Title: The sacred self: a cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing
Author: Csordas, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Religion | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.   [brief]
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Title: Looking for God in Brazil: the progressive Catholic Church in urban Brazil's religious arena
Author: Burdick, John 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Christianity
Publisher's Description: For a generation, the Catholic Church in Brazil has enjoyed international renown as one of the most progressive social forces in Latin America. The Church's creation of Christian Base Communities (CEBs), groups of Catholics who learn to read the Bible as a call for social justice, has been widely hailed. Still, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the CEBs are lagging far behind the explosive growth of Brazil's two other major national religious movements - Pentacostalism and Afro-Brazilian Umbanda .On the basis of his extensive fieldwork in Rio di Janeiro, including detailed life histories of women, blacks, youths, and the marginal poor, John Burdick offers the first in-depth explanation of why the radical Catholic Church is losing, and Pentecostalism and Umbanda winning, the battle for souls in urban Brazil.   [brief]
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Title: China's Catholics: tragedy and hope in an emerging civil society
Author: Madsen, Richard 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Asian Studies | History | Sociology | Christianity
Publisher's Description: After suffering isolation and persecution during the Maoist era, the Catholic Church in China has reemerged with astonishing vitality in recent years. Richard Madsen focuses on this revival and relates it to the larger issue of the changing structure of Chinese society, particularly to its implications for the development of a "civil society."Madsen knows China well and has spent extensive time there interviewing Chinese Catholics both young and old, the "true believers" and the less devout. Their stories reveal the tensions that have arisen even as political control over everyday life in China has loosened. Of particular interest are the rural-urban split in the church, the question of church authority, and the divisions between public and underground practices of church followers.All kinds of religious groups have revived and flourished in the post-Mao era. Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, practitioners of folk religions, even intellectuals seeking more secularized answers to "ultimate" concerns are engaged in spiritual quests. Madsen is interested in determining if such quests contain the resources for constructing a more humane political order in China. Will religion contribute to or impede economic modernization? What role will the church play in the pluralization of society? The questions he raises in China's Catholics are important not only for China's political future but for all countries in transition from political totalitarianism.   [brief]
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Title: Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the new millennium
Author: Miller, Donald E. (Donald Earl) 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Sociology
Publisher's Description: During the past thirty years the American religious landscape has undergone a dramatic change. More and more churches meet in converted warehouses, many have ministers who've never attended a seminary, and congregations are singing songs whose melodies might be heard in bars or nightclubs. Donald E. Miller's provocative examination of these "new paradigm churches" - sometimes called megachurches or postdenominational churches shows how they are reinventing the way Christianity is experienced in the United States today.Drawing on over five years of research and hundreds of interviews, Miller explores three of the movements that have created new paradigm churches: Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and Hope Chapel. Together, these groups have over one thousand congregations and are growing rapidly, attracting large numbers of worshipers who have felt alienated from institutional religion. While attempting to reconnect with first-century Christianity, these churches meet in nonreligious structures and use the medium of contemporary twentieth-century America to spread their message through contemporary forms of worship, Christian rock music, and a variety of support and interest groups.In the first book to examine postdenominational churches in depth, Miller argues that these churches are involved in a second Reformation, one that challenges the bureaucracy and rigidity of mainstream Christianity. The religion of the new millennium, says Miller, will connect people to the sacred by reinventing traditional worship and redefining the institutional forms associated with denominational Christian churches. Nothing less than a transformation of religion in the United States may be taking place, and Miller convincingly demonstrates how "postmodern traditionalists" are at the forefront of this change.   [brief]
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Title: The frontiers of Catholicism: the politics of ideology in a liberal world
Author: Burns, Gene 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | Religion | Social Theory | Gender Studies | Christianity | Politics
Publisher's Description: Gene Burns examines the origins of contemporary diversity and conflict in the Catholic Church, illuminating as well the processes of ideological change.
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Title: A new world in a small place: church and religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Religion | Christianity | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Distinguished historian Robert Brentano provides an entirely new perspective on the character of the church, religion, and society in the medieval Italian diocese of Rieti from 1188 to 1378. Combing through a cache of previously ignored documents stored in a tower of the cathedral, he uses wills, li . . . [more]
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Title: Christianity and the rhetoric of empire: the development of Christian discourse
Author: Cameron, Averil
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Classical History | History | Christianity | Ancient History | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: Many reasons can be given for the rise of Christianity in late antiquity and its flourishing in the medieval world. In asking how Christianity succeeded in becoming the dominant ideology in the unpromising circumstances of the Roman Empire, Averil Cameron turns to the development of Christian discourse over the first to sixth centuries A.D., investigating the discourse's essential characteristics, its effects on existing forms of communication, and its eventual preeminence. Scholars of late antiquity and general readers interested in this crucial historical period will be intrigued by her exploration of these influential changes in modes of communication.The emphasis that Christians placed on language - writing, talking, and preaching - made possible the formation of a powerful and indeed a totalizing discourse, argues the author. Christian discourse was sufficiently flexible to be used as a public and political instrument, yet at the same time to be used to express private feelings and emotion. Embracing the two opposing poles of logic and mystery, it contributed powerfully to the gradual acceptance of Christianity and the faith's transformation from the enthusiasm of a small sect to an institutionalized world religion.   [brief]
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Title: Absent lord: ascetics and kings in a Jain ritual culture 
Author: Babb, Lawrence A
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Asian Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: What does it mean to worship beings that one believes are completely indifferent to, and entirely beyond the reach of, any form of worship whatsoever? How would such a relationship with sacred beings affect the religious life of a community? Using these questions as his point of departure, Lawrence A. Babb explores the ritual culture of image-worshipping Svetambar Jains of the western Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan.Jainism traces its lineages back to the ninth century B.C.E. and is, along with Buddhism, the only surviving example of India's ancient non-Vedic religious traditions. It is known and celebrated for its systematic practice of non-violence and for the intense rigor of the asceticism it promotes. A unique aspect of Babb's study is his linking of the Jain tradition to the social identity of existing Jain communities.Babb concludes by showing that Jain ritual culture can be seen as a variation on pan-Indian ritual patterns. In illuminating this little-known religious tradition, he demonstrates that divine "absence" can be as rich as divine "presence" in its possibilities for informing a religious response to the cosmos.   [brief]
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Title: Writing at the margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine
Author: Kleinman, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Asian Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems - for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: An anthropology of the subject: holographic worldview in New Guinea and its meaning and significance for the world of anthropology
Author: Wagner, Roy
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Pacific Rim Studies | Geography | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: An Anthropology of the Subject rounds out the theoretical-philosophical cosmos of one of the twentieth century's most intellectually adventurous anthropologists. Roy Wagner, having turned "culture" and "symbols" inside out (in The Invention of Culture and Symbols That Stand for Themselves, respectively), now does the same for the "subject" and subjectivity. In studying the human subject and the way human culture mirrors itself, Wagner has redefined holography as "the exact equivalence, or comprehensive identity, of part and whole in any human contingency."   [brief]
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Title: The Advent project: the later-seventh-century creation of the Roman Mass proper
Author: McKinnon, James W 1932-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Medieval Studies | Classical Religions | Christianity
Publisher's Description: In his final accomplishment of an extraordinarily distinguished career, James W. McKinnon considers the musical practices of the early Church in this incisive examination of the history of Christian chant from the years a.d. 200 to 800. The result is an important book that is certain to have a long- . . . [more]
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Title: Ambrose of Milan: church and court in a Christian capital
Author: McLynn, Neil 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | History | Classical Religions | Christianity | Ancient History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: In this new and illuminating interpretation of Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374 to 397, Neil McLynn thoroughly sifts the evidence surrounding this very difficult personality. The result is a richly detailed interpretation of Ambrose's actions and writings that penetrates the bishop's painstaking presentation of self. McLynn succeeds in revealing Ambrose's manipulation of events without making him too Machiavellian. Having synthesized the vast complex of scholarship available on the late fourth century, McLynn also presents an impressive study of the politics and history of the Christian church and the Roman Empire in that period.Admirably and logically organized, the book traces the chronology of Ambrose's public activity and reconstructs important events in the fourth century. McLynn's zesty, lucid prose gives the reader a clear understanding of the complexities of Ambrose's life and career and of late Roman government.   [brief]
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Title: Women preachers and prophets through two millennia of Christianity
Author: Kienzle, Beverly Mayne
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Women's Studies | Christianity | Classical Religions | History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: For nearly two millennia, despite repeated prohibitions, Christian women have preached. Some have preached in official settings; others have found alternative routes for expression. Prophecy, teaching, writing, and song have all filled a broad definition of preaching. This anthology, with essays by an international group of scholars from several disciplines, investigates the diverse voices of Christian women who claimed the authority to preach and prophesy. The contributors examine the centuries of arguments, grounded in Pauline injunctions, against women's public speech and the different ways women from the early years of the church through the twentieth century have nonetheless exercised religious leadership in their communities. Some of them based their authority solely on divine inspiration; others were authorized by independent-minded communities; a few were even recognized by the church hierarchy. With its lively accounts of women preachers and prophets in the Christian tradition, this exceptionally well-documented collection will interest scholars and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: Pathways of power: building an anthropology of the modern world
Author: Wolf, Eric R 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This collection of twenty-eight essays by renowned anthropologist Eric R. Wolf is a legacy of some of his most original work, with an insightful foreword by Aram Yengoyan. Of the essays, six have never been published and two have not appeared in English until now. Shortly before his death, Wolf prepared introductions to each section and individual pieces, as well as an intellectual autobiography that introduces the collection as a whole. Sydel Silverman, who completed the editing of the book, says in her preface, "He wanted this selection of his writings over the past half-century to serve as part of the history of how anthropology brought the study of complex societies and world systems into its purview."   [brief]
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Title: Papal patronage and the music of St. Peter's, 1380-1513 
Author: Reynolds, Christopher A
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History
Publisher's Description: A new picture of music at the basilica of St. Peter's in the fifteenth century emerges in Christopher A. Reynolds's fascinating chronicle of this rich period of Italian musical history. Reynolds examines archival documents, musical styles, and issues of artistic patronage and cultural context in a fertile consideration of the ways historical and musical currents affected each other.This work is both a historical account of performers and composers and an examination of how their music revealed their cultural values and educational backgrounds. Reynolds analyzes several anonymous masses copied at St. Peter's, proposing attributions that have biographical implications for the composers. Taken together, the archival records and the music sung at St. Peter's reveal a much clearer picture of musical life at the basilica than either source would alone. The contents of the St. Peter's choirbook help document musical life as surely as that musical life - insofar as it can be reconstructed from the archives - illumines the choirbook.   [brief]
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Title: Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain
Author: Ginsburg, Faye D
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Media Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Electronic Media | Postcolonial Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Sociology | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media - film, television, video - are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.   [brief]
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Title: Ritual ground: Bent's Old Fort, world formation, and the annexation of the Southwest 
Author: Comer, Douglas C
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Cultural Anthropology | California and the West | United States History
Publisher's Description: From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual.Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.   [brief]
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Title: From savage to Negro: anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954
Author: Baker, Lee D 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | African American Studies | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Lee D. Baker explores what racial categories mean to the American public and how these meanings are reinforced by anthropology, popular culture, and the law. Focusing on the period between two landmark Supreme Court decisions - Plessy v. Ferguson (the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (the public school desegregation decision of 1954) - Baker shows how racial categories change over time.Baker paints a vivid picture of the relationships between specific African American and white scholars, who orchestrated a paradigm shift within the social sciences from ideas based on Social Darwinism to those based on cultural relativism. He demonstrates that the greatest impact on the way the law codifies racial differences has been made by organizations such as the NAACP, which skillfully appropriated the new social science to exploit the politics of the Cold War.   [brief]
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Title: Wandering, begging monks: spiritual authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity
Author: Caner, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Classics | Religion | Classical Religions | Christianity | Classical History | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere - including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes - to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.   [brief]
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Title: History, power, ideology: central issues in Marxism and anthropology
Author: Donham, Donald L. (Donald Lewis)
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Social Theory | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Is Marxism a reflection of the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on recent work in anthropology, history, and philosophy, Donald Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically different social order: the former Maale kingdom of southern Ethiopia."Every once in a while there appears a book that . . . opens up new ways of inquiring into the ways of the world. Donald Donham has written such a book. The style is quiet and judicious, but the effect is stunning. . . . In putting inherited partisan approaches to the test of explaining the realities of Maale society and culture, Donham enriches anthropology and imparts new vigor to the analytical Marxian traditions. History, Power, Ideology embodies a major accomplishment." - From the Foreword   [brief]
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