In this bold theoretical work, Bruce Lincoln explores the ways in which myth, ritual, and classification hold human societies together--and how, in times of crisis, they can be used to take a society apart and reconstruct it. Without overlooking the role of coercive force in the maintenance (or overthrow) of social structures, Lincoln argues his thesis with compelling illustrations drawn from such diverse areas as Platonic philosophy, the Upanishads of India, African rituals of kingship, ancient Celtic banquets, English gentlemen's clubs, the Iranian Revolution, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, professional wrestling, and the Spanish Civil War. Professional wrestling, Lincoln shows, can be viewed as a drama of classification in which the American dream of opportunity is set forth, challenged, and finally firmly reestablished in good-versus-evil encounters between wrestlers categorized by their relative "Americanness." The exhumation of nuns' mummified corpses by leftist forces and their sympathizers during the Spanish Civil War, often dismissed by liberal historians as an embarrassing aberration, is more readily understandable as a ritual in which the Spanish Catholic Church, which had long played the role of "the religion of the status quo," was symbolically exposed as corrupt in both a moral and concretely physiological sense. Discourse and the Construction of Society draws on work in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, classics, indology, and semiotics to demonstrate the multiple uses of myth, ritual, and symbolic classification in effecting ideological persuasion and evoking the sentiments that bind people to one another within distinct social groupings while separating them from others, who are thereby defined as outsiders. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study provides challenging new insights into the complex dynamics of social cohesion and change.

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification

Politics & Social Sciences

Lincoln, Bruce

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

Now reissued in an expanded edition, this unique book offers the first full-length treatment of women's initiation rites in five cultures. Asserting the critical importance of such rites in a world dominated by men, Lincoln shows that in these societies women's initiation involves not only a transformation of the self but also of the cosmos. Considering initiation rites among the Tiyyar of South India, the Navajo, the Tiv of West Africa, and the Tukuna of the Northwest Amazon, Lincoln argues that unlike men's rites, women's rites do not impart a change in hierarchical status, but rather a "cosmic" change which offers religious compensation for women's generally low socio-political status. Lincoln concludes with a brilliant reconstruction of ancient Greek initiation rites based on his original interpretation of the Demeter and Persephone myth. With a new chapter and bibliography, Emerging from the Chrysalis will be stimulating reading for those interested in ritual and its cultural impact.

Emerging From the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women's Initiation

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

In this bold theoretical work, Bruce Lincoln explores the ways in which myth, ritual, and classification hold human societies together--and how, in times of crisis, they can be used to take a society apart and reconstruct it. Without overlooking the role of coercive force in the maintenance (or overthrow) of social structures, Lincoln argues his thesis with compelling illustrations drawn from such diverse areas as Platonic philosophy, the Upanishads of India, ancient Celtic banquets, professional wrestling, and the Spanish Civil War. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study--which draws on works in history, semiotics, anthropology, sociology, classics, and indology--offers challenging new insights into the complex dynamics of social cohesion and change.

Sociology

The tale of a legendary scholar, an unsolved murder, and the mysterious documents that may connect them\nIn early 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu had fled his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-one years of age. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he was seen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate and the founding father of the field of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier.\nBut then Culianu began to receive threatening messages. As his fears grew, he asked a colleague to hold onto some papers for safekeeping. A week later, Culianu was in a Divinity School men's room when someone fired a bullet into the back of his head, killing him instantly. The case was never solved, though the prevailing theory is that Culianu was targeted by the Romanian secret police as a result of critical articles he wrote after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.\nWhat was in those mysterious papers? And what connection might they have to Culianu's death? The papers eventually passed into the hands of Bruce Lincoln, and their story is at the heart of this book. The documents were English translations of articles that Eliade had written in the 1930s, some of which voiced Eliade's support for the Iron Guard, Romania's virulently anti-Semitic mystical fascist movement. Culianu had sought to publish some of these articles but encountered fierce resistance from Eliade's widow.\nIn this book, author Bruce Lincoln explores what the articles reveal about Eliade's past, his subsequent efforts to conceal that past, his complex relations with Culianu, and the possible motives for Culianu's shocking murder.

Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and his Protégé's Unsolved Murder

History

World

Oxford University Press, Inc.

Without overlooking the role of coercive force in the maintenance (or overthrow) of social structures, Lincoln argues his thesis with rich illustrations drawn from such diverse areas as Platonic philosophy, the Upanishads of India, ancient Celtic banquets, professional wrestling, and the Spanish Civil War. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study--which draws on works in history, semiotics, anthropology, sociology, classics, and indology--offers challenging new insights into the complex dynamics of social cohesion and change. The second edition includes three new chapters, new images, and an updated bibliography.

Anthropology

All groups tell stories about their beginnings. Such tales are oft-repeated, finely wrought, and usually much beloved. Among those institutions most in need of an impressive creation account is the state: it’s one of the primary ways states attempt to legitimate themselves. But such founding narratives invite revisionist retellings that modify details of the story in ways that undercut, ironize, and even ridicule the state’s ideal self-representation. Medieval accounts of how Norway was unified by its first king provide a lively, revealing, and wonderfully entertaining example of this process. Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln illuminates the way a state’s foundation story blurs the distinction between history and myth and how variant tellings of origin stories provide opportunities for dissidence and subversion as subtle―or not so subtle―modifications are introduced through details of character, incident, and plot structure. Lincoln reveals a pattern whereby texts written in Iceland were more critical and infinitely more subtle than those produced in Norway, reflecting the fact that the former had a dual audience: not just the Norwegian court, but also Icelanders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose ancestors had fled from Harald and founded the only non-monarchic, indeed anti-monarchic, state in medieval Europe. Between History and Myth will appeal not only to specialists in Scandinavian literature and history but also to anyone interested in memory and narrative.

Between History and Myth: Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

How does religion stimulate and feed imperial ambitions and violence? Recently this question has acquired new urgency, and in Religion, Empire, and Torture, Bruce Lincoln approaches the problem via a classic but little-studied case: Achaemenian Persia. Lincoln identifies three core components of an imperial theology that have transhistorical and contemporary relevance: dualistic ethics, a theory of divine election, and a sense of salvific mission. Beyond this, he asks, how did the Achaemenians understand their place in the cosmos and their moral status in relation to others? Why did they feel called to intervene in the struggle between good and evil? What was their sense of historic purpose, especially their desire to restore paradise lost? And how did this lead them to deal with enemies and critics as imperial power ran its course? Lincoln shows how these religious ideas shaped Achaemenian practice and brought the Persians unprecedented wealth, power, and territory, but also produced unmanageable contradictions, as in a gruesome case of torture discussed in the book’s final chapter. Close study of that episode leads Lincoln back to the present with a postscript that provides a searing and utterly novel perspective on the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib

Ancient Civilizations

The University of Chicago Press

Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions

Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude.The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian. Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.

Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude.The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian. Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lincoln, Bruce. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lincoln, Bruce

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lincoln, Bruce. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification

Emerging From the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women's Initiation

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification

Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and his Protégé's Unsolved Murder

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification

Between History and Myth: Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State

Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib

Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions

Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions