Complexifying Religion
暫譯: 複雜化宗教

Coltea, Andrei-Razvan

  • 出版商: Springer
  • 出版日期: 2024-08-02
  • 售價: $5,600
  • 貴賓價: 9.5$5,320
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 324
  • 裝訂: Quality Paper - also called trade paper
  • ISBN: 9819947030
  • ISBN-13: 9789819947034
  • 相關分類: 其他
  • 海外代購書籍(需單獨結帳)

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商品描述

This book provides an original and challenging perspective of religions as abstract complex adaptive systems, using an interdisciplinary approach to try to understand what religions are and how they function, two fundamental issues which, despite an intense struggle from several fields, have not yet been resolved. What is the source of religious belief? How do religions work and what are they made of? Why is religion so important for us that it has survived centuries of scientific progress and secularization? Why are people religious even outside religion? The book addresses these questions using an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to untangle the Gordian knot of defining religion. In short, they can be considered entropy-reducing technologies. What differentiates them from other meaning-producing systems is their configuration which employs specific building blocks as tools for mitigating entropy, which are also subsystems and combine in various ways to build a unique configuration: rituals, myths, taboos, supernatural agents, authority, identity, superstitions, moral obligations, afterlife beliefs and the sacred. As a reaction to perturbances or pressure, systems can collapse. Inspired by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it is, in this book, referred to as fragility--the negative reaction of systems to random events, and four parameters can be used to evaluate it in religious systems: monotonicity (the inability to learn from past mistakes), coupling (linking with other systems: such as political or economic), centralization and stress starvation.

Several case studies are provided in order to test the theoretical claims made in this book, based on the author's field research in Romania, Japan, North Korea and Mongolia, and offering details that could be of interest to casual readers, students and researchers of religion.

商品描述(中文翻譯)

這本書提供了一個原創且具挑戰性的觀點,將宗教視為抽象的複雜適應系統,並採用跨學科的方法來理解宗教的本質及其運作方式,這是兩個基本問題,儘管來自多個領域的激烈探討,至今仍未解決。宗教信仰的來源是什麼?宗教如何運作,並由什麼構成?為什麼宗教對我們如此重要,以至於它在幾個世紀的科學進步和世俗化中依然存活?為什麼人們即使在宗教之外仍然會有宗教感?本書針對這些問題,採用跨學科的方法,試圖解開定義宗教的戈爾迪之結。簡而言之,這些可以被視為減少熵的技術。它們與其他產生意義的系統的區別在於其配置,這些配置使用特定的構建塊作為減少熵的工具,這些構建塊同時也是子系統,並以各種方式組合以建立獨特的配置:儀式、神話、禁忌、超自然代理、權威、身份、迷信、道德義務、來世信仰和神聖。作為對擾動或壓力的反應,系統可能會崩潰。受到尼古拉斯·塔勒布(Nicholas Nassim Taleb)的啟發,在本書中稱之為脆弱性——系統對隨機事件的負面反應,並且可以使用四個參數來評估宗教系統中的脆弱性:單調性(無法從過去的錯誤中學習)、耦合(與其他系統的聯繫,例如政治或經濟)、集中化和壓力匱乏。

本書提供了幾個案例研究,以測試書中提出的理論主張,這些案例基於作者在羅馬尼亞、日本、北韓和蒙古的實地研究,並提供了可能對一般讀者、學生和宗教研究者感興趣的細節。

作者簡介

Andrei-Razvan Coltea is an anthropologist and historian with an intense curiosity regarding religions, which has guided his academic interests since observing their spectacular post-communist resurgence in his country, Romania. After graduating the 'Global Studies' Ph.D. program at Shanghai University, he decided to publish all the results of his research throughout the years in this monograph, hoping, by an intensely interdisciplinary approach, to shed some light on the dynamic nature of religious phenomena.

作者簡介(中文翻譯)

安德烈-拉茲萬·科爾特亞(Andrei-Razvan Coltea)是一位人類學家和歷史學家,對宗教有著強烈的好奇心,這引導了他自從在羅馬尼亞觀察到宗教在後共產主義時期的壯觀復甦以來的學術興趣。在上海大學完成「全球研究」博士課程後,他決定將多年來的研究成果發表在這本專著中,希望通過強烈的跨學科方法,對宗教現象的動態特性提供一些啟示。