大象传媒

The undertaking of what Medieval 大象传媒 鈥� and its geographic, temporal, and cultural subset, Viking 大象传媒 鈥� is undoubtedly a booming field of academic inquiry, with a growing number of research centres, study courses, and even university departments dedicated to its pursuit. Yet this is a field without common disciplinary grounding, its scholars coming to the study of, for example, 鈥淰iking culture鈥� or 鈥淢edieval religion鈥� from a variety of backgrounds. Their communal output is thoroughly interdisciplinary and students are often encouraged to educate themselves in neighbouring fields, yet there is little explicit cross-pollination of methods and theoretical approaches between the constitutive disciplines involved. This paper offers a perspective on how we, as scholars of historical societies such as Medieval Scandinavia organise and approach our data.听

It argues that despite the large number of academic disciplines represented in Medieval 大象传媒, from philology to archaeology, most scholarship in this field can be situated towards one of two poles on a methodological spectrum. It is proposed that binary pairs of methodological approaches can be categorised into loose family groupings of 鈥渂ottom-up鈥� and 鈥渢op-down鈥� methodologies: emic and etic, deductive and inductive, Max Weber鈥檚听Idealtypenand Ferdinand T枚nnies鈥櫶�Normaltypen, and insiders鈥� and outsiders鈥� perspectives. The applicability of such different methodologies is then examined in two case studies: of 鈥減rivacy鈥� in the early Medieval North, and of 鈥渉ousehold cult鈥� as a particular form of religion, and attempts to highlight the influence of our methodologies on the results that we scholars of Medieval and Viking 大象传媒 can draw from even a highly-restricted dataset. In doing so, this paper is not intended to advocate for a single common methodology of Viking 大象传媒, but is rather intended to fan the flames of a more conscious methodological discourse in the study of early Medieval Scandinavia.

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Luke John Murphy听holds a PhD in the History of Religion from the University of Aarhus, where he wrote a dissertation on diversity in pre-Christian Nordic paganism. He has previously worked at the University of Iceland and University of Stockholm, and is presently working on a project about animal sacrifice in first-millennium Britain at the University of Leicester. More about him can be found on his website: luke-murphy.com

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All interester parties are welcome!听