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The Stranger-Kings of Sikka is the first monographic study of an origin myth and history of an indigenous eastern Indonesian state and the first contemporary ethnography of the Ata Sikka of Flores. The book will be of interest to anthropologists, ethnologists of Austronesia, historians and political scientists whose interests include Southeast Asia. During the 1920s, in the regency of Sikka on the island of Flores, D.D. Pareira Kondi and A. Boer Pareira, two notable men among the first literate Sikkanese, began writing about the history and culture of their people. Among their many surviving manuscripts are two long works on the origin of the rajas who ruled Sikka until the end of the rajadom in the 1950s. The author of this book uncovered the manuscripts in 1994 and found among them versions of the myth of origin of the Sikkanese rajas, an epic tale of immigrant-kings that was lost to living memory and as oral tradition by the 1970s. Drawing on Boer’s and Kondi's texts and his own field research in the regency of Sikka, Lewis presents an abridged English translation of the origin myth and constructs a history of the Sikkanese rajas and the organization of the society they ruled.
We are what we know. We know what is handed down. Our daily life is organised by "historical narrations". Universally. To judge over the validity of "historical narrations" and of history, we must know all about those narrators of history. Today, and during the last two centuries, all narrators of history are educated in institutions created by European Christians. They narrate history incoherently though the history all over is coherent and interdependent. The libraries are flooded by incoherent deliberations and with books that are copied and pasted from other books. This is more so since the rise of the Ottoman Empire, since the blockade of the land route and beginning of search for a sea...
Christians form the third largest religious community in India. How has this come about? There are many studies of separate groups: but there has so far been no major history of the three large groups - Roman Catholic, Protestant and Thomas Christians (Syrians). This work attempts to meet the need for such a history. It goes right back to the beginning and traces the story through the ups and downs of at least fifteen centuries. It includes careful studies of the political and social background and of the non-Christian reactions to the Christian message. The narration is non-technical and should present few difficulties to the thoughtful reader; the more technical matters are dealt with in notes and appendices. This book will be of interest to all students of Church History and will also prove fascinating to many who are concerned with the development of Christianity as a world religion and in the dialogue between different forms of faith.
In this powerful and wide-ranging study, Sander Gilman explores the idea of 'the multicultural' in the contemporary world, a question he frames as the question of the relationship between Jews and Muslims. How do Jews define themselves, and how are they in turn defined, within the global struggles of the moment, struggles that turn in large part around a secularized Christian perspective? Gilman uses his subject to unpack a sequence of important issues: what does it mean to be multicultural? Can the experience of diaspora Judaism serve as a useful model for Islam in today's multicultural Europe? What is a multicultural ethnic? Other chapters look at specific figures in Jewish cultural history – Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Israel Zangwill, Philip Roth, the hermaphrodite N.O. Body (aka Karl Baer, raised as Martha Baer) – to explore issues within Jewish identity. Throughout, Gilman pays keen attention to the ways in which contemporary literature – Chabon, Ozick, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart – taking the idea of Jewishness and multiculturalism into new arenas.
This volume discusses the various socio-economic and political processes that evolved over centuries in the vast coastal fringes of India and out of the circuits of the Indian Ocean, ultimately giving it the distinctive consciousness and identity of Maritime India. The book comments on a wide range of issues, including the nature of maritime trade of the Sassanids with India; the impact of maritime trade on the political processes of Goa; the impact of Portuguese commercial expansion on the traditional Muslim merchants of Kerala and the role of private traders in the structure and the functioning of Estado da India.
Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions. ÊThe rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews...
This study explores historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and institutions within the Indian world from their beginnings to the present time. Frykenberg focuses on trans-cultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments, uncovering complexities as Christianity intermingled with indigenous cultures.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.