Böcker av Ivan Strenski

How to Do Things with Myths assembles a radically updated collection of the author's oft-cited publications on myth. Together, they tell how theories of myth have changed and led to a novel "performative" theory of myth. Beginning from its mid-19th-century foundations with philologist, Friedrich Max Muller, myths had been conceived in textual terms as quasi-biblical, static narratives. Not until the impact of ethnographic studies of traditional societies in the early 20th century did myths come to be regarded in situ as living agents shaping their societies. Leading a movement against Muller's static, textual view of myths were his French sociological critics, notably Emile Durkheim and his equipe. The Durkheimians felt that myths mattered because of what they "did" by functioning within human societies. Adopting the Durkheimian notion of function was Bronislaw Malinowski. But as a pragmatist and positivist, Malinowski narrowed his conception of myths to utilitarian terms. In place of Malinowski's utilitarianism, the author proposes a "performative theory" of myths - a theory freeing myths for a wider range of agency in culture, unrestricted by Malinowski's behaviorism and positivism. Conceived as "important stories," myths can thus "do things" in many, often subtle and unquantifiable, ways, depending upon a given culture's own value system. Conceptually and theoretically, a performative theory situates itself with respect to the efforts of some of the most popular contemporary myth theorists -- Bruce Lincoln, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Robert A. Segal and Jonathan Z. Smith.

Muslims, Islams and Occidental Anxietiesdeconstructs our common prejudices about both the compatibility and incompatibility of Muslim and Western civilizations. Rather than reinforcing the well-meant, but misinformed, opinion that the religions all fundamentally teach identical values, we identify what seem different distinctive Muslim "goods." Rather than offering the facile moral choice between an Islam either "all good" or "all bad," we argue the case for pluralism derived from Sir Isaiah Berlin. In many cases, Islam thus represents a distinctive system of alternative ethical and religious "goods" to those valued in the West. In other cases, differences will remain different and unresolved. Far from necessarily threatening Western moral and religious identity, we explore how the alternative "goods" Islam offers the West can enrich our notions of what constitutes "the good," even to the extent of reviving or enlivening certain Western religious practices. Along with instructional guidelines for classroom use, the book in informed by the powerful and intellectually rigorous device of investigative, empathetic "dialogue" or "conversation," as articulated by MIT's Sherry Turkle and Oxford's Theodore Zeldin, respectively. This form of dialogue steers clear of the didactic mode and instead recovers the open models of philosophical dialogues pioneered by Plato, Socrates, and the "tolerant" Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus and Jean Bodin.

In this collection of 11 essays the author outlines a programme of integrative, contextualized studies of religion. A number of different themes are included in these modern studies of religion.

Identifies kernel ideas of interest for the study of religion. This book acknowledges Dumont's contribution to kinship studies and focuses on subjects of interest to students and scholars of religion: concepts such as sacred and profane, pure and impure, transcendence, values, ideology, hierarchy, and cross cultural comparison.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim is considered to be a founding father of several academic disciplines: sociology, anthropology, and religious studies. This book demonstrates the ways that Durkheimian perspectives can be applied to contemporary issues including sacrifice, religion, animal rights and terrorism.