Conversion, Identity, and Power
Conversion, Identity, and Power

Author: A. Sue Russell

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780761814405

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The introduction of Christianity into traditional societies has been the subject of numerous studies. Few of these studies, however, have adequately examined the way that this introduction affects power relationships in a community. In this, the third volume in the American Society of Missiology's dissertation series, A. Sue Russell attempts to advance the discourse on Christianity and social change by showing how a new social institution, the local church, both influences and is influenced by existing sociocultural power relationships. Building on her extensive research into the Tagal Murut, Dr. Russell clearly demonstrates that the introduction of Christianity created a dynamic that produced new social relations and power structures in Tagal society. With its unique insights into this crucial dynamic, Conversion, Identity, and Power stands as an important contribution to the sociological and missiological literature exploring the impact of Christianity on traditional societies. Book jacket.

Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany
Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany

Author: David M. Luebke

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0857453769

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The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of “conversion.” One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change— conversion—had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies.

To Be Cared For
To Be Cared For

Author: Nathaniel Roberts

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0520288815

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To Be Cared For offers a unique view into the conceptual and moral world of slum-bound Dalits (ÒuntouchablesÓ) in the South Indian city of Chennai. Focusing on the decision by many women to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity, Nathaniel Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a ÒforeignÓ ideology that disrupts local communities. Far from being a divisive force,ÊconversionÊintegrates the slum communityÑChristians and Hindus alikeÑby addressing hidden moral fault lines that subtly pitÊresidentsÊagainst one another in a national context that renders Dalits outsiders in their own land."

Identity's Strategy
Identity's Strategy

Author: Dana Anderson

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781570037061

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This work is an investigation into the persuasive techniques inherent in presentations of identity. strategies involved in the expression of personal identity. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's Dialectic of Constitutions, Anderson analyzes conversion narratives to illustrate how the authors of these autobiographical texts describe dramatic changes in their identities as a means of influencing the beliefs and action of their readers. capacity for self-understanding and self-definition. Communicating this self-interpretation is inherently rhetorical. Expanding on Burkean concepts of human symbol use, Anderson works to parse and critique such inevitable persuasive ends of identity constitution. Anderson examines the strategic presentation of identity in four narratives of religious, sexual, political, and mystical conversions: Catholic social activist Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, political commentator David Brock's Blinded by the Right, Deirdre McCloskey's memoir of transgender transformation, Crossing, and the well-known Native American text Black Elk Speaks. Mapping the strategies in each, Anderson points toward a broader understanding of how identity is made - and how it is made persuasive.

Gender, Power and Identity in the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau
Gender, Power and Identity in the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau

Author: Susan Broomhall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-12

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1317129903

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How do gender and power relationships affect the expression of family, House and dynastic identities? The present study explores this question using a case study of the House of Orange-Nassau, whose extensive visual, material and archival sources from both male and female members enable the authors to trace their complex attempts to express, gain and maintain power: in texts, material culture, and spaces, as well as rituals, acts and practices. The book adopts several innovative approaches to the history of the Orange-Nassau family, and to familial and dynastic studies generally. Firstly, the authors analyse in detail a vast body of previously unexplored sources, including correspondence, artwork, architectural, horticultural and textual commissions, ceremonies, practices and individual actions that have, surprisingly, received little attention to date individually, and consider these as the collective practices of a key early modern dynastic family. They investigate new avenues about the meanings and practices of family and dynasty in the early modern period, extending current research that focuses on dominant men to ask how women and subordinate men understood 'family' and 'dynasty', in what respects such notions were shared among members, and how it might have been fractured and fashioned by individual experiences. Adopting a transnational approach to the Nassau family, the authors explore the family's self-presentation across a range of languages, cultures and historiographical traditions, situating their representation of themselves as an influential House within an international context and offering a new vision of power as a gendered concept.

Conversion to Modernities
Conversion to Modernities

Author: Peter van der Veer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1136661832

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Peter van der Veer has gathered together a groundbreaking collection of essays that suggests that conversion to forms of Christianity in the modern period is not only a conversion to modern forms of these religions, but also to religious forms of modernity. Religious perceptions of the self, of community, and of the state are transformed when Western discourses of modernity become dominant in the modern world. This volume seeks to relate Europe and its Others by exploring conversion both in modern Europe and in the colonized world.

Right, Power, and Faquanism
Right, Power, and Faquanism

Author: Zhiwei Tong

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-08-13

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 9004381287

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In Right, Power, and Faquanism, Tong Zhiwei proposes that right and power are ultimately a unified entity which can be named “faquan,” and that the purpose of law should be to establish a balanced faquan structure and to promote its preservation and proliferation. “Faquan” is thus a jurisprudential category reflecting the understanding of the unity of right and power. It has interest protected by the law and property with defined ownership as its content, and manifests itself as the external forms of jural right, freedom, liberty, jural power, public function, authority, competence, privilege, and immunity, etc. Faquanism relies mainly on six basic concepts (faquan, right, power, quan, residual quan and duty) to analyze the content of interests and property in all legal phenomena.

The Metabolic Pattern of Societies
The Metabolic Pattern of Societies

Author: Mario Giampietro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-10-12

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 1136619941

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It is increasingly evident that the conventional scientific approach to economic processes and related sustainability issues is seriously flawed. No economist predicted the current planetary crisis even though the world has now undergone five severe recessions primed by dramatic increases in the price of oil. This book presents the results of more than twenty years of work aimed at developing an alternative method of analysis of the economic process and related sustainability issues: it is possible to perform an integrated and comprehensive analysis of the sustainability of socio-economic systems using indicators and variables that have been so far ignored by conventional economists. The book’s innovative approach aims to provide a better framework with which we can face the predicaments of sustainability issues. It begins by presenting practical examples of the shortcomings of conventional economic analysis and examines the systemic problems faced when trying to use quantitative analysis for governance. In providing a critical appraisal of current applications of economic narratives to the issue of sustainability, the book presents several innovative concepts required to generate a post-Newtonian approach to quantitative analysis in the Musiasem approach. An empirical section illustrates the results of an analysis of structural changes in world and EU countries. Finally, the book, using the insight gained in the theoretical and empirical analysis, exposes the dubious quality of many narratives currently used in the sustainability debate. Overall, the performance of modern economies across different hierarchical levels of organization and across different disciplinary knowledge systems is fully analyzed and a more realistic measure of happiness and well-being is devised. The book should be of interest to researchers and students looking at the issue of sustainability within a variety of disciplines.