Antiquitopia

I am reading Yi-Fu Tuan's very clearly written, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience . In his chapter on "Architectural Space and Awareness," which ranges from China, ancient Sumer, medieval European Cathedrals to modern architecture, he discusses the symbolic importance of space in a larger coherent worldview that is reflected in how we build, whether a home, a village, a church, or a skyscraper. While much of the chapter emphasizes continuities in how each society constructs its buildings and shelters in relationship to its larger symbolic system (to borrow a phrase from Mary Douglas), he notes something different is now happening in the modern world. Firstly, because of the high rates of literacy, the use of material and physical symbols are fading as the importance of verbal symbols rise: "verbal symbols have progressively displaced material symbols, and books rather than buildings instruct" (117). But there is something more, or something le...

In his magisterial multi-volume commentary on Leviticus (for Anchor Bible), Jacob Milgrom, interacting with the work of Mary Douglas, suggests that the ancient Israelite system of sacrifice was not merely a bunch of scattered practices, but a unified system--a symbolic system. The unifying factor for Milgrom is death-avoidance. In response, Jonathan Klawans has suggested a two-fold organizing principle: imitatio dei and attracting/maintaing the divine presence (itself sort of a throwback to R.E. Clements, God and Temple ). Klawans presents imitatio dei as the organizing principle and maintaining the divine presence as the function of sacrifice. See my fuller discussion here . I actually like Klawans's thesis, and use a lot of his insights in my dissertation. Interestingly enough, however, the idea that the ancient sacrificial cult was a symbolic system did not begin with Mary Douglas, Jacob Milgrom, and Jonathan Klawans, but St. Augustine (and perhaps earlier), who suggests a...

No...this is not Derrida; it is Michel de Montaigne: Our disputes are about words. I ask what is Nature, Pleasure, a Circle, and Substitution. The question is couched in words, and is answered in the same coin. A stone is a body. But if you press the point: And what is a body? -A substance.- And what is a substance? and so on, you will end by driving the answerer to exhaust his dictionary. One substitutes one word for another that is often less well understood. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M Cohen) Words refer only to other words, which refer to other words. Meaning is always deferred, even diminished, and never stable. It is the endless field of signifiers, a signum of a signum of a signum ad infinitum with no res .

Sitting one Sunday in a Pentecostal service, I listened as someone began to “speak in tongues.” Such occurrences have a strange effect on me. I grew up in this church, and have noticed a sharp decline in the past decade or so of people speaking in tongues (and a slight recent resurgence), and so, at least psychologically, there is a strange feeling of comfort, of reminiscences of my childhood when such utterances occasionally occur. I care much less for the so-called “interpretation” afterwards, the attempt to make this excitable speech intelligible. It always seems like a betrayal of that speech, which, as excitable, should remain unknowable. At the same time, I am a scholar of religion. I cannot but think about that this is a phenomenon that occurs in multiple contexts throughout the world, whether a Shaman on the Eurasian Steppes (you can also see it in the movie Kundun , about the life of the current Dalai Lama), the Pythia in ancient Delphi, or a Pentecostal service in twent...