Religious Regimes and State Formation

Perspectives from European Ethnology

Edited by Eric R. Wolf

Subjects: Religion And Politics
Paperback : 9780791406519, 298 pages, August 1991
Hardcover : 9780791406502, 298 pages, August 1991
Out of print (Hardcover)

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Table of contents

Foreword
Daniel Meijers and Adrianus Koster

Introduction
Eric R. Wolf

1. Religious Regimes and State-Formation: Toward a Research Perspective
Mart Bax

2. Marian Apparitions in Medjugorje; Rivalling Religious Regimes and State-Formation in Yugoslavia
Mart Bax

3. The Struggle for Control of the Irish Body: State, Church, and Society in Nineteenth Century Ireland
Tom Inglis

4. Saints, Shrines, and Politics in Contemporary Israel
Alex Weingrod

5. The Role of Ritual in State-Formation
David I. Kertzer

6. Clericals Versus Socialists: Toward the 1984 Malta School War
Adrianus Koster

7. The Sociogenesis of the Hasidic Movement: An Orthodox-Jewish Regime and State-Formation in Eighteenth-Century Poland
Daniel Meijers

8. Cultural Change and Religious Belief: The Armenians of Cyprus
Susan P. Pattie

9. Secular and Religious Responses to a Child's Potentially Fatal Illness
William A. Christian Jr.

10. Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism
Jane Schneider

11. The Virgin Mary and Marina Warner's Feminism
Peter Loizos

12. The Politics of Religion on the Hispanic-African Frontier: An Historical-Anthropological View
Henk Driessen

13. License, Death, and Power: The Making of an Anti-Tradition
Mark Tate

List of Contributors

Index

Description

This book intends to systematically overcome the received practice of treating religion and politics as wholly separate and independent domains. It studies power and meaning in their "antagonistic interdependencies" rather than approaching religion purely as a realm of meaning without reference to issues of power, or dealing with politics as the province of power without raising questions of meaning. Religion and politics are thus seen in relation to one another, and attention is focused on the disputes about how political and religious regimes should be formed.

Religious Regimes and State Formation will convince the reader that god and politics have much in common and offers surprising new perspectives on old problems.