Infrastructures of Religion and Power - Edward Swenson

Infrastructures of Religion and Power

Archaeologies of Landscape, Ritual, and Semiotics

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
404 Seiten
2024
Routledge (Verlag)
978-0-367-40422-2 (ISBN)
46,10 inkl. MwSt
This book explores the central role of religion in place-making and infrastructural projects in ancient polities.

It presents a trilectic approach to archaeological study of religious landscapes that combines Indigenous philosophies with the spatial and semiotic thinking of Lefebvre, Peirce, and proponents of assemblage theories. Case studies from ancient Angkor and the Andes reveal how rituals of place-making activated processes of territorialization and semiosis fundamental to the experience of political worlds that shaped power relations in past societies. The perspectives developed in the book permit a reconstruction of how landscapes were variably conceived, perceived, and lived in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre, and how these registers may have aligned or clashed. In the end, the examination of built environments, infrastructures, and rituals staged within specialized buildings demonstrates how archaeologists can better infer past ontologies, cosmologies, ideologies of time and place, and historically specific political struggles.

The study will appeal to students and researchers interested in ritual, infrastructures, landscape, archaeological theory, political institutions, semiotics, human geography, and the civilizations of the ancient Andes and Angkor.

Edward Swenson is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Director of the Archaeology Centre at the University of Toronto. Swenson has conducted archaeological research in the Jequetepeque Valley on the North Coast of Peru and in Cambodia as member of the Yaśodharāśramas Archaeological Project. Swenson has published extensively, and his theoretical interests include the pre-industrial city, the rise of social inequality, the archaeology of ritual and ideology, violence and religion, materiality theory, place-making and ancient infrastructures, the archaeology of time and landscape, semiotics, and the politics of spatial experience and social memory.

Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: Excavating the Theoretical Landscape: The Archaeological Search for Significance; Chapter 3: Sublime Infrastructures: Emplacing Ritual, Religion, and Power; Chapter 4: Ceremonial Architecture as Semiotic Machines; Chapter 5: Sacred Infrastructures and Rituals of Place Making in the Ancient Andes; Chapter 6: A Tale of Three Temples: The Changing Religious Landscape of the Southern Jequetepeque Valley, Peru; Chapter 7: Karma Ecologies: Khmer Place-Making, Infrastructures, and Ideologies of Space; Chapter 8: the Āśrama and Hospital Foundations of Ancient Angkor; Chapter 9: Conclusion: Landscapes of History; Index.

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo 70 Halftones, black and white; 70 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Maße 156 x 234 mm
Gewicht 800 g
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Archäologie
ISBN-10 0-367-40422-2 / 0367404222
ISBN-13 978-0-367-40422-2 / 9780367404222
Zustand Neuware
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