The Political Landscape of Early State Religions

Swenson, Edward

doi:10.1002/9781118605936.ch25

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…The stelae of Preah Khan of Angkor and Ta Prohm report respectively the foundation of 121 fire shrines and 102 hospitals throughout the empire (Coedès 1906, 48;Coedès 1941, 266;Hendrickson 2008). In both cases, these buildings followed a consistent architectural template (Figure 15.2) that facilitated their identification (Dagens 2005;Pottier and Chhem 2010;Swenson 2013). Although not all such establishments have been located, a number of these buildings, made of laterite and/or sandstone, have already been identified.…”

mentioning

confidence: 84%

Āśramas, Shrines, and Royal Power

Socheat¹,

Estève²,

Soutif³

et al. 2023

The Angkorian World

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mentioning

confidence: 84%

Āśramas, Shrines, and Royal Power

Socheat¹,

Estève²,

Soutif³

et al. 2023

The Angkorian World

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“…However, many archaeologists still tend to embrace this position, as reflected especially in the employment of quasi-evolutionary typologies, including performative and liturgical rites or imagistic and doctrinal modes of religiosity (Bloch 1989, Hastorf 2007, Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994, Moore 2004, Rappaport 1999, Whitehouse & Hodder 2010. Performative and imagistic rites (infrequent, emotionally powerful, and executed through creative improvisations) are thought to be prevalent in more egalitarian (shamanistic) societies, whereas liturgical and doctrinal modes are characteristic of hierarchical polities and institutionalized religions (for a full critique of imagistic and doctrinal modes of religiosity, see Swenson 2013). However, are episodic Ndembu initiation rites any less rule-governed, ritualized, or materially elaborated than a Catholic mass or a puja liturgy in a Jain temple?…”

Section: Conclusion: the Historical Contingency Of The Ritual Framementioning

confidence: 95%

“…54, 190;Swenson 2013). The faculty of ritual to recalibrate relational networks can also explain its appeal to anthropologists interested in agency and process, especially given its capacity to make present the absent and negotiate the "paradox of mediation and immediacy" (see Descola 2013, pp.…”

Section: Ritual As Materials Processmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Archaeology of Ritual

Swenson

2015

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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The main objective of this review is to consider what archaeology can contribute to general anthropological theories on "ritual in its own right" and to highlight the potential for advancing knowledge about ritual experience as a distinctive material process. An examination of the exceptional material frame marking ceremonial events demonstrates the value of ritual as a heuristic and challenges archaeologists who privilege the interpretation of religion, affect, ontology, or cultural rationalities as necessarily determinative of the ritualization process. Therefore, archaeologists should not interpret ritual places and residues as immediate proxies of other sociopolitical realities but instead should base their inferences on cross-contextual analyses of archaeological data sets. Ultimately, attention to the amplified materialization of the ritual process, often entailing the performative bundling of disparate material items in archaeological deposits, permits a re-evaluation of theories proposing that ritual is intimately connected to agency and power. 329

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The influence of religious authority in everyday life: a landscape-scale study of domestic architecture and religious law in ancient Hawai’i

McCoy

Codlin

2016

World Archaeology

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Public architecture has proven its utility as a metric for the materialization of religious authority; however, archaeologists have been less successful at identifying how ideology is materialized outside formal ritual settings. Here we address the question of how religious laws that dictated separation of people and activities -known as the kapu system -influenced the way homes were built in pre-European contact era Hawai'i. On the landscape scale, we consider three variables that could be correlated with the influence of religious authority: distance to a local temple marking a district boundary, the degree of daily interaction within the community and investment in household architecture. Our findings suggest religious authority was materialized with a high degree of ubiquity across all house sites without regard to any of these factors, a pattern consistent with pervasive religious authority across daily life. ARTICLE HISTORY

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The Political Landscape of Early State Religions

Cited by 4 publications

References 33 publications

Āśramas, Shrines, and Royal Power

Āśramas, Shrines, and Royal Power

The Archaeology of Ritual

The influence of religious authority in everyday life: a landscape-scale study of domestic architecture and religious law in ancient Hawai’i

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