Mesopotamian religion has been the focus of many Assyriological studies, from the founding of the discipline in the late-19th century, until the present. Since Mesopotamian religious practices are abundantly documented in thousands of textual sources from different periods and places, including hymns and mythological narratives, administrative documents pertaining to cultic practices, and descriptions of state and temple rituals, the basis for many of these studies has understandably been the philological analysis of written texts. However, Assyriological studies of religion have always been informed, implicitly or explicitly, and to lesser or greater extents, by anthropological frameworks for interpreting religious behavior and practice. In this seminar, the question of what, if anything, anthropological theory has contributed, or could be expected to contribute to understanding Mesopotamian ritual will be addressed by considering Sumerian ritual laments from both traditional philological and contemporary anthropological perspectives.
Workshop-Termine (Um Anmeldung wird wegen vorher zu verteilender Texte gebeten: adrian.heinrich@ori.uni-heidelberg.de):
03.06.16 14:00–16:00, Marstallstraße 6 /Projektraum
Seminar 1: Sumerian Ritual Laments: Defining the Corpus and Identifying Interpretive Problems
06.06.16 14:00-16:00, Grabengasse 3–5, Neue Universität / Hs. 4a
Seminar 2: Doing Things with Words: Phonetic Writings and the Meaning of Sound in the Performance of Sumerian Laments
08.06.16 14:00–16:00, Marstallstraße 6 / Projektraum
Seminar 3: Lamenting in Theory and Practice: What, if Anything, do Anthropologists Know about Ritual Lamenting that We Don’t Know Already?
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