To view prices and purchase online, please login or create an account now.



Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East: Girardian Conversations at Catalhoeyuk

Hardback

Main Details

Title Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East: Girardian Conversations at Catalhoeyuk
Authors and Contributors      Edited by Ian Hodder
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:272
Dimensions(mm): Height 235,Width 158
Category/GenreArchaeology by period and region
ISBN/Barcode 9781108476027
ClassificationsDewey:939.4
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations Worked examples or Exercises; 12 Halftones, black and white; 5 Line drawings, black and white

Publishing Details

Publisher Cambridge University Press
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publication Date 14 March 2019
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

This volume brings together two groups engaged with understanding the relationships between religion and violence. The first group consists of scholars of the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, for whom human violence is rooted in the rivalry that stems from imitation. To manage this violence of all against all, humans often turn to violence against one, the scapegoat, thereafter incorporated into ritual. The second group consists of archaeologists working at the Neolithic sites of Catalhoeyuk and Goebekli Tepe in Turkey. At both sites there is evidence of religious practices that center on wild animals, often large and dangerous in form. Is it possible that these wild animals were ritually killed in the ways suggested by Girardian theorists? Were violence and the sacred intimately entwined and were these the processes that made possible and even stimulated the origins of farming in the ancient Near East? In this volume, Ian Hodder and a team of contributors seek to answer these questions by linking theory and data in exciting new ways.

Author Biography

Ian Hodder is Dunleavie Family Professor of Archaeology at Stanford University. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has received numerous awards for his accomplishments, including the Oscar Montelius Medal from the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Fyssen International Prize, and the Gold Medal by the Archaeological Institute of America, along with honorary doctorates from the Bristol and Leiden Universities. Hodder is the author of numerous books, including Symbols in Action (Cambridge, 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1982), and Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012).