Download or read book Multi religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka written by Mark P. Whitaker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of original research about every day, innovative, interactive, and multiple religiosities among Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and devotees of New Religious Movements in post-war Sri Lanka. The contributors examine the unique and innovative religiosity that can be observed in Sri Lanka, which reveals a complex reality of mingled, and even simultaneous, cooperation and conflict. The book shows that innovative religious practices and institutions have achieved a new prominence in public life since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. Using the analytic framework of ‘innovative religiosity’ to allow researchers to look at this question between and across Sri Lanka’s plural religious landscape in order to escape both the epistemological and ethnographic isolation of studies that limit themselves to one form of religious practice, the chapters also investigate the extent to which inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of Sri Lanka’s religion-involving civil war, and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism, globalization and geopolitics on Sri Lanka’s post-war governance. The book offers a novel approach to the study of post-conflict societies and furthers the understanding of the status of tolerance between religious practitioners in contexts where both ethnic conflict and multi-religious sites are prominent. This book is an important resource for researchers studying Anthropology, Asian Religion, Religion in Context and South Asian Studies.
Download or read book Multi religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka written by Mark P. Whitaker and published by Routledge South Asian Religion Series. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of original research about every day, innovative, interactive, and multiple religiosities among Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and devotees of New Religious Movements in post-war Sri Lanka. The contributors examine the unique and innovative religiosity that can be observed in Sri Lanka, which reveals a complex reality of mingled, and even simultaneous, cooperation and conflict. The book shows that innovative religious practices and institutions have achieved a new prominence in public life since the end of Sri Lanka's civil war in 2009. Using the analytic framework of 'innovative religiosity' to allow researchers to look at this question between and across Sri Lanka's plural religious landscape in order to escape both the epistemological and ethnographic isolation of studies that limit themselves to one form of religious practice, the chapters also investigate the extent to which inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of Sri Lanka's religion-involving civil war, and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism, globalization and geopolitics on Sri Lanka's post-war governance. The book offers a novel approach to the study of post-conflict societies and furthers the understanding of the status of tolerance between religious practitioners in contexts where both ethnic conflict and multi-religious sites are prominent. This book is an important resource for researchers studying Anthropology, Asian Religion, Religion in Context and South Asian Studies.
Download or read book Religion Between Governance and Freedoms written by Olga Breskaya and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Karma and Grace written by Neena Mahadev and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred nationalist anxieties, moral panics, and even episodes of violence by Buddhists against Christians suspected of facilitating “unethical” conversions. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Neena Mahadev explores the dueling efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. She considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace. While Christian missions spread “the Good News,” subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to impede born-again churches from taking root. In gripping detail, Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Even amid trenchant conflicts, Karma and Grace demonstrates that social proximity between rivals is also conducive to religious experimentation and the ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with difference.
Download or read book Ravanisation The Revitalisation of Ravana among Sinhalese Buddhists in Post War Sri Lanka written by Deborah de Koning and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses Ravanisation: the revitalisation of Ravana among Sinhalese Buddhists in post-war (after 2009) Sri Lanka. The Hindu Ramayana generally portrays Ravana as a cruel king. How and why, then, has Ravana gained the interest of Sinhalese Buddhists? This study takes an ethnographic perspective to answer these questions. The book discusses multiple Ravana representations that have emerged at an urban Buddhist site (the Sri Devram Maha Viharaya) and a rural site (Lakegala), and discloses how Ravanisation relates to Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalism. In addition, the material, ritual, and spatial perspectives offer unique insights in the personal and local relevance of Ravana.
Download or read book Mountain at a Center of the World written by Alexander McKinley and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the pilgrimage site of Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka, a footprint is embedded atop the mountain summit. Buddhists hold that it was left by the Buddha, Hindus say Lord Siva, and Muslims and Christians identify it with Adam, the first man. The Sri Lankan state, for its part, often uses the Peak as a prop to convey a harmonious image of religious pluralism, despite increasing Buddhist hegemony. How should the diversity of this place be understood historically and managed practically? Considering the varied heritage of this sacred site, Alexander McKinley develops a new account of pluralism based in political ecology, representing the full array of actors and issues on the mountain. From its diverse people to rare species to deep geology, the Peak exemplifies a planetary pluralism that recognizes a multiplicity of beings while accepting competition and disorder. Taking a place-based approach, McKinley casts the mountain as an actor, exploring how its rocks, forests, and waters promote pilgrimage, inspire storytelling, and make ethical demands on human communities. Combining history and ethnography while furnishing original translations of sources from Pali, Sinhala, and Tamil, this multidisciplinary and stylistically innovative book shows how religious traditions share literal common ground in their reverence for the mountain.
Download or read book Devas Demons and Buddhist Cosmology in Sri Lanka written by Achala Gunasekara-Rockwell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-19 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the worship of devas and demons in Sri Lanka, illustrating how diverse influences interacted to create the Sinhala Buddhist cosmology. The work explains the processes by which apotheosis plays an important role in revitalizing that cosmology. The author offers an examination of holy sites associated with the worship of Hūniyam. These sacred spaces each have a unique background historically, and the ritualists associated with these sites have divergent understandings concerning Hūniyam. Building upon the examination of the temples, the book delves into the iconography of Hūniyam, illustrating his transformation from demon to deity in the manner that he is depicted in imagery associated with his worship. The book moves to a discussion of Aritṭ ạ Kivenḍu Perumāl, a South Indian adventurer, demonstrating the likelihood that he is the historical figure later apotheosized as Hūniyam. Sri Lankan society felt his impact so strongly that in death he became a demon in the Sinhala Buddhist cosmology. Finally, the book demonstrates that the same apotheosis processes are at work today. This book will be of interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of religion, anthropology, folklore, and history, specifically in the South Asian context.
Download or read book Proximity as Method written by Riccarda Flemmer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines proximity as a benchmarked concept that can be deployed across a range of humanities disciplines to rethink the ways in which existences in the world are always already coexistences – and to parse the heuristic, ethical, epistemological, praxeological consequences of this recognition. The volume: - Brings together diverse theoretical approaches and utilizes a range of methodological instruments – conceptual, textual-analytic (whether in the realm of literary or religious studies, or theology or law), archival, digital, sociological or politological; - Includes empirical case-studies that allow calibrated and scaled exemplifications; - Launches forays onto unexplored conceptual terrain, or call into question hallowed truths of scholarly procedure. The volume will be essential reading for students and early researchers in the social sciences and the humanities.
Download or read book Popular Hinduism Stories and Mobile Performances written by Mrinal Pande and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the recent transformations of popular Hinduism by focusing upon the religious cum artistic practice of Ramkatha, staged narratives of the Ramcharitmanas. Focusing on the sensory and media experiences, the author examines the aesthetics and dynamics of the Ramkatha ethnoscape through participant-observation in everyday practices, and how it particularly, translates politics from the realm of religion. Besides being socially constructed, the Ramkatha heavily relies on technologies for its production and continuation. Negotiated through a telling of Hindu religious stories, the mediated voice of Morari Bapu, a former school-teacher turned narrator, is a major medium of performance transposed into multiple media such as theatre, stage, music and spectacle. The book engages with voice as a vehicle of meaning to scrutinize its discursive production, imagination and re-production across mobile contexts. It investigates how the transnationally disseminated practices re-contextualize religious subjectivities of an affective community enmeshed in spatio-sensorial modes. The book will be of interest to academic audiences in the fields of South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, as well as Performance Studies and Religious Studies.
Download or read book Religious Authority in South Asia written by István Keul and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-30 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on genealogies of religious authority in South Asia, examining the figure of the guru in narrative texts, polemical tracts, hagiographies, histories, in contemporary devotional communities, New Age spiritual movements and global guru organizations. Experts in the field present reflections on historically specific contexts in which a guru comes into being, becomes part of a community, is venerated, challenged or repudiated, generates a new canon, remains unique with no clear succession or establishes a succession in which charisma is routinized. The guru emerges and is sustained and routinized from the nexus of guruship, narratives, performances and community. The contributors to the book examine this nexus at specific historical moments with all their elements of change and contingency. The book will be of interest to scholars in the field of South Asian studies, the study of religions and cultural studies.
Download or read book Secularism and Islam in Bangladesh written by Abdul Wohab and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularism and Islam in Bangladesh comprehensively analyses the syncretistic form of Bengali Islam and its relationship with secularism in Bangladesh from pre-British to contemporary times. It focuses on the importance of understanding the dynamics between religion and secularism within specific cultural contexts. The author draws upon historical, sociological, and political literature, Bangladeshi electoral results, newspaper reports, and elite interviews with political commentators and offers a rich historical and empirical analysis. Arguing that extremist interpretations of Islam, which aim to establish a theocratic state, have not been able to influence the pluralistic religious and cultural life of Bangladesh substantially, the book shows that religious and cultural pluralism will continue to thrive despite the apparent threat posed by increasing religiosity among Bangladeshi Muslims. This book is a timely and significant contribution to the discourse on secularism and Islam, with relevance beyond Bangladesh and the wider Islamic world. It will appeal to scholars and researchers working in the fields of South Asian Studies, Asian Religions, and the Sociology of Religion.
Download or read book Beyond Indenture written by Crispin Bates and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Indenture brings together essays that reflect, as far as possible, the viewpoints and voices of indentured Indians who exercised agency, resisted and manipulated the colonial labour system to their advantage, and went on to build new lives for themselves overseas following the expiration of their contracts. Some remigrated to other colonies to earn a better wage and escape from debt and other burdens. Among those who chose to remain, women played a prominent role in the struggle for rights, freedom and opportunities, achieving them in ways which often defied or redefined South Asian customs and traditions. Post-independence, the Indian communities overseas faced newer problems, not least of which were discrimination and marginalisation. This volume studies these accounts and explores the theme of the broad alliances of diasporic Indians and Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants.
Download or read book Power and Religiosity in a Post Colonial Setting written by R. L. Stirrat and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of religious change and cultural fragmentation in contemporary Sri Lanka focuses on a series of new Catholic shrines that attract hundreds of pilgrims. Their fame is based, among other things, on their efficacy as centers for demonic exorcism, alleviating suffering and helping people to find jobs. The author looks at the rise of these shrines in relation to the historical experience of the Catholic community in Sri Lanka, rather than in terms of narrowly defined religious criteria. Central to this broader nonreligious context is the role of power and especially the impact of post colonialism on the small Roman Catholic population.
Download or read book The Transformation of Tamil Religion written by Srilata Raman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. The book traces the hagiographical and biographical process by which Ramalinga Swamigal is shifted from being considered an exemplary poet-saint of the Tamil Śaivite bhakti tradition to a Dravidian nationalist social reformer. Taking as a starting point Ramalinga’s own writing, the book presents him as inhabiting a border zone between early modernity and modernity, between Hinduism and Christianity, between colonialism and regional nationalism, highlighting the influence of his teachings on politics, particularly within Dravidian cultural and political nationalism. Simultaneously, the book considers the implication of such an hagiographical process for the transformation of Tamil religion in the period between the 19th –mid-20th centuries. The author demonstrates that Ramalinga Swamigal’s ideology of compassion, cīvakāruṇyam, had not only a long genealogy in pre-modern Tamil Śaivism but also that it functioned as a potentially emancipatory ethics of salvation and caste critique not just for him but also for other Tamil and Dalit intellectuals of the 19th century. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity – Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315794518 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book Non Shia Practices of Mu arram in South Asia and the Diaspora written by Pushkar Sohoni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses engagements with non-Shia practices of Muḥarram celebrations in the past and present, in South Asia and within a larger diaspora. Breaking new ground by bringing together a variety of regional perspectives (the Deccan, the Punjab, Singapore, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago) and linguistic backgrounds (Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu), the chapters discuss the importance of Muḥarram celebrations in terms of their respective actors. While in some cases these include an interrelationship with Shia Muslims and their traditions of mourning during Muḥarram, other contributions address contexts in which Shias, and even Muslims, form only a minor component of the celebrations, or even none at all. Focusing on Muḥarram celebrations that are beyond the script provided by Shia Muḥarram practices, this book opens up new perspectives on Muḥarram as a social practice widely shared by South Asians across regions. The book will be a key resource to scholars and students of South Asian studies, Asian religion, in particular rituals and religious practices, and Islamic studies but also engaging to non-academic readers interested in the practices of several regions.
Download or read book Sri Lanka in the Modern Age written by Nira Wickramasinghe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the ethnic relations and politics in post 1978 Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Religious Studies written by Gregory D. Alles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on recent developments in the comparative study of religion, this book explores the trends of the past sixty years from a global perspective. Each of the ten chapters covers the study of religion in a different region of the world, from Europe and the Americas to Asia and the Far East. Topics covered include: local background to the study of religions formation of religious studies in the region important thinkers and writings institutions interregional diversity and interregional connections emerging issues. This book is a major contribution to the field of religious studies and a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and graduate students.
