Chapter

The Prepatriarchal HypothesisAn Assessment

March 2009

DOI:10.1525/california/9780520255852.003.0010

In book: A Garland of Feminist ReflectionsForty Years of Religious Exploration (pp.156-170)

Authors:

The prepatriarchal hypothesis is both a popular sacred history, the sacred history of the feminist spirituality movement, and a scholarly hypothesis, which argues that “the creation of patriarchy” is an historical event occurring in the relatively recent past due to certain causes and conditions. Many scholars and popularizers also speculate about what religion and society were like in the prepatriarchal world, frequently portraying it as a “feminist utopia.” Located at the interstices of several disciplines, including prehistory, archeology, anthropology, mythology, history, and the comparative study of religions, as well as being of considerable importance to feminist discourse, the prepatriarchal hypothesis has generated a great deal of controversy not only with nonfeminists, but also within the ranks of feminist thought and scholarship.

The Goddess: Myths of the Great Mother, by Christopher Fee and David Leeming, London, Reaktion Books, 2016, 176 pp., US$25.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 7802 3509 7

Article

Jan 2017

Caleb Simmons

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Article

RESPONSE: Reply to Ignacio Javier López. Hispanic Review 80.1 (2012): 165–167

September 2012 · Hispanic Review

NOËL VALIS

It is never easy to receive a critique of one's work. Professor Lo´pez objected to my review of his book, Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n (prensa, poli´tica, novela de tesis), in the pages of Hispanic Review. That is perfectly understandable. He notes that the purpose of his book was not to inquire whether Alarco´n deserved to be in the canon or not, but to rescue him from neglect and recontextualize ... [Show full abstract] his significance. I agree. In my review, I observed that Lo´pez was "to be heartily commended" for devoting a book to the novelist. I praised his efforts at contextualizing this neglected figure; I praised his analyses of individual texts. What I wanted to see was more balance and nuance in the presentation of the writer, noting that "we cannot impose our ideas on the past to make it something we think it ought to have been or to disparage what it was." I am puzzled why Lo´pez would think such a view represents an espousal of some of the more deplorable ideas Alarco´n held. "Showing enthusiasm and passion for our subject" should never be equated with advocating a particular ideological position. Unfortunately, Professor Lo´pez, in his reply, demonstrates the same flaw as in his book. He imputes to me motives and thinking that are entirely unfounded, based as they are on speculation. Somehow, because I did not include Alarco´n in my book, Sacred Realism, he seems to think this "lapsus irreparable" may have had some effect on my reading of his book. With one exception, Sacred Realism deals with spiritually troubled liberals, not conservatives like Alarco´n. Lo´pez observes that one need not share views to study them. I completely agree. That was my point. But I also noted that a "critical sympathy" toward the object of study, a notion that infuses the field of anthropology, for example, helps to create the kind of balanced and nuanced analyses that are the standard-bearers of the best scholarship.

Article

The prehistory of Prewitts Knob, Kentucky /

January 1970

Valerie A. Haskins

Typescript. Thesis (A.M.)--Washington University, 1988. Dept. of Anthropology. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-156).

Article

The Sacred Crematorium

January 1996 · Mortality

Douglas J. Davies

In this paper I consider ways in which one contemporary institution, the modern crematorium, may, increasingly, be helping to foster a sense of the sacred. Though conceived largely as an exercise in the history and phenomenology of religion the discussion also includes some empirical material from Britain which is interpreted anthropologically. The conclusion is more speculative and echoes ... [Show full abstract] earlier, and once fashionable, theories of the origin of religion which related the sense of the sacred to reported experiences of the dead.

Article

METANARRATIVES AND TEXTUAL IRONIES IN ROBERT KROETSCH'S GONE INDIAN

January 1970

Tanja Cvetkovi

The narrative structure of Robert Kroetsch's novel Gone Indian is multi- layered and abounds in the use of mythological fragments with special reference to the myths and stories of the Canadian past and present. Robert Kroetsch's use of myth in his novels, as well as in the novel Gone Indian, is exposed to parody and irony for he believes that familiar myths and stories must be "deconstructed", ... [Show full abstract] "uninvented" and "unnamed" (all his favored terms) as fictions. The surface story of the novel Gone Indian is concerned with the issues of identity of the main hero Jeremy Sadness whose life story, recorded in fragments on the tape re- corder, is manipulated and interpreted by another narrative voice in the novel, Jeremy's professor and supervisor, Mark Madham, who plays the role of a parodic reader-surrogate and writer-surrogate. What is of interest here is not the overt structure and content of the narrative, but the covert structures, hidden in "the space between' the text and the actual reader. Three of the most significant texts beneath the surface story of Gone Indian are: Frederick Jackson Turner's notion of the American frontier; the story of "Gray Owl", a type of an ironic trickster figure in the text; and Jack Shadbolt's mural at the Edmonton airport "Bush Pilot in the Norhern Sky". While the story on the surface of the text contin- ues the traditional effort of putting together a coherent narrative, the subtexts add a new reading to the surface story by constantly undermining it and diffusing its meaning. By constantly exploding the metanarrative of the surface text via various subtexts, this novel balances within "the space between' a description of Canada's perception of itself and its place in the world. Much of Robert Kroetsch's writing is closely aligned with Foucauldian archeological practices and takes the form of uncovering, revealing a new layer of meaning under the surface story. Apart from layering, the archelogical techinique allows for the existance of fragments, the interrelationships of which expand the meaning of the main narrative by means of imaginative speculation.

Article

Professorinnen in der Ur- und Frühgeschichte. Gender und Archäologie

January 2013

Andrea Bräuning

My treatise explores the career paths of the first four habilitated women in Prehistory and Early History at German universities in comparison with the career paths of the second and third generation. On the one hand, it shows that even leading female archaeologists do not only succeed through their work; it is also the memorial that is erected in their honour. On the other hand, we note that the ... [Show full abstract] proportion of women professors is still increasing; the number of habilitated women, however, is considerably higher. For this reason, the treatise explores the question of whether there are typical female career paths and when a career setback happens. The situation is not likely to change without a target-oriented control. Apart from the existing support programmes and networks for women as well as the activities of a women’s representative, financial incentives for faculties appointing more women are certainly an effective means to increase the proportion of women.

Chapter

Utopia as Archaeology

January 2013

Ruth Levitas

We turn now to setting out the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society as a method. This is not the invention of a method, but the identification of how the utopian mode works as speculative sociology. Indeed, my argument is that this is how most explicitly utopian proposals from the fin de siècle on are intended, as provisional and reflexive models of possible futures open to criticism and debate; ... [Show full abstract] and where this is not how they are intended, it is nevertheless how they should best be treated. Readings that interrogate the unconscious of the text, or explore the formal means by which the utopian marvelous or the quality of grace is conveyed, are also important, for these bear on their capacity to address what it means to be human, and this is a fundamental element of utopia as method.

Article

Full-text available

The emergence of cognitive abilities. The contribution of neuropsychology to archaeology.

January 2009

Sophie A. de Beaune

This book presents new directions in the study of cognitive archaeology. Seeking to understand the conditions that led to the development of a variety of cognitive processes during evolution, it uses evidence from empirical studies and offers theoretical speculations about the evolution of modern thinking as well. The volume draws from the fields of archaeology and neuropsychology, which ... [Show full abstract] traditionally have shared little in the way of theories and methods, even though both disciplines provide crucial pieces to the puzzle of the emergence and evolution of human cognition.

Conference Paper

The laical temple: how a museum can represent the idea of sacred in the civil society: technological...

December 2007

Simona Caraceni

Chapter

Records of Siberian Spirituality in Present-Day Russia

January 2003

Andrei A. Znamenski

In this article, Basilov, the late dean of Russian students of shamanism, hypothesizes about the general definition of this phenomenon. Many scholars are reluctant to conduct such speculations. Encouraging them not to fear broad hypotheses, Basilov does admit that discussing shamanism in general is a hard task, due to the contradictory nature of documentary materials. He stresses that his own ... [Show full abstract] generalizations on this phenomenon do not go beyond educated guesses (4). The mistake of all researchers who have tried to come up with broad definitions of shamanism was an attempt to separate the personality of a shaman from his or her social environment. Who would begin a serious study of Christianity by separating the personality of a priest from religion and society? It would be equally wrong to center (as does Mircae Eliade) discussion of shamanism on an ecstatic séance, the core of the shamanic session (5). Basilov approaches shamanism in an evolutionary manner: from the most archaic versions to the more “advanced.” One trace of the former is the so-called bear ritual practiced among some Siberian natives. Here an animal (a bear) acts as a mediator between the world of spirits and the world of human beings. An example of the latter is semi-professional mediators between spiritual forces and the human realm, as in the case of Altaian shamans.

Article

Les jeux video comme instruments de techno-transe

July 2016 · Social Compass

Mathieu Triclot

This article aims to reopen the genealogy of video games, studying the similarities they share with what the author calls ‘techno-trance devices’. These devices, which are contemporary to the first video games in the early 1960s, rely on the creative hijacking of laboratory instruments. They share numerous technical and media properties with video games. Moreover, there are some records of these ... [Show full abstract] techno-trance devices being used during religious practices at the time, which might lead to speculation of a latent trance influence in video games as apparatuses. These shared properties between video games and these devices, derived from counterculture, are thus studied through the prism of trance and the debates it fostered in anthropology.

Chapter

Interview with Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe

January 2016

Elisabeth Cunin

(This interview was first published in Spanish in Antipoda-Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 2, January–June 2006, Department of Anthropology, University of Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, from the original transcription furnished by the interviewee.)

Article

Sacred science. Can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?

August 2008 · Scientific American

Michael Shermer