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Imagining Religion (Paperback, New edition)
Loot Price: R963
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Imagining Religion (Paperback, New edition)
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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
"
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