Worship and the Ceremonial Economy of a Royal South Indian Temple
Author: Anthony Good
Publisher:
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9780773479180
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Princely India Re-imagined
Author: Aya Ikegame
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0415554497
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIndia's Princely States covered nearly 40 per cent of the Indian subcontinent at the time of Indian independence, and they collapsed after the departure of the British. This book provides a chronological analysis of the Princely State in colonial times and its post-colonial legacies. Focusing on one of the largest and most important of these states, the Princely State of Mysore, it offers a novel interpretation and thorough investigation of the relationship of king and subject in South Asia. The book argues that the denial of political and economic power to the king, especially after 1831 when direct British control was imposed over the state administration in Mysore, was paralleled by a counter-balancing multiplication of kingly ritual, rites, and social duties. The book looks at how, at the very time when kingly authority was lacking income and powers of patronage, its local sources of power and social roots were being reinforced and rebuilt in a variety of ways. Using a combination of historical and anthropological methodologies, and based upon substantial archival and field research, the book argues that the idea of kingship lived on in South India and continues to play a vital and important role in contemporary South Indian social and political life. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Ritual Matters
Author: Ute Husken
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-08-21
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 1136517936
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the interaction of rituals and ritualised practices utilising a cross-cultural approach. It discusses whether and why rituals are important today, and why they are possibly even more relevant than before.
A Priest's Guide for the Great Festival
Author: Aghoraśivācārya
Publisher: South Asia Research
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 0195378520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Mahotsavavidhi of the Saiva preceptor Aghorasiva, completed in 1157 c.e., provides step-by-step guidance for a Hindu priest conducting a nine-day festival in medieval India. This annotated rendering of Aghorasiva's 12th-century work is the first extensive translation of a medieval work on Hindu temple festivals into a European language.
Layered Landscapes
Author: Eric Nelson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-06-26
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 1317107209
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.
Permutations of Order
Author: Thomas G. Kirsch
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-13
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 1317082141
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPermutations of Order makes an innovative and important contribution to current discussions about the relationship between religion and law, bringing together theoretically informed case studies from different parts of the world, relating to various types of politico-legal settings and religions. This volume also deals with contemporary legal/religious transfigurations that involve "permutations," meaning that elements of "legal" and "religious" acts of ordering are at times repositioned within each realm and from one realm to the other. These permutations of order in part result from the fact that, in ethnographic settings like those examined here, "legal" and "religious" realms are relational to-and in certain cases even constitutive of-each other and they result in categoric transpositions and new social positionalities through which, among other things, "the legal" and "the religious" are blended. Permutations of Order is a work that transcends convention, identifies new and theoretically overarching themes and will be of strong interest to researchers and policy-makers seeking a comparative focus on the intersections and disjunctions of religion and law.
Laxminama
Author: Anshuman Tiwari
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-08-10
Total Pages: 483
ISBN-13: 9387146804
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmpire. Trade. Religion. Three crucial forces that have been almost equally responsible for shaping human civilization so far. Yet, the politics of empire has dominated history and popular discussion. Irrespective of the political upheavals, however, India has always been an open market-welcoming traders from far-off lands, promising them a fair bargain. Indian entrepreneurs since ages had developed their own sophisticated institutions and wide community-based networks. This open, liberal and robust 'bazaar economy' thrived unhindered till the advent of European trading companies, who brought with them the notions of monopoly and state controls. Business in India blossomed in tune with liberal religious thought and Indian intellectual tradition always fostered the spirit of questioning. Laxminana is an account of how the country's open market and its liberal religious outlook have nurtured each other throughout the centuries. Told through a medley of stories, this is the saga of India's socioeconomic power that has characterized not only the country's vibrant pluralistic society but also much of global history. An untold narrative of India's geographies, products and pioneers this is an unforgettable album of heroes, who championed game-changing ideas at the intersection of faith and enterprise.
Unfinished Gestures
Author: Davesh Soneji
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-01-15
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 0226768090
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Of Doubt and Proof
Author: Daniela Berti
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-03
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 1317086171
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAll institutions concerned with the process of judging - whether it be deciding between alternative courses of action, determining a judge’s professional integrity, assigning culpability for an alleged crime, or ruling on the credibility of an asylum claimant - are necessarily directly concerned with the question of doubt. By putting ritual and judicial settings into comparative perspective, in contexts as diverse as Indian and Taiwanese divination and international cricket, as well as legal processes in France, the UK, India, Denmark, and Ghana, this book offers a comprehensive and novel perspective on techniques for casting and dispelling doubt, and the roles they play in achieving verdicts or decisions that appear both valid and just. Broadening the theoretical understandings of the social role of doubt, both in social science and in law, the authors present these understandings in ways that not only contribute to academic knowledge but are also useful to professionals and other participants engaged in the process of judging. This collection will consequently be of great interest to academics researching in the fields of legal anthropology, ritual studies, legal sociology, criminology, and socio-legal studies.
Viṣṇu's Children
Author: Ute Hüsken
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9783447058544
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Vaikhanasas, a group of Brahmanic priests in the Visnu temples of south India, can look back on a long and turbulent history, that is characterized by the effort of claiming their status against rivaling priests. Central to this monograph is a controversy, ongoing for centuries, as to what makes a person eligible to perform the rituals in Visnu temples: does birth or an initiation create the ideal intermediary between the god and humans? Since the 14th century CE the discussion in the relevant Sanskrit texs centers around the question of whether the Vaikhanasas priests must undergo an initiation including a branding on the upper arms, or whether their particular prenatal life-cycle ritual visnubali makes them eligible to perform temple ritual. As hereditary temple priests the Vaikhanasas' own stance is explicit: they are Visnu's own children, preordained for temple service already before birth. In addition to the textual perspective, three instances of local conflicts from the 19th/20th centuries about the question of whether the Vaikhanasas require an initiation are analysed in their contexts. Furthermore, three examples of present day performances of the crucial ritual visnubali are presented and interpreted in the light of the relation between text and performance and from the perspective of the acting priests' ritual competence. The book also contains a DVD with some of the video-coverage of the three visnubali performances.
