Prey into hunter : the politics of religious experience

Bibliographic Information

Prey into hunter : the politics of religious experience

Maurice Bloch

(The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, 1984)

Cambridge University Press, 1992

  • : pbk

Available at  / 38 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Lectures delivered at the University of Rochester on Feb., 1987

Includes bibliographical references (p. 110-113) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Maurice Bloch has for many years been developing an original and influential theory of ritual. In this book he synthesises a radical theory of religion. Rituals in a great many societies deny the transience of life and of human institutions. Bloch argues that they enact this denial by symbolically sacrificing the participants themselves, so allowing them to participate in the immortality of a transcendent entity. Such sacrifices are achieved through acts of symbolic violence, ranging from bodily mutilations to the killing of animals. The theme is developed with reference to rituals of many types, from a variety of ethnographic sources, and Bloch shows that even exogamous marriage rituals can be reinterpreted in the light of this thesis. He concludes by considering the indirect relation of symbolic and ritual violence to political violence.

Table of Contents

  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgements
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Initiation
  • 3 Sacrifice
  • 4 Cosmogony and the State
  • 5 Marriage
  • 6 Millenarianism
  • 7 Myth.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1

Details

Page Top