Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253218640 ISBN 13: 9780253218643

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Sites of violence often provoke conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts provide insight into the construction and use of memory as a means of achieving public recognition of past wrongs. In this groundbreaking collection, scholars of religious studies, sociology, history, and political science, as well as African, Caribbean, Jewish, and Native American studies, examine the religious memorialization of violent acts that are linked to particular sites. Supported by the essays gathered here, the editors argue that memory is essential to religion and, conversely, that religion is inherent in memory. Other books have considered memory and violence, or religion and place―this collection is the first to discuss the intersection of all four.

Contributors are David Chidester, James H. Foard, Roger Friedland, Richard D. Hecht, Juan A. Herrero Brasas, Janet Liebman Jacobs, Flora A. Keshgegian, J. Shawn Landres, Edward T. Linenthal, Timothy Longman, Tania Oldenhage, Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Terry Rey, William Robert, Théoneste Rutagengwa, Oren Baruch Stier, Jonathan Webber, and James E. Young.

About this title

About the Author

Oren Baruch Stier is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at Florida International University. He is author of Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust.

J. Shawn Landres is director of research at Synagogue 3000 and a visiting research fellow at UCLA's Center for Jewish Studies. He is co-editor of After The Passion Is Gone: American Religious Consequences and Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion.

From the Back Cover

"After reading these compelling essays, I could not help but feel buffeted by a tidal wave of haunted landscapes, irredeemable violence, and the toxic presence of murderous religious impulses and actions.... Every essay demonstrates the editors' articulate claim that memory is an essential dimension of religion--although an essential too often ignored in the discipline---and religion an essential dimension of memory. Each chapter, the editors observe, `attends to the ways in which atrocities render places religiously charged, indigestible in their toxicity, while their commemoration creates of those sites sacred spaces, variously digestible in and through their memorialization and contestation.' Religious themes, symbols, motifs, permeate the essays; meaningless death, meaningful sacrifice, blood, purification and purgation, visions, pilgrimage, charged relics, including bodies, the allure of the apocalyptic, grief, mourning, processes of religious remembrance that locate personal identity in often competing narratives proclaimed by memorial structures and narrated at memorial sites. All of these case studies have to do with struggles to represent violence, engage it, and locate it in individual and social memory edifices." - From the Postscript by Edward T. Linenthal

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253218640
• ISBN 13: 9780253218643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Stier Oren, Landres J. Shawn