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This chapter suggests that iamboi were a ‘performance framed by ritual’; that is to say, not directly playing a role in ritual, but not purely theatrical either. Accordingly, iamboi had a loose connection to their various performance contexts, with entertainment playing an important role. They could be performed and re-performed at festivals and competitions, as well as on private or semi-private occasions (such as symposia). This proposition is examined with particular attention to evidence for the performance of iamboi on occasions other than symposia, namely religious festivals and mousikoi agones.

This chapter examines Pericles' personal relations with the city gods and how his career as a stratēgos illuminates the Athenians' collective relationship to all that was divine. As a reelected stratēgos and a persuasive orator, Pericles was the spokesman of a civic religion that was undergoing a mutation. He was engaged in various religious activities at a time when the city was introducing profound changes into its religious account of its origins—that is, autochthony—within a context of strained diplomatic relations. The chapter first considers Pericles' role in religion and politics in the context of Athenian democracy, with particular emphasis on the religious festivals supposedly instituted by him, before discussing Pericles' privileged links with several deities in the pantheon. It also explores the increase in the number of impiety trials in Pericles' time.

This chapter argues that one of the functions of Rome's calendar of rites – the sequence of religious festivals as they occurred throughout the year – was to define and delineate Roman power, Roman history and Roman identity; and that it did this by evoking events from different chronological periods of the Roman past and arranging them in a meaningful sequence of time; but not a sequence defined by linear, narrative, history. The chapter concerns itself principally with the practice of Roman ritual during the late Republic and early Empire; and its argument depends on taking seriously the discussions of the various festivals preserved in the writings of contemporary Romans and Greeks – men who practised or observed the rituals. All the chosen texts refer to the festival of the Parilia, which took place each year on the twenty-first of April.

This chapter studies (primarily using epigraphic evidence) the various ways in which wars, both wars of the remote past and more recent conflicts, were present in the ritual life of Hellenistic cities. It demonstrates the continual presence of war memories and memorials in ritual activities, exploring the diverse ways in which that presence was manifested (for example, historical anniversaries, public funerals, the graves of the war dead as places of memory, the part played by war dedications in sanctuaries, the commemoration of war in the public recitation of honorary decrees).

Honour was itself measurable by the honours that one had either inherited or had conferred by a superior. Ideally, honours should be commensurate with honour, so that ‘reputation is finally sanctified by the bestowal of honours’. Though competition for office was intense and the struggle for possession the cynosure of factional squabbling, disputes over royal office were not a priori causes of feuds. Honours were naturally sought for material reward, but to claim an office or prerogative was also to claim honour and to deny it to someone else, and thus the victor in the competition for office finds his reputation enhanced by the humiliation of the vanquished. This chapter discusses violence associated with honours and prerogatives in early modern France, hunting as a cornerstone of noble sociability, religious festivals, churches and their furnishings, liturgy as rights of lordship and rights of harmony, and death and burial.

This chapter describes the religious festivals and competitions that reward and encourage Islamic performance as an act of civic duty and patriotism. It argues that with the stamp of national authority superimposed upon a religious system which encompasses aesthetics, ideology, and praxis, agencies of the government and institutions for religious education participate in producing Muslim information and experience, thus legislating, to some extent, both the logos and the pathos of Islam.

This chapter examines Roman attitudes towards the commemoration of those killed on campaign. In general, there is a lack in Roman public monuments recording the names of those who died in action, but two notable exceptions are explored here: Cicero’s proposal to commemorate the dead of the Civil War, and the monuments at Adamclissi in Dacia. The chapter goes on to discuss other ways in which war, and the casualties of war, were commemorated in Rome, in particular through the incorporation of the anniversaries of significant military events into the city’s religious calendar.

This chapter examines four religious processions in urban Hong Kong: two celebrate the birthday of the deity Tam Kung and the other two are fire dragon processions. It begins with an overview of Hong Kong's Tam Kung temples and fire dragons, along with the place of processions in Chinese folk religion. It then explores how processions reflect Hong Kong's colonial and postcolonial history as well as the state's relationship with religion. It also considers the transformation of neighborhoods from small, isolated communities and how their history is preserved in their religious festivals. Finally, it explains how modernist ideology devalued and suppressed popular religious processions until after the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, when they were rediscovered as “heritage”.

This chapter introduces the argument that African-Bahians and their allies were central players in the remaking of Bahian regional identity. This occurred mainly through the major religious festivals in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. The festivals provided opportunities for African-Bahians to perform their cultural practices, such as Candomblé ritual, samba, and capoeira. After 1930, politicians and journalists began to celebrate these practices as essential components of Bahian regional identity. The chapter also situates these arguments within the historical literature and elaborates on the author's argument that the process of cultural inclusion should be understood as a process of the formation of hegemony.

Two of the three principal rites of passage showed significant falls during the long 1960s, the proportion of children baptized as infants (from 85 per cent in 1960 to 60 per cent in 1980), and of marriages solemnized according to religious rites (from 73 per cent in 1957 to 51 per cent in 1980), but the Churches retained their near monopoly over funerals. The churching of women after childbirth disappeared almost entirely. Audiences for televised religious broadcasts grew absolutely but not in relation to the number of television licences and households capable of receiving Independent Television; they were also artificially boosted by the ‘God Slot’ and disproportionately comprised women, older persons, and the most religious. About one-half of adults claimed to pray regularly, but a diminishing minority read the Bible, whose authority and authenticity were increasingly doubted. Churchgoing apart, the religious observance of Christmas and Easter weakened.

This chapter argues that the Vargas era in Salvador bequeathed a legacy for the rest of the twentieth century. This legacy was the creation of a political-cultural struggle over the meaning of Bahian regional identity and the degree to which Bahia would be associated with African-Bahian cultural practices. These vectors of conflict and negotiation fed into wider political contestation over what the cultural inclusion of those practices should mean for justice, discrimination, equal opportunity, and quality of life for Bahians of African descent.

This chapter focuses on the explosion of gospel music recording in Chicago during the 1940s. One of the first Chicago gospel singers to record for an indie label in the immediate postwar period was Brother John Sellers. Meanwhile, his mentor, Mahalia Jackson, recorded the song “Move on Up a Little Higher,” for Apollo Records. This chapter examines some of the recordings made by Chicago gospel artists for Apollo Records, including the Roberta Martin Singers' “Old Ship of Zion,” as well as those by independent Chicago-based record companies like Hy-Tone Records. It also discusses the recordings of Rev. John Branham and the St. Paul Echoes of Eden Choir, Sallie Martin, and Louis Henry Ford and the St. Paul Church of God in Christ Choir. Finally, it considers the broadcasts of the Greater Harvest Baptist Church and the Forty-Fourth Street Baptist Church; the 1948 National Baptist Music Convention held in Houston, Texas; the Argo Singers; and gospel singing during the Religious Festival of Song, part of Chicago's annual Bud Billiken Parade.

Hegel notes that it has been traditional to treat Greek and Roman religion together since there seems to be a general correspondence among their divinities. But in fact, he claims, they represent two quite different general conceptions. Since the Romans and the Greeks had such different political developments, their cultures and religions are fundamentally distinct. The Roman gods are associated with numerous fixed goals or purposes. Hegel takes this to be an important point of contrast with the Greek religion. For the Greeks, the individual gods had a variety of individual powers and characteristics, but they were never fixed to their goals or ends in a dogged way. The Greek gods can be fickle, changing their minds just as humans tend to do. But the Roman gods are one-dimensional since they are fixed on a single end and are not anything more complex than this end.

This chapter provides the commentary on Book VIII of St. Augustine's The City of God. It reviews the main thrust of Augustine's criticism that has been directed at the civic rituals that were based on the mythological accounts of the Graeco-Roman deities. The myths were enacted in the stage shows mounted at the religious festivals, which Augustine repeatedly emphasized are important in the pagan religious traditions. Augustine cites and condemns the portrayal of the deities as thieves, adulterers, and slaves for the demons impersonate the gods and portray them unworthily. Augustine gives notice that he will exclude from his discussion the Epicureans, who believed that gods exist but live a life of self-absorption, with no interest in the affairs of men.