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Contains 13 essays which discuss formal women's organizations, informal associations related to rural and semiurban organization of work, women's religious associations, and individual strategies outside the framework of associations.
This is the first book to bring together many aspects of the interplay between religion, media and culture from around the world in a single comprehensive study. Leading international scholars provide the most up-to-date findings in their fields, and in a readable and accessible way.Some of the topics covered include religion in the media age, popular broadcasting, communication theology, popular piety, film and religion, myth and ritual in cyberspace, music and religion, communication ethics, and the nature of truth in media saturated cultures.The result is not only a wide-ranging resource for scholars and students, but also a unique introduction to this increasingly important phenomenon of modern life.
America's war on terrorism has thrown political Islam in Africa into the international spotlight. This book examines the social and political manifestations of Islamism in North-East Africa, including the Nile Valley and the Horn. Militant Islamists were a powerful force in the region in the 1990's, seizing state power in Sudan - where they pursued far-reaching programmes for comprehensive social transformation - and threaten all other governments. They suceeded in moving the socio-political consensus onto Islamist terrain, but their more ambitious aims were unattainable. By 2000, jihad-ist Islamism was in retreat, brought down both by its own political and ideological limitations and by the wars waged by its adversaries. In the meantime, however, the regional enemies of the Islamic state themselves faced exhaustion. Since 2001, a new set of dynamics is beginning to unfold in the region, reflecting American global domination and how the US agenda is refracted through local political struggles.
Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems
Dessing examined the effects of migration on the lifecycle rituals of Moroccan, Turkish and Surinamese Muslims in the Netherlands. She explores how Islamic rituals marking birth, circumcision, marriage, and death have responded and accomodated to the Dutch legal and social context.
This collection focuses fresh attention on the relationships between "homeland" and "diaspora" communities in today's world. Based on in-depth anthropological studies by leading scholars in the field, the book highlights the changing character of homeland-diaspora ties. Homelands and Diasporas offers new understandings of the issues that these communities face and explores the roots of their fascinating, yet sometimes paradoxical, interactions. The book provides a keen look at how "homeland" and "diaspora" appear in the lives of both Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians and also explores how these issues influence Pakistanis who make their home in England, Armenians in Cyprus and England, Cambodians in France, and African-Americans in Israel. The critical views advanced in this collection should lead to a reorientation in diaspora studies and to a better understanding of the often contradictory changes in the relationships between people whose lives are led both "at home and away."
The first ethnographic study of life in Cuba to emerge in over twenty years, Inside the Revolution offers a rare, close view of how socialist ideology translates into everyday experience in one Cuban municipality. Mona Rosendahl draws on eighteen months of fieldwork, in a municipality she calls by the fictional name Palmera, to present a vivid account of the lives and thoughts of residents, many of whom have lived inside the revolution for more than thirty-five years. In Palmera, support for the socialist program remains strong. Rosendahl attributes continuing loyalty to four conditions: improvements in the standard of living from 1959 to 1990, the uniformity and omnipresence of political co...
In this book Ousman Kobo analyzes the origins of Wahhabi-inclined reform movements in two West African countries. Commonly associated with recent Middle Eastern influences, reform movements in Ghana and Burkina Faso actually began during the twilight of European colonial rule in the 1950s and developed from local doctrinal contests over Islamic orthodoxy. These early movements in turn gradually evolved in ways sympathetic to Wahhabi ideas. Kobo also illustrates the modernism of this style of Islamic reform. The decisive factor for most of the movements was the alliance of secularly educated Muslim elites with Islamic scholars to promote a self-consciously modern religiosity rooted in the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions. This book therefore provides a fresh understanding of the indigenous origins of “Wahhabism.”
This volume on beer in Africa focuses on the making and unmaking of self in the inchoate, dark, exalted and sometimes upsetting context of bars, shebeens and other formal and informal drinking occasions. Beer in Africa takes the production and consumption of fermented drinks as its point of entry to investigate how local actors deal with the ambivalent and the hazy, and how this ambiguity stands as the sine qua non of social life and daily practice.