Anders-Christian Jacobsen , Carmen Cvetkovic , Jakob Engberg , Thorsten Rørbæk , René Falkenberg , Kasper Bro Larsen , Anders Klostergaard Petersen , Birgitte Bøgh , Rubina Raja , Jan Dochhorn , Nils Arne Pedersen , Erin J. Wright , Robert Bonde Nielsen Hansen , Vladimir Cvetkovic & Uffe Holmsgaard Eriksen
As indicated by the title "The discursive fight over religious texts in antiquity”, theme 1 focuses on an area of conflict which became decisive for the development of Christianity.
Several centuries passed before the Church agreed on which group of texts were to be regarded as the norms for the preaching of Christianity. There were no foregone conclusions and a great number of conflicts arose among the Christians, who held diverse opinions about the message of the Gospel. The most viable opinion is reflected in the texts that together form the New Testament canon.
Through many years, Christians as a religious and social group established their own identity by giving preferential treatment to a certain collection of texts which were used at services and in teaching. By doing so, they differentiated themselves from other Christian and non-Christian religious groups with different opinions. These texts thus became normative for the lives and world view of the believers.
However, even in a religious community who agree on the delimitation of the texts which form the basis of the faith, frictions may arise. Read as individual texts, the scripture is subject to interpretation. Theologians were able to explain the meaning of difficult passages of the scripture, but they did not always agree on these interpretations.
This theme aims to enlighten the processes in the history of early Christianity that became important for the formation of the New Testament canon.Beskrivelse
01/01-2007 → 04/06-2010
My PhD project aims to explore the settlement history of the Northwest Quarter of the ancient city of Gerasa, known today as Jerash, in Jordan. The Northwest Quarter of Jerash is largely unexplored and was selected for further study for this reason. Ongoing excavations since 2011 have resulted in many discoveries and expanded current knowledge of urbanization and settlement development over time in Jerash. Although Jerash was an important Decapolis city, much material has been excavated that has contributed to the understanding of the Ayyubid-Mamluk periods. On top of the NW hill an extensive building complex was found, with Mamluk style pottery alongside repairs and modifications of the buildings, indicating Mamluk settlement over several generations. This activity is reflected in the material culture through handmade geometrically-painted ware (HMGPW), which was a ceramic style generally associated with Mamluk activity and also known to have existed during the Ayyubid period. Evidence of Ayyubid-Mamluk occupation in this area is much better represented than previously thought. My PhD project, ‘ceramics in context’, grew out of a need to analyze this later medieval material. By examining the ceramic material from these periods, both empirically and in a wider regional context, my project aims to better understand the settlement history in the Northwest Quarter.
The ceramic repertoire of the Middle Islamic period in Jordan, and its chronology and typology, is still largely unclear. Research on Islamic pottery in Jordan and the Levant is still at an early stage of development and many of the studies publish ceramics without contextualizing them or saying too much. For this reason, I aim to develop a more precise ceramic chronotypology for the Ayyubid-Mamluk period by focusing on an individual site such as Jerash. Through empirical analysis of individual finds I will contextualize them within the site and the urban development of Jerash. After constructing a chronotypology and examining the pottery at a local level, it can then be placed in its regional context in order to gain insight on the social history of a region, production and consumption, lines of trade, and cultural regionalism. Another question I hope to answer is, ‘what was the pottery used for?’ Considering aspects of diet or food and eating trends is necessary to better understand and contextualize the pottery. By combining both the empirical analysis of ceramics and the deeper meanings of pottery use, their social and economic implications will be understood in a way which can take research on this topic much further.Beskrivelse
01/06-2015 → 01/09-2018
Karoline Stentoft Andersen , Annemette Krintel Petersen & Marie Veje Knudsen
The main purpose of the study is to obtain a better understanding of the mechanisms that leads up to acute admission to the ED based on dyspnea, seen from a patient's perspective. A phenomenological study is conducted among six patients after discharge from ED at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark. The interviews are analysed using meaning condensation according to Kvale and Brinkmann.Beskrivelse
15/02-2016 → 15/02-2017
Astrid Lindman , Annemette Krintel Petersen & Charlotte Handberg
Ph.d. projekt - Astrid LindmanBeskrivelse
01/08-2016 → 31/12-2020
Gitte Gjøde , Kirsten Marianne Klausen , Tine Legarth Iversen , Bodil Spejlborg Jørgensen , Rasmus Thorbjørn Nielsen , Erling Hansen & Anni Petersen
AU Library, Navitas nedlægges og fusionerer med AU Library, Katrinebjerg. Beskrivelse
20/03-2017 → 15/09-2017
Rane Willerslev , Svein Harald Gullbekk , Caroline Humphrey , Anders Klostergaard Petersen , Matthew Walsh , Sean O'neill , Mette-Louise Johansen , Mette Løvschal & Jan Dietrich
This project seeks answers to the question: why human sacrifice? It explores
the slippery boundaries between so-called sacred acts of ritual human
violence and more common forms of profane violence such as in homicide,
suicide, warfare, and genocide. While sacrifice is understood as a sacred
exchange of one thing for another, the substitution of an offering as a
surrogate in place of a sacrificer, it cannot be understood in purely religious
terms. Rather, human sacrifice must be studied in its relationship to the
profane acts of violence into which it is inevitably transformed: the actually
taking of a human life. Such violence is often explained by situating it within
an overly-simplistic sacred vs. profane dichotomy, ignoring the historical
co-dependence between the two.
Through three transdisciplinary work packages the project examines
human sacrifice from the point of view of values, examining what values
are associated with human sacrifice and how those values change,
circumstantially. The project uses cultural phylogenetics modeling as a
heuristic to identify possible value shifts within genealogies of sacrificial
traditions across time and place. This will provide a lens from which to
observe when and how value shifts have occurred, in the short and long
term. Further cross-cultural comparisons and text-based analyses will identify
common denominator historical conditions that structure sacrificial violence.
The project not only challenges conventional theories of human sacrifice
with renewed analyses of why and how it has occurred throughout human
history, but it also engages directly with the pervasive ramifications of human
sacrificial practices today, often ultimately manifested in purely secular
forms of violence. The project takes research findings into the domains
of policy-making and law enforcement to offer deeper understandings of
sacrificial tropes with a view toward positive solutions to real-world problems
of sacrificial violence.
The primary objective is: 1) To generate a greater working knowledge of
the nature of human sacrificial violence, not only amongst scholars, but
also for policy-makers at the international level, and for the public at large,
all of whom are regularly confronted with the very real consequences
of human sacrificial violence. Using both qualitative humanities and
quantitative scientific methodologies, an analysis of the historical record will
be synthesized to provide valuable insights into contemporary social and
political challenges;
2) To forge a deeper understanding of the social mechanisms underpinning
the slippery relationship between sacred acts of sacrifice and profane forms
of violence such as murder;
3) To uncover what values are at play in various human sacrificial traditions:
how they emerge, are subverted and substituted over time in different
contexts;
4) Advance development of innovative cross-cultural comparative
methodologies with applications for other research project.
The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR), FRIHUMSAM.Beskrivelse
23/03-2018 → 24/03-2021
