Download or read book La possession en Asie du Sud written by Jackie Assayag and published by Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. This book was released on 1999 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: En Asie du Sud, la possession par des divinités ou des esprits, entendue comme cette présence étrangère à soi en soi, n'a guère été prise en compte dans la réflexion générale s'intéressant à ce type de manifestation. Dans le sous-continent lui-même, son étude s'est focalisée sur les zones géographiques périphériques et concentrée majoritairement sur les « tribus ». De plus, nombre d'interprétations l'ont réduite à une catégorie autonome, perdant de vue qu'il s'agit de l'une de ces interactions parmi tant d'autres, à la croisée des idiosyncrasies et des symboles partagés, par lesquelles les acteurs mettent en forme leur monde. En articulant leur réflexion sur la parole, le corps et le territoire, les quinze auteurs de ce volume ont voulu restituer la multiplicité des significations et la variété de ses liens avec toute une série de pratiques sociales et d'institutions, de discours et d'émotions. La possession, comme trajectoire de vie, perception des espaces propres aux dieux et aux hommes et représentation de la société, y compris dans ses dimensions identitaires et politiques, est à la fois mode de pensée et d'action. Ainsi apparaît-elle, par excellence, comme un « travail de la culture » qui lie intimement perception individuelle, modèle cognitif et société
Download or read book Spirit Possession written by Éva Pócs and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possession, a seemingly irrational phenomenon, has posed challenges to generations of scholars rooted in Western notions of body-soul dualism, self and personhood, and a whole set of presuppositions inherited from Christian models of possession that was “good” or “bad.” The authors of the essays in this book present a new and more promising approach. They conceive spirit possession as a form of communication, of expressivity, of culturally defined behavior that should be understood in the context of local, vernacular theories and empiric reflections. With the aim of reformulating the comparative anthropology of spirit possession, the editors have opened corridors between previously separate areas of research. Together, anthropologists and historians working on several historical periods and in different European, African, South American, and Asian cultural areas attempt to redefine the very concept of possession, freeing it from the Western notion of the self and more clearly delineating it from related matters such as witchcraft, devotion, or mysticism. The book also provides an overview of new research directions, including novel methods of participant observation and approaches to spirit possession as indigenous historiography
Download or read book Culture persane et m decine ayurv dique en Asie du Sud written by Fabrizio Speziale and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cet ouvrage étudie, pour la première fois, le mouvement de traduction en persan des sources ayurvédiques qui a eu lieu à partir du XIVe siècle. En parallèle, il analyse les formes d’apprentissage de la culture médicale persane par les savants hindous. This book looks for the first time at the movement of translation of Ayurvedic sources into Persian that took place from the 14th century onwards. In parallel, it analyzes the forms of learning of Persian medical culture by Hindu scholars.
Download or read book Religion Secularism and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal written by David N. Gellner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The socio-political landscape of Nepal has been rocked by dramatic and far-reaching changes in the past thirty years. Following a ten-year Maoist revolution and civil war, the country has transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. The former Hindu kingdom has declared its commitment to secularism, without coming to any agreement on what secularism means or should mean in the Nepalese context. What happens to religion under conditions of such rapid social and political change? How do the changes in public festivals reflect and/or create new group identities? Is the gap between the urban and the rural narrowing? How is the state dealing with Nepal’s multicultural and multi-religious society? How are Nepalis understanding, resisting, and adapting ideas of secularism? In order to answer these important questions, this volume brings together eleven case studies by an international team of anthropologists and ethno-Indologists of Nepal on such diverse topics as secularism, individualism, shamanism, animal sacrifice, the role of state functionaries in festivals, clashes and synergies between Maoism and Buddhism, and conversion to Christianity. In an Afterword, renowned political theorist Rajeev Bhargava presents a comparative analysis of Nepal’s experiences and asks whether the country is finding its own solution to the conundrum of secularism.
Download or read book Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia written by Fabrizio Ferrari and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2011-03-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on original fieldwork, this book develops a fresh methodological approach to the study of indigenous understandings of disease as possession, and looks at healing rituals in different South Asian cultural contexts. Contributors discuss the meaning of 'disease', 'possession' and 'healing' in relation to South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism, and how South Asians deal with the divine in order to negotiate health and wellbeing. The book goes on to look at goddesses, gods and spirits as a cause and remedy of a variety of diseases, a study that has proved significant to the ethics and politics of responding to health issues. It contributes to a consolidation and promotion of indigenous ways as a method of understanding physical and mental imbalances through diverse conceptions of the divine. Chapters offer a fascinating overview of healing rituals in South Asia and provide a full-length, sustained discussion of the interface between religion, ritual, and folklore. The book presents a fresh insight into studies of Asian Religion and the History of Medicine.
Download or read book Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and geographies, the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling presents modern spirit possession in a variety of contexts. Weaving together the interrelated movements of Spiritualism along with its specific Franco and Latin American currents, articles explore the nineteenth-century beginnings of séances and trance mediumship. Channelling, an heir to Spiritualism begun in the 1970s and still flourishing today, is brought into direct conversation with its predecessors with a view to showing both continuity and disjuncture as the products of new cultural and religious needs. The Brill Handbook marks the first extensive collection on these two interrelated movements and examines themes such as gender, race, performance, and technology in each instance.
Download or read book The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism written by Shail Mayaram and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It highlights shifts over two centuries as the geopolitical context has transitioned from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.
Download or read book Awakening a Living World on a K iy am Stage written by Einat Bar-On Cohen and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-03-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kūṭiyāṭṭam, an ancient form of Sanskrit theater from Kerala, was traditionally performed only in temples by members of two temple assistant castes. Today, however, it has spread to other castes and to venues outside temples. It is a fantastically complex, sophisticated, layered performance, toiling at amassing and perfecting ways of materializing a world where gods, demons, and mythical heroes live, bringing the audience into these other realities. Taking an anthropological approach, Awakening a Living World on a Kūṭiyāṭṭam Stage explores how Kūṭiyāṭṭam uses cultural dynamics, gleaned from temple ritual and theater, to remove the distinctions between mundane reality and the mediaeval plays being performed on stage. The unique features of Kūṭiyāṭṭam—makeup masks, enthralling drumming, delivering words in mudrā gestures, a shimmering lamp, male and female actors—all intertwine to animate stories from the great Indian eposes. Analyzing the cultural dynamics at work in Kūṭiyāṭṭam foregrounds a symbolic anthropology in which representation and symbols are shunned, while endless repetitions fill the stage with reverberating somatic intensities of profound depth. Thus, a new kind of living reality emerges that includes the protagonists of the play—gods, demons, humans, animals, and objects—together with the artist, the audience, and beyond.
Download or read book Religious Transformation in Modern Asia written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the religious transformation of each nation in modern Asia. When the Asian people, who were not only diverse in culture and history, but also active in performing local traditions and religions, experienced a socio-political change under the wave of Western colonialism, the religious climate was also altered from a transnational perspective. Part One explores the nationals of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, focusing on the manifestations of Japanese religion, Chinese foreign policy, the British educational system in Hong Kong in relation to Tibetan Buddhism, the Korean women of Catholicism, and the Scottish impact in late nineteenth century Korea. Part Two approaches South Asia through the topics of astrology, the works of a Gujarātī saint, and Himalayan Buddhism. The third part is focused on the conflicts between ‘indigenous religions and colonialism,’ ‘Buddhism and Christianity,’ ‘Islam and imperialism,’ and ‘Hinduism and Christianity’ in Southeast Asia.
Download or read book Yogini in South Asia written by István Keul and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In different stages in the history of South Asian religions, the term yoginī has been used in various contexts to designate various things: a female adept of yoga, a female tantric practitioner, a sorceress, a woman dedicated to a deity, or a certain category of female deities. This book brings together recent interdisciplinary perspectives on the medieval South Asian cults of the Yoginis, such as textual-philological, historical, art historical, indological, anthropological, ritual and terminological. The book discusses the medieval yoginī cult, as illustrated in early Śaiva tantric texts, and their representations in South Asian temple iconography. It looks at the roles and hypostases of yoginīs in contemporary religious traditions, as well as the transformations of yoginī-related ritual practices. In addition, this book systematizes the multiple meanings, and proposes definitions of the concept and models for integrating the semantic fields of ‘yoginī.’ Highlighting the importance of research from complementary disciplines for the exploration of complex themes in South Asian studies, this book is of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies and Religious Studies.
Download or read book The Divine and the Demonic written by Dr Graham Dwyer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on supernatural affliction - illness and misfortune ascribed to demonic spirits or ghosts and to other mystical agents, such as sorcerers and witches.
Download or read book Sinister Yogis written by David Gordon White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.
Download or read book The Modern Anthropology of India written by Peter Berger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Modern Anthropology of India is an accessible textbook providing a critical overview of the ethnographic work done in India since 1947. It assesses the history of research in each region and serves as a practical and comprehensive guide to the main themes dealt with by ethnographers. It highlights key analytical concepts and paradigms that came to be of relevance in particular regions in the recent history of research in India, and which possibly gained a pan-Indian or even trans-Indian significance. Structured according to the states of the Indian union, contributors raise several key questions, including: What themes were ethnographers interested in? What are the significant ethnographic contributions? How are peoples, communities and cultural areas represented? How has the ethnographic research in the area developed? Filling a significant gap in the literature, the book is an invaluable resource to students and researchers in the field of Indian anthropology/ethnography, regional anthropology and postcolonial studies. It is also of interest to students of South Asian studies in general as it provides an extensive and critical overview of regionally based ethnographic activity undertaken in India.
Download or read book Promising Rituals written by Beatrix Hauser and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how the performance of rituals influences the understanding that Hindu women form of their own selves, their sense of femininity, identity as well as their role and position in the lived-in world, and vice versa. Drawn from an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in southern Orissa, each section of the book takes a close look at a specific ritual practice, in exploring concepts such as purity/pollution, religious observances (such as fasting), deity possession, associated beliefs and attitudes, as also celebrated traditions such as Thākurānī Yātrā, local processions, and the role of female ritual specialists. The study uses the premise that religious practices in themselves are neither restricting nor liberating; rather rituals provide a perceptual context with the ability to affect the self-understanding of participants, as also their conception of agency, in a way that spills across non-ritual spheres. Conceptualizing gender identity as resulting from seen, but mostly unnoticed, everyday activities and approaching cultural performances as sites of collectively defining the self, the author offers a telling and vivid account of how women perceive, realize and reflect on religious ideas, while engaging in rituals and, by doing so, negotiate complex gender norms. The book also examines the assumptions of recent theories on the social construction of identities, often-debated impact of religion on women, performativity, self-identity, and ritual agency in considering ‘doing’ gender in a traditional, non-Western context. This book will serve as essential reading for scholars of sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, history, religion, performance, and folklore studies.
Download or read book Modernity and Spirit Worship in India written by Miho Ishii and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the entangled relations between people’s daily worship practices and their umwelt in South India. Focusing on the practices of spirit (būta) worship in the coastal area of Karnataka, it examines the relationship between people and deities. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book links important anthropological theories on personhood, perspectives, transactions, and gift-exchanges together with the Gestaltkreis theory of Viktor von Weizsäcker. First, it examines the relations between būta worship and land tenure, matriliny, and hierarchy in the society. It then explores the reflexive relationship between modern law and current practices based on conventional law, before examining new developments in būta worship with the rise of mega-industries and environmental movements. Furthermore, this book sheds light on the struggles and endeavours of the people who create and recreate their relations with the realm of sacred wildness, as well as the formations and transformations of the umwelt in perpetual social-political transition. Modernity and Spirit Worship in India will be of interest to academics in the field of anthropology, religious studies and the dynamics of religion, and South Asian Culture and Society.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Hinduism written by Denise Cush and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 1130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Hinduism contains over 900 entries reflecting recent advances in scholarship which have raised new theoretical and methodological issues as well as identifying new areas of study which have not been addressed previously. The debate over the term 'Hinduism' in the light of post-Orientalist critiques is just one example of how once standard academic frameworks have been called into question. Entries range from 150-word definitions of terms and concepts to 5,000-word in-depth investigations of major topics. The Encyclopedia covers all aspects of Hinduism but departs from other works in including more ethnographic and contemporary material in contrast to an exclusively textual and historical approach. It includes a broad range of subject matter such as: historical developments (among them nineteenth and twentieth century reform and revival); geographical distribution (especially the diaspora); major and minor movements; philosophies and theologies; scriptures; deities; temples and sacred sites; pilgrimages; festivals; rites of passage; worship; religious arts (sculpture, architecture, music, dance, etc.); religious sciences (e.g. astrology); biographies of leading figures; local and regional traditions; caste and untouchability; feminism and women's religion; nationalism and the Hindu radical right; and new religious movements. The history of study and the role of important scholars past and present are also discussed. Accessibility to all levels of reader has been a priority and no previous knowledge is assumed. However, the in-depth larger entries and the design of the work in line with the latest scholarly advances means that the volume will be of considerable interest to specialists. The whole is cross-referenced and bibliographies attach to the larger entries. There is a full index.
Download or read book Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment written by Aditya Malik and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon, Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment draws on oral and written narratives, stories, testimonies, and rituals told and performed in relation to the "God of Justice," Goludev, and other regional deities. The book seeks to answer several questions: How is the concept of justice defined in South Asia? Why do devotees seek out Goludev for the resolution of matters of justice instead of using the secular courts? What are the sociological and political consequences of situating divine justice within a secular, democratic, modern context? Moreover, how do human beings locate themselves within the indeterminateness and struggles of their everyday existence? What is the place of language and ritual in creating intimacy and self? How is justice linked to intimacy, truth, and being human? The stories and narratives in this book revolve around Goludev's own story and deeds, as well as hundreds of petitions (manauti) written on paper that devotees hang on his temple walls, and rituals (jagar) that involve spirit possession and the embodiment of the deity through designated mediums. The jagars are powerful, extraordinary experiences, mesmerizing because of their intensity but also because of what they imply in terms of how we conceptualize being human with the seemingly limitless potential to shift, alter, and transform ourselves through language and ritual practice. The petitions, though silent and absent of the singing, drumming, and choreography that accompany jagars, are equally powerful because of their candid and intimate testimony to the aspirations, breakdowns, struggles, and breakthroughs that circumscribe human existence.
