Rituals of Land, Sea, and Sky

Undergraduate

This course investigates the many ways that humans and other beings relate to the environment through ritual. Throughout human history, one of the greatest goals of ritual was to engage with and transform the natural environment. And while the rise of modernity and “world religions” has trained our eyes on more transcendent concepts of god, the spirits of the land, sea, and sky continue to impinge upon our lives. In this course, we grapple with how they do so: how societies around the world engage these spirits and other divine forms in the landscape and examine their influence on individuals, cultures, and entire civilizations. HU T 1:30pm-3:25pm