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In October of 2001, the Australian High Court confirmed aboriginal title to two thousand kilometres of ocean off the north coast. The decision, which was the result of a seven-year court battle, highlighted aboriginal belief that the sea is a gift from the creator to be used for sustenance, spirituality, identity, and community. This evocative study of the people of northern coastal Australia and their sea worlds illuminates the power of human attachment to place. Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory offers a cross-disciplinary approach to native land claims that incorporates historical and contemporary case studies from not only Australia, but also New Zealand, Scandinavia, the US, and Can...
Worship and Social Engagement in Urban Aboriginal-led Australian Pentecostal Congregations: (Re)imagining Identity in the Spirit provides an ethnographic account of three Australian Pentecostal congregations with Aboriginal senior leadership. Within this Pentecostalism, Dreaming realities and identities must be brought together with the Christian gospel. Yet current political and economic relationships with the Australian state complicate the possibilities of interactions between culture and Spirit. The result is a matrix or network of these churches stretching across Australia, with Black Australian Pentecostals resisting and accommodating the state through the construction of new and ancient identities. This work occurs most notably in context of the worship ritual, which functions through ritual interaction chains to energise the various social engagement programs these congregations sustain.
This book explores a range of societies in and around the Pacific and southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that encountered religions introduced from elsewhere, or fashioned their own responses to already established religious traditions. These changes observed through the responses of the receiving societies indicate that religious change is a creative dynamic, rather than a passive acceptance of new ideas, beliefs and practices. While change is often triggered by the introduction of new understandings, it can only become entrenched within a community when it takes on meaning for individuals, and becomes embedded within the social and cultural life of the community.
In the early decades of the 19th century, Indigenous Australians suffered devastating losses at the hands of British colonists, who largely ignored their sovereignty and even their humanity. At the same time, however, a new wave of Christian humanitarians were arriving in the colonies, troubled by Aboriginal suffering and arguing that colonists had
From Muddy Waters to Mick Jagger, Elvis to Freddie Mercury, Jeff Buckley to Justin Timberlake, masculinity in popular music has been an issue explored by performers, critics, and audiences. From the dominance of the blues singer over his "woman" to the sensitive singer/songwriter, popular music artists have adopted various gendered personae in a search for new forms of expression. Sometimes these roles shift as the singer ages, attitudes change, or new challenges on the pop scene arise; other times, the persona hardens into a shell-like mask that the performer struggles to escape. Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music is the first serious study of how forms of masculinity are negotiated, constructed, represented and addressed across a range of popular music texts and practices. Written by a group of internationally recognized popular music scholars—including Sheila Whiteley, Richard Middleton, and Judith Halberstam—these essays study the concept of masculinity in performance and appearance, and how both male and female artists have engaged with notions of masculinity in popular music.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and mis...
This book examines the rise and fall of feminism in the public imagination in the last twenty years, and explains why 'feminism failed me' has become the catch-cry of a generation. Today many women turn their back on feminism because they feel betrayed by the promises of feminism. Yet during the 1980s the popular ideal of the 'Superwoman' offered a source of empowerment and pride for women and equality with men - even 'having it all' - seemed possible. Through a close reading of popular culture sources, this book shows how women's engagement with feminism has shifted over time, and considers its future as a social movement.
In Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks, Karen J. Brison examines the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church that sends Fijian and Papua New Guinean missionaries to East Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe and elsewhere. After studying the ministry’s main church in Suva for several years, Brison visited its missionaries and their local partners in East Africa and Papua New Guinea. The result of those visits, this book provides an unusual insight into Pentecostal churches in the global south, arguing that they seldom produce novel visions of Christianity and world inequality. It also offers new perspectives, by situating Pacific island churches within a global commun...
In Modernity through Letter Writing Claudia B. Haake shows how the Cherokees and Senecas envisioned their political modernity in missives they sent to members of the federal government to negotiate their status. They not only used their letters, petitions, and memoranda to reject incorporation into the United States and to express their continuing adherence to their own laws and customs but also to mark areas where they were willing to compromise. As they found themselves increasingly unable to secure opportunities for face-to-face meetings with representatives of the federal government, Cherokees and Senecas relied more heavily on letter writing to conduct diplomatic relations with the U.S....
The Yolngu Indigenous people in the Northeast Arnhem Land of Australia respond to neo-colonial challenges by continuing to affirm their political autonomy and transmit ‘Yolngu Law’, which are ways of knowing and being with the younger generation. They deal with non-indigenous institutions, through participation of bodies, language, things, images of movement and notions of mutual care, feelings and accountability. This book explores the Yolngu relational ontology and epistemology in the context of everyday practices, ritual ceremonies, bicultural education, vernacular Christianity and the production of popular music.