1,722,242 research outputs found
Introduction
Full text link"Sure as death.” This idiom refers to the quality of inevitability of a certain phenomenon. In this sense, certainly, death is a sure thing. However, beside the fact that as humans we all share the condition of a limited lifespan, beyond the datum of inescapable annihilation at some point in our lives, death remains distressingly ambiguous: “uncertainty . . . surrounds death” (Bloch and Parry 1982: 17). We do not know when we will die, or how, or where, let alone are we able to be sure of what follows death or what the exact status of a deceased person is. This ambivalence is brought out clearly in the scene referred to in the above quote from Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982: 14). A son (the author himself) is contemplating old photographs of his recently deceased father. Life and death seem intertwined, but oddly so, not in any way one could be sure of. Auster suggests different renditions of this entanglement of life and death and the “or,” and “or rather” indicate the irreducible uncertainty of the situation. The ambiguities surrounding death are ultimate in two senses: they refer to the end of a lifetime and they are so elementary. This volume deals with various manifestations of such ultimate ambiguities
Berger (Peter) Luckmann (Thomas) La Construction sociale de la réalité
No full textSéguy Jean. Berger (Peter) Luckmann (Thomas) La Construction sociale de la réalité. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°64/2, 1987. p. 238
Berger (Peter L.) The Social Reality of Religion
No full textSéguy Jean. Berger (Peter L.) The Social Reality of Religion. In: Archives de sociologie des religions, n°28, 1969. pp. 177-179
Berger (Peter) Luckmann (Thomas) La Construction sociale de la réalité
No full textSéguy Jean. Berger (Peter) Luckmann (Thomas) La Construction sociale de la réalité. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°64/2, 1987. p. 238
Berger (Peter L.) Kirche ohne Auftrag am Beispiel Amerikas
No full textFürstenberg Friedrich. Berger (Peter L.) Kirche ohne Auftrag am Beispiel Amerikas. In: Archives de sociologie des religions, n°15, 1963. p. 160
Berger (Peter L.) La Religion dans la conscience moderne
No full textSéguy Jean. Berger (Peter L.) La Religion dans la conscience moderne. In: Archives de sociologie des religions, n°31, 1971. p. 177
Berger (Peter L.) The Social Reality of Religion
No full textSéguy Jean. Berger (Peter L.) The Social Reality of Religion. In: Archives de sociologie des religions, n°28, 1969. pp. 177-179
Berger (Peter) La Rumeur de Dieu. Signes actuels du surnaturel
No full textPoulat Emile. Berger (Peter) La Rumeur de Dieu. Signes actuels du surnaturel. In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n°37, 1974. pp. 188-189
Configurations of Values
No full textCentral to public debates about commonalities and differences between citizens of different religious and cultural backgrounds is the compatibility of cultural values and the norms through which these values are actualized. Values, and changes in value systems, are the central theme in Chapter 14 of this volume, in which Peter Berger discusses a specific strand of structural anthropology that he emphasizes can be useful in the analysis of both empirical and historical data: the theory of value as developed by Louis Dumont, which has its roots in Durkheim’s sociology of religion. Berger begins by contextualizing Dumont’s theory in the history of the discipline of anthropology by outlining the main features of Dumont’s analytical framework and how it has been developed by Joel Robbins. He sketches how Dumont, informed by his Indological and anthropological research on the Hindu caste system, developed a general theory of hierarchy, the latter being just the other side of the coin of value (as posing a value introduces hierarchy). While Lévi-Strauss was mainly concerned with binary oppositions in cultural structures, Dumont argued that relationships between ideas are hierarchical. Left and right, for instance, are not simply opposites but stand in a hierarchical relation. When taking an oath or shaking hands after making an agreement, only the right hand is appropriate because it stands for the whole person. Dumont discussed the various properties of value and added the concepts of “context” and “level” in order to account for a dynamic relationship between ideas and values within a certain framework he called ideology. Joel Robbins further developed the dynamic potential in Dumont’s theory in explaining processes of change and globalization. In line with Mason’s argument that the label of “religion” as a universal cultural category often obfuscates more than it illuminates outside the Western world, the author demonstrates that the theory of value as developed by Dumont and Robbins provides an important perspective from which to study religion, precisely because it does not depend on “religion” as a privileged analytical concept or domain
Death, ritual, and effervescence
Full text linkDeath as ultimate ambiguity—“ultimate” in the double sense of the suspense concerning individual destiny, and the more general elementary political, social, and religious questions that it raises—is closely connected with emotions. That death is related to emotions seems obvious enough; less so, perhaps, is why these emotions should be ambivalent. Various articulations and shades of sorrow are expected to be at the core of the emotional experience of a death. However, the affective response to a death is much more diverse, as scholars have variously noted: love turns into fear, longing into disgust, sorrow into anger
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