Religion Evolving

Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Richard Sosis

The scientific study of religion has made significant advances in recent decades, explaining how the mind produces religious ideas, the motivations underlying religious behaviour, and the transmission of religious cultures within and across generations. In Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and...

Levantine Entanglements

Terje Stordalen, Oystein S. LaBianca

This cross-disciplinary volume makes the case for the Levant, including the use of the term, as a unit of analysis for the study of cultural production and change over the long-term in the Eastern Mediterranean. It offers a new perspective on the history of this region that overcomes Orientalist app...

Turkish Folk Music Between Ghent and Turkey

Liselotte Sels

In our twenty-first-century world, shaped by the transformative processes of migration, diasporization, and cosmopolitanization, musical performance conditions and contexts constantly change, while musical forms newly emerge and evolve. The development of Turkish folk music is well-documented, provi...

Being Viking

Jefferson F. Calico

Contemporary Paganism has been a growing segment of American religiosity for over forty years and is composed of a variety of groups, practices, and ideologies. Asatru (Asatru), a movement that seeks to revive the practice of pre-Christian Norse religion, remains one of the least studied of these Pa...

Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity

Vaia Touna

Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity is a multi-authored work that tackles the problem of how to examine the historicity of identity. Six scholars of religion, all members of the Culture on the Edge group, engage in a constructive dialogue mediating and critically cross-examining issues of identi...

Marine Ventures

Hein Bjartmann Bjerck, Heidi Mjelva Breivik, Silje E. Fretheim, Ernesto L. Piana, Birgitte Skar, Angelica M. Tivoli, Francisco J. Zangrando

Human-sea relations are important factors in past and present human evolution. Discussions about these relations have ranged from shellfish gathering at beaches to the elaboration of technological, social and cognitive systems for marine foraging. The role of the marine environment is now seen as a...

Soulless Matter, Seats of Energy

Fabrizio M. Ferrari, Thomas Dahnhardt

Soulless Matter, Seats of Energy is the natural continuation of the two previous edited collections on animals and plants in South Asian religions. This volume reflects on the mineral world in South Asian traditions. It explores the way in which various religious traditions, including Hinduism, Jain...

Charming Beauties and Frightful Beasts

Fabrizio M. Ferrari, Thomas Dahnhardt, Patrick Olivelle, David Smith, David Torri, Alice Collett, Eleanor Nesbitt, Stefano Beggiora, Ivette Vargas-O'Bryan, Sarit K. Chaudhuri, Eva de Clercq, David Pinault, Rachel Dwyer, Xenia Zeiler, Amy L. Allocco

Fabrizio M. Ferrari, Thomas Dahnhardt

Discussions on non-human animals, other-than-human persons and religion originally emerged within the context of Christian theology, eco-theology and Western-based environmentalism. In response to that, and by adhering to post-modern discourses on, for instance, indigeneity, mimicry and hybridity, t...