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The Western Construction of Religion
The Western Construction of Religion not only provides a critical assessment of the whole history of "religionas it is understood in the West but offers better ways of constructing the study of this central part of human experience.
The Invention of Religions
For nearly thirty years, a scientific revolution has taken place in the religious studies departments of several North American and British universities--and the results are considerable, obliging us to envisage new ways of conceiving of this academic field. While the History of Religions tended to rest in the shade and guardianship of past authorities, this critical current has re-examined the discipline's a priori positions, its favourite arguments, its long prehistory within Euro/Christian culture, but also its numerous ethnocentric prejudices. The first part of the volume considers anew the origins and Christian history of the notion of religion. This starting point then allows us to ide...
Religion and Magic in Western Culture
In the history of Western culture, theology, and science, a strict dichotomy exists between religion and magic: religion as the intellectually and morally superior one – magic as the primitive, superstitious, demonic other. The present work aims to break with this tradition, and traces the origin of this dichotomy as well as its many purposes. Whose powers does it serve? Which interests and ideological stakes does it conceal? Moreover, the author proposes a new epistemological framework for the study of magisms as well as their “rehumanisation”, and argues for a rehabilitation of their studies.
Vehicle Dynamics Estimation using Kalman Filtering
Vehicle dynamics and stability have been of considerable interest for a number of years. The obvious dilemma is that people naturally desire to drive faster and faster yet expect their vehicles to be “infinitely” stable and safe during all normal and emergency maneuvers. For the most part, people pay little attention to the limited handling potential of their vehicles until some unusual behavior is observed that often results in accidents and even fatalities. This book presents several model-based estimation methods which involve information from current potential-integrable sensors. Improving vehicle control and stabilization is possible when vehicle dynamic variables are known. The fun...
Twentieth Century Mythologies
Myths have intrigued scholars throughout history. 'Twentieth Century Mythologies' traces the study of myth over the last century, presenting the key theories of mythology and critiquing traditional definitions of myth. The volume presents the work of influential scholars in mythology: the noted Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumezil, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. 'Twentieth Century Mythologies' is an indispensable resource for scholars of religion and myth and for all those interested in the history of ideas.
Theorizing Myth
In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded. In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.
Religion, Theory, Critique
Religion, Theory, Critique is an essential tool for learning about theory and method in the study of religion. Leading experts engage with contemporary and classical theories as well as non-Western cultural contexts. Unlike other collections, this anthology emphasizes the dynamic relationship between "religion" as an object of study and different methodological approaches and openly addresses the question of the manifold ways in which "religion," "secular," and "culture" are imagined within different disciplinary horizons. This volume is the first textbook which seeks to engage discussion of classical approaches with contemporary cultural and critical theories. Contributors write on the infl...
Autophagy in Mammalian Systems, Part B
This is the companion volume to Daniel Klionsky's Autophagy: Lower Eukaryotes, which features the basic methods in autophagy covering yeasts and alternative fungi (aspergillus, podospora, magnaporthe). Klionsky is one of the leading authorities in the field. He is the editor-in-chief of Autophagy. The November 2007 issue of Nature Reviews highlighted his article, "Autophagy: From phenomenology to molecular understanding in less than a decade. He is currently editing guidelines for the field, with 230 contributing authors, that will publish in Autophagy.Particularly in times of stress, like starvation and disease, higher organisms have an internal mechanism in their cells for chewing up and r...
The Invention of World Religions
The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language. In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates how new classifications of language and race caused Buddhism and Islam to gain special significance, as these religions came to be seen in opposing terms-Aryan on one hand and Semitic on the other. Masuzawa also explores the complex relation of "world religions" to Protestant theology, from the hierarchical ordering of religions typical of the Christian supremacists of the nineteenth century to the aspirations of early twentieth-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who embraced the pluralist logic of "world religions" and by so doing sought to reclaim the universalist destiny of European modernity.
Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity
Many scholars of Islam are interested in creating a liberal, inclusive, pluralistic, feminist, and modern version of the religion that they believe to be explicit in the pages of the Qur'ān, but missed by earlier interpreters. In so doing, they create "good" Islam and, in the process, seek to define what does and does not get to count as authentic. As the purveyors of what they now believe to be veritable Islam, they subsequently claim that rival presentations are bastardizations based either on Orientalism and Islamophobia (if one is a non-Muslim) or misogyny and homophobia (if one is a Muslim that disagrees with them). Instead of engaging in critical scholarship, they engage in a constructive and theological project that they deceive themselves into thinking is both analytical and empirical. This book provides a hard-hitting examination of the spiritual motivations, rhetorical moves, and political implications associated with these apologetical discourses. It argues that what is at stake is relevance, and examines the consequences of engaging in mythopoesis as opposed to scholarship.
