Description
Fun ... and intellectually bracing ... Lincoln powerfully illuminates the symbolic terrain wherever he alights, and he alights in an astonishing variety of settings. (James C. Scott, Yale University )
Lincoln has a delicately nuanced control of the theoretical literature and a command of a stunning range of multi-cultural data ... the book will be a significant contribution to many fields - comparative religion, history of religions, the study of the social construction of reality, anthropology, sociology, and myth criticism, to name but a few ... The approach is more than interdisciplinary; it is what one might call 'supra-disciplinary", in that it has comfortably and easily drawn on many approaches to define its own coherent integrated set of questions. (Marilyn Waldman, Ohio State University )
Lincoln has a delicately nuanced control of the theoretical literature and a command of a stunning range of multi-cultural data ... the book will be a significant contribution to many fields - comparative religion, history of religions, the study of the social construction of reality, anthropology, sociology, and myth criticism, to name but a few ... The approach is more than interdisciplinary; it is what one might call 'supra-disciplinary", in that it has comfortably and easily drawn on many approaches to define its own coherent integrated set of questions. (Marilyn Waldman, Ohio State University )
Présentation de l'éditeur
This is a paperback reprint of a book published in 1989. Lincoln explores the ways in which myth, ritual, and classification hold human societies together - and how, in times of crisis, they can be used to take a society apart and reconstruct it.
