scholarly journals Corpses and the Protestant cult of the dead

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik R. Seeman
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

Scholars of the body and religion readily acknowledge that corpses have agency. ‘The work of the dead,’ as Thomas Laqueur puts it, includes everything from sacralizing the landscape to creating imagined communities. Scholars have been less successful, however, in documenting the continuing relations between ordinary Protestants and their departed loved ones. In their focus on cemetery designers and political leaders, historians have overlooked the spiritual journals – mostly by women – that document relations between the living and dead. This article argues that corpses were central to such relations, even for mainstream Protestants whose ministers insisted otherwise. This argument challenges the way most scholars think of Protestantism. Rather than considering it as a religion of internal beliefs and creeds, I emphasize the material and tactile foundations of Protestant belief. And rather than seeing a religion dedicated to maintaining the Reformation’s divide between the living and dead, I put relations with the dead at the heart of lived Protestantism.

Revisiting the Dead: Tomb Reuse and Post-Burial Practices at Ascoli Satriano (Pre-Roman Apulia, Seventh–Fourth Centurybc)

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Matthias Hoernes ◽  
Christian Heitz ◽  
Manuele Laimer
Keyword(s):  
Human Remains ◽  
The Body ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Complex Procedure ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Archaeology Of Death ◽  
The Way

In the archaeology of death and burial, the premise that the dead were buried ritually and not simply disposed of seems to be accepted without argument. Where graves were reopened and reused for subsequent burials, however, the post-funeral manipulation of ‘older’ depositions is often regarded as having been primarily pragmatic and circumstantial. Countering this interpretative imbalance, we argue that the reuse of tombs was a highly complex procedure that forced communities into negotiating and formalizing, or even ritualizing, the way in which bodies and objects were acted on and engaged with. Taking the necropolis Giarnera Piccola/Ascoli Satriano in pre-Roman northern Apulia as a case study, and employing a microarchaeological-archaeothanatological perspective, we discuss the diverse and sometimes conflicting practices used to deal with pre-existing graves, objects and human remains, identifying tensions between maintaining or reconstructing the integrity of the body and intentionally manipulating and fragmenting it. We argue that repeatedly reused tombs constituted a socially and symbolically charged arena for a prolonged, active relationship with the deceased and for mobilizing, mediating and maintaining inter-generational memories.

Writing and the Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions

Hebrew funerary inscriptions began to appear in Judah during late Iron IIB. These inscriptions are relatively unique in that they are written on, or inside, tombs. But they also include amulets that adorned the body during burial. The funerary inscriptions emerged at a stage when the bench tomb had fully developed, and their writings reveal multiple concerns regarding the dead. The Hebrew inscriptions stress the imperative of safeguarding the dead inside the tomb on multiple levels. The interred are identified by name, and their place inside the tomb is described. All of these concerns relate to the existence of the dead and the preservation of their memory. These concerns are also consistent with blessings and curses that are often inscribed on the tomb, which indicate that Yahweh’s power could extend over the dead as well as the living.

The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski
Keyword(s):  
Essential Element ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Hidden Knowledge ◽  
Physical Diseases ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

Christians always admired and venerated martyrs who died for their faith, but for a long time thought that the bodies of martyrs should remain undisturbed in their graves. Initially, the Christian attitude toward the bones of the dead, whether a saint’s or not, was that of respectful distance. This book tells how, in the mid-fourth century, this attitude started to change, swiftly and dramatically. The first chapters show the rise of new beliefs. They study how, when, and why Christians began to believe in the power of relics, first, over demons, then over physical diseases and enemies; how they sought to reveal hidden knowledge at the tombs of saints and why they buried the dead close to them. An essential element of this new belief was a strong conviction that the power of relics was transferred in a physical way and so subsequent chapters study relics as material objects. The book seeks to show what the contact with relics looked like and how close it was. Did people touch, kiss, or look at the very bones, or just at reliquaries which contained them? When did the custom of dividing relics appear? Finally, the book deals with discussions and polemics concerning relics and tries to find out how strong was the opposition which this new phenomenon had to face, both within and outside Christianity on the way to relics becoming an essential element of medieval religiosity.

Unqualified Pleasure

2018 ◽  
pp. 791-808
Author(s):  
Branka Arsić
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Dead

Everything that Poe wrote is touched by the question of life. Most notably, dead women come back to life, the living switch personhoods with the dead, and hearts dismembered from the body keep on beating. Such existential shifts were typically interpreted as Poe’s take on the Gothic, his engagement with the supernatural, or, as political allegories. Declining to follow any of those directions, this chapter will take Poe’s ideas about life literally and nontrivially. Closely discussing such texts as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Mesmeric Revelation,” and Eureka, the essay will investigate Poe’s continuous insistence that nothing is inanimate and immaterial, as well as his claim that life can’t be understood according to an anthropomorphic model. Reading his literature against the backdrop of the scientific treatises on life and vitalism that influenced him, this chapter will seek to explain what is at stake in Poe’s statement that even “unorganized matter” is alive and sensuous, endowed with capacity for pain and joy.

scholarly journals Mobilizing the Sense of “Fat”: A Phenomenological Materialist Approach

Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Slatman
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
The Way ◽  
Phenomenological Exploration

AbstractThis paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”—a collection of pieces without a unity—together with his idea of corpus-writing—fragmentary writing, without head and tail—can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style—hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization.

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

Specific Susceptibility to HCN and the amount of HCN recovered from Fumigated Insects

1951 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Pradhan ◽  
S. C. Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Body Weight ◽  
Water Content ◽  
Relative Position ◽  
Surface Resistance ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Effective Resistance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Effective Dosage ◽  
Adult Females ◽  
The Dead

The relationship was studied between susceptibility of a number of different species of insects to HCN fumigation and the recovery of HCN from them immediately after fumigation.The test insects used were Tribolium castaneum, seventh stage caterpillars of Corcyra cephalonica, first-and second-instar nymphs of Drosicha sp., third-and fourthinstar nymphs of Drosicha sp. and adult females of Drosicha sp.The apparatus and methods used in the fumigation and in the recovery of HCN from the fumigated insects are fully described.Preliminary expsriments showed that the processes of distillation and redistillation did not affect the recovery of HCN but that the result obtained for recovery from distillation could be affected if some volatile reducing substance were produced and carried over to the distillate. It was found that this did actually take place in the case of one of the test insects—T. castaneum—but that redistillation got rid of the impurity.In the main experiments it was shown that, on the assumption that the concentration of HCN to which insects are exposed is the effective dosage, the susceptibility of the test insects varied in the following descending order : firstand second-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp. > third- and fourth-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp.>C. cephalonica> T. castaneum>the adult females of Drosicha sp.When the same insects were arranged in descending order of the quantities of HCN recovered per 100 gm. of body weight, the order was identical except for the nymphs of Drosicha sp. which occupied a different relative position. The two categories of nymphs of Drosicha sp. were found to occupy a different relative position again with regard to the other three test insects when exposed to a superlethal concentration and assessed for recovery of HCN per 100 gr. body weight.Parallel batches of T. castaneum and C. cephalonica were fumigated and the HCN was recovered from the dead and survivors. More HCN was recovered from the dead insects than from those that survived.Both recovery and sorption of HCN were estimated separately in parallel batches of insects (adult females of Drosicha sp. and C. cephalonica). Recovery was found to be less than sorption showing that a part of the HCN absorbed is converted into a non-recoverable state. Further, that the weight of HCN sorbed per gram body weight of adult females of Drosicha sp. is much less than in the case of C. cephalonica under similar conditions of fumigation and that the amount of HCN converted into non-recoverable products is less in Drosicha adults than in C. cephalonica.A comparison of the water content of T. castaneum, C. cephalonica and Drosicha sp. (adults) showed that there was a positive correlation between water content and higher susceptibility to HCN and greater recovery of HCN was also indicated. It is suggested that this may be a factor in the “ Surface Resistance ” of an insec to a fumigant.The observations of previous workers that larger amounts are sorbed by or recovered (after fumigation) from more susceptible species than for those less susceptible was corroborated by the results obtained with C. cephalonica, T. castaneum and adult females of Drosicha sp. but not with those from nymphs of Drosicha sp.When dosage-mortality graphs were prepared by taking the amount of HCN recovered per gram body weight as an index of internal dose, the order of resistance of different test insects based on this new criterion was found to be entirely different from that based on the usual criterion of the concentration of HCN in the fumatorium being the index of effective dosage.These apparently anomalous observations may be explained by assuming that the resistance shown by an insect in an actual fumigation operation, i.e., to the concentration of HCN to which it is exposed (external dose) is what may be called the total “ Effective Resistance ” and that this “ Effective Resistance ” is the resultant of (a) “ Surface Resistance ” to the entry of fumigant and (b) “ Internal Resistance ” to the amount of HCN which actually gains entry into the body in some way or other. Thus the “Effective Resistance ” of an insect may be due to a combination either of low “ Surface Resistance ” and high “ Internal Resistance ”, giving a very low “ Effective Resistance ” as in the case of C. cephalonica, or vice versa giving the maximum “ Effective Resistance ” as in adult females of Drosicha sp. The lower recovery of HCN from the nymphs of Drosicha sp., although they were more susceptible to fumigation than C. cephalonica, is explained by their higher “ Surface Resistance ” combined with a very much lower “ Internal Resistance ”, leading to a lower “ Effective Resistance ”.

The image of a modern shaman. A literary example of Ida Brzezińska

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Angelika Moskal
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

Abstract: The shaman figure is most often associated with primitive communities, inhabiting, among others Siberia. The shaman plays one of the most important roles in them - he is an intermediary between the world of people and the world of spirits. Responds to, among others for the safe passage of souls to the other side and protects her from evil spirits. However, is there room for representatives of this institution in contemporary Polish popular literature? How would they find themselves in the 21st century? The article aims to show the interpretation of the shaman on the example of Ida Brzezińska, the heroine of the books of Martyna Raduchowska. I intend to introduce the role and functions of the „shaman from the dead”, juxtaposing the way Ida works (including reading sleepy margins from a rather unusual dream catcher, carrying out souls and the consequences that await in the event of failure or making contact with the dead) with the methods described by scholars shamans. The purpose of the work is to show how much Raduchowska tried to adapt shamanism in her work by modernizing it, and how many elements she added from herself to make the story more attractive.

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