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Obras por Webb Keane

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male
Nacionalidade
USA

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Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
Alhickey1 | Oct 21, 2020 |
When I read this paper for the first time at the start of my MA, I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of things it brought in, and I kind of tunnel-visioned down to my immediate concern: Keane's fruitful application of Erving Goffman's author/animator and addressee/target distinctions to religious speech, when people try to talk to God (my paper was about when people try to talk for God, more or less, it was still useful). But with five-and-a-half years more context (!), I'm picking up a lot more of what Keane's putting down, starting to see this in its full aspect, really as a minor classic. Keane pulls in so many aspects of, and an excellent selection of previous work on, what happens when humans communicate with or on behalf of invisible beings: the human desire to speak with authority while eschewing agency; what it means to espouse a religion (make a belief-statement) as a means of resistance to "actual" belief; Quaker "plain speech," which needs to change and remain an open hermeneutic practice unless it is to calcify into a shibboleth, a "this is the way we Friends talk, we few, we proud," which is the opposite of what it is meant to be; the social negotiation of spirit possession (I can never tell you that I'm possessed, no matter how scary I make my voice; interpretive power and the choice to believe always remain with the interlocutor); the key, key distinction between quotation and paraphrase, and "divine verbatim" or lack thereof in Scripture; the way a human choir joins the angelic chorus; the phonological features of Baptist preachers; the Bakhtinian monologic and dialogic in prayer; Yucatec Mayan shamanic "beautification" of religious stories vs. monotheistic concern with attribution and canon; how reasonable believers determine the difference between glossolalia and insanity; what principles like Gricean construal and Sperberian–Wilsonian relevance mean when your interlocutor is, like, invisible, man; and then the Derridean "iterability" of spirit talk, where we can never get a definitive answer from the spirit about what the spirit means, leaving the utterance even more prone to appropriation than normal; the richness of religious metaphor (content) vs. the poverty of the forms of religious language (I think this is an easy error to fall into, but I also think that Robert Alter would set Keane straight about the art that goes into the seemingly plodding and repetitive); and more. One thing that's missing a bit is actual analysis--line-by-line or whole-corpus identification of the specific linguistic features that characterize all the many kinds of specialized or semispecialized discourse just mentioned--but still, there are (heh) gods here. Also, see josiasporter's review for an example of one of the better abstracts I've ever read. Annual Review of Anthropology 26. .… (mais)
 
Assinalado
MeditationesMartini | 1 outra crítica | Jan 17, 2014 |
Keane’s article is wide-reaching and dense, looking at uptake of prayer-utterance in Baptist ritual as a passive acquiescence to an utterance that is monologic but not authoritative (see Bakhtin). Provising a critical reading of Graham (see above), Keane connects the points made in his Baptist discussion with the period of codification of hadith and identifies attestation of verbatim extraction of speech report from a supernatural source—God’s word in God’s words—as a driver of codification. Keane presents this process in Goffman’s terms: "Subsequent efforts to distinguish “prophetic speech” from “revelation” in effect sharpen the boundary between author and animator, and thus between reported text and reporting context, thereby keeping the original prophecy at a greater, potentially more authoritative, remove from subsequent events." Annual Review of Anthropology 26.… (mais)
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Assinalado
MeditationesMartini | 1 outra crítica | May 29, 2010 |

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Obras
5
Membros
88
Popularidade
#209,356
Avaliação
½ 3.7
Críticas
4
ISBN
13
Marcado como favorito
1

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