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Words of Destiny
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 322

Words of Destiny

Astrologers play an important role in Indian society, but there are very few studies on their social identity and professional practices. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out in the city of Banaras, Words of Destiny shows how the Brahmanical scholarly tradition of astral sciences (jyotiḥśāstra) described in Sanskrit literature and taught at universities has been adapted and reformulated to meet the needs and questions of educated middle and upper classes in urban India: How to get a career promotion? How to choose the most suitable field of study for children? When is the best moment to move into a new house? The study of astrology challenges ready-made assumptions about the boundari...

Divine Remedies
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 359

Divine Remedies

"L'abondance des sources qu'offre l'Asie du Sud - à la fois textuelles, historiques et ethnographiques - au croisement et à l'interaction du médical et du religieux, rend difficile l'analyse que ce volume se propose d'accomplir. En fait, la porosité des frontières entre les domaines nous oblige à questionner les outils mêmes de notre enquête. Si l'objectif est de focaliser l'attention sur les recoupements entre soins et cultes, remèdes et rituels, thérapeutes et officiants, le risque encouru est celui de dissoudre et de confondre les deux domaines, en traitant tout acte thérapeutique de religieux, et tout acte religieux de thérapeutique. Ce gommage ferait disparaître la raison d...

Manuscripts and Performances in Religions, Arts, and Sciences
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 526

Manuscripts and Performances in Religions, Arts, and Sciences

  • Categories: Art

Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions. The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume's three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience. The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors' respective fields.

Religious Transformation in Modern Asia
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 338

Religious Transformation in Modern Asia

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2015-02-24
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  • Publisher: BRILL

Religious Transformation in Modern Asia offers phenomenological glimpses of the religious transition in 18th to 20th centuries. The colonial experience of indigenous Asian people, as case studies, will be expounded in relation to the emergence of a new religion, Christianity.

Le Discours du destin . L'astrologie à Bénarés
  • Language: fr
  • Pages: 456

Le Discours du destin . L'astrologie à Bénarés

Consulter un astrologue est en Inde une démarche courante et régulière, parfois même obligatoire. Pensée pragmatique, tendue vers la résolution de problèmes concrets, l'astrologie touche à tous les aspects de la vie. Quand et avec qui se marier ? Où et quand bâtir sa maison ? Comment se soigner ? Quelle profession choisir ? Quel légume planter ? Tradition savante décrite dans la littérature sanskrite et pratiquée principalement par des spécialistes brahmanes, elle fait partie du style de vie des classes moyennes et des élites urbaines qui se veulent représentatives de la modernité. Enseignée dans les universités, elle a une fonction très éloignée de celle qui lui est assignée en Occident, où elle est regardée comme une croyance marginale et " superstitieuse ". Entre science et religion, elle répond aux transformations de la société contemporaine.Nourri d'enquêtes de terrain, l'ouvrage de Caterina Guenzi éclaire avec subtilité les processus d'adaptation, d'interprétation et de réécriture dont cette discipline brahmanique fait l'objet dans l'Inde urbaine du XXIe siècle.

The Art of Fate Calculation
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 318

The Art of Fate Calculation

From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

Vietnam at the Vanguard
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 268

Vietnam at the Vanguard

This transdisciplinary edited book explores new developments and perspectives on global Vietnam, touching on aspects of history, identity, transnational mobilities, heritage, belonging, civil society, linguistics, education, ethnicity, and worship practices. Derived from the Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference series, this cutting-edge collection presents new scholarship and also represents new ways of knowing global Vietnam. Over the past 10 years, knowledge production about Vietnam has diversified in various ways as globalization, the internationalization of higher education, and the digital revolution have transformed the world, as well as Vietnam. Whereas as l...

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, Volume VII
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 1544

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, Volume VII

The concluding volume of a critical English edition of the monumental Indian epic The seventh and final book of the monumental Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the Uttarakāṇḍa, brings the epic saga to a close with an account of the dramatic events of King Rāma's millennia-long reign. It opens with a colorful history of the demonic race of the rākṣasas and the violent career of Rāma’s villainous foe Rāvaṇa, and later recounts Rāma’s grateful discharge of his allies in the great war at Lankā as well as his romantic reunion with his wife Sītā. But dark clouds gather as Rāma, confronted by scandal over Sītā’s time in captivity under the lustful Rāvaṇa, makes the agonizing ...

Daemons Are Forever
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 350

Daemons Are Forever

A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common dæmonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the “inner demons” cohabiting the bodies of ...

Writing Tamil Catholicism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 369

Writing Tamil Catholicism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2022-05-02
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  • Publisher: BRILL

In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.