Download or read book The Anthropology of Religion Charisma and Ghosts written by Stephan Feuchtwang and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has many religions. But rituals of local temples are none of these. They celebrate many gods and their powers to respond. Gods are invited as welcome guests by appropriate rituals of welcome and communication. Other rituals pacify ghosts and harmful powers. These rituals are rich with their own poetry, a poetry of performance, not just of contemplation. Interpreting this poetry demands revision of theories of ritual and religion. The author has spent over four decades studying Chinese ritual and religion through observation in contemporary China and Taiwan, constantly revising and rethinking theories of religion, ritual and their role in different political regimes.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Anthropology written by Andrew J. Strathern and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion provides an indispensable overview of contemporary and classical issues in social and cultural anthropology. Although anthropology has expanded greatly over time in terms of the diversity of topics in which its practitioners engage, many of the broad themes and topics at the heart of anthropological thought remain perennially vital, such as understanding order and change, diversity and continuity, and conflict and co-operation in the reproduction of social life. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the contributors to this volume provide us with thoughtful and fruitful ways of thinking about a number of contemporary and long-standing arenas of work where both established and more recent researchers are engaged. The companion begins by exploring classic topics such as Religion; Rituals; Language and Culture; Violence; and Gender. This is followed by a focus on current developments within the discipline including Human Rights; Globalization; and Diasporas and Cosmopolitanism. It provides an interesting and challenging look at the state of current thinking in anthropology, serving as a rich resource for scholars and students alike.
Download or read book Believing in Ghosts and Spirits written by Hu Baozhu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present book by Hu Baozhu explores the subject of ghosts and spirits and attempts to map the religious landscape of ancient China. The main focus of attention is the character gui 鬼, an essential key to the understanding of spiritual beings. The author analyses the character gui in various materials – lexicons and dictionaries, excavated manuscripts and inscriptions, and received classical texts. Gui is examined from the perspective of its linguistic root, literary interpretation, ritual practices, sociopolitical implication, and cosmological thinking. In the gradual process of coming to know the otherworld in terms of ghosts and spirits, Chinese people in ancient times attempted to identify and classify these spiritual entities. In their philosophical thinking, they connected the subject of gui with the movement of the universe. Thus the belief in ghosts and spirits in ancient China appeared to be a moral standard for all, not only providing a room for individual religiosity but also implementing the purpose of family-oriented social order, the legitimization of political operations, and the understanding of the way of Heaven and Earth.
Download or read book Of Ancestors and Ghosts written by Adeana McNicholl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Part I of this book, I argued that preta narratives participated in a larger world-building process that negotiated the contours of the Buddhist cosmos and, with it, the place of the departed. Through stories about encounters between humans and pretas, Buddhist authors explored the place of the departed in a karmic cosmological system, worked out how to best assist them, and advocated for the importance of the sangha in facilitating these offerings. These tales do not merely reflect the process through which the preta as a specific entity and rebirth category became distinguished from the ancestral departed, but also participated in this process. This illustrates the importance of viewing narratives, in Rob Campany's terms, as argumentative. Stories are not merely the distillation of more abstract doctrine but are sites for the construction of religious worldviews. This illustrates that religious cosmologies are not laid down fully formed in doctrinal treatises. They are cumulatively built over time, and "popular culture" can do important work in the aggregative construction of cosmologies"--
Download or read book Cultivating Charismatic Power written by Tiffany Cone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Islam and China are topics of relevance and contention in today’s economic, political and religious climate. In this work, Tiffany Cone makes an important contribution to these contemporary discourses through an ethnographic case study of Islamic leadership and the cultivation of charismatic power by Sufi disciples at a shrine site in Northwest China. Though this volume focuses on a specific religious community, it carries valuable insights into religious unity, syncretism and religious legitimacy, materialism and religious integrity, and the stability of religious institutions in light of rapid economic growth. Cultivating Charismatic Power speaks to global concerns about the rise of a militant Islam and an increasingly aggressive Chinese State. As such, it will appeal to scholars and practitioners across a range of fields including anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, Islamic Studies, and Chinese Studies.
Download or read book Heritage and Religion in East Asia written by Shu-Li Wang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heritage and Religion in East Asia examines how religious heritage, in a mobile way, plays across national boundaries in East Asia and, in doing so, the book provides new theoretical insights into the articulation of heritage and religion. Drawing on primary, comparative research carried out in four East Asian countries, much of which was undertaken by East Asian scholars, the book shows how the inscription of religious items as "Heritage" has stimulated cross-border interactions among religious practitioners and boosted tourism along modern pilgrimage routes. Considering how these forces encourage cross-border links in heritage practices and religious movements in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, the volume also questions what role heritage plays in a region where Buddhism, Taoism, and other various folk religious practices are dominant. Arguing that it is diversity and vibrancy that makes religious discourse in East Asia unique, the contributors explore how this particularity both energizes and is empowered by heritage practices in East Asia. Heritage and Religion in East Asia enriches understanding of the impact of heritage and religious culture in modern society and will be of interest to academics and students working in heritage studies, anthropology, religion, and East Asian studies.
Download or read book Religion and Religious Practices in Rural China written by Mu Peng and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how, unlike in the West, the daily religious life of most Chinese people spreads without institutional propagation. Based upon more than a decade of field research in rural China, the book demonstrates the decisive role of rites of passage and yearly festival rituals held in every household in shaping people’s religious dispositions. It focuses on the family, the unit most central to Chinese culture and society, and reveals the repertoire embodied in daily life in a world envisioned as comprising both the “yin” world of ancestors, spirits, and ghosts, and the “yang” world of the living. It discusses especially the concept of bai, which refers to both concrete bodily movements that express respect and awe, such as bowing, kneeling, or holding up ritual offerings, and to people’s religious inclinations and dispositions, which indicate that they are aware of a spiritual realm that is separate from yet close to the world of the living. Overall, the book shows that the daily practices of religion are not a separate sphere, but rather belief and ritual integrated into a way of dwelling in a world envisaged as consisting of both the “yin” and the “yang” worlds that regularly communicate with each other.
Download or read book Praying with the Senses written by Vlad Naumescu and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “These essays advance the understanding of Eastern Orthodox spiritual practices from a religious studies perspective.”—Reading Religion How do people experience spirituality through what they see, hear, touch, and smell? In this book, Sonja Luehrmann and an international group of scholars assess how sensory experience shapes prayer and ritual practice among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Prayer, even when performed privately, is considered as a shared experience and act that links individuals and personal beliefs with a broader, institutional, or imagined faith community. It engages with material, visual, and aural culture including icons, relics, candles, pilgrimage, bells, and architectural spaces. Whether touching upon the use of icons in the age of digital and electronic media, the impact of Facebook on prayer in Ethiopia, or the implications of praying using recordings, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, these timely essays present a sophisticated overview of the history of Eastern Orthodox Christianities. Taken as a whole they reveal prayer as a dynamic phenomenon in the devotional and ritual lives of Eastern Orthodox believers across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. “Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility―and durability―of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age.”—Nadieszda Kizenko, author of A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People
Download or read book Challenging Authorities written by Arne S. Steinforth and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the notion of ‘alternative facts’ and the alleged dawning of a ‘postfactual’ world entered public discourse, social anthropologists found themselves in unexpectedly familiar territory. In theirempirical experience, fact—knowledge accepted as true—derives its salience from social mechanisms of legitimization, thereby demonstrating a deep interconnection with power and authority. In thisperspective, fact is a continually contested and volatile social category. Due to the specific histories of their colonial and post-independence experience, African societies offer a particularly broad array of insights into social processes of juxtaposition, opposition, and even outright competition between different postulated authorities. The contributions to the present volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is contested in Southern and Eastern Africa, investigating localized discourses on which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative, thus highlighting the specificities and pluralities in ‘modern’ societies. This edited volume engages with larger theoretical questions regarding power and authority in the context of (post)colonial states (neo)traditional authority, claiming space, conflict and (in)justice, and contestations of knowledge. It offers in-depth critical analyses of ethnographic data that put contemporary African phenomena on equal footing with current controversies in North America, Europe, and other global settings.
Download or read book Framing cosmologies written by Allen Abramson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book’s key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.
Download or read book Religious Cognition in China written by Ryan G. Hornbeck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are human tendencies toward religious and spiritual thoughts, feelings, and actions outcomes of “natural” cognition? This volume revisits the “naturalness theory of religious cognition” through discussion of new qualitative and quantitative studies examining the psychological foundations of religious and spiritual expression in historical and contemporary China. Naturalness theory has been challenged on the grounds that little of its supporting developmental and experimental research has drawn on participants from predominantly secular cultural environments. Given China’s official secularity, its large proportion of atheists, and its alleged long history of dominant, nonreligious philosophies, can any broad claim for religion’s psychological “naturalness” be plausible? Addressing this empirical gap, the studies discussed in this volume support core naturalness theory predictions for human reasoning about supernatural agency, intelligent design, the efficacy of rituals, and vitalistic causality. And yet each study elucidates, expands upon, or even challenges outright the logical assumptions of the naturalness theory. Written for a non-specialist audience, this volume introduces the naturalness theory and frames the significance of these new findings for students and scholars of cultural psychology, the psychology of religion, the anthropology of religion, and Chinese Studies.
Download or read book Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China written by Thomas Jansen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China, co-edited by Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein and Christian Meyer, investigates the transformation of China’s religious landscape under the impact of global influences since 1800. The interdisciplinary case studies analyze the ways in which processes of globalization are interlinked with localizing tendencies, thereby forging transnational relationships between individuals, the state and religious as well as non-religious groups at the same time that the global concept ‘religion’ embeds itself in the emerging Chinese ‘religious field’ and within the new academic disciplines of Religious Studies and Theology. The contributions unravel the intellectual, social, political and economic forces that shaped and were themselves shaped by the emergence of what has remained a highly contested category. The contributors are: Hildegard Diemberger, Vincent Goossaert, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein, Dirk Kuhlmann, LAI Pan-chiu, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Christian Meyer, Lauren Pfister, Chloë Starr, Xiaobing Wang-Riese, and Robert P. Weller.
Download or read book Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China written by Paul Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The centrality of death rituals has rarely been documented in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism. Bringing together a range of perspectives including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, this edited volume presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. While the contributions show that the ideas and ritual practices related to death are continuously transformed in local contexts through political and social changes, they also highlight the continuities of funeral cultures. The studies are based on long-term fieldwork and covering material from Theravāda Buddhism in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and various regions of Chinese Buddhism, both on the mainland and in the Southeast Asian diasporas. Topics such as bad death, the feeding of ghosts, pollution through death, and the ritual regeneration of life show how Buddhist cultures deal with death as a universal phenomenon of human culture.
Download or read book Excavating the Afterlife written by Guolong Lai and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective. By examining burial structure, grave goods, and religious documents unearthed from groups of well-preserved tombs in southern China, Lai shows that new attitudes toward the dead, resulting from the trauma of violent political struggle and warfare, permanently altered the early Chinese conceptions of this world and the afterlife. The book grounds the important changes in religious beliefs and ritual practices firmly in the sociopolitical transition from the Warring States (ca. 453–221 BCE) to the early empires (3rd century–1st century BCE). A methodologically sophisticated synthesis of archaeological, art historical, and textual sources, Excavating the Afterlife will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists, and textual scholars of China, as well as to students of comparative religions. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/excavating-the-afterlife Honorable Mention for the 2016 Society for American Archaeology Book Award in the Scholarly Category
Download or read book The Stranger at the Feast written by Tom Boylston and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.
Download or read book A Time of Lost Gods written by Emily Ng and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.
Download or read book Civilisation Recast written by Stephan Feuchtwang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows what humanity has borrowed and shared as a common heritage.
