In 1977, Stephen King published his short story “Children of the Corn” in Penthouse. Seven years later, movie audiences across the nation were horrified by the ritual doings of small town Nebraska kids who worshiped something malevolent in the corn.
It surely was no coincidence that later in the year, Nebraska experienced a sharp drop in [...]
Tags:agriculture·arousal·Aztecs·Children of the Corn·crucifixion·Daily Mass·doctrinal·Engels·episodic·Gatlin·Harvey Whitehouse·HRAF·imagistic·intensity·Linda Hamilton·Marx·memory·modes of religiosity·morphospace·Nebraska·neolithic·pagan·political economy·Quentin Atkinson·ritual form·Salah·Sarah Connor·scythe·semantic·Stephen King·Sun Dance·vision quest
Are capitalism and Christianity compatible? This is the bizarre question asked by Mario Gómez-Zimmerman in “The Capitalist Structures of Hinduism.” His belief is that this compatibility (which seems self-evident to me) will somehow be strengthened if he can show that other religions are also compatible with capitalism.
This is a zinger of a non-sequitur which would [...]
Tags:Ayn Rand·capitalism·caste·Christianity·classical Hinduism·elites·Hinduism·India·inequality·legitimation·Mario Gomez-Zimmerman·Neolithic transition·political economy·power·stratification·Varna·Vedic
There is no shortage of research projects whose aim is to “explain religion” or the “evolution of religion.” In addition to the Evolution of Religion Project which I interrogated in a recent post, anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse leads the “Explaining Religion” project based at Oxford University.
Whitehouse is interested primarily in religious variation and sees religions as [...]
Tags:doctrinal·episodic memory·Explaining Religion Project·Harvey Whitehouse·imagistic·modes of religiosity·Neolithic·Oxford·political economy·religious transmission·religious variation·ritual forms·semantic memory·shamanic
I just finished reading David Swartz’s superb article, “Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power” (open access), and must recommend it not only to cultural theorists but to archaeologists as well. Several aspects of Bourdieu’s thought lend themselves readily to novel interpretations of what otherwise might appear to [...]
Tags:archaeological theory·behavorial modernity·Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion·cultural theory·David Swartz·embodiment·Foucault·Marx·materialist history·Nietzsche·paleolithic hominids·Pierre Bourdieu·political economy·ritual objects·sociology of religion·spiritualist history·symbolic power·symbolism·Weber
