Bøger af Simon Coleman

"Pilgrims in Place, Pilgrims in Motion: Sacred Travel in the Ancient Mediterranean" brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on the connected poles of pilgrimage: the sanctuaries being visited, and the journeys to get there. Contributions investigate different concepts of place, community, social tensions and expectations of pilgrim behaviour; long-term meanings of place as embodied in memory and topography; mobility, migration and placemaking; connectivity and its relationship to pilgrimage. Individual chapters discuss shrines, sanctuaries and sacred places as well as journeys and mobility across Greek, Roman and late antique contexts, framed as part of a keydebate within the study of pilgrimage, the central tension between place and motion.

The notion of a life in which little is fixed, all is malleable and identity can be a neutral phenomenon is becoming normal according to the editors. These papers focus upon the modern problems that emerge out of the confusion of what constitutes identity and the role that religion plays in this.

This 2000 book analyses the revival of charismatic Protestant Christianity as an example of globalization. Simon Coleman shows that, along with many social movements, these religious conservatives are negotiating their own interpretations of global and postmodern processes. They are constructing an evangelical arena of action and meaning within the liminal, chaotic space of the global. The book examines globalization not only as a social process, but also as an embodied practice involving forms of language and ritualized movement. Charismatic Christianity is presented through its material culture - art, architecture and consumer products - as well as its rhetoric and theology. The book provides an account of the incorporation of electronic media such as television, videos and the Internet into Christian worship. Issues relating to the conduct of fieldwork in contexts of globalization are raised in an account which is also a major ethnography of a Faith ministry.

Issues addressed include the tensions between oral and written accounts of pilgrimage, the relation of pilgrimage accounts to secular forms of writing, and finally, pilgrimage as a form of narrative.