Download or read book The Construction of Religious Boundaries written by Harjot Oberoi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-12-15 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through an examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikhism recognized multiple identities based in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties. As a result, religious identities were highly blurred and competing definitions of Sikhism were possible. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Singh Sabha, a powerful new Sikh movement, began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with suspicion and hostility. Aided by cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj, the Singh Sabha sought to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of diversity, bringing about the highly codified culture of modern Sikhism. A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.
Download or read book The Construction of Religious Boundaries written by Harjot Oberoi and published by Delhi, India : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Author Shows That Early-Period Sikh Tradition Was Not Unduly Concerned With Establishing Distinct Religious Boundaries And That There Was Immense Diversity Within Sikh Society For Much Of The 19Th Century. But By The Closing Decades Of The 19Th Century, Egged On By The Social And Cultural Forces Unleashed By The Raj, The Singh Sabha, Ranging Religions Movement, Viewed The Multiplicity In Sikh Identity With Suspicious And Hostility And Launched A Powerful Project To Recast Sikh Tradition And Purge It Of Its Diversity. Condition Good.
Download or read book The Construction of Religious Boundaries written by Harjot Oberoi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-12-15 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.
Download or read book Lines in Water written by Eliza F. Kent and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-12 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When asked to distinguish between different faiths, Mughal prince Dara Shikoh is said to have replied, "How do you draw a line in water?" Inspired by this question, the essays in this volume illustrate how ordinary people in South Asia and the diaspora negotiate their religious identities and encounters in creative, complex, and diverse ways. Taking the approach that narratives "from below" provide the richest insight into the dynamics of religious pluralism, the authors examine life histories, oral traditions, cartographic practices, pilgrimage rites, and devotional music and songs. Drawing on both ethnographic and historical data, they illuminate how, like lines in water, religious boundaries are dynamic, fluid, flexible, and permeable rather than permanently fixed, frozen, and inviolable. A distinct feature of the volume is its proposition of a fresh and innovative typology of boundary dynamics. Boundaries may be attractive or porous, firmly drawn or transcended. Attractive boundaries invite confluence while affirming the differences between self and other, whereas permeable boundaries facilitate exchanges that create new identities and in turn form new lines. Although people may recognize the significance of religious borders, they can choose to transcend them. Throughout this volume, the authors highlight the fascinating range of South Asian religious and cultural traditions.
Download or read book Contested Boundaries written by Timothy D. Hall and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Great Awakening in eighteenth-century America challenged the institutional structures and raised the consciousness of colonial Americans. These revivals gave rise to the practice of itinerancy in which ministers and laypeople left their own communities to preach across the countryside. In Contested Boundaries, Timothy D. Hall argues that the Awakening was largely defined by the ensuing debate over itinerancy. Drawing on recent scholarship in cultural and social anthropology, cultural studies, and eighteenth-century religion, he reveals at the center of this debate the itinerant preacher as a catalyst for dramatic change in the religious practice and social order of the New World. This book expands our understanding of evangelical itinerancy in the 1740s by viewing it within the context of Britain's expanding commercial empire. As pro- and anti-revivalists tried to shape a burgeoning transatlantic consumer society, the itinerancy of the Great Awakening appears here as a forceful challenge to contemporary assumptions about the place of individuals within their social world and the role of educated leaders as regulators of communication, order, and change. The most celebrated of these itinerants was George Whitefield, an English minister who made unprecedented tours through the colonies. According to Hall, the activities of the itinerants, including Whitefield, encouraged in the colonists an openness beyond local boundaries to an expanding array of choices for belief and behavior in an increasingly mobile and pluralistic society. In the process, it forged a new model of the church and its social world. As a response to and a source of dynamic social change, itinerancy in Hall's powerful account provides a prism for viewing anew the worldly and otherworldly transformations of colonial society. Contested Boundaries will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial American history, religious studies, and cultural and social anthropology.
Download or read book Invasion of Religious Boundaries written by Jasbir Singh Mann and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributed articles.
Download or read book Sacred Boundaries written by Keith P. Luria and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2005-08 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious rivalry and persecution have bedeviled so many societies that confessional difference often seems an unavoidable source of conflict. Sacred Boundaries challenges this assumption by examining relations between the Catholic majority and Protestant minority in seventeenth-century France as a case study of two religious groups constructing confessional difference and coexistence
Download or read book Religion Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland written by Claire Mitchell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has conflict in Northern Ireland kept political dimensions of religion alive, and has religion played a role in fuelling conflict? Conflict in Northern Ireland is not and never will be a holy war. Yet religion is more socially and politically significant than many commentators presume. In fact, religion has remained a central feature of social identity and politics throughout conflict as well as recent change. There has been an acceleration of interest in the relationship between religion, identity and politics in modern societies. Building on this debate, Claire Mitchell presents a challenging analysis of religion in contemporary Northern Ireland, arguing that religion is not merely a marker of ethnicity and that it continues to provide many of the meanings of identity, community and politics. In light of the multifaceted nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Mitchell explains that, for Catholics, religion is primarily important in its social and institutional forms, whereas for many Protestants its theological and ideological dimensions are more pressing. Even those who no longer go to church tend to reproduce religious stereotypes of 'them and us'. Drawing on a range of unique interview material, this book traces how individuals and groups in Northern Ireland have absorbed religious types of cultural knowledge, belonging and morality, and how they reproduce these as they go about their daily lives. Despite recent religious and political changes, the author concludes that perceptions of religious difference help keep communities in Northern Ireland socially separate and often in conflict with one another.
Download or read book Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan written by Virinder S. Kalra and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices and movements, Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal argue that the popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarised picture between formal, institutional religion, nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities. Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, resistance and power in which gender and caste are connate of what comes to be known as 'religious'. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, dynamic and contested relations that characterize everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, the book highlights how popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism and theological frameworks while simultaneously reflecting gender/caste society.
Download or read book Ritualizing on the Boundaries written by Fred W. Clothey and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his comparative study of four Tamil resettlements, Clothey examines the rituals that have traveled with these South Indian communities - Hindu, Muslim, and Christian - and how these practices perpetuate or modify the heritages these groups claim for themselves in their new environs. Clothey looks specifically at settlements in the cities of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Singapore; Mumbai, India; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Describing such settlements as communities living on boundaries, Clothey explores how their existence illustrates divisions between ethnic, local, and global identities; between generations; and between imagined pasts and uncertain futures. He contends that one of the most visible ways expatriated communities negotiate these boundaries is through the use of ritual - the building of shrines and temples, the use of festivals and performances, and the enactment of ancient ceremonies.
Download or read book Fluid Boundaries written by William F. Fisher and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than an ethnography, this book clarifies one of the most important current debates in anthropology: How should anthropologists regard culture, history, and the power process? Since the 1980s, the Thakali of Nepal have searched for an identity and a clarification of their "true" culture and history in the wake of their rise to political power and achievement of economic success. Although united in this search, the Thakali are divided as to the answers that have been proposed: the "Hinduization" of religious practices, the promotion of Tibetan Buddhism, the revival of practices associated with the Thakali shamans, and secularization. Ironically, the attempts by the Thakali to define their identity reveal that to return to tradition they must first re-create it—but this process of re-creation establishes it in a way in which it has never existed. To return to "tradition"—to become Thakali again—is, in a way, to become Thakali for the very first time.
Download or read book Boundaries of Religion written by Rowena Robinson and published by OUP India. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume map the course of ethnic conflict and popular Christianity in India. This is a collection of the author's engagement with these issues over the past two decades. The book will help in understanding the condition of minorities, especially Christians, in India.
Download or read book Boundaries of Our Habitations written by Delwin Brown and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1994-07-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brown's theory of tradition stands on its own as a significant contribution to the academic study of religions, but it also provides the framework for a challenging critique of contemporary American theologies—conservative, liberal, and radical — and the basis for a novel understanding of the significance of the racial/ethnic, feminist, and class-identified theologies now emerging.
Download or read book Defining Nature s Limits written by Neil Tarrant and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era. Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.
Download or read book The Beginnings of Jewishness written by Shaye J. D. Cohen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the notion of Jewishness from c. 200 BCE to c. 200 CE. Reasonable and well-informed people disputed whether a given person was Jewish or not; Cohen opens by discussing just such an argument, about Herod the Great.
Download or read book Postmodernism and Islam written by Akbar S. Ahmed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can West and East ever understand each other? In this extraordinary book one of the world's leading Muslim scholars explores an area which has which has been almost entirely neglected by scholars in the field - the area of postmodernism and Islam. This landmark work is startling, constantly perceptive and certain to be debated for years to come.
Download or read book Crossing and Dwelling written by Thomas A. TWEED and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply researched and vividly written study, this book depicts religion in place and in movement, dwelling and crossing. Drawing on insights from the natural and social sciences, Tweed's work is grounded in the gritty particulars of distinctive religious practices, even as it moves toward ideas about cross-cultural patterns. It offers a responsible way to think broadly about religion, a topic that is crucial for understanding the contemporary world.
