The Powerful Ephemeral
The Powerful Ephemeral

Author: Carla Bellamy

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-08-05

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0520950453

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The violent partitioning of British India along religious lines and ongoing communalist aggression have compelled Indian citizens to contend with the notion that an exclusive, fixed religious identity is fundamental to selfhood. Even so, Muslim saint shrines known as dargahs attract a religiously diverse range of pilgrims. In this accessible and groundbreaking ethnography, Carla Bellamy traces the long-term healing processes of Muslim and Hindu devotees of a complex of dargahs in northwestern India. Drawing on pilgrims’ narratives, ritual and everyday practices, archival documents, and popular publications in Hindi and Urdu, Bellamy considers questions about the nature of religion in general and Indian religion in particular. Grounded in stories from individual lives and experiences, The Powerful Ephemeral offers not only a humane, highly readable portrait of dargah culture, but also new insight into notions of selfhood and religious difference in contemporary India.

Islam Translated
Islam Translated

Author: Ronit Ricci

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-05-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0226710882

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The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.

Our Most Troubling Madness
Our Most Troubling Madness

Author: T.M. Luhrmann

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0520291093

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Schizophrenia has long puzzled researchers in the fields of psychiatric medicine and anthropology. Why is it that the rates of developing schizophrenia—long the poster child for the biomedical model of psychiatric illness—are low in some countries and higher in others? And why do migrants to Western countries find that they are at higher risk for this disease after they arrive? T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow argue that the root causes of schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural. This book gives an intimate, personal account of those living with serious psychotic disorder in the United States, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It introduces the notion that social defeat—the physical or symbolic defeat of one person by another—is a core mechanism in the increased risk for psychotic illness. Furthermore, “care-as-usual” treatment as it occurs in the United States actually increases the likelihood of social defeat, while “care-as-usual” treatment in a country like India diminishes it.

Parts and Wholes
Parts and Wholes

Author: Laila Prager

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 551

ISBN-13: 3643907893

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This festschrift for Josephus D.M. Platenkamp brings some central concerns of anthropology into focus: social morphology, exchange, cosmology, history, and practical applications. Ranging across several disciplines and continents, but with a preference for Southeast Asia, the contributions look at a common approach that unites these diverse themes. In this view, the most constitutive relationships of society are based on exchange. Exchange and ritual articulate central values of a society, thus appearing as parts in relationship to a whole. These relationships encompass both human and non-human beings, the social and the cosmological domain. Thus, the study of these subject issues merges into a single project. (Series: ?Anthropology: Research and Science / Ethnologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft, Vol. 27) [Subject: Anthropology]Ã?Â?Ã?Â?

Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia
Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia

Author: Bryan S. Turner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1317636465

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The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism
Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism

Author: Merin Shobhana Xavier

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-03-22

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1350026700

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This book sheds light on the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship (BMF), one of North America's major Sufi movements, and one of the first to establish a Sufi shrine in the region. It provides the first comprehensive overview of the BMF, offering new insight into its historical development and practices, and charting its establishment in both the United States and Sri Lanka. Through ethnographic research, Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism shows that the followers of Bawa in the United States and Sri Lanka share far more similarities in the relationships they formed with spaces, Bawa, and Sufism, than differences. This challenges the accepted conceptualization of Sufism in North America as having a distinct “Americanness”, and prompts scholars to re-consider how Sufism is developing in the modern American landscape, as well as globally. The book focuses on the transnational spaces and ritual activities of Bawa's communities, mapping parallel shrines and pilgrimages. It examines the roles of culture, religion, and gender and their impact on ritual embodiment, drawing attention to the global range of a Sufi community through engagement with its distinct Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian followers.

The Hindu Sufis of South Asia
The Hindu Sufis of South Asia

Author: Michel Boivin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1788319575

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Within the complex religious landscape of modern India, the community of Sindh stands out as a powerful example of interfaith relations. This Hindu community moved to India and practiced Sufism following Sindh's inclusion to Pakistan in the 1947 partition. Drawing on a close analysis of literature and poetry, interviews with key informants, and a reading of historic rituals and architectures, Michel Boivin demonstrates that this active religious minority has managed to retain its unique Hindu-Sufi identity amidst the rigidification of official religions in both India and Pakistan. Of particular significance, Boivin argues, was the creation of sacred spaces called darbars. These shrines include a religious building where the Hindu Sindhis worship Sufi saints, chant Sufi poetry and perform Sufi rituals. In looking at this vibrant community as a trans-religious culture capable of navigating the challenges of the modern nation state, this book is an important contribution to understanding the Muslim-Hindu encounter in India.

Religious Journeys in India
Religious Journeys in India

Author: Andrea Marion Pinkney

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-08-20

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 143846603X

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Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions. In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra. “It’s rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars’ engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide.” — John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

Deceptive Majority
Deceptive Majority

Author: Joel Lee

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-10

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1108843824

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This is an ethnographic history of religious majoritarianism and its sly subversion by one of India's most oppressed minorities.

Highways to the End of the World
Highways to the End of the World

Author: Edward Simpson

Publisher: Hurst Publishers

Published: 2022-11-04

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1787389952

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This book argues that road-building was naturalised in the twentieth century to the point of common sense, integrating roadbuilding into a system of climate change denial hidden within a broad international development imperative. But if we can ‘read’ South Asian roads as forms of governance and knowledge, we can challenge the region’s established geopolitical narratives, and the idea of a never-ending future. Highways to the End of the World explores the political economy of these ideas by focusing on the history of this phenomenon, and on the road-builders of South Asia themselves. How do these flamboyant and controversial ‘roadmen’ think about their work and the future of the planet? What do roads do, and why? And how did they become central to the region’s nationalist and developmental projects in the first place? Simpson’s fascinating ethnographic account takes us from fume-filled toll booths in the heart of India, via overworked government offices in Pakistan, to pharaonic bridges in the Indian Ocean. Simpson follows the money, explores the politics of evidence, and argues against the utopian hyperbole of present-day ‘road talk’, finding both humanitarian crises and freewheeling international capital in the hedgerows. Roads have never been so interesting, or so controversial.