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Journal articles on the topic "Goethe's writings about humans"
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Stephenson, Roger H. "“Binary Synthesis”: Goethe's Aesthetic Intuition in Literature and Science." Science in Context 18, no. 4 (December 2005): 553–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889705000669.
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ArgumentThis essay seeks to identify the cultural significance of Goethe's scientific writings. He reformulates, in the light of his own concrete experience, “crucial turning-points” (Hauptmomente) in the history of science – key ideas, the historical understanding of which is vital to present understanding – thus situating his own scientific work at the bi-polar center of the Western scientific tradition, conceived as the dramatic interplay over centuries of two opposing modes of thought. For in his experimentation he recaptures the glimpse of living form gained in aesthetic perception (Anschauung), from which such inherited theoretical positions are ultimately derived. At each stage of this process, imagination, in its aesthetic modality, is essential, for it alone reveals the world as it truly is. The literary quality of his writings on nature, as on culture, reveals Goethe's stylistic achievement in devising a medium in which the insights gained in contemplation may be so transmitted as to make a similar, imaginative, appeal to his reader – re-enacting the abstract-concrete equilibrium characterizing all aesthetic experience. Matching his style to the subtle, delicate, connectedness of Nature, Goethe recreates the delights of participating in natural creativity. His Janus-faced, scientific-literary, style illustrates “binary synthesis,” the principle that unites Goethe's science with his art.Beauty is the normal state.(Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life)There can be no such thing as an eclectic philosophy, but there can be eclectic philosophers. But an eclectic is anyone who, from whatever exists and is happening round about, appropriates the things he or she finds congenial to her or his nature; and this context validly includes all that can be called culture and progress in a theoretical and practical sense. It follows that two eclectic philosophers could turn into the greatest opponents if they are antagonistic to one another, each picking out whatever suits him or her in every traditional system of philosophy.(Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years)
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Balka, Ellen. "Rethinking ‘The Medium is the Message’: Agency and Technology in McLuhan's Writings." Media International Australia 94, no. 1 (February 2000): 73–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x0009400108.
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McLuhan's oft-cited maxim ‘the medium is the message’ is examined and it is argued that, although McLuhan can be read as a technological determinist, it is also possible to interpret ‘the medium is the message’ from within the context of a social constructivist understanding of technology, which sees society and technology as mutually shaping phenomena. Inherent to such a reading of McLuhan is an understanding of technology as the output of social processes, in which humans have agency. These themes are addressed through a review of scholarship that suggests that McLuhan is a technological determinist. an examination of McLuhan's work and those who challenge the dominant understanding of McLuhan as technological determinist. Previous research about the use of computer networks by women is used to illustrates how McLuhan can be read as a social constructivist. It is argued that communication scholarship might benefit from reliance on a broader understanding of technology and society that draws more heavily on insights gained form the social studies of technology.
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Lloyd, Natalie. ""Something of Interest about Ourselves": Natural History and the Evolutionary Hierarchy at Taronga Zoological Park." Society & Animals 15, no. 1 (2007): 57–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853007x169342.
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AbstractSherbourne Le Souef, a director of Sydney's Taronga Zoological Park during the first part of the twentieth century, utilized his observations of nonhuman animals living in captivity to write on the "actions, reactions and traits common to [humans] and animals" (Le Souef, 1930, p. 598). Le Souef's writings reflect his search beyond the human will for "the genesis of man's actions and reactions" (p. 598) and his appreciation of evolutionary theory where the idea of hierarchy was maintained. Similar to William T. Hornaday, a director of the zoological gardens in New York, Le Souef sought the moral improvement of zoo audiences through encouraging observation of nonhuman animals. More broadly, he argued for the relevance of his own observations to the general progress of the peoples of the new world. This paper identifies how notions of animal behavior were understood to indicate social, cultural, spiritual, and species hierarchies.
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Kirkwood, Rachel. "“Stand Still in The Light”: What Conceptual Metaphor Research Can Tell Us about Quaker Theology." Religions 10, no. 1 (January 10, 2019): 41. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel10010041.
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The purpose of this study is to explore how an interdisciplinary approach can benefit Quaker Studies. The paper applies conceptual Metaphor Theory to help explicate aspects of theology in 17th century Quaker writings. It uses a combination of close reading supported by a corpus of related texts to analyse the writing of 4 key figures from the first decade of the movement. Metaphor analysis finds that orientational schemas of UP-DOWN and IN-OUT are essential structural elements in the theological thought of all 4 writers, along with more complex metaphors of BUILDINGS. Quaker writers make novel extensions to and recombinations of Biblical metaphors around Light and Stones, as well as using aspects of the theory of Elements. Such analysis can help explicate nuances of theological meaning-making. The evaluation of DOWN IS GOOD and UP IS BAD—except in specific circumstances—is distinctively Quaker, and embodied metaphors of divine immanence in humans indicate a ‘flipped’ soteriology which is distanced from the Christ event.
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Linds, Justin Abraham. "Ferments and the AIDS virus: interspecies counter-conduct in the history of AIDS." Medical Humanities 45, no. 4 (August 13, 2019): 435–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2019-011670.
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In the first three decades after AIDS started infecting people in the USA and Canada, before, during and after the emergence of anti-retroviral therapies, numerous “alternative and holistic treatments” for AIDS were debated, tested, circulated, written about and taught. This paper, taking a narrow focus, examines documents that reveal how some people with AIDS developed a logic of care predicated on intimate interactions with microscopic lifeforms—the AIDS virus and the bacteria involved in fermentation, in particular. Focusing on the writings of Jon Greenberg and Sandor Katz, two former members of ACT UP/NY, I show that the men did not just dissent from management by biomedical authority but found new authority about how to care for themselves as people with AIDS from their interactions with non-human microscopic life. The practices and writings of both men demonstrate that Foucault’s theory of counter-conduct exists in the history of AIDS as an interspecies process in which microscopic existents lead humans. From Katz and Greenberg, I argue there is an interspecies dimension to counter-conduct that exists as a frame for understanding people who find in non-human life a guide towards unconventional forms of care, revised forms of human behaviour and philosophies for persisting with illness.
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Gissis, Snait B. "Visualizing "Race" in the Eighteenth Century." Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41, no. 1 (2011): 41–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2011.41.1.41.
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This paper looks at the conditions of the emergence of "race" as a new scientific category during the eighteenth century, arguing that two modes of discourse and visualization played a significant role: that on society, civility, and civilization——as found principally in the travel literature——and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were transferred and transformed within travelogue and natural history writings. The nature, boundaries, and potentialities of humankind were discussed in this exchange within the conceptual grid of classifications and their visual representations. Over the course of the century the discourse on society, civility, and civilization collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified and visually represented along the same lines as flora, according to similar assumptions about visible features. Concurrently, these visible features were related necessarily to bundles of social, civilized, and cognitive characteristics taken from the discourse on society, civility, civilization, as found in the contemporaneous travelogue.
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Pickersgill, Martyn. "Epigenetics, education, and the plastic body: Changing concepts and new engagements." Research in Education 107, no. 1 (August 1, 2019): 72–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0034523719867102.
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Epigenetic processes, and the investigative practices that take these as their focus, are of increasing interest to a range of professionals beyond biomedicine. This has been piqued by, especially, the belief that bioscientific research is demonstrating new molecular mechanisms through which the social and physical environment impact upon the bodies of humans and other animals. Beyond the laboratory, epigenetic notions are entangled with wider ideas about the malleability of the soma (e.g., relating to neuroscience). In many contexts (including, to an extent, education), this intertwinement has contributed to producing and valourising a conception of a particularly plastic body. In this paper, I draw on a range of biomedical and education-related texts in order to outline and reflect upon the notions of ‘education’ and ‘epigenetics’ that are supported through and propelled by an array of writings that, to greater or lesser extents, bring these spheres of praxis into conversation. Discussions of epigenetics and stress, for instance, are framing certain kinds of educational work (e.g., with new parents) as a means of intervening in soma and society. In so doing, they implicitly extend ideas about what education is and what it can do. On the other hand, writings from educational researchers, for example, are enrolling epigenetic findings and ideas to support various positions or approaches. Many education researchers will be sceptical of some of the more hyperbolic assertations made about the significance of epigenetics. However, the fact that a nascent discourse connecting education and epigenetics is emerging is suggestive of a need for reciprocal, thoughtful, and critical exchange with bioscientists who seek to address educational issues, or whose work is being enrolled by others to do so.
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van Luijk, Ruben. "Over Hesperiaanse Melancholie: Eugène Nielen Marais en de Geschiedenis van een poëtische Gemoedsgesteldheid." Werkwinkel 9, no. 1 (July 17, 2014): 55–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/werk-2014-0004.
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Abstract The article gives a brief ‘idea history’ of Hesperian melancholy a.k.a. Hesperian depression, the fleeting state of dejection that some humans and animals experience at dusk. The term was apparently coined by the South African poet and naturalist Eugene Marais (1871-1936), who noticed the phenomenon during his field observations of baboons. Marais' observations of primates were in the first place an attempt to shed more light on the evolutionary roots of the human psyche and its afflictions - not in the least his own. A personal focus seems probable in his notes on the use of euphoria-inducing substances among animals and humans, which are an evident reflection of his own morphine addiction; but also in his writings about Hesperian depression. During his lifetime, Marais only published about Hesperian depression twice, once in a very concise article in English, and once in more elaborate form in Afrikaans. The term ‘Hesperian depression’ only became more current when his manuscript on primate behaviour, The Soul of the Ape, was posthumously published in 1963. Since then, the term and its description sometimes appear in (popular) publications of paleobiologists and scholars of the evolution of human behaviour. In psychology and psychiatry, the term was introduced by the eminent American psychoanalyst William G. Niederlander, who presented it in a 1971 article in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association as an idea of his own. It is evident, however, that he took his cue from Marais, who thus was posthumously plagiarized.
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MIGLIETTI, SARA. "ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS FOR A FALLEN WORLD: JOHANN JAKOB SCHEUCHZER (1672–1733) AND THE BOUNDARIES OF HUMAN AGENCY." Earth Sciences History 39, no. 2 (November 12, 2020): 447–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.17704/1944-6187-39.2.447.
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ABSTRACT This article traces the formation of a (self-)critical discourse around human environmental agency in early Enlightenment Europe, focusing on the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) and the Royal Society milieus to which he was connected. In manuscript and printed writings, and particularly in his beautifully illustrated Physica sacra (1731–1735), Scheuchzer used a combination of biblical exegesis, thought experiments, and ecological insights to reflect about the relationship between God, humankind, and nature. Against claims that the tradition of natural theology in which Scheuchzer belonged “prevented and delayed the acknowledgment of the earth as vulnerable” (Kempe 2003b, p. 166), the article shows how different thinkers could use the Bible to support competing claims regarding the role of humans as agents in God’s creation. While some authors enthusiastically upheld contemporary ideologies of environmental ‘improvement’, others—including Scheuchzer himself—called for greater self-restraint and developed a biblically-grounded form of precautionary environmental ethics.
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Taylor, Cheryl. "‘To my brother’: Gay love and sex in Thea Astley’s novels and stories." Queensland Review 26, no. 2 (December 2019): 269–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.32.
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AbstractBeginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Goethe's writings about humans"
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Bell, Matthew Giles. "Man and other plants : naturalistic anthropology in Goethe's writing from Werther to Die Wahlverwandtschaften." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.315000.
Full textBooks on the topic "Goethe's writings about humans"
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Kent, Bonnie. In the Image of God. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199385997.003.0005.
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Christian writings from late antiquity through the Middle Ages have much to say about the dignity of various beings but little to say about the dignity that all humans have simply because they are human. Few authors of the Latin West used the biblical account of creation to argue for the kind of human dignity we often hear about today. Why? This chapter argues that two factors do much to explain their silence. First, patristic and medieval authors believed that God made angels as well as humans in his image, so that humans were not the sole creatures endowed with understanding, will, and free choice. Second, most authors thought that human nature was badly deformed by the Fall and needed to be reformed in the likeness of Christ. They focused less on creation than salvation, an end they believed attainable only through the grace of baptism and God-given virtues.
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Boyle, Deborah. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190234805.003.0001.
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Interest in Margaret Cavendish’s philosophical views has increased dramatically in the past two decades. While earlier readers were not kind to Cavendish, recent scholarly work has been more sympathetic, showing how her writings were informed by the work of her contemporaries and revealing ways in which Cavendish’s views were original. Her corpus contains recurring themes, including a consistent interest in questions of gender, an obsession with fame, and a focus on the need for peace and order. This book argues that focusing on peace and order illuminates multiple facets of Cavendish’s philosophical thinking: her natural philosophy, her political theory, her views on gender, her views about the relationship between humans and the natural world, and her medical theory. This introductory chapter surveys some of the many texts in which Cavendish focuses on peace, order, and what she calls “regularity” and provides a summary of the topics addressed in subsequent chapters.
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Attrill-Smith, Alison, Chris Fullwood, Melanie Keep, and Daria J. Kuss, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198812746.001.0001.
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Humans are becoming increasingly reliant on interconnected technologies to go about their daily lives in the personal and professional spheres. From finding romance, to conducting businesses entirely online, receiving health services, shopping, banking, and gaming, the Internet and World Wide Web open up a world of possibilities to people across the globe. Understanding the psychological processes underlying and influencing the thinking, interpretation, and behavior associated with this online interconnectivity is the core premise of Cyberpsychology. This book explores a wide range of cyberpsychological processes and activities through the research and writings of some of the world’s leading cyberpsychology experts. The book covers a broad range of topics spanning the key areas of research interest in this emerging field of enquiry and will be of interest to those who have only recently discovered the discipline as well as more seasoned cyberpsychology researchers and teachers. The book contains eight sections, and includes contributions spanning the breadth of current academic and public interest. Topics include: online research methods, self-presentation and impression management, technology across the lifespan, interaction and interactivity, online groups and communities, social media, health and technology, video gaming, and cybercrime and cybersecurity.
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Ruse, Michael. Darwinian Theory Comes of Age. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190867577.003.0010.
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As professional science, Darwinian theory is now a fully functioning paradigm. Darwinism as religion continues and war continues as a good confirmatory case study. There is now, thanks both to fossil finds and to refined molecular techniques, a much better understanding of human evolution and its history. This is new; the interpretations are not. There is much talk about killer apes, owing as much to Augustine as to Darwin, with speculations by Konrad Lorenz backed by dramatic writings by the film-script-writer-turned-amateur-anthropologist Robert Ardrey. Starting to play a major role are sophisticated studies of the great apes, notably Jane Goodall on wild chimpanzees and Frans de Waal on caged chimpanzees, the former moving more toward the innate nature of ape violence and the latter rather the other way. Major clashes about nature versus nurture occurred with anthropologist Ashley Montagu on the one side and biologist Edward O. Wilson on the other. There are an increasing number of naysayers, especially the Quaker bird-song specialist, William Thorpe, but the traditional picture persists. War is part of our biological heritage; it had to be a good thing inasmuch as it led progressively upward to humans, but it is now outdated and dangerous, and we can and should eliminate it.
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Gordon, Jane Anna, and Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, eds. The Politics of Richard Wright. University Press of Kentucky, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175164.001.0001.
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Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological preconditions for personal freedom. He insisted that humans unflinchingly confront and responsibly reconstruct their worlds. He therefore offered not only honest social criticisms but unromantic explorations of political options. The book is organized in five sections. It opens with a series of broad discussions about the content, style, and impact of Wright’s social criticism. Then the book shifts to particular dimensions of and topics in Wright’s writings, such as his interest in postcolonial politics, his approach to gendered forms of oppression, and his creative use of different literary genres to convey his warnings. The anthology closes with discussions of the different political agendas and courses of action that Wright’s thinking prompts—in particular, how his distinctive understanding of psychological life and death fosters opposition to neoslavery, efforts at social connectivity, and experiments in communal refusal. Most of the book’s chapters are original pieces written for this volume. Other entries are excerpts from influential, earlier published works, including four difficult-to-locate writings by Wright on labor solidarity, a miscarriage of justice, the cultural significance Joe Louis, and the political duties of black authors. The contributors include experts in Africana studies, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis.
Book chapters on the topic "Goethe's writings about humans"
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Neu, Daniela. "On the Relation Between Being and Humans in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism and in his Contributions to Philosophy." In The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 189–93. Philosophy Documentation Center, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/wcp20-paideia19986152.
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Heidegger's main question, the question of Being concerning human facticity, struggles to uncover the original ground to which humans belong, a ground from which modern society tends to uproot itself through the dominance of calculative and representational thinking. What is most dangerous for Heidegger about this process is that the original ground of humans and beings in general might be covered and forgotten to the extent that humans lose completely the sense of what they truly need. The task of philosophy is to help bring back humans and beings in general to the place which they originally belong, i.e., to their most fulfilled way of being which is their proper or own [das Eigene, eigen]. The term "En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] — the key word in Heidegger's thinking since the 1930's — marks his attempt to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being "enowned" of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being. I will rethink the question of this relation in reference to two of Heidegger's writings, and will focus on his struggle for a proper language which would be able to say what essentially remains concealed in metaphysical language: the truth (or ground) or Being as Ereignis.
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Sagar, Paul. "Sociability." In The Opinion of Mankind. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691178882.003.0002.
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This chapter examines David Hume's science of man as yielding a science of human sociability, placing his writings in opposition to Thomas Hobbes's theory of human nature and his supervening science of politics. It first considers Hobbes's theory of human nature, which he articulates in his 1642 De Cive, and his arguments about pride, as well as his depiction of humans' natural unsociability in Leviathan. It then discusses the views of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, who rejected Hobbes's vision of human sociability, and Bernard Mandeville's claim that human beings were primarily driven by pride. It also analyzes Hume's theory of sociability, showing that it is tripartite in nature: sympathy and imagination must undergird and then supplement utility, even if utility remains the central factor. Finally, it looks at Hume's views on justice and government.
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Bradley, Ben. "Introduction." In Darwin's Psychology, 1–23. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198708216.003.0001.
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Twentieth-century psychology took a modernist form, giving Darwin’s approach to agency an unscientific look. Meanwhile, twentieth-century biologists were reconstructing evolutionary theory to highlight molecular genetics, reducing Darwin’s far-reaching writings about the living world to one grand idea: natural selection. Advances in biology today, which ground evolutionary thinking in a theory of the organism (or phenotype), find new wisdom in Darwin’s vision of the world. This vision has two axes. One describes the interwoven lives of the creatures who fill a given habitat, making interdependence central—a theatre of agency or ‘struggle for life.’ The other is what that struggle effects over time periods measured in millions of years, namely: evolution. Like his law of natural selection, Darwin’s psychology drew primarily on his understandings of the theatre of agency, whether discussing the actions of humans, animals, or plants—as the chapters of this book will show.
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Dalit Body." In The Empire of Disgust, 1–20. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199487837.003.0001.
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Dalit bodies have been the objects of upper-caste disgust when they have not been simply overlooked. Even in academic writings such as those of the Subaltern Studies group, the figure of the ‘dalit’ gets folded into the figure of the ‘insurgent peasant’, and the question of caste remains largely overlooked. This essay attempts to construct ‘the dalit body’ and, while acknowledging this to be a construct in the manner of Frantz Fanon’s construction of ‘the black body’, it seeks to tease out of such a construction a way of thinking about the human body in an age when humans collectively are recognized as exercising a geological agency that changes the climate system of the whole planet and reveals our entanglement with other forms of life and larger planetary processes. With this aim in view, the chapter ends with a reading of some excerpts of Rohit Vemula’s Facebook postings that became available after his tragic suicide in 2016.
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Murray, Stuart. "(Post)human Subjects, Disability Deployments." In Disability and the Posthuman, 35–72. Liverpool University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789621648.003.0003.
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Chapter One concentrates on recent theoretical writings on disability and posthumanism and also explores the intellectual spaces in which the subjects take shape, before moveing to a discussion of how these come together in select science fiction films. Disability Studies and critical posthumanism have much in common; a critique of humanist norms; a recognition of complex embodiment; and a commitment to intersectionality and inclusive practice among them. But they also harbour suspicions of one another. The most important divergence between the two subject areas comes in arguments surrounding transhumanism. Transhumanist assertions that the application of future technology will allow for bodily and neurological enhancement, and the ‘improvement’ of humans as a result, are met with hostility by many with disabilities who see in them suggestions that disability is a condition that might, and indeed should, be eradicated in a science-led drive towards ‘perfection’. The chapter will explore these and other debates, especially as they form around cultural representations and the ways stories are told about the bodies and technologies of the future.
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Christian, William A. "Excerpt from Person and God in a Spanish Valley." In Anthropology of Catholicism. University of California Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520288423.003.0007.
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The book Person and God in a Spanish Valley, by anthropologist and historian William A. Christian, is a classic twentieth-century study in the anthropology of Catholicism. It embraces key spatial and temporal dynamics of Catholicism through the analysis of devotional behavior across a range of intersecting axes and contexts. Among these, gender, class, and moment within the life course are shown to be of particular importance in shaping the quality and concerns of individual faith. In chapter 3, of which this is an abridged version, Christian shows how different styles of payer point to different economies of affection, obligation, forgiveness, and indebtedness. “Putting God in one’s debt” clearly illustrates that Catholicism is not only a practice of devotion but also an economy of circulation of affects and indebtedness. Devotional prayers can work either to keep humans and the divine separate or to bring humans increasingly close to the divine. However, Person and God also does much to emplace Catholicism within a broader history of agrarian politics and reform in northern Spain and is a remarkable work for its mastery of historical perspective as well as its fine ethnography. In particular, it offers some important anthropological insights on the local repercussions of the Second Vatican Council (1963–65), revealing shifts toward new forms of priesthood, less concerned with a hierarchical reproduction of the church (and its connection to land patronage) and more inclined to a lay participation. The effect of such changes in Catholic doctrine and orientation on long-existing systems of “triadic patronage” in the area is one of the key questions that this work addresses. Among the numerous monographs on Mediterranean villages that came out in the 1970s, Christian’s is perhaps unusual in the degree to which it foregrounds Catholic forms of reasoning and practice, rather than backgrounding them to discussions of patronage and kinship and political economy. The importance of Person and God for a modern anthropology of Catholicism cannot be overestimated, for it has been key in establishing a core “analytical grammar” for understanding popular Catholic practices that subsequent generations of scholars continue to revisit. Indeed, the work has figured as an important reference point in various twenty-first-century writings on the anthropology of Christianity,1 having achieved something of a status as “the go-to” citation for discussions about the presence of an “earlier” anthropology of Christianity.