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Historically in middle-class Bengali Hindu households it has been the matriarch’s responsibility to arrange and maintain the domestic shrine and to perform daily rituals of deity worship and caretaking—termed in this book as domestic shrine traditions. These traditions are often assimilated with the other domestic caretaking labor women are expected to complete for their families. Utilizing a years-long ethnography with Bengali American Hindu women, and drawing from Marxist feminist Social Reproduction Theory, this book argues that domestic shrine traditions are reproductive labor that is essential to the transnational and transgenerational sustenance of Hindu traditions and subjectivities. As the first monograph focused on Hindu women’s domestic shrine traditions in the United States, this book illuminates both the value of these traditions for the women who maintain them, and how these traditions connect immigrant Hindus to family and ethno-religious identity in ways unmatched by the public Hindu temple or organization.
""You have to come to my wedding," Kavita told me, turning to face me where I sat next to her on the couch. "You can come with the other people from the street. You will get everything you need for your *research* there." "I will come, I will come!" I replied enthusiastically. I had only met Kavita and her two younger sisters, Arthi and Deepti (see Figure 2.1), mere minutes before this invitation was extended. I had initially come to Pulan that day in October 2012 to meet another woman, Heena, whose family rents a room on the third story of Kavita's family's home. Heena and I had been sitting in the furniture refurbishing store she operates with her husband on the main street of Pulan when D...
This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book's identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.
The aphorisms collected in this book, first published in 1953, were composed by Patanjali, a great Indian sage, over 1,500 years ago, and here translated into clear English prose. The accompanying commentary interprets the sayings for the modern world, and in doing so gives a full picture of what yoga is, what its aims are, and how it can be practised.
Leys are as elusive as beams of starlight. They are everywhere, you just can't see them. They may be compared to the hidden knowledge of a secret tradition. On public display and freely available to those in the know. Invisible and unsuspected by those who aren't. Thus the ancient wisdom at the basis of leys is encoded within the land for future generations to discover anew, if they possess the vision. London's leys can lead you to magical places, to the soul of the city and to an understanding of the hidden unity which connects our ancient sacred sites to each other and also links our spiritual dimensions to theirs. To our ancestors these locations were places of the gods, places of healing, places of power, places of vision initiation, inspiration and revelation. They still are.
Facilitation and mediation are important skills in our highly organized world. Holding Change is a guide for attending to both in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imaginings of our future. It provides lessons for generating the ease necessary to move through life’s inevitable struggles and for practicing the art of holding others without losing ourselves. Black feminists have evolved this wisdom, but it can serve anyone working to create change, individually, interpersonally, and within our organizations. The majority of the book is sourced from brown’s twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work, with additional wisdom from a selection of living Black feminist facilitators and mediators.
“An explosive, fascinating book that reveals how the Bible cannot be used as a rulebook when it comes to sex. A terrific read by a top scholar.” —Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus Boston University’s cutting-edge religion scholar Jennifer Wright Knust reveals the Bible’s contradictory messages about sex in this thoughtful, riveting, and timely reexploration of the letter of the gospels. In the tradition of Bart Erhman’s Jesus Interrupted and John Shelby Spong’s Sins of Scripture, Knust’s Unprotected Texts liberates us from the pervasive moralizing—the fickle dos and don’ts—so often dictated by religious demagogues. Knust’s powerful reading offers a return to the scripture, away from the mere slogans to which it is so often reduced.
A feminist unpacking of the field of graphic design, including visual essays, poems, speculative tales and more D for Dummy Woman, M for Monster's Tools, S for Style Defense, U for Unstable Signs--The Glossary of Undisciplined Designpresents a feminist unpacking of the field of graphic design, offering "undisciplinarity" as the solution to a discipline that has historically featured a multitude of dogmatic rules, discriminatory structures and a particularly one-sided canon. Carried by a decidedly fragmentary and collective backbone, The Glossary of Undisciplined Designcombines a multitude of theories and narratives of varying densities and forms, from visual essay, to hands-on experiment, to interview or advertorial, to poem, to speculative tale and scholarly writing. With around 55 contributions by 20 international designers, activists, educators and theorists, the handbook progresses alphabetically, exploring role models, tools and methods of dissent within a colorful and graphic handbook, featuring qualities akin to those of an artist's zine.
Concubines and Courtesans contains sixteen essays on enslaved and freed women across medieval and pre-modern Islamic social history. The essays consider questions of slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production, sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time.