Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon
Author: Paul Wirz
Publisher: Brill Archive
Published: 1954
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13:
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Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia
Author: Fabrizio Ferrari
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-03-07
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 113684628X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDrawing on original fieldwork, this book develops a fresh methodological approach to the study of indigenous understandings of disease as possession, and looks at healing rituals in different South Asian cultural contexts. Contributors discuss the meaning of 'disease', 'possession' and 'healing' in relation to South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism, and how South Asians deal with the divine in order to negotiate health and wellbeing. The book goes on to look at goddesses, gods and spirits as a cause and remedy of a variety of diseases, a study that has proved significant to the ethics and politics of responding to health issues. It contributes to a consolidation and promotion of indigenous ways as a method of understanding physical and mental imbalances through diverse conceptions of the divine. Chapters offer a fascinating overview of healing rituals in South Asia and provide a full-length, sustained discussion of the interface between religion, ritual, and folklore. The book presents a fresh insight into studies of Asian Religion and the History of Medicine.
New Horizons in Medical Anthropology
Author: Margaret Lock
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-09-02
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1134471270
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNew Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a festschrift in honor of Charles Leslie whose influential career helped shape this subfield of anthropology. This collection of cutting-edge essays explores medical innovation and medical pluralism at the turn of the 21st century. The book accomplishes two things: it reflects recent research by medical anthropologists working in Asia who have been inspired by Charles Leslie's writing on such topics as medical pluralism and the early emergence of what has become a globalized biomedicine, the social relations of therapy management, and the relationship between the politics of the state and discourse about the health of populations, illness, and medicine. The book also takes up lesser known aspects of Leslie's work: his contribution as an editor and the role he played in carrying the field forward; his ethics as a medical anthropologist committed to humanism and sensitive to racism and eugenics; and the passion he inspired in his co-workers and students. Charles Leslie is a remarkable and influential social scientist. New Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a fitting tribute to a sensitive scholar whose theories and codes of practice provide an essential guide to future generations of medical anthropologists.
Charred Lullabies
Author: E. Valentine Daniel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1996-11-11
Total Pages: 266
ISBN-13: 1400822033
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel "walked into the ashes and mortal residue" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.
Buddhism in Life
Author: Martin Southwold
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780719009716
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKarma and Rebirth
Author: Ronald W. Neufeldt
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 1986-05-31
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 1438414455
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKarma and Rebirth: Post Classical Developments explains the religious concepts most central to Asian philosophy, religion, and society, presenting articles representative of contemporary understanding and practice. The contributors look not only at the understanding of karma and rebirth in modern India, but also in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Tibet, China, Japan, and the Western world. This broad treatment underscores the fact that karma and rebirth have become part of the religious history and cultural fabric of the Western world. The collection is divided into three sections. Part I deals with figures and movements of the Hindu renaissance in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part II on Buddhism deals with Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese treatments of karma. Part III is devoted to the influence of karma and rebirth in the Western world through theosophy, new religious movements, and recent developments in psychology.
Buddhism Transformed
Author: Richard Gombrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-03-09
Total Pages: 508
ISBN-13: 0691226857
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this study a social and cultural anthropologist and a specialist in the study of religion pool their talents to examine recent changes in popular religion in Sri Lanka. As the Sinhalas themselves perceive it, Buddhism proper has always shared the religious arena with a spirit religion. While Buddhism concerns salvation, the spirit religion focuses on worldly welfare. Buddhism Transformed describes and analyzes the changes that have profoundly altered the character of Sinhala religion in both areas.
Shamanism [2 volumes]
Author: Mariko Namba Walter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2004-12-15
Total Pages: 1088
ISBN-13: 1576076466
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA guide to worldwide shamanism and shamanistic practices, emphasizing historical and current cultural adaptations. This two-volume reference is the first international survey of shamanistic beliefs from prehistory to the present day. In nearly 200 detailed, readable entries, leading ethnographers, psychologists, archaeologists, historians, and scholars of religion and folk literature explain the general principles of shamanism as well as the details of widely varied practices. What is it like to be a shaman? Entries describe, region by region, the traits, such as sicknesses and dreams, that mark a person as a shaman, as well as the training undertaken by initiates. They detail the costumes, music, rituals, artifacts, and drugs that shamans use to achieve altered states of consciousness, communicate with spirits, travel in the spirit world, and retrieve souls. Unlike most Western books on shamanism, which focus narrowly on the individual's experience of healing and trance, Shamanism also examines the function of shamanism in society from social, political, and historical perspectives and identifies the ancient, continuous thread that connects shamanistic beliefs and rituals across cultures and millennia.
Placating the Demons
Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-11-15
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13: 1000457176
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book critically examines dominant ceremonial practices in Sri Lanka. It presents key ideas and symbolic systems that exist to this day, in similar shapes or in different guises. It looks at issues such as misfortunes caused by demons (yaksa dosa), an important ceremonial practice known as the puna-yāgaya, ideas pertaining to spirit possession, trance, and mediums. It also deals with classical Ayurvedic theories of disease, urban ceremonial practices such as cases of the apotheoses from demon to divinity, as well as multiple forms of Buddhist ceremonial practices that are part of the Sri Lankan consciousness and have found their way into public cultural performances in Sri Lanka. As a comprehensive volume on ceremonial practices in Sri Lanka, this work will be useful for scholars and researchers in cultural studies, sociology, social-anthropology, and particularly those interested in myths and rituals in South Asia.
Buddhist Sects and Sectarianism
Author: Bibhuti Baruah
Publisher: Sarup & Sons
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 500
ISBN-13: 9788176251525
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis Title Is A Historical Analysis Of Origin And Development Of Buddhist Sects And Sectarianism In The History Of The Succession Of Schools, It Is Found That The First Schism In The Sangha Was Followed By A Series Of Schisms Leading To The Formation Of Different Sub-Sects, And In The Course Of Time Eleven Such Sub-Sects Arose Out Of The Theravada While Seven Issued From The Mahasasnghikas. All These Branches Of Buddhist Sects Appeared One After Another In Close Succession Which In Three Or Four Hundred Years After The Buddha'S Parinirvana. Here, We Focus On Following Important Aspects: Growth And Ramification Of Buddhist Sects And Sectarian Schools; Mahayana Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism, Yogacara, Newar Buddhism, Bhutanese Buddhist Sects, Protestant Buddhism, Nichren Buddhism, Amida Buddhism, Tendai Buddhism, Shingon Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Millennial Buddhism, There Are Different Authorities, Such As The Traditions Of The Theravadins, Sammitiyas, Mahasanghikas, And Subsequently The Tibetan And Chinese Translations Which Give Us Accounts Of The Origin Of The Different Sects And Sectarianism.
