William W. McCorkle's Books

Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased

From Corpse to Concept

By: William W. McCorkle

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Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased

From Corpse to Concept

By: William W. McCorkle

Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased traces mortuary behavior from the early fossil record to modern religious contexts in diverse cultural settings. By using archival and ethnographic evidence from Buddhist traditions, the author highlights the disparity between doctrines that contradict actual practices performed by Buddhists themselves. By appealing to the evolved cognitive architecture of human minds, this book argues that ritualized disposal behavior is the by-product of mental systems designed to handle living people. Due to complex social intelligence, humans are compelled to handle dead people in ritualized behaviors and to represent them in counterintuitive ways. The author also examines the professional religious guilds that have taken advantage of these ritualized compulsions over the last several thousand years, by giving and controlling the meanings behind these actions. Furthermore, experimental evidence is given to support this hypothesis, providing the first mature cognitive and evolutionary theory for mortuary behavior by humans.

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Page Count

206

Publisher

Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

1433110105

ISBN 13

9781433110108

A Self-Governing Dominion

California, 1849-1860

By: William Henry Ellison

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A Self-Governing Dominion

California, 1849-1860

By: William Henry Ellison

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

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348

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520338049

ISBN 13

9780520338043

New Patterns for Comparative Religion

Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective

By: William E. Paden

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New Patterns for Comparative Religion

Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective

By: William E. Paden

The cross-cultural study of religion has always gone hand in hand with the worldview, sciences, or intellectual frameworks of the time. These frames, whether focused on psychology or politics, gender or colonialism, bring out perspectives for understanding religious behavior. Today one of our common civic worldviews is represented in the shift from scriptural to evolutionary history. This volume brings together in one place key essays by professor emeritus William Paden, showing a progression of steps he has taken in exploring bridgeworks between comparative religion and evolutionary models of religious behavior. One of the leading scholars in religious studies, Paden shows ways that religion can be contextualized as part of the natural world and thus seen as reflecting the ingrained sociality and world-making drive of the human species. Paden argues that although comparativism has been challenged as too culture-bound, too western, or too gendered, cross-over categories and concepts between religious traditions cannot be avoided. Arguing that there are recurrent patterns of human behavior common to our species and that thereby underlie all cultures, he proposes that the missing link in the Religion Evolution debate is comparative religion, a global, cross-cultural perspective on religious behaviours throughout time. Each article is contextualized within this overall trajectory of thought within Paden's work and the history of the discipline as a whole.

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Page Count

265

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474252125

ISBN 13

9781474252126

Book's by William W. McCorkle

Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased

Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased

A Self-Governing Dominion

A Self-Governing Dominion

New Patterns for Comparative Religion

New Patterns for Comparative Religion

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