Unearthly Powers by Alan Strathern

£26.99
Out of stock
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781108701952
Published:
21 Mar 2019
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
408 pages
Dimensions:
228x153x20mm
Weight:
0.660kgs
Author:
Using examples from Rome to Tahiti, Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about religion and its changing relationship with political authority throughout history. Exploring phenomena including sacred kingship, conversion, and the rise of the world religions, this is a major intervention in our understanding of the pre-modern world.
Why was religion so important for rulers in the pre-modern world? And how did the world come to be dominated by just a handful of religious traditions, especially Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism? Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion and its interaction with political authority. His analysis distinguishes between two quite different forms of religiosity - immanentism, which focused on worldly assistance, and transcendentalism, which centred on salvation from the human condition - and shows how their interaction shaped the course of history. Taking examples drawn from Ancient Rome to the Incas or nineteenth-century Tahiti, a host of phenomena, including sacred kingship, millenarianism, state-church struggles, reformations, iconoclasm, and, above all, conversion are revealed in a new light.

About the Author: Alan Strathern is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and Fellow in History at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is the author of Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge, 2008), and co-editor with Zoltán Biedermann of Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (2017). He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History in 2010.

More Information
Number of pages 408

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