Download or read book Shared Idioms Sacred Symbols and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia written by Kelly Pemberton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do text, performance, and rhetoric simultaneously reflect and challenge notions of distinct community and religious identities? This volume examines evidence of shared idioms of sanctity within a larger framework of religious nationalism, literary productions, and communalism in South Asia. Contributors to this volume are particularly interested in how alternative forms of belonging and religious imaginations in South Asia are articulated in the light of normative, authoritative, and exclusive claims upon the representation of identities. Building upon new and extensive historiographical and ethnographical data, the book challenges clear-cut categorizations of group identity and points to the complex historical and contemporary relationships between different groups, organizations, in part by investigating the discursive formations that are often subsumed under binary distinctions of dominant/subaltern, Hindu/Muslim or orthodox/heterodox. In this respect, the book offers a theoretical contribution beyond South Asia Studies by highlighting a need for a new interdisciplinary effort in rethinking notions of identity, ethnicity, and religion.
Download or read book Shared Idioms Sacred Symbols and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia written by Kelly Pemberton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work focuses on processes of articulating identity. The notions of "shared idioms" and "sacred symbols" shaping this volume suggest both a search for common ground and boundary-drawing processes. Individual chapters locate "sites" of these modes and the conditions that engender them, problematizing the truth-claims of unitary markers of identity.
Download or read book Hagiography and Religious Truth written by Rico G. Monge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hagiographic materials from the world's religions can tell us much about the beliefs and practices of the people, yet the limited degree to which hagiography has been used as an instrument for understanding diverse religious traditions is surprising. Hagiography and Religious Truth provides a clearer understanding of the ways hagiography functions to disclose truth for practitioners and suggests various ways that these underexploited sources enrich our comprehension of broader issues in religious studies. This volume provides a much-needed cross-cultural and interreligious comparison of saints' lives, iconography, and devotional practices. The contributors show that hagiographic sources can in fact be “truths of manifestation,” which function as vehicles for prefiguring, configuring, and refiguring religious, social, and cultural life. The editors argue that some meanings simply cannot be communicated effectively through historical-critical methodologies. By exploring how hagiography functions throughout several of the world's religious traditions, this volume illustrates how various modes of hagiography articulate religious ideas and uniquely represent conceptions of sanctity.
Download or read book Writing Tamil Catholicism written by Margherita Trento and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.
Download or read book Religious Ethics and Migration written by Ilsup Ahn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to provide justice for undocumented workers who have been living among us without proper legal documentation? How can we do justice to the undocumented migrants who have been doing the low-skilled, low-paid jobs unwanted by citizens? Why should we even try to do justice for people who violate the laws of the society? Religious Ethics and Migration: Doing Justice to Undocumented Workers addresses these questions from a distinctive religious ethical perspective: the Christian theology of forgiveness and radical hospitality. In answering these questions, the author employs in-depth interdisciplinary dialogues with other relevant disciplines such as immigration history, global economics, political science, legal philosophy, and social theory. He argues that the political appropriation of a Christian theology of forgiveness and the radical hospitality modeled after it are the most practical and justifiable solutions to the current immigration crisis in North America. Critical and interdisciplinary in its approach, this book offers a unique, comprehensive, and balanced perspective regarding the urgent immigration crisis.
Download or read book Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India written by Kelly Pemberton and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insightful field research into the complexity of women's roles in a subset of Islamic culture. Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton grounds her firsthand research into India's Sufi shrines and saints by setting her observations against the historical backdrop of colonial-era discourses by British civil servants, Orientalist scholars, and Muslim reformists and the assumptive portrayals of women's activities in the milieu of Sufi orders and shrines inherent in these accounts. These early narratives, Pemberton holds, are driven by social, economic, intellectual, and political undercurrents of self-interest that shaped Western understanding of Indian Muslims and, in particular, of women's participation in the institutions of Sufism. Pemberton's research offers a corrective by assessing the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recognized as a spiritual authority or guide—despite official denial of such status—and by examining the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual mediation carried out by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she maps shifting ideas about women's involvement in public ritual events in a variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate outside the public sphere of major shrines. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Pemberton sets observed practices of lived religious experiences against the boundaries established by prescriptive behavioral models of Islam to illustrate how the varied reasons given for why women cannot become spiritual masters conflict with the need in Sufi circles for them to do exactly that. Thus this work also invites further inquiry into the ambiguities to be found in Islam's foundational framework for belief and practice.
Download or read book William James s Hidden Religious Imagination written by Jeremy Carrette and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’
Download or read book Negotiating Languages written by Walter N. Hakala and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage. Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registers—Urdu and Hindi—and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a key lexicographical work and its fateful political consequences. Recovering texts by overlooked and even denigrated authors, Negotiating Languages provides insight into the forces that turned intimate speech into a potent nationalist politics, intensifying the passions that partitioned the Indian subcontinent.
Download or read book Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English written by Cara N. Cilano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at a wide selection of Pakistani novels in English, this book explores how literary texts imaginatively probe the past, convey the present, and project a future in terms that facilitate a sense of collective belonging. The novels discussed cover a range of historical movements and developments, including pre-20th century Islamic history, the 1947 partition, the 1971 Pakistani war, the Zia years, and post-9/11 Pakistan, as well as pervasive themes, including ethnonationalist tensions, the zamindari system, and conspiracy thinking. The book offers a range of representations of how and whether collective belonging takes shape, and illustrates how the Pakistani novel in English, often overshadowed by the proliferation of the Indian novel in English, complements Pakistani multi-lingual literary imaginaries by presenting alternatives to standard versions of history and by highlighting the issues English-language literary production bring to the fore in a broader Pakistani context. It goes on to look at the literary devices and themes used to portray idea, nation and state as a foundation for collective belonging. The book illustrates the distinct contributions the Pakistani novel in English makes to the larger fields of postcolonial and South Asian literary and cultural studies.
Download or read book Key Themes for the Study of Islam written by Jamal J. Elias and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Key Themes for the Study of Islam" examines the central themes and concepts indispensable to an informed understanding of Islamic religion and society. From Gender and History to Prayer and Prophecy, each authoritative chapter focuses on a single aspect of the religion and presents a critical discussion written by a world expert in that field. Exposing as false the idea that Islam and Muslims are incomprehensible to Western culture, this book will become the first choice for students and experts in religion from disparate fields, who wish to know how Islam relates to vital concepts in religion and society today.
Download or read book Beyond Sectarianism written by Tehseen Thaver and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Tehseen Thaver offers a fundamental reevaluation of how one should think about the relationship between the Qur’an, Shi‘ism, and religious identity. Beyond Sectarianism focuses on the literary Arabic Qur’an exegesis of the highly influential yet less studied poet, historian, and exegete al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015). Al-Radi’s fascinating interpretations sought to resolve Qur’anic ambiguities or mutashabihat. Through a philologically layered and historically attuned analysis, Thaver argues that al-Radi’s efforts at resolving Qur’anic ambiguities were interlocked with the project of the canonization of the Arabic language. Although he was marked as a Shi‘i scholar, the interpretive and political horizons that informed al-Radi’s scholarly endeavors could not be reduced to predetermined templates of sectarian identity. Rather, Thaver argues, al-Radi was an active participant and beneficiary of critical intellectual currents and debates that animated the wider Muslim humanities during his life, especially on questions of language, poetry, and theology. Thaver thus leads her readers to reconsider their assumptions about the interaction of sectarian identity and scriptural interpretation in the study of Islam and religion. Though centered on the context of late tenth- and eleventh-century Baghdad under the Buyid dynasty, Beyond Sectarianism raises and addresses crucial questions of religious thought and identity with major ramifications for how we imagine the narrative of Islam and the place of sectarianism in it today.
Download or read book Secularism and Religion Making written by Markus Dressler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion. The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.
Download or read book Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education written by Yang Lu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education deals with the current issues and challenges faced by teachers and learners of Chinese. Written by leading professionals and academics, the book is the first collection of research articles based on data collected in higher education institutions in the UK. The studies focus on concerns related to learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and aim to establish studies on teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) as part of the mainstream of applied linguistics The contributors have applied their theoretical backgrounds in applied linguistics and education to tackle issues such as how to benchmark the Chinese written language with CEFR, how to integrate standardised Chinese proficiency tests with institutional assessments and teaching methodologies. Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education will be invaluable to professionals, academics and students seeking theoretical frameworks in applied linguistics for TCFL.
Download or read book Globalization and Orthodox Christianity written by Victor Roudometof and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With approximately 200 to 300 million adherents worldwide, Orthodox Christianity is among the largest branches of Christianity, yet it remains relatively understudied. This book examines the rich and complex entanglements between Orthodox Christianity and globalization, offering a substantive contribution to the relationship between religion and globalization, as well as the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and the sociology of religion – and more broadly, the interdisciplinary field of Religious Studies. While deeply engaged with history, this book does not simply narrate the history of Orthodox Christianity as a world religion, nor does it address theological issues or cover all the individual trajectories of each subgroup or subdivision of the faith. Orthodox Christianity is the object of the analysis, but author Victor Roudometof speaks to a broader audience interested in culture, religion, and globalization. Roudometof argues in favor of using globalization instead of modernization as the main theoretical vehicle for analyzing religion, displacing secularization in order to argue for multiple hybridizations of religion as a suitable strategy for analyzing religious phenomena. It offers Orthodox Christianity as a test case that illustrates the presence of historically specific but theoretically distinct glocalizations, applicable to all faiths.
Download or read book Queering Religion Religious Queers written by Yvette Taylor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection considers how religious identity interplays with other forms and contexts of identity, specifically those related to sexual identity. It asks how these intersections are formed, negotiated and resisted across time and places, including the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, and the Global South. Questions around ‘queer’ engagements in same-sex marriages, civil partnerships and other practices (e.g. adoption) have created a number of provoking stances and policy provisions – but what remains unanswered is how people experience and situate themselves within sometimes competing, or ‘contradictory’, moments as ‘religious queers’ who may be tasked with ‘queering religion’. Additionally, the presumed paradoxes of ‘marriage’, queer sexuality, religion and youth combine to generate a noteworthy generational absence. This leads to questions about where ‘religious queers’ reside, resist and relate experiences of intersecting religious and sexual lives. In looking at interconnectedness, this collection offers international contributions which bridge the ‘contradictions’ in queering religion and in making visible ‘religious queers.’ It provides insight into older and younger people’s understandings of religiosity, queer cultures, and religious groups. A small but active religious minority in the US has received much attention for its anti-gay political activity; much less attention has been paid to the more positive, supportive role that religious-based groups play in e.g. providing housing, education and political advocacy for queer youth. Queer methodologies and intersectional approaches offer a lens both theoretically and methodologically to uncover the salience of related social divisions and identities. This collection is both innovative and sensitive to ‘blended’ identities and their various enactments.
Download or read book Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture written by Stella Lau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian churches and groups within Anglo-American contexts have increasingly used popular music as a way to connect with young people. This book investigates the relationships between evangelical Christianity and popular music, focusing particularly on electronic dance music in the last twenty years. Author Stella Lau illustrates how electronic dance music is legitimized in evangelical activities by Christians’ discourses, and how the discourses challenge the divide between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ in the Western culture. Unlike other existing books on the relationships between music cultures and religion, which predominantly discuss the cultural implications of such phenomenon, Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture examines the notion of ‘spirituality’ in contemporary popular electronic dance music. Lau’s emphasis on the sonic qualities of electronic dance music opens the door for future research about the relationships between aural properties of electronic dance music and religious discourses. With three case studies conducted in the cultural hubs of electronic dance music – Bristol, Ibiza and New York – the monograph can also be used as a guidebook for ethnographic research in popular music.
Download or read book Buddhism and Violence written by Vladimir Tikhonov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is generally accepted in the West that Buddhism is a 'peaceful' religion. This volume demolishes this stereotype, and produces instead a coherent account of the modern Buddhist attitudes towards violence and warfare, which take into consideration both doctrinal logic of Buddhism and the socio-political situation in Asian Buddhist societies. The chapters in this book offer a deep analysis of 'Buddhist militarism' and Buddhist attitudes towards violence, grounded in an awareness of Buddhist doctrines and the recent history of nationalism. The international team of contributors includes scholars from Thailand, Japan, and Korea.
