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1 - The Vitalities of Çatalhöyük

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

By
Ian Hodder
Edited by
Ian Hodder
Ian Hodder
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

This book describes new work on the role of religion at the nine-thousand-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. It follows on from a volume entitled Religion and the Origin of Complex Societies: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study (Hodder 2010) that resulted from a seminar funded by the Templeton Foundation. The new volume results from a larger and more ambitious Templeton seminar that took place at Çatalhöyük over three years (2009–2011). All the contributors to this volume participated in the seminar, spending a week at the site each year, talking to the excavators and laboratory researchers, developing their own chapters in dialogue with archaeologists. Each chapter in this volume thus results from in-depth engagement with the archaeological data from the site as well as from intense discussions with other contributors.

The contributors were charged with writing about the role of religion at Çatalhöyük from the point of view of their own experience but engaging with the detailed data from the site. The contributors come from philosophy and religious studies, anthropology and sociology, and from archaeological contexts in different parts of the world. The interactions between the various scholars and with the archaeologists at the site were fruitful, and the group as a whole moved toward an understanding of religion at Çatalhöyük in terms of “vital matter,” that is, in terms of the ways in which materials and substances that were seen to have a vital force played active roles in forming and transforming societies. Bodies and bones, flesh and horns, surfaces and interfaces all in their various ways became marked as constitutive of social life. Such matters had vitality but were also vital in producing and reproducing social life. They constituted the religious by drawing numinous forces into the interstices of daily life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society
Vital Matters
 , pp. 1 - 32
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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