Cosmology (Anthropology)

In its analysis of the archaeologies and histories of the northern fringe of Europe, this book provides a focus on animistic-shamanistic cosmologies and the associated human-environment relations from the Neolithic to modern times. The North has fascinated Europeans throughout history, as an enchanted world of natural and supernatural marvels: a land of light and dark, of northern lights and the midnight sun, of witches and magic and of riches ranging from amber to oil. Northern lands conflate fantasies and realities. Rich archaeological, historical, ethnographic and folkloric materials combine in this book with cutting-edge theoretical perspectives drawn from relational ontologies and epistemologies, producing a fresh approach to the prehistory and history of a region that is pivotal to understanding Europe-wide processes, such as Neolithization and modernization. This book examines the mythical and actual northern worlds, with northern relational modes of perceiving and engaging with the world on the one hand, and the 'place' of the North in European culture on the other. This book is an indispensable read for scholars of archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies and folklore in northern Europe, as well as researchers interested in how the North is intertwined with developments in the broader European and Eurasian world. It provides a deep-time understanding of globally topical issues and conflicting interests, as expressed by debates and controversies around Arctic resources, nature preservation and indigenous rights. Vesa-Pekka Herva is a professor of archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland. He has studied various aspects of material culture, human-environment relations, cosmology and heritage in northeastern Europe from the Neolithic to modern times. Antti Lahelma is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His core expertise lies in the study of prehistoric identity, cultural production and worldview, particularly in the northern circumpolar area.

“This paper analyses which are the great cultural cosmogonic models of creation in mythology; so it will be an essay of comparative mythology about the origin of the world, a study marked by the concern to detect philosophical principles that guide this area of thought.”

Based on recent ethnographic and archival doctoral research with Soiots and Oka-Buriats in Okinskii Raion of westernmost Buriatiia, this contribution examines local perceptions of imperial, Soviet, and contemporary roadways in the sentient landscapes of the Eastern Saian Mountains. Soiot and Oka-Buriats share a heritage of hunting and pastoral practices, which are intimately interwoven with the perception of a sacred landscape. From this perspective, specific land features represent local spirit masters (Rus. khoziaieva mestnosti) who govern the lifeforms within designated areas, much in the way human masters are seen to govern the affairs of their own households, including livestock. At the heart of this perception lies a deep commitment to balance in the reciprocal relationships between human and other than human masters, maintained not solely through mutual gift giving, but also by heeding each others' spacial autonomy. Road planners of imperial and Soviet periods did not abide by this ethos, and were thus seen as angering prominent spirit entities by constructing roads in violation of their spaces.

Responding to recent scholarship, this book examines animal domestication and offers a Soiot approach to animals and landscapes, which transcends the wild-tame dichotomy. Following herder-hunters of the Eastern Saian Mountains in southern Siberia, the author examines how Soiot and Tofa households embrace unpredictability, recognize sentience, and encourage autonomy in all their relations with animals, spirits, and land features. It is an ethnography intended to help us reinvent our relations with the earth in unpredictable times.

"The Yuchis are one of the least known yet most distinctive of the Native groups in the American southeast. Located in late prehistoric times in eastern Tennessee, they played an important historical role at various times during the last five centuries and in many ways served as a bridge between their southeastern neighbors and Native communities in the northeast. First noted by the de Soto expedition in the sixteenth century, the Yuchis moved several times and made many alliances over the next few centuries. The famous naturalist William Bartram visited a Yuchi town in 1775, at a time when the Yuchis had moved near and become allied with Creek communities in Georgia. This alliance had long-lasting repercussions: when the United States government forced most southeastern groups to move to Oklahoma in the early nineteenth century, the Yuchis were classified as Creeks and placed under the jurisdiction of the Creek Nation. Today, despite the existence of a separate language and their distinct history, culture, and religious traditions, the Yuchis are not recognized as a sovereign people by the Creek Nation or the United States."

"Jason Baird Jackson examines the significance of community ceremonies for the Yuchis today. For many Yuchis, traditional rituals remain important to their identity, and they feel an obligation to perform and renew them each year at one of three ceremonial grounds, called “Big Houses.” The Big House acts as a periodic gathering place for the Yuchis, their Creator, and their ancestors. Drawing on a decade of collaborative study with tribal elders and using insights gained from ethnopoetics, Jackson captures in vivid detail the performance, impact, and motivations behind such rituals as the Stomp Dance, the Green Corn Ceremony, and the Soup Dance and discusses their continuing importance to the community."

"In countless ways, the Yuchi (Euchee) people are unique among their fellow Oklahomans and Native peoples of North America. Inheritors of a language unrelated to any other, the Yuchi preserve a strong cultural identity. In part because they have not yet won federal recognition as a tribe, the Yuchi are largely unknown among their non-Native neighbors and often misunderstood in scholarship. Jason Baird Jackson’s Yuchi Folklore, the result of twenty years of collaboration with Yuchi people and one of just a handful of works considering their experience, brings Yuchi cultural expression to light."

"Yuchi Folklore examines expressive genres and customs that have long been of special interest to Yuchi people themselves. Beginning with an overview of Yuchi history and ethnography, the book explores four categories of cultural expression: verbal or spoken art, material culture, cultural performance, and worldview. In describing oratory, food, architecture, and dance, Jackson visits and revisits the themes of cultural persistence and social interaction, initially between Yuchi and other peoples east of the Mississippi and now in northeastern Oklahoma. The Yuchi exist in a complex, shifting relationship with the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with which they were removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s."

"Jackson shows how Yuchi cultural forms, values, customs, and practices constantly combine as Yuchi people adapt to new circumstances and everyday life. To be Yuchi today is, for example, to successfully negotiate a world where commercial rap and country music coexist with Native-language hymns and doctoring songs. While centered on Yuchi community life, this volume of essays also illustrates the discipline of folklore studies and offers perspectives for advancing a broader understanding of Woodlands peoples across the breadth of the American South and East."

Rites of passage are performed on an individual or community basis in order to make visible a transformation in the status, state or temporality of a person, social group or even the entire cosmos. Such rites, which are related to the periodicity of cosmic time, imply that the universe is governed by long periods (called pachas in the Andean context) of stability and short periods of chaos and renovation that have repercussions in human life. Among the most important of these rites are the New Year celebrations. In the Andean case, this rite is constituted by a set of different practices which take the form of the elaboration of años viejos (personified Old Years) or the presence of the viudas de año viejo (widows of the Old Year), whose transvestism indicates the destruction of Latin American hetero-normal patterns. During this night, there is an explicit desire to destroy everything that gives order to the cosmos in order to renew it and inaugurate a new cosmic period.

The significance of religion and concepts of al-ghaib (the invisible and unknowable) and sanctity in a materialistically oriented and globally dominant and changing world has been a nexus of current debates in Orthodox Islam. The concept of al-ghaib is a fundamental principle in Islamic theology; however, it has a profound impact on Muslim's daily lives. Thenceforth, this study focuses on the concepts of al-ghaib, or invisibility, sanctity, and imagination, as reflected in ordinary Muslims' views and key practices aimed at disclosing the unknown and unseen. This article presents an anthropological holistic insight incorporating objective description and subjective interpretation and as such comprises a phenomenological hermeneutic inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic studies conducted in communities belonging to Bahrain (predominantly Shi'a) and Egypt (predominantly Sunni), this inquiry aims at exploring the relationships between the Islamic sacred conviction of al-ghaib and everyday practices of Muslim communities. These ethnographic accounts are examined and compared with scholarly literature and cross-cultural materials.

In 2007, in order to facilitate the building and operations of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act proclaimed a large 'astronomy reserve' in the central Upper Karoo, a roughly rhombic space covering some 120,000 square kilometres. As it happens, this geographic reserve coincides almost exactly with a region described by |Xam prisoners of the mid 19th century as |Xam-ka !au, their homeland. We show how archival records indicate that jXam descendants are still living in the space now reserved for astronomy and how the claims of the Kalahari communities represented in the South African San Council of having once lived in the area lack substance. We compare the |Xam and the SKA notions of landscape, describe the historic evolution from the one to the other and suggest that benefit for local communities can only be in the form of bottom-up discussions about the planning of future developments and the distribution of tangible benefits.

The True Motion of Earth and its Axis

Think of earth’ motion like the motion of the moon (with one side always facing earth) socalled ‘phase-locked’ (tidally locked) to the sun – as the basic-motion and then add to it a daily (24 hour) rotation to the left (CCW) and a daily AXIS-angle-direction-ticking to the right (CW) (little less than one degree per day)…that’s it,that simple….

Aus heutiger Perspektive könnten die keilschriftlichen Kulturen Mesopotamiens, die mehr als drei Jahrtausende überdauerten, wie eine große Einheit anmuten. Dass Götternamen und Kultorte über den gesamten Zeitraum in gleicher Weise belegt sind und sich mythologische Motive bis in die älteste Dichtung zurückverfolgen lassen, verstärkt nur den Eindruck wirksamer kultureller Traditionen. Doch Religion ist immer in ihrer jeweiligen Lebenswelt verankert, und die Geistesgeschichte zeigt markante Entwicklungen auf dem langen Weg von den frühbronzezeitlichen Stadtstaaten bis zu den Imperien von Assur und Babylon. Ein historisches Bewusstsein des Betrachters ist deshalb auch beim Thema der Kosmogonien gefordert, um die frühen mesopotamischen Erzählungen über die Ursprünge in ihrer eigenen Welt zu situieren. In diesem Beitrag möchte ich mich auf die Frühe Bronzezeit konzentrieren, das dritte Jahrtausend v. Chr., wobei zur Verdeutlichung auch einige Quellen aus der frühen altbabylonischen Zeit (hier 20. bis 18. Jh.) einbezogen werden, sofern sie in älterer Tradition stehen. Um die Unterschiede dieser älteren Quellen zur bekanntesten Dichtung mit kosmogonischen Themen, dem späten babylonischen Mythos Enūma eliš zu verdeutlichen, seien davon zunächst einige Aspekte in Erinnerung
gerufen.

This chapter argues that the ‘chthonic’ category of Greek religion may be understood from a combined theological, philosophical and cosmological perspective, which concerns the relationship of humans to the soil, nature and the generative powers. It demonstrates that Aeschylus’ Oresteia provides previously unappreciated evidence that the chthonic captures a certain consciousness related to natural generation and production, the use and abuse of resources and the human relationship to the cosmic order as determined by these. By exploring how earth and the chthonic inform the role of the Erinyes and by demonstrating that their function goes well beyond that of deities of revenge and their antithesis with the Olympian gods, the chapter will demonstrate that their theology, in fact, approximates an eco-theology. It also explores how this category of the chthonic relates to bigger cultural questions, including the relationship of humans to the cosmic order, which is a key question at the heart of the Oresteia.

It is well known the harmful effects that savage capitalism has been causing to the environment since its introduction in a sphere in which a different logic and approach to nature are the essential conditions for the maintenance of the ecosystem and its complex relations between humans and non-human organisms. The amazon rainforest is a portion of the planet in which for thousands of years its human dwellers have been interacting with nature that it is understood beyond its physical condition. Thus, to what extent Amazonian's approaches to nature could be considered as a moral philosophy through which the way of conceptualizing nature and its non-human denizens enhances the continuity of life and the intimate relations between entities? To answer this question, I will explore the cosmolog-ical system of the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon with whom I lived for 5 months between July and November 2018, and thereby elucidate the spiritual relations that this society has with the metaphysical domain of nature.

Article included in nº 6 of Cons-ciencias Magazine.
Artigo incluído no nº6 da Revista Cons-ciências.
A ideia de contemporaneidade formou-se num contexto socio-histórico muito concreto. A crença que a razão e a ciência trariam a resolução infinita dos problemas da humanidade adveio de toda uma série de transformações políticas, sociais e tecnológicas que ocorreram em finais do séc. XVIII e durante o séc. XIX e que instauraram um ambiente positivista e cientista nas sociedades ocidentais. É certo que novas teorias científicas, que começaram a ser desenvolvidas no início do século XX, trouxeram a ideia de que um novo paradigma epistemológico está a emergir. Um paradigma que nos alerta para a interdependência, complexidade e inter-relação dos fenómenos trazendo um conhecimento mais no âmbito das probabilidades do que das certezas. No entanto, até pelo seu caráter transacional, o paradigma emergente, até aos dias de hoje, de modo algum substituiu inteiramente o paradigma anterior. Em muitas áreas do saber, a experiência empírico-científica e, consequentemente, a razão continuam a ser as melhores ferramentas ao dispor do investigador. O próprio conceito de contemporaneidade, embora, atualmente, também seja alvo de polémica, continua a ser usado para denominar a nossa época. É claro que a questão epistemológica aqui colocada pode encerrar em si contradições óbvias. No entanto, os desenvolvimentos científicos ocorridos no último século, levados até às últimas consequências, do ponto vista racional, implicam alterações na nossa noção de realidade que não podem escapar a um olhar e a uma análise mais cuidadosas. É neste âmbito que este artigo é desenvolvido. Partimos, desde logo, de novas teorias científicas, do campo da física e da astrofísica, que surgiram no século XX e que implicam não só mudanças de ordem epistemológica como também alterações na perceção da natureza do real. São estabelecidas, posteriormente, relações com a arte, com a psicologia, de diferentes escolas, e com eventos marcantes do nosso tempo, captados pelos média, para teorizar e projetar hipóteses sobre a natureza do real que intersetam elementos das correntes expostas.

ÖZET: Evrenin oluşumunun mitolojik kaynaklarda zamansal ve yapısal olarak nasıl açıklandığı, bu mitlerin birbirleriyle ve sanat eserleriyle olan ilişkisi ve tüm bu düşüncelerin bilim felsefesi ve modern astronominin oluşmasına nasıl katkıda bulunduğu, bu çalışmanın temel araştırma konularıdır. Araştırma sonucunda elde edilen veriler, heykellerin üretim sürecine katkıda bulunmuştur. Neredeyse tüm mitlerde karşılaşılan kaos kavramına bir yaratıcı figür ya da ilksel bir olgu olarak nasıl yaklaşıldığı, kaosun, karmaşa ve/veya düzenin temsili olarak mitlerde nasıl yer aldığı araştırılmıştır. Kaosun yapısı üzerinden örneklerle, kozmik su kavramı ele alınmış, yaratıcı ve yıkıcı bir güç olarak suyun mitolojilerdeki yeri incelenmiştir. Tapınak yapıları ve şehir planlamaları başta olmak üzere, gökyüzü üzerinden yapılan gözlemlerin uygarlıkların günlük hayatında ne gibi yansımaları olduğu araştırılmış ve farklı mimari örneklerle kozmos ve kent ilişkisine değinilmiştir. Gök cisimlerinin genel olarak mitolojilerde üstlendikleri görev ve tanrılaşma süreçleri antik edebiyat örnekleri üzerinden incelenmiş ve Kozmik Canavarlar bölümünde ejderha gibi mitolojik yaratıkların anlatılarda üstlendikleri kozmik rol araştırılmıştır. Uygulamalar bölümünde üretilen heykeller, tüm bu araştırma ve modern bilim felsefesinden örneklerle açıklanmaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Heykel, Kozmogoni, Kozmos, Evren, Mitoloji

SUMMARY How the formation of the universe is explained temporally and structurally in mythological sources, how these myths are related to each other and to the art works, and how all of these thoughts contributed to the formation of the philosophy of science and modern astronomy are the main research topics of this study. The data obtained from the research informed the production process of the sculptures. It was explored how chaos, which is almost an ever-present concept in all myths, was approached as a creative figure or as a primary phenomenon, and how chaos appeared in myths as a representation of disorder and/or order. The concept of cosmic water was studied with examples on the structure of chaos and the place of water as a creative and destructive power in mythologies was examined. Moreover, it was investigated what are the reflections of sky observations primarily on the temple buildings and city planning and on the daily life in the old civilizations and the relationship between cosmos and the city through different architectural examples was discussed. The role of celestial bodies and deities in mythologies are then examined through examples in ancient literature, and the cosmic role of mythological creatures such as dragons are explored in a section on “Cosmic Monsters”. The sculptures produced in the “Works” section are explained using both this research as well as examples from the philosophy of modern science. Keywords: Sculpture, Cosmogony, Cosmos, Universe, Mythology