New Directions in Spiritual Kinship
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship

Author: Todne Thomas

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 3319484230

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This volume examines the significance of spiritual kinship—or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine—in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Rather than confining the study of spiritual kinship to Christian godparenthood or presuming its disappearance in light of secularism, the authors investigate how religious practitioners create and contest sacred solidarities through ritual, discursive, and ethical practices across social domains, networks, and transnational collectives. This book’s theoretical conversations and rich case studies hold value for scholars of anthropology, kinship, and religion.

New Directions in Anthropological Kinship
New Directions in Anthropological Kinship

Author: Linda Stone, professor emeritus, Washington State University

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2002-05-30

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 058538424X

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Following periods of intense debate and eventual demise, kinship studies is now seeing a revival in anthropology. New Directions in Anthropological Kinship captures these recent trends and explores new avenues of inquiry in this re-emerging subfield. The book comprises contributions from primatology, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. The authors review the history of kinship in anthropology and its theory, and recent research in relation to new directions of anthropological study. Moving beyond the contentious debates of the past, the book covers feminist anthropology on kinship, the expansion of kinship into the areas of new reproductive technologies, recent kinship constructions in EuroAmerican societies, and the role of kinship in state politics.

Communities of Kinship
Communities of Kinship

Author: Carlo Calleja

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1978711980

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In Communities of Kinship: Retrieving Christian Practices of Solidarity with Lepers as a Paradigm for Overcoming Exclusion of Older People, Carlo Calleja describes kinship as a moral category, arguing that practicing kinship with others can cultivate virtues that shape the character of the agent. Contemporary Western society tends to focus on kinship as the sharing of blood ties or genetic material. On the other hand, the spiritual kinship that is proposed by religions tends to be exclusive and often nominal. For this reason, Calleja proposes practices and structures of solidaristic kinship, which involves sharing in the suffering of the other person. Finding parallels between the exclusion of lepers and the efforts of Christian communities to reforge kinship bonds with them in ancient and medieval times, he argues that communities of kinship with older persons can help cultivate the virtues needed for the flourishing of oneself and society.

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology
The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology

Author: Lene Pedersen

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2021-03-31

Total Pages: 938

ISBN-13: 1529756421

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The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is the first instalment of The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences series and encompasses major specialities as well as key interdisciplinary themes relevant to the field. Globally, societies are facing major upheaval and change, and the social sciences are fundamental to the analysis of these issues, as well as the development of strategies for addressing them. This handbook provides a rich overview of the discipline and has a future focus whilst using international theories and examples throughout. The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is an essential resource for social scientists globally and contains a rich body of chapters on all major topics relevant to the field, whilst also presenting a possible road map for the future of the field. Part 1: Foundations Part 2: Focal Areas Part 3: Urgent Issues Part 4: Short Essays: Contemporary Critical Dynamics

Feeding Iran
Feeding Iran

Author: Rose Wellman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0520976312

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Since Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations for martyrs in Islamic national rituals to create citizens who embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God. Feeding Iran provides a rare and humanistic account of religion and family life in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic that examines how home life and everyday piety are linked to state power.

The Devil Sat on My Bed
The Devil Sat on My Bed

Author: Erin E. Stiles

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-14

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0197639631

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Many Latter-day Saints in Utah report visits from spirits-both the benevolent spirits of kin and threatening evil spirits-and understand these encounters with reference to key Latter-day teachings. In The Devil Sat on My Bed, Erin E. Stiles draws on interviews with members of Utah's Mormon community to explore their accounts of interactions with spirits and how they understand them.

Rebuilding Community
Rebuilding Community

Author: Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0197642020

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Over the course of the twentieth century, Shia Ismaili Muslim communities were repeatedly displaced. How, in the aftermath of these displacements, did they remake their communities? Shenila Khoja-Moolji highlights women's critical role in this rebuilding process and breaks new ground by writing women into modern Ismaili history. Rebuilding Community tells the story of how Ismaili Muslim women who fled East Pakistan and East Africa in the 1970s recreated religious community (jamat) in North America. Drawing on oral histories, fieldwork, and memory texts, Khoja-Moolji illuminates the placemaking activities through which Ismaili women reproduce bonds of spiritual kinship: from cooking for congregants on feast days and looking after sick coreligionists to engaging in memory work through miracle stories and cookbooks. Khoja-Moolji situates these activities within the framework of ethical norms that more broadly define and sustain the Ismaili sociality. Jamat--and religious community more generally--is not a given, but an ethical relation that is maintained daily and intergenerationally through everyday acts of care. By emphasizing women's care work in producing relationality and repairing trauma, Khoja-Moolji disrupts the conventional articulation of displaced people as dependent subjects.

Relations
Relations

Author: Marilyn Strathern

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1478009349

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The concept of relation holds a privileged place in how anthropologists think and write about the social and cultural lives they study. In Relations, eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of this key concept and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world. Exploring relation's changing articulations and meanings over the past three centuries, Strathern shows how the historical idiosyncrasy of using an epistemological term for kinspersons (“relatives”) was bound up with evolving ideas about knowledge-making and kin-making. She draws on philosophical debates about relation—such as Leibniz's reaction to Locke—and what became its definitive place in anthropological exposition, elucidating the underlying assumptions and conventions of its use. She also calls for scholars in anthropology and beyond to take up the limitations of Western relational thinking, especially against the background of present ecological crises and interest in multispecies relations. In weaving together analyses of kin-making and knowledge-making, Strathern opens up new ways of thinking about the contours of epistemic and relational possibilities while questioning the limits and potential of ethnographic methods.

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology

Author: Simon Coleman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-11-25

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 1317590678

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The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is an invaluable guide and major reference source for students and scholars alike, introducing its readers to key contemporary perspectives and approaches within the field. Written by an experienced international team of contributors, with an interdisciplinary range of essays, this collection provides a powerful overview of the transformations currently affecting anthropology. The volume both addresses the concerns of the discipline and comments on its construction through texts, classroom interactions, engagements with various publics, and changing relations with other academic subjects. Persuasively demonstrating that a number of key contemporary issues can be usefully analyzed through an anthropological lens, the contributors cover important topics such as globalization, law and politics, collaborative archaeology, economics, religion, citizenship and community, health, and the environment. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is a fascinating examination of this lively and constantly evolving discipline.