Download or read book Neither Cargo Nor Cult written by Martha Kaplan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. British officials called the movement the Tuka cult, imagining it as a contagious superstition that had to be stopped. Navosavakadua and many of his followers, deemed "dangerous and disaffected natives," were exiled. Scholars have since made Tuka the standard example of the Pacific cargo cult, describing it as a millenarian movement in which dispossessed islanders sought Western goods by magical means. In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult. Engaging Fijian oral history and texts as well as colonial records, Kaplan resituates Tuka in the flow of indigenous Fijian history-making and rereads the archives for an ethnography of British colonizing power. Proposing neither unchanging indigenous culture nor the inevitable hegemony of colonial power, she describes the dialogic relationship between plural, contesting, and changing articulations of both Fijian and colonial culture. A remarkable enthnographic account of power and meaning, Neither Cargo nor Cult addresses compelling questions within anthropological theory. It will attract a wide audience among those interested in colonial and postcolonial societies, ritual and religious movements, hegemony and resistance, and the Pacific Islands.
Download or read book Cargo Cult and Culture Critique written by Holger Jebens and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cargo cults have long exerted a remarkable attraction on Westerners, and the last decade has seen the publication of much new work on the subject. This collection of original essays is based on fieldwork in Melanesia, Fiji, Australia, and Indonesia by scholars who are influential in the contemporary debate on cargo. Conceived as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, the volume offers an up-to-date view of the subject and the debates it arouses among contemporary anthropologists. Some contributors plead for the abolition of "cargo" because of its troublesome implications, but also because, in the authors’ view, cargo cults do not exist as identifiable objects of study. Others argue that it is precisely this troublesome nature that makes the term a useful analytical tool that should be welcomed rather than rejected. By delineating and substantiating key issues and positions in this lively and ongoing debate, this volume underscores and refines the contemporary reevaluation of cargo cults. Scholars of the Pacific region and others interested in new religious movements should find this volume both enlightening and compelling. Contributors: Nils Bubandt, Vincent Crapanzano, Douglas M. Dalton, Elfriede Hermann, Holger Jebens, Martha Kaplan, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Stephen C. Leavitt, Lamont Lindstrom, Ton Otto, Joel Robbins, Jaap Timmer, Robert Tonkinson.
Download or read book Represented Communities written by John D. Kelly and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity. Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation. Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.
Download or read book Contemporary Religiosities written by Bruce Kapferer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last decade has seen an unexpected return of the religious, and with it the creation of new kinds of social forms alongside new fusions of political and religious realms that high modernity kept distinct. For a fuller understanding of what this means for society in the context of globalization, it is necessary to rethink the relationship between the religious and the secular; the contributors - all leading scholars in anthropology - do just that, some even arguing that secularization itself now takes a religious form. Combining theoretical reflection with vivid ethnographic explorations, this essential collection is designed to advance a critical understanding of social and personal religious experience in today's world.
Download or read book The Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel and its Historical Contexts written by Ehud Ben Zvi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient Israelite literature Exile is seen as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts “the Exile” is a central ideological concept. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms that YHWH punished Israel/Judah for having abandoned his ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain “Return”. As the Exile comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH’s proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. The concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.
Download or read book Introducing Religion written by Willi Braun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of religion encompasses ordinary human social practice and is not limited to the extraordinary or divine. 'Introducing Religion' brings together leading international scholars in the field of religious studies to examine religion as integral to everyday social practice. The book establishes a theoretical framework for the study of religion to analyse prayer, ritual, science, morality and politics in relation to the world's major religions. It will be of interest to students of theory and method in religious studies seeking a clear introduction to the multifaceted nature of religion.
Download or read book Penang written by Jean Elizabeth DeBernardi and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Falun Gong and the Future of China written by David Ownby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-16 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 25, 1999, ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered outside Zhongnanhai, the guarded compound where China's highest leaders live and work, in a day-long peaceful protest of police brutality against fellow practitioners in the neighboring city of Tianjin. Stunned and surprised, China's leaders launched a campaign of brutal suppression against the group which continues to this day. This book, written by a leading scholar of the history of this Chinese popular religion, is the first to offer a full explanation of what Falun Gong is and where it came from, placing the group in the broader context of the modern history of Chinese religion as well as the particular context of post-Mao China. Falun Gong began as a form of qigong, a general name describing physical and mental disciplines based loosely on traditional Chinese medical and spiritual practices. Qigong was "invented" in the 1950s by members of the Chinese medical establishment who were worried that China's traditional healing arts would be lost as China modeled its new socialist health care system on Western biomedicine. In the late 1970s, Chinese scientists "discovered" that qi possessed genuine scientific qualities, which allowed qigong to become part of China's drive for modernization. With the support of China's leadership, qigong became hugely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, as charismatic qigong masters attracted millions of enthusiastic practitioners in what was known as the qigong boom, the first genuine mass movement in the history of the People's Republic. Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi started his own school of qigong in 1992, claiming that the larger movement had become corrupted by money and magic tricks. Li was welcomed into the qigong world and quickly built a nationwide following of several million practitioners, but ran afoul of China's authorities and relocated to the United States in 1995. In his absence, followers in China began to organize peaceful protests of perceived media slights of Falun Gong, which increased from the mid-'90s onward as China's leaders began to realize that they had created, in the qigong boom, a mass movement with religious and nationalistic undertones, a potential threat to their legitimacy and control. Based on fieldwork among Chinese Falun Gong practitioners in North America and on close examinations of Li Hongzhi's writings, this volume offers an inside look at the movement's history in Chinese popular religion.
Download or read book A Mission Divided written by Dr Kirstie Close-Barry and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides insight into the long process of decolonisation within the Methodist Overseas Missions of Australasia, a colonial institution that operated in the British colony of Fiji. The mission was a site of work for Europeans, Fijians and Indo-Fijians, but each community operated separately, as the mission was divided along ethnic lines in 1901. This book outlines the colonial concepts of race and culture, as well as antagonism over land and labour, that were used to justify this separation. Recounting the stories told by the mission’s leadership, including missionaries and ministers, to its grassroots membership, this book draws on archival and ethnographic research to reveal the emergence of ethno-nationalisms in Fiji, the legacies of which are still being managed in the post-colonial state today. ‘Analysing in part the story of her own ancestors, Kirstie Barry develops a fascinating account of the relationship between Christian proselytization and Pacific nationalism, showing how missionaries reinforced racial divisions between Fijian and Indo-Fijian even as they deplored them. Negotiating the intersections between evangelisation, anthropology and colonial governance, this is a book with resonance well beyond its Fijian setting.’ – Professor Alan Lester, University of Sussex ‘This thoroughly researched and finely crafted book unwraps and finely illustrates the interwoven layers of evolving complexity in different interpretations of ideals and debates on race, culture, colonialism and independence that informed the way the Methodist Mission was run in Fiji. It describes the human personalities and practicalities, interconnected at local, regional and global levels, which influenced the shaping of the Mission and the independent Methodist Church in Fiji. It documents the influence of evolving anthropological theories and ecumenical theological understandings of culture on mission practice. The book’s rich sources enhance our understanding of the complex history of ethnic relations in Fiji, helping to explain why ethnic divisive thinking remains a challenge.’– Jacqueline Ryle, University of the South Pacific ‘A beautifully researched study of the transnational impact of South Asian bodies on nationalisms and church devolution in Fiji, and an important resource for empire studies as a whole.’ – Professor Jane Samson, University of Alberta, Canada
Download or read book In God s Image written by Matthew Akim Tomlinson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, most indigenous Fijians are Christians, and the Methodist Church is the foundation of their social and political lives. Yet, as this thought-provoking study of life on rural Kadavu Island finds, Fijians also believe that their ancestors possessed an inherent strength that is lacking in the present day. Looking in particular at the interaction between the church and the traditional chiefly system, Matt Tomlinson finds that this belief about the superiority of the past provokes great anxiety, and that Fijians seek ways of recovering this strength through ritual and political action—Christianity itself simultaneously generates a sense of loss and the means of recuperation. To unravel the cultural dynamics of Christianity in Fiji, Tomlinson explores how this loss is expressed through everyday language and practices.
Download or read book Our Wealth is Loving Each Other written by Karen J. Brison and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Wealth Is Loving Each Other explores the fluid and context-bound nature of cultural and personal identity among indigenous Fijians. While national identity in Fiji is often defined in opposition to the West through reference to a romanticized pre-modern tradition, individual Fijians are often more concerned with defining their identity vis-à-vis other villagers and other groups within Fiji. When people craft self accounts to justify their position within the indigenous Fijian community they question and redefine both tradition and modernity. Modernity on the margins is an experience of anxiety provoking contradictions between competing ideologies, and between international ideologies and local experiences. Indigenous Fijians have been exposed to international ideologies and government programs extolling the virtues of "pre-modern" communities that place communal good and time honored tradition over individual gain. But other waves of policy and rhetoric have stressed individual achievement and the need to "shake" individuals out of community bonds to foster economic development. Individuals feel contradictory pressures to be autonomous, achieving individuals and to subordinate self to community and tradition. Brison examines traditional kava ceremonies, evangelical church rhetoric, and individual life history narratives, to show how individuals draw on a repertoire of narratives from local and international culture to define their identity and sense of self. Our Wealth is Loving Each Other is appropriate for upper level students and anyone with an interest in Fiji or anthropology.
Download or read book India Beyond India Dilemmas of Belonging written by Elfriede Hermann and published by Göttingen University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People’s transnational mobilities, their activities to build homes in their countries of residence and their connectivities have resulted in multiplicities of belonging to encountered, imagined and represented communities operating within various political contexts. Migrants and their descendants labor to form and transform relations with their country of origin and of residence. People who see their origins in India but are now living elsewhere are a case in point. They have been establishing worldwide home places, whose growing number and vibrancy invite reconsideration of Indian diasporic communities and contexts in terms of ‘India(s) beyond India.’ Issues of belonging in Indian diasporas include questions of membership not only in the nation of previous and present residence and/or the nation of origin, but also in other communities and networks in political, economic, religious and social realms at local, regional or global levels. Yet, belonging – and especially simultaneous belonging – to various formations is rarely unambiguous. Rather, belonging in all its modes may entail dilemmas that arise from inclusions and exclusions. Bearing in mind such processes, the contributions to this volume endeavor to provide answers to the question of what kinds of difficulties members of Indian communities abroad encounter in connection with their identifications with and participation in specific collectivities. The underlying argument of all the essays collected is that members of Indian diasporas develop strategies to cope with the dilemmas they face in connection with their sense of belonging to particular communities, while they are subjected to specific power relationships. Thus, the volume sheds light on the ways in which dilemmas of belonging are being negotiated in intercultural fields.
Download or read book Disturbing History written by Robert Nicole and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disturbing History focuses on Fiji’s people and their agency in responding to and engaging the multifarious forms of authority and power that were manifest in the colony from 1874 to 1914. By concentrating on the lives of ordinary Fijians, the book presents alternate ways of reconstructing the island’s past. Couched in the traditions of social, subaltern, and people’s histories, the study is an excavation of a large mass of material that tells the often moving stories of lives that have largely been overlooked by historians. These challenge conventional historical accounts that tend to celebrate the nation, represent Fiji’s colonial experience as ordered and peaceful, or British tutelage as benevolent. In its contribution to postcolonial theory, Disturbing History reveals resistance as a constant but partial and untidy mix of other constituents such as collaboration, consent, appropriation, and opportunism, which together form the colonial landscape. In turn, colonialism in Fiji is shown as a force shaped in struggle, fractured and often fragile, with a presence and application in the daily lives of people that was often chaotic, imperfect, and susceptible to subversion. The book divides the period of study into two broad categories: organized resistance and everyday forms of resistance. The first examines the Colo War (1876), the Tuka Movement (1878–1891), the Seaqaqa War (1894), the Movement for Federation with New Zealand (1901–1903), the Viti Kabani Movement (1913–1917), and the various organized labor protests. The second half of the book addresses resistance manifested in the villages and plantations, including tax and land boycotts, violence and retributive justice, avoidance protest, petitioning, and women’s resistance. In their entirety these forms reveal a complex web of relationships between powerful and subordinate groups and among subordinate groups themselves. The author concludes that resistance cannot be framed as a totality but as a multilayered and multidimensional reality. In the wake of Fiji’s present volatile climate, this book will aid readers in understanding the continuities and disjunctures in Fiji’s interethnic and intraethnic relations.
Download or read book Bearing Witness written by Doug Munro and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brij V. Lal is a singular scholar. His work has spanned disciplines—from history to politics—and genres—from conventional monograph history, to participant history, political commentary, encyclopaedia, biography and faction. Brij is without doubt the most eminent scholar Fiji has ever produced. He also remains the most significant public intellectual of his country, despite having been banned from entering it in 2009. He is also one of the leading Pacific historians of his generation, and an internationally recognised authority on the Indian diaspora. This Festschrift volume celebrates, reflects upon and extends the life and work of this colourful scholar. The essays, whose contributors are drawn from across the globe, do more than review Brij’s work; they also probe his contribution to both scholarly and political life. This book will therefore serve as an invaluable guide for readers from all walks of life seeking to better situate and understand the impact of Brij’s scholarly activism on Fiji and beyond." — Clive Moore, University of Queensland "It is a pleasure to commend this collection of very different essays that celebrate, reflect upon and extend the life and work of a remarkable scholar. Although I have had, at times, a close association with Brij Lal’s life and work, I have learned much from reading this book. It provokes further thought about the course of democracy in Fiji, and the very sorry state and future of Pacific history and the humanities in academia. Here is a timely assertion of the significance and major contribution that courageous scholars such as Brij have made to the study and public awareness of these areas of concern." — Jacqueline Leckie, University of Otago
Download or read book Ritual Textuality written by Matt Tomlinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, Ritual Textuality presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.
Download or read book The Other Side written by John Patrick Taylor and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Other Side is the first major ethnographic and historical study of the Sia Raga people of north Pentecost Island, a region that was home to the late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu’s first prime minister. Exploring Raga social, spatial, and historical consciousness, this richly poetic account provides important theoretical contributions to ongoing debates in Pacific anthropology about the relation between structure and history, and place and time. It reveals important insights into the convergence of indigenous and exogenous cosmologies and hegemonies historically, and shows how these are implicated in contemporary social, ritual, and material cultural expressions. These analyses engage with broader concerns relating to colonial and postcolonial identities, political economy, and globalization in island Melanesia. The Other Side combines original and substantial ethnography with sophisticated theoretical reflection that will appeal broadly across the field of anthropology. It will also be of considerable value to scholars of Pacific and Melanesian history, politics, and society. The clear writing and entertaining narrative combine to create a work that is accessible to a wide audience. The volume’s critical and reflective analysis of anthropological research makes it a valuable teaching aid in courses that focus on ethnographic methods and writing. Students in Pacific anthropology will find it especially useful.37
Download or read book Pulling the Right Threads written by Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crucial insights into effective ethnographic research
