Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Le but de cet article est d’analyser les caractéristiques des rites du mariage dans la société Mbochi, en République du Congo. En ce qui concerne le travail anthropologique que nous avons effectué dans le sous-groupe ngaé qui se trouve dans la partie septentrionale du pays, et dont les spécificités coutumières du mariage sont l’exigence d’une tradition ancestrale. Cette étude est le fruit d’une enquête orale réalisée dans le district d’Allembé. La chaîne d’alliances matrimoniales réalisée grâce à la compensation matrimoniale appelée «dot» parmi les ngaé, qui ne peuvent avoir des relations sexuelles, sans transgression de la société, exige le respect des valeurs morales. C’est ainsi que la coutume a établi le «mariage» parce qu’il n’y a pas de procréation sans sexualité. Selon cette pratique, il existe différents types de mariage.

To be included in the health care system of each society, the individual must be regarded as worthy of attention. The fact that someone is regarded as such is closely related to the cultural representations that each society stipulates about human afflictions. Under these circumstances, we consider that, in the same way society needs to recognise a patient as such, this condition will only be withdrawn according to a pool of expectations and representations on an ad hoc basis. These don’t necessarily correspond with the cessation of symptomatology, disappearance of biological evidence or referral of the subjective suffering in the affected person. This process of social deselection can be described as a “desistencial” process. The current ethnographic investigation describes and analyses the details of this process in relation to a group of psychiatric pathology classified as Severe Mental Disorders (SMD).

This work analyses the practices and meanings of the territorial circulation of itinerant women who practiced prostitution in the province of Buenos Aires in the first decades of the 20th century. Based on the follow-up of multiple trajectories that converge in brothels and the reconstruction of the routes that they plied, this text argues that mobility was part of women’s survival strategies, while it also being essential for the functioning of the regulated sex work market in the province.

Ressenya del llibre: Cortés Vázquez, José A.; Beltran, Oriol (coord.) (2019) Repensar la conservación. Naturaleza, mercado y sociedad civil. Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona. 

Jesus war ein charismatischer Wundertäter. Dies ist allgemein bekannt. Dass Jesus seine Krankenheilungen unter Zuhilfenahme magischer Rituale vollzog – dieses Phänomen wird in der Bibelwissenschaft bislang vernachlässigt. Das liegt mitunter daran, dass Magie im christlichen Kontext mit dubiosen rituellen Praktiken assoziiert wird, die den göttlichen Willen menschlich-magisch beeinflussen. Eine solche Einschätzung der Magie entspricht unter Berücksichtigung der antiken Quellen jedoch keinen objektivierbaren Kri terien, sondern ist allein Ergebnis kultureller Identitätsarbeit, indem das „fremde“ magisch-rituelle Handeln als illegitime Magie abgewertet wird, wohingegen die „eigenen“ magisch-rituellen Handlungen göttlich autorisiertes Wirken verdeutlichen. Weil die rituell magischen Krankenheilungen Jesu demzufolge für nicht-christusgläubige Außenstehende mit illegitimen magischen Handlungen verwechselbar waren, trug die redaktionelle De-Ritualisierung der Evangelien dazu bei, unmissverständlich deutlich zu machen, dass Jesus Christus der einzig geborene Sohn Gottes ist.

How do image-objects obtain a religious meaning? When can we interpret material evidence as traces of a religious ritual? These questions are central to the archaeology of religion, but often answered in favor of religion without sound criteria. Using examples from Pompeii I look into “material religion” through the lens of viewing habits and habitualized practices embedded in and shaping social and cultural habitus in a Roman city of the 1st cent. CE. This practice-oriented approach to religion and material culture allows for a more nuanced interpretation of when and how people in Graeco-Roman antiquity conceived of an image-object as religious and ascribed a religious meaning to it. Based on an understanding of religion as communication with supra-human agents, the notion of a “spectrum of religiousness” softens the black-and-white view on motifs and objects as either religious or profane. The distinction of a gradually varying perception of image-objects is archaeologically based on both loosely assembled evidence (e.g. the iconographical and material remains in a house) or intentionally arranged evidence (e.g. niches with altars in front of them). In the repetition of such material reflections of practices the religious character of imageobjects comes to the fore.

Starting from the notion of religion as communication and resonance, this article analyses the details and varieties of religious communication in ancient Rome. Decentring the traditional focus on “sacrifice” by admitting that sacra facere was far more than “sacrifice”, allows us to use the rich evidence for the many facets, pragmatic relationships and cognitive associations of such rituals for an analysis focused on the self-world relations that were established in such performances. The article will model religious ritual as a triangular relationship between human agents (in active as well as passive roles), their “special” or “divine” addressees and animals or objects not just casually employed but constitutive for such communication. It will further argue that such religious practices have a specific relational quality which makes them particularly important for establishing relationships, foregrounding the reflexive, self-observing character of such “intensified” practices. Against this background, the body of this article follows the many conceptual and material associations and implications of Roman religious ritual, thus arguing for the individual and cultural malleability of ritual relations. It is construing a heuristic grid and on that basis plausibilizes the claim that self-world relations are established and habitualized in practices that are characterized by their inclusion of not unquestionably plausible addressees and hence more intensively mediatized and more self-reflexive than many other social practices.

The present paper explores children’s experience as supplicants to authorities in power as a vital tool for coping with life-threatening circumstances in classical Athens. The examination of the specific characteristics of children’s performance, as it is represented in literary and artistic sources, reveals the inability of minors to execute all the stages of the rite of supplication. Children’s participation was demonstrated principally in the physical aspects of supplication, while they were unable to perform the verbal, argumentative element of the ritual, which generally was carried out in its prescribed form by adults who accompanied the children, and initiated and supervised the rite. The incapacity of children, as the article shows, correlates with the stereotypical inferiority and weakness that defined the stage of childhood in classical Athens. Hence, unlike other religious activities which involved minors and reflected a successful socialization process, the rite of supplication spotlights children’s position as societally weak members of the community.

Ovid’s Fasti is a work of significance in defining the relationship between religious identity and clothing. This article examines the interplay between dressing and the divine and considers the key role that dressing, undressing, and nakedness plays in the worship of certain deities in the Fasti. Clothing and nudity are intimately linked to the changing nature of the socio-political landscape in the worship of these deities. Contemporary rites in 1st cent. Rome relate to fertility, blur social boundaries, and recall ancient preliterate peoples prior to cultivation, providing historical continuity of cultic practices.

The aims of this article are  to show the variety of characterizations of Saint Martin in the poetic texts by Venantius Fortunatus, mainly his Carmina, to explain this variety from the historical contexts of different poems, and  to describe the effect that it might have had on the readers of the collection of poems in the interplay between literature and ritual. Saint Martin is characterized in a wide array of ways in Fortunatus’ occasional poems, which does not provide a congruent picture of the saint, but seems to serve the needs of particular audiences, who are presented with a version of Saint Martin tailor-made for them. The readers of the Carmina as a unified collection of many such poems are forced to reconcile the different characterizations with each other and with their own expectations about the saint. As they do so, they can have an experience similar to the social experience of members of a congregation in the cult of Saint Martin.