This chapter argues that many psychologists of religion have sought insights from the neighboring discipline of sociology. Generally speaking, sociologists focus more on social groups, social patterns, social institutions, sociohistorical context, and social structures. Sociologists also have emphasized various social justice perspectives, including those based on race, gender, age, and LGBT issues. The chapter tells in some detail how several of the founders of sociology – Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber – thought about religion. Next, we delve into the influential theory of religion developed by sociologist Peter Berger who sees the main project of a society as the creation of a stable, predictable order that people believe in as objective reality. This, for Berger, matters greatly because we need a shield against the terror of anomie. After discussing Berger, we move on to the market theory of religion. We see how various thinkers – starting with the great economist Adam Smith – have applied fundamental principles of economics to the analysis of religious organizations.

This penultimate chapter shows how the story of the constitution is not only told by the written text of a constitution but (even predominantly so) by symbols, images, icons, gestures, behaviour, flags, rituals and so on. The constitutional story is conveyed directly and indirectly in very many (unstudied) ways.

Losing someone you love. Finding love again. When my husband knew he was dying, he told me there are only two things, two assets we have that matter in this life. They are love and time. It is how you spend this time, and how you spend your love, that tells you who you are.

A question not asked to this point in the study of genocide by all the scholars associated with this work in the various disciplines is whether or not there something inherent in the very social construction we call “religion” that lends itself, adapts itself, all-too-easily to those communities— both nation-states and non-nation-state actors—that perpetrate genocide, either in actuality or in potential? Thus, this contribution begins with something of a theoretical look-see vis-à-vis that nexus between religion and genocide by suggesting applicable definitions for both and further outlining the constituent factors of each. (NB: There are, in truth, uncomfortable similarities between religious groups and genocidal perpetrator groups which, to my understanding, have never been addressed or explored.) To further bolster my overall argument—that religion, however defined and understood, is a “participating factor” (my preferred term) in all genocides, both historically and contemporarily—a series of case studies, using Raphael Lemkin’s tri-partite division from his incomplete History of Genocide—Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern Times—are examined to determine whether my thesis holds.

Few political ethnographies have tracked everyday realities of citizenship before and after the Arab uprisings. This chapter explains the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study, situating it in relation to the relevant works on Egypt and the region. It sets out the approach of studying the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools, situating the study within the sociology and anthropology of education. It identifies the key parameters for approaching lived citizenship in schools in terms of the focus on privatization and austerity on the one hand, and violence and discipline on the other. It charts how the research approaches the production of imagined citizenship in schools through analysis of textbook discourses, rituals and everyday student and teacher narratives.

Schools reveal dominant modes of governance and legitimation. The production of lived citizenship in Egyptian schools reveals a mode of governance that I call “permissive-repressive neoliberalism” –deinstitutionalization and heightened violence in the context of privatization and austerity. This chapter considers how far these trends can be considered a reflection of neoliberalism as a global phenomenon and unpacks their implications for the functioning of schools as disciplinary institutions. It shows how schools reflect everyday legitimation by charting what school textbooks, rituals and narratives reveal about the production of imagined citizenship before and after 2011.

This essay examines the textual representation of creole religiosity as it developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during its transition from a transplanted, transatlantic belief system into a hybrid American faith. Various textual genres attest to this Creole faith in transition including spiritual life writings, chronicles of religious orders, sermons and tracts dealing with miracles and portents, as well as more formal literary genres including theater and poetry. Creole religiosity was a highly gendered phenomenon, and these texts reveal the contours of the exemplarity the Church demanded from men and women as well as the challenges launched against these ideals. Authors studied here include the canonical like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, as well as nuns and clerics whose names are less familiar but whose texts bring New Spanish devotional culture to life.

This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

Is the periodization of the Principate according to dynasties also valid for the history of the court? Was there continuous development of court life – such as increasing institutionalization – or were certain elements of court life linked to certain styles of rule, recurring occasionally but then disappearing again? In answering these questions, this chapter focuses on elements that are central in this book: place; composition; activity; and the institutionalization or ritualization of court life. The chapter finds that there were few neatly defined chronological developments of the court, other than changes which were directly related to the increasing absence of the emperors from Rome. There was, however, a consistent moralistic discourse, often created and perpetuated by courtiers, surrounding the emperor’s behaviour at court. This meant that the expectations of members of the Roman court could influence emperors just as they could influence life at their court.

Chapter 3 examines the intriguing question of how contrasting pragmatic data is possible. We argue that not every instance of interaction can be contrastively examined – rather we need to identify our tertium comparationis. In so doing, it is fundamental to consider the phenomenon of conventionalisation, i.e. the degree of recurrence of a particular pragmatic phenomenon in the language use and evaluations of members of a social group or a broader linguaculture. We argue that the cross-cultural pragmatician needs always to consider whether the phenomena to be compared are sufficiently conventionalised in the respective linguacultures or not. We discuss various situations, such as lingua franca contexts, in which conventionalisation can be a particularly complex issue to consider. We point out that conventionalisation manifests itself in two intrinsically interrelated types of language use, namely, convention and ritual, which play an important part in our analytic framework.

Chapter 4 turns to martyr mothers in Maxmûr. This camp, with its violent history, is highly militarised and a place where the boundaries between the armed and civil spheres are non-existent. Almost every week someone from the camp falls at one of the many frontlines in the region, while the families in the camps, and especially the mothers, continue to live life according to the party’s liberation ideology. I show how the militant mothers of the camp play an integral part in continuing not only camp life but the struggle for freedom according to the PKK more broadly. I map out three key sites of daily life for mothers: first, the martyr house and death wakes; second, camp work; and third, the private house. Throughout I discuss how mothers organise and perform rituals of mourning, remembrance and resistance. Hereby, the martyr culture is a key location where a sense of belonging and sacrifice but also a vision and hope for a future nation are negotiated.

Nabopolassar fought with an Assyrian-style army and took the throne of Babylon. Thirteen years later, Nineveh fell despite Egyptian help. Babylon took over much of the Assyrian empire. Later he defeated the last Assyrian king at Harran. His success was seen as Marduk’s revenge. Captured wealth from Assyrian royal cities allowed major building work at Babylon, which was continued by Nabopolassar’s son Nebuchadnezzar II. Neither king left statues of themselves, and cylinder seals represent gods by their symbols. Major subsidence in the citadel required frequent rebuilding on the Southern Palace. The names of temples and gates were compiled on to a clay tablet as a literary work. Colour-glazed bricks adorned the Processional Way leading to the temple of the New Year festival outside the citadel walls. That festival is described. Some of his creations Nebuchadnezzar described as a Wonder, but he made no mention of the Hanging Garden. In a separate part of the citadel, Nebuchadnezzar built a Summer Palace. His conquests included Tyre and Ashkelon but not Egypt or Lydia. He sacked the Temple in Jerusalem and deported its royal family to Babylon. Other captives settled on land nearby. Business archives of long duration continue into the Achaemenid period.

Darius I overcame rebellions and seized the throne of Babylon, but cuneiform scholarship continued and developed; religious practices did not change, nor did the great buildings on the citadel. The zodiac scheme came into use. The Achaemenid king took Babylonian royal titles and promoted the worship of Marduk for local purposes. Xerxes broke the continuity. Following an uprising, a purge led to the ending of many archives. The province of Babylon was divided in two. Subsequent Achaemenid kings continued to treat Babylon with reverence. Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, entered Babylon, retained the Persian satrap, and moved treasure from Susa and Ecbatana to Babylon. He was recognized as a god. Lack of sons at his premature death precipitated a civil war from which Alexander’s commander Seleucus emerged to take the throne jointly with his son Antiochus. The derelict ziggurat was demolished, but temples and rituals, chronicles and astronomical diaries, continued as before. Aramaic was widely used, and fewer texts were inscribed in cuneiform. Interest in the fall of Assyria and of the Babylonian empire is apparent in Greek literature. Famous scholars include Berossus and named astronomers. Parthians invaded and eventually ended the dynasty.