholars such as Jung, Malinowski, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, and Godelier. Written from the standpoint of critical sympathy, and free of jargon, this book is an invaluable guide to the writings on religion of all the major figures in anthropology.

Edmund Leach's book investigates the writings of 'structuralists,' and their different theories: the general incest theory and of animal sacrifice. This book is designed for the use of teaching undergraduates in anthropology, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and related disciplines faced with structuralist argument. It provides the prolegomena necessary to understand the final chapter of Levi-Strauss's massive four-volume Mythologiques. Some prior knowledge of anthropological literature is useful but not essential. The principal ethnographic source is the Book of Leviticus; this guide should help anyone who is trying to grasp the essentials of 'seminology' - the general theory of how signs and symbols come to convey meaning. The author's core thesis is that: 'the indices in non-verbal communication systems, like the sound elements in spoken language, do not have meaning as isolates, but only as members of set'; the book's special merit is that it makes this kind of jargon comprehensible in terms of our everyday experience.

In this innovative book Dr Morris seeks to show the many ways in which the excavated remains of burials can and should be a major source of evidence for social historians of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Burials have a far wider geographical and social range than the surviving literary texts, which were mainly written for a small elite. They provide us with unique insights into how Greeks and Romans constituted and interpreted their own communities. In particular, burials enable the historian to study social change. Ian Morris illustrates the great potential of the material in these respects with examples drawn from societies as diverse in time, space and political context as archaic Rhodes, classical Athens, early imperial Rome and the last days of the western Roman empire.

Ancient China and Greece are two classical civilizations that have exerted far-reaching influence in numerous areas of human experience and are often invoked as the paradigms in East-West comparison. This book examines gender relations in the two ancient societies as reflected in convivial contexts such as family banquets, public festivals, and religious feasts. Two distinct patterns of interpersonal affinity and conflict emerge from the Chinese and Greek sources that show men and women organizing themselves and interacting with each other in social occasions intended for collective pursuit of pleasure. Through an analysis of the two different patterns, Yiqun Zhou illuminates the different sociopolitical mechanisms, value systems, and fabrics of human bonds in the two classical traditions. Her book will be important for readers who are interested in the comparative study of societies, gender studies, women's history, and the legacy of civilizations.

This fourth volume in John Pocock's great sequence on Barbarism and Religion focuses on the idea of barbarism. Barbarism was central to the history of western historiography, to the history of the enlightenment, and to Edward Gibbon himself. As a concept it was deeply problematic to enlightened historians seeking to understand their own civil societies in the light of exposure to newly-discovered civilizations hitherto beyond the reach of history. The troubled relationship between philosophy and history is addressed directly in this fourth volume.

Review
"Readers of this volume will be richly rewarded by the breadth and depth of Professor Loewe's scholarship. Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China is also a stimulating introduction to important issues concerning Han intellectual and religious history and well illustrates the kind of penetrating cultural analysis that is possible with the adept use of both traditionally received texts and evidence from the archeological record." Journal of Chinese Religions
"A very valuable source of rich information....Because of rapid changes in the field, we welcome more of this kind of work, that is, collections of proven scholarship that reflect the accumulated wisdom of a veteran scholar." Cho-Yun Hsu, American Historical Review
"Shows how the study of the Han period has developed in the past few decades. This impressive collection is of value to scholars and students of Chinese religion, history, and culture." Religious Studies Review
"Anyone who prefers faddish jargon to lucid exposition is advised to look elsewhere." Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Product Description
The four centuries of the Han dynasties from 206 BC to AD 220 witnessed major developments in the ideas of sovereignty. Michael Loewe traces these changes along with some of their religious aspects, including the techniques used by emperors and others to forecast the future or to divine the present. Both mythology and the tradition of learning affected the growth of the imperial ideal that, despite its failings, was of major importance both for the Han and China's subsequent dynasties.

The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism is a multi-authored interdisciplinary guide to the study of Christian mysticism, with an emphasis on the third through the seventeenth centuries. The book is thematically organized in terms of the central contexts, practices and concepts associated with the mystical life in early, medieval and early modern Christianity. This book looks beyond the term 'mysticism', which was an early modern invention, to explore the ways in which the ancient terms 'mystic' and 'mystical' were used in the Christian tradition: what kinds of practices, modes of life and experiences were described as 'mystical'? What understanding of Christianity and of the life of Christian perfection is articulated through mystical interpretations of scripture, mystical contemplation, mystical vision, mystical theology or mystical union? This volume both provides a clear introduction to the Christian mystical life and articulates a bold new approach to the study of mysticism.

This book uses a pioneering quantitative approach to investigate many aspects of the Roman Empire, such as the amount of wealth over which people disposed and the costs associated with many institutions important to the Roman economy.

The astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti has been overlooked by the current trend of scholarly interest in the poem. It is this material which is the subject of this book. The author does not study Ovid's stars using the techniques of mathematical astronomy. Rather she aims to combine the methodology of recent 'programmatic' or genre-based readings with a broad cultural perspective. Arguing that the stars serve to align the Fasti with hexameter didactic poetry, she first tests the assumption that the Fasti is influenced by the Phaenomena of Aratus. A second task is to assess the value of such writing in Augustan Rome: the Fasti and its Aratean model may be removed from the literary-historical sphere and placed in the political setting of the later Augustan Principate, in which the stars had been appropriated to express the powerful connection between the Julian family and the cosmos.

How was magic practised in medieval times? How did it relate to the diverse beliefs and practices that characterised this fascinating period? In Magic in the Middle Ages Richard Kieckhefer surveys the growth and development of magic in medieval times. He examines its relation to religion, science, philosophy, art, literature and politics before introducing us to the different types of magic that were used, the kinds of people who practised magic, and the reasoning behind their beliefs. In addition, he shows how magic served as a point of contact between the popular and elite classes, how the reality of magical beliefs is reflected in the fiction of medieval literature, and how the persecution of magic and witchcraft led to changes in the law. This 2000 book places magic at the crossroads of medieval culture, shedding light on many other aspects of life in the middle ages.

This is the most accessible guide available both for students of literature new to this developing field, and for students of gender studies and readers interested in the interactions of feminism, literary criticism and literature.

Ezra Pound is one of the most visible and influential poets of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most complex, his poetry containing historical and mythical allusions, experiments of form and style and often controversial political views. Yet Pound's life and work continue to fascinate. This Introduction, first published in 2005, is designed to help students reading Pound for the first time. Pound scholar Ira B. Nadel provides a guide to the rich webs of allusion and stylistic borrowings and innovations in Pound's writing. He offers a clear overview of Pound's life, works, contexts and reception history and his multidimensional career as a poet, translator, critic, editor, anthologist and impresario, a career that placed him at the heart of literary modernism. This invaluable and accessible introduction explains the huge contribution Pound made to the development of modernism in the early twentieth century.

Peter Szondi is widely regarded as being among the most distinguished post-war literary critics. This first English edition of one of his most lucid and interesting series of lectures opens up his work in hermeneutics for English-speaking readers. The question of what is involved in understanding a text occupied Biblical and legal scholars long before it became a concern of literary critics. Peter Szondi here traces the development of hermeneutics through examination of the work of eighteenth-century German scholars. Ordinarily treated only as prefigurations of Schleiermacher, the work of Enlightenment theorists Johann Martin Chladenius, George Friedrich Meier, and Friedrich Ast yields valuable insight into the 'material theory' of interpretation, on which a practical interpretive methodology might be built.