02885nam0 22003251i 450 UON0052267320240307104728.2978-02-267-6360-620240205d1982 |0itac50 baengUS|||| |||||Imagining Religionfrom Babylon to JonestownJonathan Z. SmithChicagoThe University of Chicago Press1982XIII, 165 p.24 cm.With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. “These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre.”—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review001UON000657682001 Chicago studies in the history of JudaismWilliam Scott Green and Calvin Goldscheider, editorsReligioneAntropologiaUONC036111FIRELIGIONE STUDIUONC049511FIUSChicago, Ill.UONL000120200Religione21SmithJonathan Z.UONV14455059178The University of Chicago PressUONV246827650ITSOL20251003RICASIBA - SISTEMA BIBLIOTECARIO DI ATENEOUONSIUON00522673SIBA - SISTEMA BIBLIOTECARIO DI ATENEOSI B 2.0 0240 SI 50675 5 0240 BuonoSIBA - SISTEMA BIBLIOTECARIO DI ATENEOSI20246 1J 20240205Bolla n. 33 del 20.2.2024. Imagining Religion4314152UNIOR