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Guilty Males and Proud Females

Author : Fabrizio M. Ferrari

Publisher :

Page : 288 pages

File Size : 42,81 MB

Release : 2010

Category : Medical

ISBN :

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Book Description

Guilty Males and Proud Females is the first complete study on the Bengali gajan festival dedicated to Dharmaraj, a village god in the Rarh region of Bengal. The gajan is the dramatic representation of an hierogamy--the marriage of a god and goddess--and a recreation of the life-cycle of earth. As Fabrizio M. Ferrari explains one of the most fascinating aspects of the gajan is its approach to gender. The central deity of the gajan is a goddess identified with the earth. To please such a goddess, male devotees must acknowledge the pain they inflict towards the female world and become "ritual women." Conversely, as part of the festival, women display their generative power and provoke the jealousy of men by ritually mocking conception and delivery. The outcome of the ritual is that their suffering is acknowledged and transformed into power. Much more than an ethnography of Bengali popular religion, Guilty Males and Proud Females contributes to new studies on gender transformation in the Bengal region and will be of interest to scholars of South Asian religions, folklore, and gender studies.



Beliefs about Inequality

Author : James R. Kluegel

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 344 pages

File Size : 22,10 MB

Release : 2017-09-08

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1351328980

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Book Description

Motivated by the desire to explain how Americans perceive and evaluate inequality and related programs and policies, the authors conducted a national survey of beliefs about social and economic inequality in America. Here they present the results of their research on the structure, determinants, and certain political and personal consequences of these beliefs. The presentations serve two major goals; to describe and explain the central features of Americans' images of inequality. Beliefs About Inequality begins with a focus on people's perceptions of the most basic elements of inequality: the availability of opportunity in society, the causes of economic achievements, and the benefits and costs of equality and inequality. The book's analysis of the public's beliefs on these key issues is based on fundamental theories of social psychology and lays the groundwork for understanding how Americans evaluate inequality-related policies. The authors discuss the ultimate determinants of beliefs and the implications of their findings for social policies related to inequality. They propose that attitudes toward economic inequality and related policy are influenced by three major aspects of the current American social, economic, and political environment: a stable "dominant ideology" about economic inequality; individuals' social and economic status; and specific beliefs and attitudes, often reflecting "social liberalism" shaped by recent political debates and events.



Ritual Matters

Author : Ute Husken

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 417 pages

File Size : 30,53 MB

Release : 2012-08-21

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1136517936

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Book Description

This 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.



Thematizations of the Goddess in South Asian Cinema

Author : Anway Mukhopadhyay

Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Page : 265 pages

File Size : 12,52 MB

Release : 2022-11-16

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 1527591239

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Book Description

This collection presents cross-disciplinary explorations of the tropes, themes and representational frameworks constellating around the figure of the Goddess in South Asian cinema. It critically approaches the Goddess theme in various genres of South Asian cinema, using analytical tools culled from gender studies, comparative cultural studies, and religious studies, as well as film semiotics. The films discussed here represent variegated thematizations of the Goddess across regions in South Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and various geo-cultural locations in India. As the volume highlights the regional and politico-cultural differences and commonalities in representational schemes between South Asian films of different genres through the Goddess motif, it will appeal to scholars of film studies, South Asian studies and comparative religion, and will hold a special appeal for those interested in Goddess cultures and theology.



Proud Man

Author : Murray Constantine

Publisher : Gateway

Page : 177 pages

File Size : 19,38 MB

Release : 2016-10-27

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1473214688

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Book Description

Originally published in England in 1934, this searing, still timely novel offers and incisive critique of the sexual politics and militarism of England, and the West as a whole. Proud Man is told from the perspective of a "Genuine Person" who has been thrown back in time thousands of years from a peaceful future society. The Genuine Person comes from a people that are androgynous, self-fertilizing, and vegetarian; they live without a national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the "Genuine Person" confronts the deeply troubled reality of England in the 1930s, still battered after one World War and on the road to another.



Historical Dictionary of the Bengalis

Author : Kunal Chakrabarti

Publisher : Scarecrow Press

Page : 605 pages

File Size : 28,85 MB

Release : 2013-08-22

Category : History

ISBN : 0810880245

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Book Description

The Bengali (Bangla) speaking people are located in the northeastern part of South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh and two states of India – West Bengal and Tripura. There are almost 246 million Bengalis at present, which makes them the fifth largest speech community in the world. Despite political and social divisions, they share a common literary and musical culture and several habits of daily existence which impart to them a distinct identity. The Bengalis are known for their political consciousness and cultural accomplishments The Historical Dictionary of the Bengalis provides an overview of the Bengalis across the world from the earliest Chalcolithic cultures to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 750 cross-referenced dictionary entries on politicians, educators and entrepreneurs, leaders of religious and secular institutions, writers, painters, actors and other cultural figures, and more generally, on the economy, education, political parties, religions, women and minorities, literature, art and architecture, music, cinema and other major sectors. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Bengalis.



Habitat, Ecology and Ekistics

Author : Rukhsana

Publisher : Springer Nature

Page : 343 pages

File Size : 36,39 MB

Release : 2020-10-21

Category : Technology & Engineering

ISBN : 3030491153

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Book Description

This volume uses an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to assess various issues resulting from human-environment interactions in relation to sustainable development. The book encompasses theoretical and applied aspects, using both thematic and regional case studies from India, to highlight the impact of human-environment interactions at various spatio-temporal scales, with each study focusing on a particular anthropogenic issue, particularly in an Indian context. The book's three focal themes (e.g. habitat linkages, ekistics and social ecology, hazard and environmental management) elaborate the essential components of human-environment interactions with nature, its impact on the surrounding natural and social environments, and management techniques through research innovations. Readers will learn how maladjustments, disturbances and disasters are often inevitable byproducts of human-environment systems, and what conceptual and practical strategies can be applied towards sustainable coexistence. The book will be of interest to students, academics and policymakers engaged in environmental management, human-environment interactions and sustainable development.



The Muhammad Avatāra

Author : Ayesha A. Irani

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 457 pages

File Size : 30,79 MB

Release : 2020-12-18

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0190089245

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Book Description

In The Muhammad Avatara, Ayesha Irani offers an examination of the Nabivamsa, the first epic work on the Prophet Muhammad written in Bangla. This little-studied seventeenth-century text, written by Saiyad Sultan, is a literary milestone in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural history of Islam, and marks a significant contribution not only to Bangla's rich literary corpus, but also to our understanding of Islam's localization in Indic culture in the early modern period. That Sufis such as Saiyad Sultan played a central role in Islam's spread in Bengal has been demonstrated primarily through examination of medieval Persian literary, ethnographic, and historical sources, as well as colonial-era data. Islamic Bangla texts themselves, which emerged from the sixteenth century, remain scarcely studied outside the Bangladeshi academy, and almost entirely untranslated. Yet these premodern works, which articulate Islamic ideas in a regional language, represent a literary watershed and underscore the efforts of rebel writers across South Asia, many of whom were Sufis, to defy the linguistic cordon of the Muslim elite and the hegemony of Arabic and Persian as languages of Islamic discourse. Irani explores how an Arabian prophet and his religion came to inhabit the seventeenth-century Bengali landscape, and the role that pir-authors, such as Saiyad Sultan, played in the rooting of Islam in Bengal's easternmost regions. This text-critical study lays bare the sophisticated strategies of translation used by a prominent early modern Muslim Bengali intellectual to invite others to his faith.



'Yogini' in South Asia

Author : István Keul

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 254 pages

File Size : 50,19 MB

Release : 2013-07-18

Category : History

ISBN : 1135045836

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Book Description

In different stages in the history of South Asian religions, the term yoginī has been used in various contexts to designate various things: a female adept of yoga, a female tantric practitioner, a sorceress, a woman dedicated to a deity, or a certain category of female deities. This book brings together recent interdisciplinary perspectives on the medieval South Asian cults of the Yoginis, such as textual-philological, historical, art historical, indological, anthropological, ritual and terminological. The book discusses the medieval yoginī cult, as illustrated in early Śaiva tantric texts, and their representations in South Asian temple iconography. It looks at the roles and hypostases of yoginīs in contemporary religious traditions, as well as the transformations of yoginī-related ritual practices. In addition, this book systematizes the multiple meanings, and proposes definitions of the concept and models for integrating the semantic fields of ‘yoginī.’ Highlighting the importance of research from complementary disciplines for the exploration of complex themes in South Asian studies, this book is of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies and Religious Studies.



The Muhammad Avat=ara

Author : Ayesha A. Irani

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 457 pages

File Size : 18,21 MB

Release : 2021-01-18

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0190089229

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Book Description

"The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam reveals the powerful role of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal.Its focus is on examines the magnificent seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa of SaiyadSultān, who lived in Arakanese-controlled Chittagong to affirm the power of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal. Drawing upon the Arabo-Persian Tales of the Prophets genre, the Nabīvaṃśa ("The Lineage of the Prophet") retells the life of the Prophet Muhammad for the first time to Bengalis in their mother-tongue. Saiyad Sultān lived in Arakanese-controlled Chittagong,in a period when Gauṛiya Vaiṣṇava missionary activity was at its zenith. This book delineates the challenges faced by the author in articulating the pre-eminence of Islam and its Arabian prophet in a place land where multiple religious affiliations were common, and when GauṛīyaVaiṣṇava missionary activity was at its zenith. Sultān played a pioneering role in setting into motion various lexical, literary, performative, theological, and, ultimately, ideological processes that led to the establishment of a distinctively Bengali Islam in East Bengal, while yet shaping a distinctively Bengali Islam. At the heart of this transformation of a people and their culture lay the persuasiveness of translation to refresh salvation history for a people onoin a new Islamic frontier. The Nabīvaṃśa not only kindled a veritable translation movement of Arabo-Persian Islamic literature into Bangla, but established the grammar of creative translation that was to become canonical for this regional tradition. This text-critical study lays bare the sophisticated strategies of translation used by a prominent early modern Muslim Bengali intellectual to invite others to his faith"--