Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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English

Publikace detail

Jonathan Z. Smith's theory of ritual and myth

Autoři: Palatáš Marcel

Rok: 2016

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Jonathan Z. Smith's theory of ritual and myth	It has been quite customary in the academic Study of religion to speak of myth with a good deal of regards to “ritual” applying vice versa. Jonathan Z. Smith belongs to that category of scholars. He has become most famous for his theory of ritual, according to which the primary function of ritual is that of “microadjustment” of, say, unpredictable unconformities or obstacles of the real life. In my contribution, I would like to shed some light on his theory of myth, which still goes along as a silent companion. I will abstract and examine Smith s remarks about the category of myth in the context of his works, and the works he quoted. In the meanwhile, I'm going to point out and analyze the relations between myth and ritual in his understanding to religion and propose some directions of further elaboration and correction of his theory. I will argue that although Smith criticized Eliade's approach to the study of religion and made a huge effort in re-conceptualizing methodology of comparison in social sciences, he also made considerable mistakes in comparing and interpreting religious data. This is most apparent in Takeshi Kimura's critique of Smith's paper Bare facts of ritual (1980), where he completely disproved Smiths' assumptions about what the Ainu bare ritual means and how it should be interpreted. Finally, I will uncover some Eliadean aspects in Smith's view of religion although he relentlessly tried to avoid them.	Jonathan Z. Smith; ritual; myth; theory of religion; hunting rituals