ebooks History of Western Civilization: A Handbook by William H. McNeill in History

Description

With this influential book of essays; Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction; one neither theological nor willfully ideological.Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown; Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional; anthropological; historical; and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses; religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity; cognition; and curiosity—simply put; as the result of human labor; one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them."These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence; creativity; and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies; suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual; and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay; on Jonestown; demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason; Religious Studies Review