Book Description
Demonstrates the inadequacy of the category 'religion' by focusing on the Paraiyars of South India, exploring the complexity of religious belief in marginalized indigenous communities.
Author : Anderson H M Jeremiah
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 44,87 MB
Release : 2013-05-14
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1441178813
Demonstrates the inadequacy of the category 'religion' by focusing on the Paraiyars of South India, exploring the complexity of religious belief in marginalized indigenous communities.
Author : Anderson Harris Mithra Jeremiah
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 28,87 MB
Release : 2009
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Joshua Samuel
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 30,33 MB
Release : 2020-02-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004420053
In Untouchable Bodies, Resistance, and Liberation Joshua Samuel engages in constructing an embodied comparative theology of liberation by comparing divine possessions among Hindu and Christian Dalits in South India.
Author : Sunder John Boopalan
Publisher : Springer
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 15,14 MB
Release : 2017-09-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 331958958X
This book argues that an active memory of and grief over structural wrongs yields positive agency. Such agency generates rites of moral responsibility that serve as antidotes to violent identities and catalyze hospitable social practices. By comparing Indian and U.S. contexts of caste and race, Sunder John Boopalan proposes that wrongs today are better understood as rituals of humiliation which are socially conditioned practices of domination affected by discriminatory logics of the past. Grief can be redressive by transforming violent identities and hostile in-group/out-group differences when guided by a liberative political theological imagination. This volume facilitates interdisciplinary conversations between theorists and theologians of caste and race, and those interested in understanding the relation between religion and power.
Author : Anderson H. M. Jeremiah
Publisher :
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 23,63 MB
Release : 2009
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Ishwaran
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 19,9 MB
Release : 1983-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9004670289
Author : Aled Thomas
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 39,40 MB
Release : 2021-04-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1350182567
In this novel academic study, Aled Thomas analyses modern issues surrounding boundaries and fluidity in contemporary Scientology. By using the Scientologist practice of 'auditing' as a case study, this book explores the ways in which new types of 'Scientologies' can emerge. The notion of Free Zone Scientology is characterised by its horizontal structure, in contrast to the vertical-hierarchy of the institutional Church of Scientology. With this in mind, Thomas explores the Free Zone as an example of a developing and fluid religion, directly addressing questions concerning authority, leadership and material objects. This book, by maintaining a double-focus on the top-down hierarchy of the Church of Scientology and the horizontal-fluid nature of the Free Zone, breaks away from previous research on new religions, with have tended to focus either on new religions as indices of broad social processes, such as secularization or globalization, or as exemplars of exotic processes, such as charismatic authority and brainwashing. Instead, Thomas adopts auditing as a method of providing an in-depth case study of a new religion in transition and transformation in the 21st century. This opens the study of contemporary and new religions to a series of new questions around hybrid religions (sacred and secular), and acts as a framework for the study of similar movements formed in recent decades.
Author : Abamfo Ofori Atiemo
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 31,70 MB
Release : 2013-06-13
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1441199470
It has been maintained that the secular nature of modern human rights makes them incompatible with the religious orientation of African and non-Western societies. However, in view of the resilience of religion in the global and local public sphere, it is important to explore how religion can contribute to the promotion and enjoyment of human rights. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ghana, Abamfo Ofori Atiemo here establishes a convergence between human rights and local religious and cultural values in African societies. He argues that human rights represent universal 'dream values'. This allows for a cultural embedding of human rights in Ghana and other non-Western societies. He argues that 'dream values' are usually presented in religious language and proclaimed, for example, by prophets and seers or expressed in certain forms of taboo, proverbs or legal norms. He employs the concept of inculturation, adaptation of the way Church teachings are presented to non-Christian cultures, as a hermeneutical tool for developing a model to understand the encounter between universal human rights and local cultures. Offering a new model for explaining the relation between religion and human rights, Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana offers a novel perspective on the links between global trends and local cultures underpinned by strong currents of religious ideas.
Author : Rupa Viswanath
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 46,33 MB
Release : 2014-07-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0231537506
Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.
Author : Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 50,55 MB
Release : 2011-10-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1400840945
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.