Beginning with an overview of the properties of metal clay, including safety information and metalsmithing terms, this thorough resource offers detailed procedures for creating a variety of components, settings, findings, attachments, 3-D forms, and textured effects. Each technique is shown with step-by-step photography to make it easy for jewelry makers at the advanced beginner to intermediate levels to learn the art of metal clay. The 12 unique projects within have multiple components made from metal clay, including clasps, chains, and settings; moveable and removable pieces; unusual textures and patinas; and unique construction and engineering. Creative tips on incorporating beads are also included. This handbook offers jewelry artists the design inspiration needed to create gallery-level pieces that are truly wearable art.
The state of Goa on India's southwest coast was once the capital of the Portuguese-Catholic empire in Asia. When Vasco Da Gama arrived in India in 1498, he mistook Hindus for Christians, but Jesuit missionaries soon declared war on the alleged idolatry of the Hindus. Today, Hindus and Catholics assert their own religious identities, but Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints attract worship from members of both religious communities. Through fresh readings of early Portuguese sources and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the history of Hindu-Catholic syncretism in Goa and reveals the complex role of religion at the intersection of colonialism and modernity.
The essays in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia challenge the idea that notions of modernity and colonialism are mere imports from the West, and show how colonial modernity has evolved from and into unique forms throughout Asia. Although the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity, until recently East Asian scholarship has tried to view Asian colonialism through the paradigm of colonial India (for instance), failing to recognize anti-imperialist nationalist impulses within differing Asian countries and regions. Demonstrating an impatience with social science models of knowledge, the contributors show that binary categories focused on during the Cold War are no longer central to the project of history writing. By bringing together articles previously published in the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, editor Tani Barlow has demonstrated how scholars construct identity and history, providing cultural critics with new ways to think about these concepts--in the context of Asia and beyond. Chapters address topics such as the making of imperial subjects in Okinawa, politics and the body social in colonial Hong Kong, and the discourse of decolonization and popular memory in South Korea. This is an invaluable collection for students and scholars of Asian studies, postcolonial studies, and anthropology. Contributors. Charles K. Armstrong, Tani E. Barlow, Fred Y. L. Chiu, Chungmoo Choi, Alan S. Christy, Craig Clunas, James A. Fujii, James L. Hevia, Charles Shiro Inouye, Lydia H. Liu, Miriam Silverberg, Tomiyama Ichiro, Wang Hui
"There is no question that the value of a detailed account of Moroccan colonial history in English is an important addition to the field, and Wyrtzen's book will undoubtedly become a reference for Moroccan, North African, and Middle Eastern historians alike." ―American Historical Review Jonathan Wyrtzen's Making Morocco is an extraordinary work of social science history. Making Morocco’s historical coverage is remarkably thorough and sweeping; the author exhibits incredible scope in his research and mastery of an immensely rich set of materials from poetry to diplomatic messages in a variety of languages across a century of history. The monograph engages with the most important theorists of nationalism, colonialism, and state formation, and uses Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory as a framework to orient and organize the socio-historical problems of the case and to make sense of the different types of problems various actors faced as they moved forward. His analysis makes constant reference to core categories of political sociology state, nation, political field, religious and political authority, identity and social boundaries, classification struggles, etc., and he does so in exceptionally clear and engaging prose. Rather than sidelining what might appear to be more tangential themes in the politics of identity formation in Morocco, Wyrtzen examines deeply not only French colonialism but also the Spanish zone, and he makes central to his analysis the Jewish question and the role of gender. These areas of analysis allow Wyrtzen to examine his outcome of interest—which is really a historical process of interest—from every conceivable analytical and empirical angle. The end-product is an absolutely exemplary study of colonialism, identity formation, and the classification struggles that accompany them. This is not a work of high-brow social theory, but a classic work of history, deeply influenced but not excessively burdened by social-theoretical baggage.
In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated—during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty—contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology.
Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. Through the figure of the convert, Viswanathan addresses the vexing question of the role of belief and minority discourse in modern society. She establishes new points of contact between the convert as religious dissenter and as colonial subject. This convergence provides a transcultural perspective not otherwise visible in literary and historical texts. It allows for radically new readings of significant figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Pandita Ramabai, Annie Besant, and B. R. Ambedkar, as well as close studies of court cases, census reports, and popular English fiction. These varying texts illuminate the means by which discourses of religious identity are produced, contained, or opposed by the languages of law, reason, and classificatory knowledge. Outside the Fold is a challenging, provocative contribution to the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies.
An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.
Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism examines the tenacious, lingering impact of European colonial ideology on religion and politics around the world. Even though the formal structures of colonialism have crumbled, with a few notable exceptions, European colonial ideology continues to operate across the globe, resulting in limited, nationalistic conceptualizations of religion and politics. Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism shows convincingly that not only has colonialism had a devastating impact on the colonized, but its reach has turned inward to erode the colonizer’s own social and political systems. By examining the colonial violence constitutive of liberal political ideology, the continued oppression of Muslims in Europe in the name of security, and the way neoliberal economics bends religious hermeneutics to its will, the authors of Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism call attention to the threats that face our world today. They also point to potential sites of hope—for example, the work of a priest in the Balkans who seeks to build solidarity across religious differences; groups in Africa who are constructing decolonial religious imaginaries; and the Islamo-futurism of Dune, which haltingly imagines a form of modernity beyond the West. Contributors: Atalia Omer, Joshua Lupo, Santiago Slabodsky, Nadia Fadil, S. Sayyid, Luca Mavelli, Edmund Frettingham, Cecelia Lynch, Slavica Jakelić, and Gil Anidjar
The localisation of a region, group, or culture was a common social phenomenon in pre-modern Asia, but global colonialism began to affect the lifestyle of local people. What was the political condition of the relationship between insiders and outsiders? The impact of colonial authorities over religious communities has not received significant attention, even though the Asian continent is the home of many religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Shintoism, and Shamanism. Colonial Transformation and Asian Religions in Modern History presents multi-angled perspectives of socio-religious transition. It uses the cultural religiosity of the Asian people as a lens through which readers can re-examine the concepts of imperialism, religious syncretism and modernisation. The contributors interpret the growth of new religions as another facet of counter-colonialism. This new approach offers significant insight into comprehending the practical agony and sorrow of regional people throughout Asian history.
This text analyses how modern Jordanian identity was created and defined. The author studies two key institutions, the law and the military, and uses them to create an analysis of the making of modern Jordanian identity.
