Download or read book The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices written by Urmila Mohan and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores 'efficacious intimacy' as an embodied concept of worldmaking, and a framework for studying belief practices in religious and political domains. The study of how beliefs make and manifest power through their sociality and materiality can reveal who, or what, is considered effective in a particular socio-cultural context. The chapters feature case studies drawn from diverse religious and political contexts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and explore practices ranging from ingesting sacred water to resisting injustice. In doing so, the authors analyze emotions and affects, and how they influence dynamics of proximity and distance. Taking an innovative approach to the topic of intimacy, the book offers a fascinating examination of how life-worlds are constructed by material practices. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, religion, and material culture"--

Download or read book The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices written by Urmila Mohan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-17 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores ‘efficacious intimacy’ as an embodied concept of worldmaking, and a framework for studying belief practices in religious and political domains. The study of how beliefs make and manifest power through their sociality and materiality can reveal who, or what, is considered effective in a particular socio-cultural context. The chapters feature case studies drawn from diverse religious and political contexts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and explore practices ranging from ingesting sacred water to resisting injustice. In doing so, the authors analyze emotions and affects, and how they influence dynamics of proximity and distance. Taking an innovative approach to the topic of intimacy, the book offers a fascinating examination of how life-worlds are constructed by material practices. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, religion, and material culture.

Download or read book Religious Plurality in Africa written by Marloes Janson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam and African religious traditions.Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Islam or Christianity have long been a central research issue, the configuration as a whole has barely been taken into account, even though Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions have long co-existed - and still co-exist - more or less peacefully in many settings in Africa. Building on recent interventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).nterventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).nterventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).nterventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond). from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).

Download or read book More Than Belief written by Manuel A. Vasquez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion.

Download or read book Cataloguing Culture written by Hannah Turner and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism operates in museum bureaucracies. Using the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as her reference, Hannah Turner organizes her study by the technologies framing museum work over two hundred years: field records, the ledger, the card catalogue, the punch card, and eventually the database. She examines how categories were applied to ethnographic material culture and became routine throughout federal collecting institutions. As Indigenous communities encounter the documentary traces of imperialism while attempting to reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on access to and return of cultural heritage.

Download or read book The Pot King written by Jean-Pierre Warnier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The king of Mankon (Cameroon) acts as a container of ancestral substances he distributes to his people. This book shows how the exercise of power in a contemporary African kingdom is based on the implementation of bodily and material technologies.

Download or read book Jesus for Zanzibar Narratives of Pentecostal Non Belonging Islam and Nation written by Hans Olsson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation Hans Olsson offers an ethnographic account of the lived experience and socio-political significance of newly arriving Pentecostal Christians in the Muslim majority setting of Zanzibar. This work analyzes how a disputed political partnership between Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania intersects with the construction of religious identities. Undertaken at a time of political tensions, the case study of Zanzibar’s largest Pentecostal church, the City Christian Center, outlines religious belonging as relationally filtered in-between experiences of social insecurity, altered minority / majority positions, and spiritual powers. Hans Olsson shows that Pentecostal Christianity, as a signifier of (un)wanted social change, exemplifies contested processes of becoming in Zanzibar that capitalizes on, and creates meaning out of, religious difference and ambient political tensions.

Download or read book Passion of the Western Mind written by Richard Tarnas and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Download or read book Ark Encounter written by James S. Bielo and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Opened in July 2016, Ark Encounter is a creationist theme park in Kentucky. It features a re-creation of Noah's ark, built to full scale to creationist specifications drawn from Genesis, as well as exhibits that imagine the Bible's account of life before the flood." --Back cover.

Download or read book Being There written by Jackson W. Carroll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-16 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a close-up look at theological education in the U.S. today. The authors' goal is to understand the way in which institutional culture affects the outcome of the educational process. To that end, they undertake ethnographic studies of two seminaries-one evangelical and one mainline Protestant. These studies, written in a lively journalistic style, make up the first part of the book and offer fascinating portraits of two very different intellectual, religious, and social worlds. The authors go on to analyze these disparate environments, and suggest how in each case corporate culture acts as an agent of educational change. They find two major consequences stemming from the culture of each school. First, each culture gives expression to a normative goal that aims at shaping the way students understand themselves and from issues of ministry practice. Second, each provides a "cultural tool kit" of knowledge, practices, and skills that students use to construct strategies of action for the various problems and issues that will confront them as pastors or in other forms of ministry. In the concluding chapters, the authors explore the implications of their findings for theories of institutional culture and professional socialization and for interpreting the state of religion in America. They identify some of the practical dilemmas that theological and other professional schools currently face, and reflect on how their findings might contribute to their solution. This accessible, thought-provoking study will not only illuminate the structure and process by which culture educates and forms, but also provide invaluable insights into important dynamics of American religious life.

Download or read book Introducing Anthropology of Religion written by Jack David Eller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and readable survey introduces students to key areas of the field and shows how to apply an anthropological approach to the study of contemporary world religions. Written by an experienced teacher, it covers all of the traditional topics of anthropology of religion, including definitions and theories, beliefs, symbols and language, and ritual and myth, and combines analytic and conceptual discussion with up-to-date ethnography and theory. Eller includes copious examples from religions around the world – both familiar and unfamiliar – and two mini-case studies in each chapter. He also explores classic and contemporary anthropological contributions to important but often overlooked issues such as violence and fundamentalism, morality, secularization, religion in America, and new religious movements. Introducing Anthropology of Religion demonstrates that anthropology is both relevant and essential for understanding the world we inhabit today.

Download or read book Cultural Politics of Emotion written by Sara Ahmed and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.

Download or read book Mestizo Logics written by Jean-Loup Amselle and published by Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Metisse. This book was released on 1998 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative work seeks to reverse the perspective and reasoning of anthropology and to develop an alternative mode of conceiving culture that would not automatically privilege the colonizing West. That necessarily involves a critique of the ?ethnological reason” that extracts elements from their context, aestheticizes them, and then uses their supposed differences to classify types of political, economic, or religious ensembles. Such ?reason” yields classical oppositions like the State versus segmentary societies, market versus subsistence economies, and Islam or Christianity versus paganism. As an alternative, the author opposes to exclusionary categories a ?mestizo logic” that sees social phenomena as situated on a continuum and accentuates indistinction and the originary syncretism in all cultures and other ways of categorizing human life. The book's rich source material is drawn from the author's fifteen years of fieldwork and research in West Africa. The opening chapters first treat the notion of ethnological reason?its history and ideological practices?then oppose to it the reality of cultural tension, the fact that conflicts and negotiations bring about transformations in the identity of collectivities. The following two chapters illustrate a real system of transformation, and question some basic concepts of political anthropology. The discussion continues in a more illustrative manner over the next two chapters, which present case studies of two West African societies that challenge typologies of political anthropology and ethnographic classification. The last three chapters?on white paganism, cultural identities and cultural models, and understanding and acting?situate the debate within a wider historical framework of political and cultural confrontations. Who defines ?ethnicities,” ?identities,” ?differences”? Where can one find them as pure essences witnessing to their own originary beings?

Download or read book Social and Cultural Anthropology written by Nigel Rapport and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Conceptsis the ideal introduction to this discipline, defining and discussing its central terms with clarity and authority. Among the concepts explored are: cybernetics, ecriture, the feminine, gossip, human Rights, moralities, stereotypes, thick description, and violence. Each entry is accompanied by extensive cross-referencing and an invaluable list of suggestions for further reading.

Download or read book After Method written by John Law and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Law argues that methods don't just describe social realities but are also involved in creating them. The implications of this argument are highly significant. If this is the case, methods are always political, and it raises the question of what kinds of social realities we want to create. Most current methods look for clarity and precision. It is usually said that only poor research produces messy findings, and the idea that things in the world might be fluid, elusive, or multiple is unthinkable. Law's startling argument is that this is wrong and it is time for a new approach. Many realities, he says, are vague and ephemeral. If methods want to know and help to shape the world, then they need to reinvent themselves and their politics to deal with mess. That is the challenge. Nothing less will do.

Download or read book Human Machine Reconfigurations written by Lucille Alice Suchman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Unthinking Mastery written by Julietta Singh and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-07 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julietta Singh challenges the drive toward the mastery over self and others by showing how the forms of self-mastery advocated by anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi unintentionally reproduced colonial logic, thereby leading her to argue for a more productive human subjectivity that is not centered on concepts of mastery.