Sacred Performances - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Sacred Performances write by M. E. Combs-Schilling. This book was released on 1989. Sacred Performances available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. With penetrating insight Combs-Schilling illuminates the remarkable survival of one of the world's oldest monarchies, still ruling after 1200 years. The author unravels the paradox of this ancient yet progressive institution that has weathered invasion, economic collapse, and colonial assult. The pillars of stability for which political analysts typicaly search -- military strength, bureaucratic control, and commerical prosperity -- have often been absent in Morocco, sometimes for centuries. How then has the monarchy stood firm? In this remarkable book, Combs-Schilling argues that the answer is to be found in the distinctive forms of ritual practice developed during times of great crises. Unique among Islamic governments, the Moroccan monarchy became cnetral to the popular celebrations of the most sacred rituals of Islam, cloaking itself in their sanctity. Combs-schilling breaks new ground in thinking about ritual. The author explores the consequences of the replication and reinforcement of Morocco's national ceremonies in viallages and homes and the metaphorical equivalence thereby built. The author outlines how ritual metaphors simultaneously fuse the monarchy with the hallowed prophets of Islam and the mundane structures of family life. In elucidating the forcefulness of ritual embodiment the book challenges anthropological theory. It demonstrates that rituals created realities by inscribing them deeply within the individual's body and mind. Rituals use eros and physical substance to build imaginative abstractions. Performances of exquisite beauty and grace make the monarchy intrinsic to definitions of male and female, to experience of birth, intercourse, death, and to the ultimate longing to break death's bonds. Combs-Schilling creates a model for national political analysis that takes meaning as well as strategic power into account. The author applies the anthropological analysis of rituals to new arenas -- the nation-state and the world political economy -- without ever losing sight of the individual and the flow of daily life. The book clarifies a distinctive form of nationalism that expands the boundaries articulated by Anderson in Imagined Territories. Rituals rather than territory or administration came to define the Moroccan monarchy and the Moroccan nation under Western assault, and enabled them to survive. For the novice, the book provides an unusual and compelling entry into Islamic culture and history. Yet it is provocative for the expert in its reinterpretation of the strategic dimensions of Muhammad's marriages and the political potency of the rituals of Islam where power, sacrifice, and sexual identity converge. By revealing the link between national ceremony and individual identity, the author calls into question the popular view that sharply divides East and West and suggests commonalities in the structures of political-sexual power that are built into societies that operate within the cultural contexts of the world's three monotheistic faiths: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England write by . This book was released on 2005-01-01. Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life – the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking – may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors – such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan – as well as less canonical examples – the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets – the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.
The Sacred Act of Reading
The Sacred Act of Reading - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Sacred Act of Reading write by Anne Margaret Castro. This book was released on 2020-01-13. The Sacred Act of Reading available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.
Miracle Plays and Sacred Dramas
Miracle Plays and Sacred Dramas - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Miracle Plays and Sacred Dramas write by Karl von Hase. This book was released on 1880. Miracle Plays and Sacred Dramas available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
The Spectrum of the Sacred
The Spectrum of the Sacred - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Spectrum of the Sacred write by Baidyanath Saraswati. This book was released on 1984. The Spectrum of the Sacred available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
