A THEORY OF PURITY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION

유요한 Syracuse University 2005 해외박사

정결과 오염을 규정하는 체계들이 시대를 막론하고 거의 모든 문화들에서 발견되며 상이한 문화들의 정결 체계들 사이에서도 유사성이 주목되어 왔음에도 불구하고, 비교종교학 분야에서는 정결과 오염의 개념에 대한 정교한 이론들을 발전시키지 못한 것이 사실이다. 현재는 사회-기능주의적인 이론들이 정결과 오염의 연구에 있어 지배적이다. 이러한 사회-기능주의적인 이론들이 주로 정결의 사회적 차원에만 초점을 맞추어 온 반면, 본 논문은 정결의 종교적 차원을 진지하게 고려할 필요성을 강조한다. 본 논문은 비교종교학의 관점에서 정결과 오염의 이론이 필요하다는 문제 의식 아래, 정결의 종교적 차원을 포괄하는 새로운 이론을 제시하고자 하는 것이다. 이러한 이론은 고대 지중해 문화권의 세 종교 전통을 비교 연구하는 비교종교학의 작업을 통해 이루어진다. 고대 이집트, 그리스, 이스라엘의 정결의 개념에 대한 비교 연구는, 내 이론적인 틀이 일반적인 정결 개념 뿐 아니라, 특정한 개별 문화들의 정결 개념들을 이해하는 데 유용하다는 것을 보여줄 것이다. 본 논문의 이론에 따르면, "정결"은 첫째, 우주론적 세계관 내의 각 영역들의 필수적인 조건들을 가리키며, 둘째, 전체 우주론적 세계관을 구성하는 다양한 영역들 사이의 상호 관계를 규정하는 법칙들을 의미한다. "부정"은 한 영역이 그 영역의 필수적인 조건을 충족시키지 못하는 상태로 이해되며, "오염"은 한 영역이 다른 영역의 원리적 법칙들을 용납하지 못할 경우에 발생하는 영역들 간의 부정적인 영향을 가리킨다. 전술한 세 문화들의 우주론들에서는, 영역들은 신성의 영역- 비신성의 영역과 삶의 영역-죽음의 영역이라는 두 개의 기본적 구별에 근거하고 있다. 이러한 두 개의 큰 구별은 삶과 연관된 신성의 영역, 죽음과 연관된 신성의 영역, 삶과 연관된 비신성의 영역, 죽음과 연관된 비신성의 영역 등 네 개의 주요 영역들을 발생시킨다. 이 구별들의 특정한 방식들은 각 문화 내에서 다양하지만, 본 논문의 이론은 특정한 각 문화들에 적용된다. 이러한 것은 마지막 장에서 내 이론이 일본 종교의 정결 개념에 적용되는 모습을 통해 입증될 것이다. Though systems regulating purity and pollution are found in almost every culture and across historical time periods, and though the similarities among the purity systems of different cultures have been noticed, the field of comparative religion has failed to develop sophisticated theories about the concepts of purity and pollution. Currently, social-functionalist theories are dominant in the study of purity and pollution. While the social-functionalist theories have focused almost exclusively on the social dimensions of purity, my work has highlighted the necessity of also taking seriously the religious dimensions of purity. This dissertation represents my attempt to offer a much-needed theory of purity and pollution from the perspective of comparative religion. A comparative study of three ancient Mediterranean cultures - ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Israel - shows the usefulness of my framework for understanding purity in general, as well as the purity ideas of individual cultures, more specifically. According to my theory, purity refers to, first, the requisite conditions or necessary qualities of each realm within a cosmological worldview, and second, the rules that regulate the interrelationship among the various realms that constitute the total cosmological worldview. Impurity is understood as the failure of a realm to satisfy its requisite condition and pollution is the negative effects of one realm on another in cases when their rules cannot tolerate each other. In the cosmologies of these three cultures, realms were based on two basic distinctions - divine vs. non-divine, and life vs. death. These two distinctions generated four major realms: the divine realm of life; the divine realm of death; the non-divine realm of life; and the non-divine realm of death. While the specific way that the distinctions play out in a culture is variable, my theory of purity and pollution still holds, which will be affirmed through applying my theory to the Japanese case in the last chapter.

Private Religion: Reading Wittgenstein on Religious Experience, Language, and Subjectivity

Morse, Evan Winter ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Yale University 2016 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

The primary aim of this project is to show that the critique of radical privacy developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations can be applied to theories of private religion and the rhetoric of experience that underlies them. Such theories of private religion, which understand religion essentially as the expression of private, ineffable experiences, were once standard in the study of religion. These models have been widely rejected on the basis of constructivist critiques of the possibility of unmediated experience. I argue that constructivism relies implicitly on arguments drawn from the Investigations, but that because this Wittgensteinian heritage has gone unacknowledged, constructivist arguments that unmediated experience is impossible suffer from a fatal overreach. Wittgenstein does not seek to refute the possibility of private experience. Instead, he leads his readers to see that this notion is nonsense that has never been imagined by its proponents. If theorists of private religion were really thinking of religious experience and language as radically private, they would have to imagine human beings as subjects entirely divorced from broader shared forms of life, but this is exactly what they never do. Since I argue that Wittgenstein's role in debates about private religion has to this point been only implicit, I first examine, in chapter one, the prevailing picture of Wittgenstein's thought in the study of religion. Using William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience as a touchstone, I show that in his private, unpublished remarks on religion, Wittgenstein characterizes true religion as a matter of feeling or passion, which is rooted in direct, individual experience. In the second chapter, I argue that this account of religion reflects the assumptions of a tradition of theories of private religion according to which religion has its origin in immediate private experience. Such theories of private religion have recently faced many lines of critique, preeminent among which are constructivist critiques that seek to demonstrate that the unmediated experience at the heart of private religion is impossible because experience is always constructed. I argue, in the third chapter, that constructivism depends implicitly on Wittgensteinian arguments against radical privacy. The constructivists use forms of the so-called private language argument to demonstrate that the unmediated experience that theories of private religion require cannot be an element of a public discourse. In the fourth chapter, I argue that relying on these arguments secondhand rather than reading the Investigations has crippled constructivism. Recent, "resolute" interpretations of the Investigations show that, while Wittgenstein does undermine theories of radical privacy, he does not employ demonstrative arguments to do so. Finally, in chapter five, I show that constructivist arguments against unmediated experience actually contribute to giving substance to nonsensical notions of private religion. In demonstrating that private experience cannot function discursively, constructivism reifies the rhetoric of experience that supports private religion. My resolutely disciplined critique of private religion instead highlights the inability of theories of private religion to imagine religious experience apart from the shared context they seek to deny. Private religion shows itself to be manifestly absurd. This claim represents two major advances. First, my explicitly Wittgensteinian intervention in constructivist debates about unmediated religious experience shows a way out of what has been an intractable debate. Second, my resolute critique models a philosophical methodology that is constitutively interdisciplinary for the study of religion.

Learning from Maoshan: Temple Construction in Early Medieval China

Pettit, J. E. E Indiana University 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Maoshan, a range of mountains southeast of Nanjing, has been home to one of China's most influential Daoist temples. One of Maoshan's most famous patriarchs was Tao Hongjing (456–536 CE), a polymath whose wide range of interests included alchemy, genealogy, mapmaking, herbal medicine, and Daoist ritual. Scholarship on Tao has focused on his editorial work of the Shangqing Revelations, an assortment of mid-fourth-century scriptures written at Maoshan. I build on these earlier studies by demonstrating that Tao promoted the Shangqing Revelations as a prospectus for prospective clients interested in building temple compounds. I first study Tao's commentary to the Shangqing Revelations in which Tao persuaded his principal sponsor, Liang Emperor Wu, to invest in temple construction at Maoshan. I argue that Tao interpreted the revelations as evidence that his sponsor's salvation was predicated, at least in part, on the completion of a temple compound. I further show that Tao's skills as an excavator and architect of temples helped justify his leadership over this burgeoning institution. In the middle chapters of this study, I analyze the ways in which Tao's persona as a "temple builder" would likely have been received by potential clients. The methodology of these chapters is explicitly comparative: I examine hagiographies, scriptures, and inscriptions composed in both early imperial and medieval China. I rely heavily on narratives written in both Buddhist and Daoist contexts. This disparate group of texts illustrates the history that made Tao's status as a temple developer a recognizable social role by his era. It further establishes that Tao's temple building was one expression of a cultural practice that transcended doctrinal and geographic boundaries. In the final chapter, I examine Tao's construction at Maoshan during his post-515 abbacy, a period when he remade Maoshan into a Buddhist-Daoist ritual site. While Tao might have altered the doctrinal symbols of his temple, his representation of his abbotship remained consistent with his earlier writings. Tao's writings on the cooperation between clerics and sponsors, I conclude, formed a template for later religious entrepreneurs at Maoshan.

The wandering archetype: C. G. Jung's "Wotan" and Germanic-Aryan myth and ideology

Dohe, Carrie Beth The University of Chicago 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation explores the cultural and intellectual background of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung's 1936 essay, "Wotan." Challenging the widespread perception that this essay mainly represents Jung's depth-psychological diagnosis of National Socialism, the dissertation uses discourse analysis and historical research to show that "Wotan" portrays Jung's convictions about the racial essence of Germanism (Germanentum). He had begun formulating these ideas as early as 1912, drawing on a complex discourse about the "Germanic barbarian" that extended over 2,000 years and was first developed by Caesar and Tacitus as justification for Roman imperial attempts to colonize central Europe. 1,500 years later, German humanists transformed Tacitus's ambivalent portrait of the Germanic peoples into a discourse of self-validation. By Jung's era, this discourse had gone through several permutations. Germanists, philosophers, artists and founders of new religious movements in the larger German cultural domain incorporated the image of Rome as state-builder into the self-image of the Germans, while they projected onto the Jews the image of Rome as over-civilized and degenerate. They then incorporated the negative portrayal of the Germanic barbarian as lazy, undisciplined and overemotional into the image of the "dark-skinned savage" of modern European colonial discourse. Furthermore, they embraced Tacitus's positive description of the Germanic tribes as youthful, unspoiled and free as essential racial attributes of Germanism. Finally, scholars in multiple disciplines secularized and legitimized these ideologically laden motifs through scientific language, including that of anthropology, psychology, medicine, racial science, and the science of religion. The dissertation explores how Jung fashioned his image of an inherited collective Germanic psyche by combining these various discursive threads with the spirituality of self-redemption (Selbsterlosung). This new form of religiosity, promulgated by a wide range of German-cultural artists, writers, and religious thinkers, was rooted in the Protestant belief of an inward calling by God, yet secularized under the impact of Nietzschean philosophy and combined with German volkisch ideology to become a source of self-definition and new spirituality in the broader German-cultural realm. The dissertation follows the permutations in Jung's image of "Wotan the Wanderer," from the god's first appearance in Jung's writings in 1912 through the posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections , to demonstrate how Jung used Wotan to create a profile of a collective Germanic psyche that he believed was most capable of generating out of its depths the necessary spiritual solution to the malaise of modern society. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the employment of Jung's theory of inherited archetypes and a Germanic-Aryan collective unconscious within significant segments of the contemporary Germanic religious revival known as Heathenism or Asatru.

The Messiah in the "Parables of Enoch" and the Letters of Paul: A comparative analysis

Waddell, James A University of Michigan 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

In the first century CE Jewish identity was defined in a context of significant religious diversity. This presents those who read Paul's Letters with a problem: how to locate Paul's thought within the complicated matrix of Jewish intellectual traditions of this period. A comparative analysis of the Messiah in the Book of the Parables of Enoch and the Letters of Paul, this study locates one aspect of Paul's thought, his christology, in the context of Jewish intellectual traditions of the first century CE. Conceptual elements of messianic traditions are identified in these documents by examining the nature and functions of the divine figure and the nature and functions of the messiah figure. This has implications for understanding divine and human agency and the relationships between mediatorial figures and the one God in Jewish literature from the Second Temple period. The literature demonstrates a complex variety of expressions for describing interactions between the divine figure and all other created beings. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the Book of the Parables and the Letters of Paul share specific conceptual elements of messianic traditions. The combination of shared elements is so striking as to preclude the possibility that the Book of the Parables and the Letters of Paul constituted independent, parallel developments. It cannot be claimed, however, that Paul was familiar with the text of the Book of the Parables ; there are no direct quotes of the Book of the Parables anywhere in Paul's Letters. We can say, however, that Paul was familiar with the conceptual elements of the Enochic messiah, and that Paul developed his concept of the Kyrios out of the Son of Man traditions in the Book of the Parables of Enoch. This study argues that at least one facet of Paul's thought, his christology, was heavily influenced by Enochic Son of Man traditions.

Biblical narration and the death of the rhapsode

Kawashima, Robert Saiji University of California, Berkeley 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation addresses a problem in the history of Israelite literature and religion long recognized by biblical scholars: what I call the “novelty” of biblical narrative. Long before Herodotus and even Homer, Israelite writers practiced a conspicuously innovative narrative art, anticipating in striking ways the modern novelist's craft. In spite of the undeniable linguistic tradition that runs from biblical literature back to its closest known antecedent, the Ugaritic narrative poems, there are substantive differences between the two corpora, raising important questions regarding the nature and origins of biblical narrative. I attempt to answer these questions through an analysis of its language, style, and literary technique. Scholars have found evidence in both Ugaritic and early biblical poetry of an oral-formulaic tradition analogous to that proposed for Homer by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. In light of linguistic and literary theories of narrative and of the modern novel in particular, however, I argue that biblical narrative is the result of a specifically written verbal art that we should counterpose to the oral-traditional art of epic. For biblical prose utilizes grammatical forms not ordinarily found in the spoken language. Furthermore, the medium of writing enabled the development of narrative techniques foreign to the improvisational art of epic. The tradition has faded and the rhapsode has died. In ancient Israel we must reckon instead with the author and his text. Finally, I relate the art of biblical narrative to ancient Israelite thought. I specifically argue that underlying the “Mosaic revolution” of Israel's incipient monotheism is what Foucault would call an “episteme.” While the “pagan” religions of Mesopotamia, Canaan, and we might add archaic Greece, maintained a metaphysical continuity between the divine and mundane worlds and thus held to a monistic view of the universe, the religion of ancient Israel made a metaphysical distinction, apparently for the first time in the history of knowledge, between matter and mind. It is this gesture of thought that lies at the heart of the frequently noted distinctiveness of biblical religion, providing an appropriate historical context for ancient Israel's remarkable literary achievement.

Bullfighting and bull taming: Formations of religion and masculinity

Robinson, Gabriel A The University of Chicago 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

What does bullfighting have to do with religion and gender? Scholars, poets, critics, and fans have alleged that they are intertwined. They have described bullfighting as a survival of ancient sacrifice, an expression of a primordial masculinity, or a ritual restoration of a lost pagan wildness or sexual force. Such claims are problematic insofar as they use the authority of scholarship to shore up dubious claims about the unchanging nature of masculinity and the sacred. Yet they point towards a centuries-long history in which material-semiotic practices of fighting, taming, and telling stories about bulls have served to construct religion and gender in Spain. Bullfighting does makes moving statements about what it means to be male, to be human, and to seek to transcend ordinary mortal limits and fears. But to understand the emotional and persuasive power of these ideological statements we need to set the present-day signifying uses of men's and bulls' bodies in bullfights against the layered history of their past uses. My dissertation uses a comparative analysis of myths and rituals drawn from the nine centuries of bullfighting's documented existence to restore a sense of this historical push and pull among different social actors, out of which bullfighting's gendered and religious meanings were (and are) formed.

Kabbalah and Neo-Confucianism: A comparative morphology of medieval movements

Lior, Yair Boston University 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This study is a comparative analysis of the rise of Neo-Confucianism in China during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the emergence of the school of Kabbalah in France and Spain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. This comparison is grounded in the observation that the two schools, in spite of their obvious differences, were an outcome of separate reactions to the rising popularity of foreign paradigms. I draw a distinction between synthetic and analytic modes of operation (modalities), arguing they represent contrasting cultural paradigms characterized by divergent cognitive, social, linguistic, and cultural temperaments. I argue that both the classical Chinese and Jewish worldviews conformed to the basic characteristics of the synthetic modality, and that they entered a period of acute crisis as a result of the rising popularity of the analytic Buddhist and Greek philosophical traditions respectively. As I define it, the synthetic worldview is characterized by the affirmation of the body and this-worldly life, an emphasis on ritual and community, cultural particularism, and associative, non-analytical modes of thought. The contrasting analytic worldview stresses individualism, de-contextualization of data, other-worldliness, contemplative spirituality, and universalism. In the context of this project, I develop a methodological framework I call genetic-morphology. This methodology seeks to integrate a synchronic search for cross-cultural patterns with an emphasis on the diachronic evolution of traditions as they change and adapt to new environmental conditions. It also integrates data from diverse academic fields such as religious studies, anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, biology, and systems theory. As such this study offers a gestalt appreciation of cultural systems, their internal dynamic, the symbiotic relationship between their constituent parts, and the function of information in their operation. This dissertation concludes that Kabbalah and Neo-Confucianism can be understood as "defense theologies," or adaptive responses devised to protect their classical synthetic modes of operation from the cultural pressures of analytic paradigms. Kabbalah and Neo-Confucianism were unique in their ability to appropriate powerful features from analytic traditions and subordinate them to native synthetic sensibilities, thereby equipping the Jewish and Chinese traditions with revolutionary theologies that dismantled the challenges of foreign analytic paradigms.

The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel

Doak, Brian R Harvard University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation explores the role of giants in the narrative and historiographic worlds of symbol, geography, and religion in ancient Israel. The Nephilim, Anaqim, Rephaim, Emim, Zamzumim/Zuzim, some Gibborim, and other individuals (e.g., Goliath) can all be classified as "giants"---not only with respect to their height and other physical properties, but also with respect to the negative moral qualities assigned to giants in antiquity. Previous interpreters have treated giants as merely a fantastical prop against which God's agents emerge victorious. I argue that giants are a theologically and historiographically generative group, through which we gain insight into central aspects of ancient Israel's symbolic world. All that is overgrown or physically monstrous represents a connection to the primeval chaos that stands as a barrier to creation and right rule. In this sense, giants represent chaos-fear, and their eradication is a form of chaos maintenance by both human and divine forces. Moreover, I demonstrate a series of affinities between the Bible's presentation of its giants and aspects of Greek epic tradition (e.g., the Iliad, Catalogue, Works and Days, Cypria, and the Gigantomachy/Titanomachy), as well as other Near Eastern traditions. Both giants and heroes were thought to represent a discrete "race" of beings, both were thought to be larger than contemporary people, and both lived and flourished, in the historical imaginations of later authors, throughout the Bronze Age and largely ceased to exist at the end of this period. The size, strength, and physical excess of heroes and giants lead to cataclysmic judgment through the "flattening" effects of warfare and flood. After their death, these figures retain possibilities for an ongoing life in cult, and, in both Greek and Deuteronomistic historiography, the heroes and giants are positioned in a heroic age. This study argues that the Bible's invocation of the giant constitutes a creative evaluation of Canaan's heroic past, and stands as a forceful reminder of the place of Israel's deity among the axes of power that giants represent. The biblical engagement with the category of the giant signifies a profound meditation on the category of epic in the ancient world---even a decisive, ultimate rejection of epic and heroism as controlling tropes of the biblical worldview.

Ecologies of participation: In between shamans, diviners, and metaphysicians

Cabot, Zayin Lawrence California Institute of Integral Studies 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation revolves around the riddle of how to honor seemingly disparate traditions such as West African (Dagara) divinatory practices and Western philosophical praxis. The project, following the participatory approach of Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, sets out to honor these differences by embracing the agapeic-erotic metaphysics of William Desmond, and in so doing delimits modern distinctions between science, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. Rather than move beyond the important scholarly contributions of these fields, however, this dissertation embarks on an interdisciplinary adventure between these traditions by critically reading the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in parallel with Desmond. This project articulates multiple ecologies of participation, with totemism, animism, and naturalism foremost among them. It clarifies how Descola and Viveiros de Castro's robust reading of animist/Amerindian shamanic perspectivism is in keeping with Ferrer and Sherman's participatory enaction. It is critical of Viveiros de Castro's dismissal of totemism as overly abstract, as well as Descola's conflation of naturalism solely with post-Enlightenment thought, and his broad use of the category of analogism to include disparate traditions such as Vedic, Ancient Chinese, Greek, West African, and Central American thought. By way of clarifying this critique, this dissertation applies the same participatory understanding offered to animism by Descola and Viveiros de Castro to both totemic (divinatory) and naturalist (metaphysical/philosophical) enactions, placing all three under the broader heading of ecological perspectivism. The subsequent comparative lens allows for a more balanced reading of these three ecologies by broadening the use of these terms. By including the work of Desmond, it also answers important concerns leveled by critics regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of Descola and Viveiros de Castro's assertions regarding ontological relativity. In so doing, this project sets the stage for renewed dialogue between what are often seen as radically divergent traditions (e.g., the animism of the Achuar, the totemism of the Guugu Yimithirr, and the naturalism of modern science).