bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Song Loves the Masses
Authors: Herder Johann Gottfried , Bohlman Philip V.
Published: September 2017

Had Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) written a book on music, it would have been Song Loves the Masses. One of the great polymaths of modern intellectual history, Herder wrote influential contributions to philosophy, theology, anthropology, aesthetics, history—and music. His writings on musical subjects are among his most comprehensive, ranging from studies of music in the origins of human speech to the song practices underlying a universal humanity. Herder’s collections of these practices, to which he referred collectively as “folk songs” sounded world music in its complex diversity and provided the modern foundations for the fields of anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Many of the folk songs themselves entered the classical music of Europe, significantly transforming its aesthetics and history. The first-ever translations of Herder’s nine most sweeping works on music unfold across the chapters of this book. From the first attempts to forge theories of folk song and publish anthologies in the 1770s through the translations of the Spanish epic, El Cid, and the biblical Song of Songs to the aesthetics of transcendence that imbued his final essays, the chapters in Song Loves the Masses together transform our modern understanding of music and history.
Prologue
Authors: Herder Johann Gottfried , Bohlman Philip V.
Published: September 2017

Over the course of more than two centuries modern readers have returned to Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings because of the wide-ranging influence on the many areas of thought that are foundational to modern intellectual history. In this prologue, Herder’s contributions to theological writings from world religions provide touchstones for the foundations of world music in intellectual history. His studies of Christianity and Judaism, as well as early Hindu writings, become common historical subject matter, joined through translation and the widespread presence of music in seminal texts. The prologue identifies the ways in which Herder’s universal thought leads to a new aesthetic and ontology of music, combining the object of song with the subject of singing.
“Homer und Ossian” / “Homer and Ossian”
Authors: Herder Johann Gottfried
Published: September 2017

The magnificent goal entrusted to those seeking to understand history, to bring humankind’s works of art to light, to breathe life into the birth of the spirit, to endow art with a depth and fullness that leads to the harvest of fruit—this goal unfolds as a ...
Letter 46, Theologische Schriften / Theological Writings
Authors: Herder Johann Gottfried
Published: September 2017

From time to time I have sent you poetic pieces, among them those in aesthetic genres from hymns, songs, parables, fables, etc., and with a few thoughts to accompany them. I do not believe, however, that such things offer atonement for what has otherwise been neglected, for I do not entirely understand what, in correspondence of this kind, might really atone for neglect. The letter writer ceases to write when he wishes, and the reader ceases to read when she comes to the end of the letter. Given the sheer abundance of reading material about which we speak, moreover, it is only likely that we skip over several lines here and there. You will have long known from your good sense and intelligence that poesy is ...
The Epic as Nation
Authors: Bohlman Philip V.
Published: September 2017

A full translation of the Iberian epic, El Cid, remained one of Herder’s most ambitious project throughout his life. Herder drew from several different sources, both Spanish and French, to create an expansive work of 70 cantos, which reflect the transmission in the smaller narrative forms of the Spanish romance and their realization in German through the line-by-line decasyllabic forms of epic, thereby representing its singability in oral tradition. The Cid’s story of encounter between religions in medieval Al-Andalus was widely known already in eighteenth-century Europe, but Herder’s translation, which would appear in hundreds of versions into the twentieth century, became one of the most sweepingly influential texts of epic nationalism.
Music Transcendent and Sublime
Authors: Bohlman Philip V.
Published: September 2017

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late essay Herder, a polemic against his former teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reveals the extent to which he has moved into a fully aesthetic domain in his concern for the universal history of humanity. Embodying the subjectivity of song and singing, music acquires the force of transcendence, and it therefore aspires to the Enlightenment ideals of the sublime. In Herder’s “On Music,” human beings are endowed with a degree of understanding that allows them to perceive the traits that make music unlike any other form of expression.
Paradox of Preservation
Authors: Watt Laura Alice , Lowenthal David
Published: September 2017

Point Reyes National Seashore has a long history as a working landscape, with dairy and beef ranching, fishing, and oyster farming; yet, since 1962 it has also been managed as a National Seashore. This book chronicles how national ideals about what a park “ought to be” have developed over time and what happens when these ideals are implemented by the National Park Service (NPS) in its efforts to preserve places that are also lived-in landscapes. Using the conflict surrounding the closure of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the book examines how NPS management policies and processes for land use and protection do not always reflect the needs and values of local residents. Instead, the resulting landscapes produced by the NPS represent a series of compromises between use and protection—and between the area's historic pastoral character and a newer vision of wilderness. The book covers topics relating to environmental history, conservation, public lands, and cultural landscape management.
Public Parks from Private Lands
Authors: Watt Laura Alice , Lowenthal David
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores the history of making parks from privately owned lands, a process that at first relied on donations from states or wealthy individuals, but gradually involved the direct purchase of land. Parks are often celebrated as “belonging to the American public,” but in many cases, they belonged to someone else first. The chapter thus considers the implications of making parks from private lands. After all, these places come with their own history, and often with residents and their own uses for and meanings of the land, which do not generally fit well with the simplified “empty scenic nature” model of park management.
The Politics of Preservation
Authors: Watt Laura Alice , Lowenthal David
Published: September 2017

This chapter puts the oyster controversy in the context of the larger story of PRNS, noting parallels between the present conflict and earlier park management dynamics. The use of formal planning processes (or lack thereof) has moreover been applied inconsistently in ways that seem to privilege natural resources and pressure the working landscape. The Seashore's long-awaited update of its general management plan, which is intended to provide an overall sense of management direction and goals for the park, remains stalled. An increasingly selective use of planning, science, and history seems to consistently downplay and erode the working landscape, even while publicly the NPS staff profess to support the ranches.
Point Reyes as a Leopoldian Park
Authors: Watt Laura Alice , Lowenthal David
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter shows that, elsewhere in the world, the notion of “what a park is for” is indeed changing—from the inclusion of residents in many European parks and of indigenous peoples in parks in developing countries (that is, where they hadn't already been kicked out), to world heritage sites that recognize the importance of community connections and local landscape meanings, and even to the NPS, at particular park units where the management staff is supportive of change. It recommends specific policy modifications at Point Reyes, as well as more broadly within the NPS, that could improve the long-term prospects of collaborative management of working landscapes and better reconcile their coexistence with wilderness.
Freiheitsdreck (2)
Authors: Brodsky Seth
Published: September 2017

This chapter adopts Michel Foucault's canonical conception of heterotopia as another heuristic, a way of suggesting that New Music, as an otherwise extremely heterogeneous field of labor and mode of cultural production, could be considered precisely such an “other space,” one in which the more robust and hegemonic cultural fantasies of greater Europe are analyzed, broken apart and broken down, eventually traversed. It further suggests that these hegemonic fantasies first come to New Music as music. That is, it is in the medium, the form and format of (older) music, that these fantasies are made accessible to New Music in the first place. New Music encounters “joyful brotherhood” not primarily as a complex signifier, but insofar as it has a sound, a body, a coordinate in the symbolic order “music” that is, in this case, Beethoven's Ninth.
Latin Letter Collections before Late Antiquity
Authors: Salzman Michele Renee
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the variety of Latin letter collections that the late antique reader would have inherited. These range from letters by scholars, poets, statesmen, philosophers, orators, military officials, and Christian leaders. The chapter also considers how these letter collections were formed and circulated among late antique readers.
Greek Letter Collections before Late Antiquity
Authors: Jones Christopher P.
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the variety of Greek letter collections that the late antique reader would have inherited. These range from letters—real, spurious, or imagined—by orators, philosophers, military officials, and Christian leaders. The chapter also considers how letter collections were formed, how the ancient reader confronted questions of authenticity, and ancient discussions of the art of letter writing.
The Letter Collection of Basil of Caesarea
Authors: Radde-Gallwitz Andrew
Published: September 2017

In a recent article, Roy Gibson has underscored the differences between ancient letter collections and their modern presentations. The latter, Gibson shows, tend to arrange letters in chronological order, subordinating the question of the collection’s original form and purpose to the interests of the modern biographer. The corpus of letters of Basil of Caesarea exemplifies Gibson’s theme well. When, in 1730, the Benedictine editors of St. Maur imposed order on the seeming incoherence of the arrangement in the manuscripts available to him, they did so by placing the letters in a putative chronological order. All subsequent editions and translations have followed suit, and thus the study of Basil’s letters has served a largely biographical purpose. This chapter disentangles, as much as possible, the original collection or collections of Basil’s letters from the modern reception of them. There is evidence for the circulation of small collections of Basil’s letters during his lifetime, collections arranged by addressee for purposes ranging from apologetic to polemical. This chapter examines the history of the collection’s formation, arrangement, and content.
The Letter Collection of Libanius of Antioch
Authors: Hoof Lieve Van
Published: September 2017

Libanius’s letter collection is the largest to survive from antiquity, and indeed it is one of the most important sources on the socio-cultural history of late antiquity. Nevertheless, it has been only partially translated and selectively studied; this chapter, by contrast, focuses on the collection as a whole. First, it analyzes the three most important manuscripts, which shows 300 roughly identical letters in varying order. Second, it examines the collection’s design and its effects on interpretation. Finally, it dives into the question of editorial origins: did Libanius or some posthumous admirer compile the collection? Thus this chapter will show that reading Libanius’ letters in their original order—not in the chronological order first proposed by Otto Seeck and adopted by most editors and translators—not only enriches our understanding of the individual letters, but also shows the value of the letter collection as a unified literary composition.
The Letter Collection of Ruricius of Limoges
Authors: Mathisen Ralph W.
Published: September 2017

The letters of Ruricius survive only in the Codex Sangallensis 190, written in the late eighth or early ninth century. They cover the period from ca.470 until ca. 507, the crucial transitional phase between imperial and barbarian Gaul, and are divided into two books, the first with eighteen letters and the second with sixty-five. The collection also contains 13 letters written to Ruricius. The collection therefore provides a rare opportunity to see sequences of letters in an exchange. These letters present a picture of life in late Roman Gaul that significantly complements that provided by Ruricius’ better-known confrères, such as Sidonius, Avitus, and Ennodius. The Ruricius collection has a very local flavor and, in an intimate and domestic way, describes everyday life in Visigothic Aquitania. The first book of letters was carefully organized as a unit in its own right. The second book is more difficult to assess.  Even though there are no indications of divisions in the manuscript, there are suggestions of attempts to organize some of the letters into internally consistent "dossiers." The second book also seems rather to preserve, at the beginning, traces of plans to create two additional books, and, toward the end, elements of a rudimentary filing system.
The Letter Collection of Aeneas of Gaza
Authors: Watts Edward J.
Published: September 2017

The 25 short letters of Aeneas of Gaza form one of late antiquity’s smallest and most idiosyncratic epistolary collections. The addressees of the letters and their epistolary personalities are mostly obscure. The collection instead seems to consist of a series of distinctive epistolary moments in which Aeneas shows his wit, irony, and penchant for baroque metaphors across a range of epistolary types. Its first letter, however, suggests that the collection was likely once much larger and well-developed, with the personalities of the addresses more vivid and Aeneas’s rhetorical flourishes more steadily paced. This suggests that we may now have an example of a truncated collection that offers insight into the ways that later Byzantines may have interacted with a late antique letter collection.
Conclusion
Authors: Simmons Lizbet
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter revisits the push-pull factors of punitive schools and reviews their role in expanding dependency and correctional vulnerability. It first discusses the politics of dependency, a theory that governments, lacking in their ability to govern and to provide stability to a population by way of opportunity, manage those populations instead through dependency. It is argued that we have no other promising choice but to divest from punitive policies—to cease practices of suspension and expulsion. We can defund the dependency model while shoring up resources for public education by refusing to suspend, expel, or push students out of schools because of disciplinary infractions, and insisting instead on inclusion and equality. This approach is centered on a politics of care and an insistence that humans are at every moment humanized.
Hymns for the Fallen
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: September 2017

Hymns for the Fallen listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to stimulate reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies—such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper—as well as lesser known films, Todd Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich, culturally resonant aspect of the cinema, not only invokes the realities of war, but also shapes the American audience’s engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all three elements of film sound—dialogue, sound effects, music—and considers how expressive and formal choices on the soundtrack have turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the commercial space of the cinema.
Introduction
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: September 2017

The introduction lays out the structure of Hymns for the Fallen in broad strokes, noting the chronological scope of the study (35 war films made after the close of the Vietnam War), the subgenre (prestige combat films) and the book’s larger approach to film sound and film music. The three elements of the soundtrack—dialogue, sound effects, and music—and their relationship analytically within the book are also introduced. The book’s larger analogy between serious war films and war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is drawn by comparison of scenes from Hamburger Hill (1987) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The formative impact of the Vietnam War on Hollywood combat film production is also noted. The figures of the American soldier and veteran are presented as central both to combat film narratives and to the target audiences for these films.
Disembodied Voices
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: September 2017

Disembodied voices resound across the post-Vietnam Hollywood combat film. Some are heard in real time by way of military technology, such as radios which let soldiers and audiences experience battles which are heard but not seen (acousmatic battles, in Michel Chion’s term). Different wars present different technological opportunities to unify the dispersed nature of modern combat by way of the soundtrack. Disembodied voices also enter these films by way of tape recordings sent from home, allowing the voices and perspectives of women into otherwise all-male films. Letters heard in voice-over frequently deliver the voices of soldiers who died in the line of duty. When present, voice-over narration in these films is assigned to specific characters who offer their individual perspective on events. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line takes this approach an extreme, combining voice-overs attached to specific characters with acousmatic voices that speak from a kind of soldier’s over-soul.
Helicopter Music
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: September 2017

This chapter considers the sonic representation of the helicopter in combat films set in Vietnam and the Greater Middle East. The sound of unseen helicopters has frequently been used as a kind of effects-made music underlining tense narrative moments or dialogue. The sound of helicopter rotors in scenes set on or near helicopters has often been modulated (lowered in volume) or replaced entirely by music. Special attention is given to scenes of soldiers inside helicopters riding into battle and to how music has been used to shape the cinematic experience of helicopter-borne battle. Film form often follows musical form when helos take to the skies on-screen. The helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the supposedly diegetic sound of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now is analyzed in detail. The editor Walter Murch built the sequence on Wagner’s musical form, expressing an equivalence between musical pleasure and the pleasures of firing weapons.
1989 and After
Authors: Rutherford-Johnson Tim
Published: September 2017

Beginning with examples by Steve Reich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Merzbow, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Bright Sheng, this chapter introduces the diversity of composition being produced at the end of the 1980s and explains the need for a new form of music history that can reflect and organize that variety. It provides a rationale for 1989 as a starting point for that history and describes six main developments in society, culture, and technology that have enabled and inspired developments in Western art music since then: social liberalization, globalization, digitization, the Internet, late capitalist economics, and the green movement.
Fluidity
Authors: Rutherford-Johnson Tim
Published: September 2017

The Internet and digital technology have given rise not only to new genres of music, but also new ways of using and thinking about musical material and form. Using as a guide Nicolas Bourriaud’s writings on contemporary art–especially The Radicant–this chapter considers how digitization has affected compositional aesthetics from the transcriptions of Peter Ablinger and translations of Olga Neuwirth, to disembodiment in the music of Stefan Prins and the journey forms of Jennifer Walshe.
Smart Girls
Authors: Pomerantz Shauna , Raby Rebecca
Published: September 2017

Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popularized books touting girls’ academic success. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls now play on an equal playing field so have nothing to complain about. But contrary to the widespread belief that girls have surpassed the need for support because they are ‘doing well’ in school, smart girls struggle in ways that have been made invisible. Why do some girls choose to dumb down? How do smart girls handle being labeled ‘nerd’ or ‘loner? How do they deal with stress, including the ‘Supergirl’ drive for perfection? How are race and class part of smart girls’ negotiations of academic success? And how do smart girls engage with the sexism that is still present in schools, in spite of messages to the contrary? Set against the powerful backdrops of post-feminism and neo-liberalism where girls are told they now ‘have it all’, Smart Girls sheds light on girls’ varied everyday experiences, strategic negotiations of traditional gender norms, and the savoring of success – all while keeping their eyes on an A+ and a bright future.
The Blueness of Green
Authors: Doherty Gareth
Published: September 2017

This chapter looks at the infrastructure of blue (water resources) in Bahrain's built environment, as well as the efficacy of blue in keeping the country green. Beginning with a description of the Bahraini light and the colors of the sea, from technical, historical, and social perspectives, the chapter studies the water system and the politics of treated sewage effluent (TSE). Over half the water of the state is used in the irrigation of green space in Bahrain—an indication of the enormous value accorded to green. Because Bahrain is an island, the intensity of the light and the colors it animates are amplified due to the humidity generated by the surrounding sea.
Loft Jazz
Authors: Heller Michael C.
Published: September 2017

The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. This book provides a study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, underground archives, and the radical politics of self-determination.
Why does LGBTQ IPV Happen?
Authors: Messinger Adam M.
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines theories of LGBTQ IPV perpetration and the degree to which they are supported by evidence. These theories are divided into several categories: perpetration theories that are shared between HC and LGBTQ IPV (including theories focused on socialization, power imbalances, dependency, self-justifications, and psychological traits), contested perpetration theories regarding gender (including evidence supporting competing views in the literature that gender is a relevant factor for neither HC nor LGBTQ IPV, only HC but not LGBTQ IPV, or both HC and LGBTQ IPV), and perpetration theories unique to LGBTQ IPV (including theories regarding experiencing discrimination, internalizing discriminatory attitudes, and degree of outness). Relatedly, this chapter also examines barriers to escape for victims (including not recognizing IPV, dependency, fear, and hurdles in reaching out for help). Finally, this chapter exposes barriers that are making it more difficult to see the big picture of why LGBTQ IPV happens (including fears of excusing abusers and blaming victims, challenges in distinguishing causes from outcomes, and doubts over whether there are one or multiple explanations of IPV). Ultimately, this chapter emphasizes the complexity of IPV and calls for more population-specific theorizing. The chapter concludes with implications for future policy, practice, and research.
“The Enemy Comes from Our People”
Authors: Eisenbrandt Matt
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the recent history of El Salvador, with a focus on the importance of coffee as a crop that built fortunes for a small group of families. The wealth concentrated in the hands of oligarchs led to massive economic inequality throughout the twentieth century, and an uprising in the 1930s was put down in such a brutal manner that it stifled opposition for decades and came to be known as the Matanza. This chapter chronicles U.S. government support for anti-Communism and counterinsurgency efforts that created the death squads in El Salvador, continued military repression amid growing cries for reform in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of insurgent groups targeting the oligarchs, and the bloody response of the military and death squads. After a reformist military coup in 1979, Roberto D’Aubuisson and civilian supporters carried out a public crusade denouncing advocates of reform as Communists, with the country getting closer to civil war.
“You Know Better Than to Ask That”
Authors: Eisenbrandt Matt
Published: September 2017

This chapter describes the legal team’s search for the getaway driver, Amado Garay, who testified against Alvaro Saravia and Roberto D’Aubuisson in 1987 but was not seen again. Through a coincidence, this team discovers that Garay is under witness protection in the United States. The legal team begins a complicated and frustrating effort to confirm whether Garay remains in witness protection and how to get in contact with him. The team also suspects that Roberto Santivañez, who made public disclosures about D’Aubuisson and others during the 1980s, could be under protection as well.
“A Rabid Anti-Communist”
Authors: Eisenbrandt Matt
Published: September 2017

The legal team returns to El Salvador for interviews crucial for gathering evidence about the death squad financiers and understanding further details of the Romero assassination. A worker for the ARENA party in the early 1980s discloses significant information about party members and their links to violence. She confirms testimony that she previously provided to the Truth Commission and provides a new statement for the legal team detailing payments made by party faithful and insider information about the facts of Romero’s murder.
The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America, 1926–1960
Authors: Johnson Sylvester A.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explains how the FBI’s interaction with Muslims predates 9/11 by many decades, going back to the early history of the FBI. It examines the FBI's efforts to surveil and infiltrate the Moorish Science Temple of America, from the 1930s until 1960. Racial assumptions shaped the FBI’s response to this group, particularly following their refusal to conform to the Selective Service Act during the Second World War. The chapter demonstrates how the FBI’s attitudes to race and religion intersected to produce a clear pattern of hostility toward this religious group despite the FBI’s repeated findings that the group was not a threat to national security.
Policing Kashmiri Brooklyn
Authors: Rana Junaid
Published: September 2017

This chapter explains the arrest and incarceration of Kashmiri political activist Ghulam Nabi Fai and his connections to the Pakistani neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In so doing, the author accounts for the special significance of the so called War on Terror and its impact on American Muslims. The chapter explains how this expanded scale of policing stifles everyday forms of political organization and dissent. Because this involves non-state actors who are involved in liberationist nationalist activity, the notion of ‘terror’ itself is blurred and becomes a convenient scapegoat in a complex of criminalization and illegality of political acts of critique, debate, and the organization of funds. Thus, the FBI program of counter-terrorism builds upon legacies of surveillance, infiltration, and profiling based on intermingling notions of race, religion, and immigration.
Introduction
Authors: Mayblin Maya , Norget Kristin , Napolitano Valentina
Published: September 2017

The chapter discusses what a contemporary Anthropology of Catholicism would look like, both through and beyond the ‘sacramental imagination’, as a political and institutional form, a contested set of practices, and an embodied and ethical orientation to the world. Through a discussion of ethnographic works on Catholicism both new and old, this chapter reflects both on what is distinctive about Catholicism as a ‘religious’ form, and how a focus on Catholicism can open windows onto areas of debate within the discipline of anthropology more widely.
Excerpt from “The Dinka and Catholicism”
Authors: Lienhardt Godfrey
Published: September 2017

Like Julian Pitt-Rivers, Godfrey Lienhardt (1921–93) was a student of E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford. His great ethnography Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka, published in 1961, is regarded as one of the great social anthropological studies of religion. In his research (1947–50) on this southern Sudanese nomad population (neighbors of the Nuer, the people researched by Evans-Pritchard), Lienhardt approaches religious symbolism, imagery, and leadership as informed intimately by the Dinka’s own everyday experience of the world. He altered dominant social anthropological perspectives on religion of the time by drawing attention to the discrepancy and contradictions that existed between people’s everyday experience of “religion” and their conscious, reflexive articulations about those practices.
The attention to skepticism and ambiguity is evident in this essay (first published in 1982, and reproduced here almost in its entirety) that reflects on the interaction between the Dinka and Italian Catholic missionaries, who had been in the Sudan since the mid-nineteenth century. Lienhardt begins by asking, “What kind of translation, as it were, of experience is required for a Dinka to become a nominal or believing Christian?” He responds to this question with circumspection, stressing the challenges in any missionary encounter, which he aptly characterizes as not one of simple straightforward instruction and conversion (or rupture), but one fraught with gaps in understanding and divergent intentions on both sides. Many of these gaps inhere in language, both idiomatic and semantic terms, with many ideas being “caught in translation,” leading Catholicism to “stick” unevenly and in unpredictable ways across the Dinka world. Thus the Dinka accepted the Church mostly, Lienhardt suggests, through ideas of progress and mostly material development that were quite foreign to Dinka experience and, somewhat ironically, also to the ideas and principles taught by the missionaries. Catholic doctrine and eschatology were thus absorbed into the Dinka life-world through a kind of “linguistic parallax” (a displacement or change in the perception of objects in space from different points of observation). Lienhardt erroneously characterizes the church as “the bearer of a theoretically unified body of theological and social doctrine”—a portrayal similar to widespread views even today. But the acuity of his attention to the intricacies and uncertainties of the exchange of meanings that is part of missionization—and to the political economic realities shaping the encounter—distinguishes this work as a pioneering study in the anthropology of missions, especially in colonial Africa. In this respect Lienhardt’s essay might be seen as a precursor to a great tradition of poststructuralist works on African religious missionaries, postcolonialism, and social transformation.1 His focus on Catholicism, however, provides us a glimpse of the dynamics of “syncretism” in situ as a process that cannot be understood outside its social, historical, and political context.
Excerpt from Person and God in a Spanish Valley
Authors: Christian William A.
Published: September 2017

The book Person and God in a Spanish Valley, by anthropologist and historian William A. Christian, is a classic twentieth-century study in the anthropology of Catholicism. It embraces key spatial and temporal dynamics of Catholicism through the analysis of devotional behavior across a range of intersecting axes and contexts. Among these, gender, class, and moment within the life course are shown to be of particular importance in shaping the quality and concerns of individual faith. In chapter 3, of which this is an abridged version, Christian shows how different styles of payer point to different economies of affection, obligation, forgiveness, and indebtedness. “Putting God in one’s debt” clearly illustrates that Catholicism is not only a practice of devotion but also an economy of circulation of affects and indebtedness. Devotional prayers can work either to keep humans and the divine separate or to bring humans increasingly close to the divine. However, Person and God also does much to emplace Catholicism within a broader history of agrarian politics and reform in northern Spain and is a remarkable work for its mastery of historical perspective as well as its fine ethnography. In particular, it offers some important anthropological insights on the local repercussions of the Second Vatican Council (1963–65), revealing shifts toward new forms of priesthood, less concerned with a hierarchical reproduction of the church (and its connection to land patronage) and more inclined to a lay participation. The effect of such changes in Catholic doctrine and orientation on long-existing systems of “triadic patronage” in the area is one of the key questions that this work addresses.
Among the numerous monographs on Mediterranean villages that came out in the 1970s, Christian’s is perhaps unusual in the degree to which it foregrounds Catholic forms of reasoning and practice, rather than backgrounding them to discussions of patronage and kinship and political economy. The importance of Person and God for a modern anthropology of Catholicism cannot be overestimated, for it has been key in establishing a core “analytical grammar” for understanding popular Catholic practices that subsequent generations of scholars continue to revisit. Indeed, the work has figured as an important reference point in various twenty-first-century writings on the anthropology of Christianity,1 having achieved something of a status as “the go-to” citation for discussions about the presence of an “earlier” anthropology of Christianity.
Excerpt from “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century”
Authors: Bynum Caroline Walker
Published: September 2017

In this chapter the renowned medievalist scholar Caroline Walker Bynum brings our attention to a striking historical occurrence: in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the concern with and attachment to Eucharistic devotion was overwhelmingly female. Why this gender bias, and at that time? Christian women were predominantly “inspired, compelled, comforted and troubled by the Eucharist” and in many different forms—from miraculous apparitions, to experiences of ecstasy connected to the attendance and ingestion of the Eucharist, to the showing of sensorial excesses in its presence. Bynum shows how material and physical receptions of the body of Christ were expressed not only as forms of ecstasy but also as gendered modes of living the Imitatio Christi. This thirteenth-century corporeal, female experience of the Eucharist is connected to a particular moment in the life of Christ—the transition between life and death. Positioned as “brides” and hence as the erotic counterparts of Christ, women and female mystics exploited the full potential of Christ’s own corporeality rather than his otherworldly nature.
Bynum’s work constitutes a formative reference point for scholars of Catholicism across a range of disciplines for the obvious reason that it deals so elegantly with themes of substance, gender, bodies, and devotional forms of Catholic practice. Her work continues to be an original source of inspiration for anthropologists because of its remarkable sensitivity to religion as an embodied, practice-generative engagement with the world. Bynum should also be considered as important for the “new” anthropology of Catholicism for her pioneering work on the gymnasticity of gender and for the attention it draws to the sublimated erotic tension that exists between institutional doxa and mystical aesthetics.2 In Bynum’s work, gender is not presented as merely one among a number of potential analytical foci for elaboration of Catholicism; rather, it is the very ontological architecture of the religious, and hence an essential topic for scholars seeking to understand Catholicism as a translocal force.
Containment and Contagion
Authors: Mayblin Maya
Published: September 2017

This chapter concerns the contradiction in modern Catholicism that women can be God-like but not priest-like. Drawing on research into the Roman Catholic Women Priest movement, it explores how this contradiction persists through the manipulation of metaphors of contagion and containment in relation to notions of sin and virtue. Just as the sins of the one couple (Adam and Eve) contaminate the many and for generations thereafter, the moral failures of any one individual, by analogy, can be applied metaphorically to all of humankind. Yet grace, too, can be contagious, spreading among persons (underlying certain Catholic models of religious practice). Problems arise when some people’s sins turn out to be more contagious than others. Through a mixture of ethnographic and historical sources, the discussion traces how sin and grace are differently containable or contagious according to gender. The infinite manipulability of this sin/grace complex helps to illuminate how opposition to the ordination of women remains institutionally entrenched even as male sex-abuser priests have come to dominate the media. The chapter concludes that Catholicism’s multiform problems with gender are reproduced via this politics of contagion and containment, and that radical repercussions are at stake in sin’s containment.
Opulence and Simplicity
Authors: Bandak Andreas
Published: September 2017

In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicity often collides with clergy who appear to collect money for this-worldly purposes or for the sake of what is perceived as their own benefit. Lamentation over such perceived opulence attests to a tension between grace, gift, and debt. This chapter explores such tension in attending to how moral personhood is fashioned through various engagements with prayer, surrender, and debt. Where David Morgan has argued for a particular Catholic sacrificial economy (2009), wherein individuals are placed in charged relationships, this chapter examines the inherent tension between simplicity and opulence. Catholicism, it argues, may very well work by asserting a particular emphasis on the holy office that appear opulent, which necessitates a counter-movement in the form of purification and work towards greater simplicity.
Making a Home in an Unfortunate Place
Authors: Molina J. Michelle
Published: September 2017

This chapter advocates moving the thought of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) to the center of conversations that animate religious studies today, namely the themes of "embodiment," "materiality", and "intersubjectivity." Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology utilizes a notion of a lived world that accounts for humans and objects simultaneously as a “knot of relations.” Phenomenology in this vein is both a descriptive method, as well as a philosophic practice, that is, an intellectual stance that challenges scholars to loosen their hold upon the category of "religion." Meaning cannot be posited in advance as "religious" but rather, meaning is emergent, knotted into embodied relations. Thus, this chapter advocates utilizing phenomenological method to take note of the variety of concepts and objects, selves and others that emerge from embodied experience.
What Is Catholic about the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis?
Authors: Orsi Robert A.
Published: September 2017

This chapter explores a question often asked about survivors of clerical sexual abuse: do they remain Catholic? Such a question, this chapter argues, fails to account for the complex reality. Survivors were abused as youngsters so they were usually unable to determine this for themselves. The insistence of adults that children and teenagers who were abused continue going to church was another way of denying the reality of the abuse. (“They drove me to my abuser,” one survivor said of his parents.) Many survivors remained faithful Catholics into adulthood. But most survivors describe a moment when being at Mass became physically and emotionally painful. For many the decision to stay or leave was not simple or final. Some survivors developed strategies for protecting themselves from further fear and harm as they continued attending Mass; others found ways of being both inside and outside the church; still others made different choices over time. The struggle of many survivors with the church in which they were religiously formed, encountered the sacred, and were abused—abuse that always had religious context and significance—offers a revealing perspective on Catholics and Catholicism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
In Search of Safety
Authors: Owen Barbara , Wells James , Pollock Joycelyn
Published: September 2017

Based on extensive mixed-methods data, this book examines gendered violence and conflict in women’s prisons. Conflict and violence in the prison are located in intersectional inequalities and cumulative disadvantage, reflecting their pathways to prison. Women in prison share common characteristics, many mediated by structural, historical, and cumulative disadvantage. T pathways approach is expanded to include women’s experience within these structural clusters of intersectional inequalities. In their search for safety, women must negotiate these inequities through developing forms of prison capital. The history and philosophies underpinning women’s imprisonment, the gendered impact of prison and drug policy, and the variations in rates of imprisonment for differentially-situated women are also used to contextualizes the imprisonment of women. Prison conditions, aggravated by crowding, inadequate medical and mental health care and the lack of gender-informed operational practice, contribute to the gendered harm of imprisonment. A women’s search for safety is described through the lens of prison capital, forms of human, social and cultural capital women leverage to combat the gendered harm of imprisonment. Forms of capital combine with the intersectional inequality of imprisonment to condition the context for trouble and harm among women and with staff. The harm of women’s imprisonment can be located in human rights violations inside. The way forward is found in implementing international human rights standards in U. S. prisons, focusing on the promise of the Bangkok Rules.
Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality
Authors: Adamczyk Amy
Published: September 2017

Across the world, public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, in other countries, very few people find homosexuality acceptable. Why are there such big differences in attitudes about homosexuality? Using survey data from almost ninety societies, this book shows that cross-national differences in how residents view homosexuality can largely be explained by three country characteristics: the strength of democratic institutions, the level of economic development, and the religious context. While these factors can explain a lot of the differences across the world, the way they shape attitudes within individual nations varies substantially. Each country has a different story to tell about how these forces affect public opinion. Country case studies, a content analysis of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews are used to unpack the characteristics working within individual and key sets of nations. Attention is given not only to demographic and country characteristics that shape public opinion but also to the way these factors work within specific countries and combine with a nation’s unique history and social context to shape attitudes, laws, policies, and enforcement regarding homosexuality.
Introduction
Authors: Adamczyk Amy
Published: September 2017

The introductory chapter opens with an overview of the massive divide in public opinion about homosexuality and laws related to it across the world. The introduction poses the question of why attitudes about homosexuality differ so substantially across the globe, and it discusses the book’s mixed-methods research design, which is used to investigate this issue. Using explanatory sequential design, this chapter unpacks how the book’s analysis will proceed, starting with an examination of survey data from almost ninety societies. The chapter explains how the cross-national quantitative data fit with the three comparative country case-study chapters that focus on nations that have majority Protestant, Muslim, and Catholic populations. There is also a discussion about how the quantitative examination of attitudes in Confucian societies fits with the Taiwanese interviews, which are used to better understand the forces shaping residents’ attitudes.
The Importance of Religion, and the Role of Individual Differences
Authors: Adamczyk Amy
Published: September 2017

Drawing on an original analysis of the last three waves of World Values Survey, this chapter explores the role of a nation’s religious context and individual demographic factors for shaping cross-national attitudes. Ideas drawn from rational choice theories of religion and religious contextual effects provide theoretical insight into how personal religious beliefs and overall levels of religious belief shape attitudes. The analysis shows that more religious residents and residents of nations with high levels of religious belief are more likely to disapprove of homosexuality. Distinctions are also drawn between the various major religions. Nations with a substantial number of people who adhere to Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and a variety of Protestant faiths tend to have residents with more conservative views than those living in majority Catholic and mainline Protestant nations. The chapter ends by assessing the individual demographic factors that shape attitudes.