Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City
Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

Author: John Fahy

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1789206103

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. While ISKCON’s history is often presented in terms of an Indian guru ‘transplanting’ Indian spirituality to the West, this book focusses on the efforts to bring ISKCON back to India. Paying particular attention to devotees’ failure to consistently live up to ISKCON’s ideals and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an ‘ideal Vedic city’, this book argues that the anthropology of ethics must account for how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.

Where is the Good in the World?
Where is the Good in the World?

Author: David Henig

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-07-08

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1800735529

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.

The Oxford History of Hinduism: Modern Hinduism
The Oxford History of Hinduism: Modern Hinduism

Author: Torkel Brekke

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0192508199

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford History of Hinduism: Modern Hinduism focuses on developments resulting from movements within the tradition as well as contact between India and the outside world through both colonialism and globalization. Divided into three parts, part one considers the historical background to modern conceptualizations of Hinduism. Moving away from the reforms of the 19th and early 20th century, part two includes five chapters each presenting key developments and changes in religious practice in modern Hinduism. Part three moves to issues of politics, ethics, and law. This section maps and explains the powerful legal and political contexts created by the modern state—first the colonial government and then the Indian Republic—which have shaped Hinduism in new ways. The last two chapters look at Hinduism outside India focusing on Hinduism in Nepal and the modern Hindu diaspora.

Emergent Religious Pluralisms
Emergent Religious Pluralisms

Author: Jan-Jonathan Bock

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-09-25

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 3030138119

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In a rapidly changing world, in which religious identities emerge as crucial fault lines in political and public discourse, this volume brings together multiple disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate shifting conceptions of, and commitments to, the ideals of religious pluralism. Spanning theology, sociology, politics and anthropology, the chapters explore various approaches to coexistence, political visions of managing diversity and lived experiences of multireligiosity, in order to examine how modes of religious pluralism are being constructed and contested in different parts of the world. Contributing authors analyse challenges to religious pluralism, as well as innovative kinds of conviviality, that produce meaningful engagements with diversity and shared community life across different social, political and economic settings. This book will be relevant to scholars of religion, community life, social change and politics, and will also be of interest to civil society organisations, NGOs, international agencies and local, regional and national policymakers.

Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe
Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe

Author: Daan Beekers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1350127329

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Engaging with debates about lived religion, pluralism, and secularism, this book presents an ethnographic study of committed young Muslims and Christians in the predominantly secular context of the Netherlands. Daan Beekers breaks with conventional frameworks that keep these groups apart by highlighting the common ground between revivalist-minded Protestant Christians and Sunni Muslims. Based on in-depth fieldwork, Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe shows that these young adults embark on reflexive projects of cultivating personal faith that are rife with struggles, setbacks, and doubts. Beekers argues that this shared precarious condition of everyday religious pursuits is shaped by young believers' active participation in today's high capitalist and largely secular society where they encounter other modes of imagining and living in the world. Yet he reveals that this close engagement with secular culture also fosters a reinvigorated religious commitment that demands constant care and nourishment. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book reaches beyond longstanding divisions in the study of religion in Europe. It both provides rich insights into everyday religious lives and disrupts persistent binary oppositions between categories such as minorities and majorities, migrants and natives, and Islam and the West.

An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange

Author: Jacob Copeman

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2023-09-15

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1805390708

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself.

New Perspectives on Moral Change
New Perspectives on Moral Change

Author: Cecilie Eriksen

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-08-12

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1800735987

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The world we live in is constantly changing. Climate change, transforming gender conceptions, emerging issues of food consumption, novel forms of family life and technological developments are altering central areas of our forms of life. This raises questions of how to cope with and understand the moral changes implicit in such alterations. This volume is the first to address moral change as such. It brings together anthropologists and philosophers to discuss how to study and theorize the change of norms, concepts, emotions, moral frameworks and forms of personhood.

Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective
Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective

Author: Susan Bayly

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2024-05-03

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 1805395017

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contemporary Asian societies bear the imprint of the experience and afterlives of colonialism, revolutionary socialism and religious and secular nationalism in dramatically contrasting ways. Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective draws together essays that demonstrate the role of these far-reaching transformations in the shaping of two Asian settings in particular – India and Vietnam. It traces historical and contemporary realities through a variety of compelling topics including the lived experience of India’s caste system and the ethical challenges faced by Vietnamese working women.

Against Better Judgment
Against Better Judgment

Author: Patrick McKearney

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2023-06-09

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1805390015

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy.