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Exploring religious and spiritual changes which have been taking place among Indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand, this book focuses on important changes in religious affiliation in census data over the last 15 years. Drawing on both local social and political debates, while contextualising the discussion in wider global debates about changing religious identities, especially the growth of Islam, the authors present a critical analysis of the persistent images and discourses on Aboriginal religions and spirituality. This book takes a comparative approach to other Indigenous and minority groups to explore contemporary changes in religious affiliation which have raised questions...
For every generic type of monster-ghost, demon, vampire, dragon-there are countless locally specific manifestations, with their own names, traits, and appearances. Such monsters populate all corners of the globe haunting their humans wherever they live. Living with Monsters is a collection of fourteen short pieces of ethnographic fiction (and a more academically inclined introduction and afterword) presenting a playful, spirited, and engaging look at how people live with their respective monsters around the world. They focus on the nitty-gritty dos and don'ts of how to placate spirits in India; how to domesticate Georgian goblins, how to live with aliens, how to avoid being taken by Anito in...
Very few studies have examined the worldview of the Anishinaabeg from within the culture itself and none have explored the Anishinaabe worldview in relation to their efforts to maintain their culture in the present-day world. This book fills that gap. Focusing mainly on the Minnesota Anishinaabeg, Lawrence Gross explores how their worldview works to create a holistic way of living. However, as Gross also argues, the Anishinaabeg saw the end of their world early in the 20th century and experienced what he calls 'postapocalypse stress syndrome.' As such, the book further explores how the values engendered by the worldview of the Anishinaabeg are finding expression in the modern world as they seek to rebuild their society.
Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity considers indigenous peoples’ struggles for human rights, anxieties about anthropocentric mastery of nature, neoliberal statecraft, and entrepreneurialism of the self. The book focuses on four domains - shamanism, indigenism, environmentalism and neoliberalism - in terms of interrelated historical processes and overlapping discourses. In doing so, it engages with shamanism’s manifold meanings in a world increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples’ practices of territoriality, increasingly concerned about humans’ integral relationship with natural environments, and increasingly encouraged and coerced to adjust self-conduct to comport with and augment government conduct.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive substance that has long been associated with indigenous Amazonian shamanic practices. The recent rise of the drink’s visibility in the media and popular culture, and its rapidly advancing inroads into international awareness, mean that the field of ayahuasca is quickly expanding. This expansion brings with it legal problems, economic inequalities, new forms of ritual and belief, cultural misunderstandings, and other controversies and reinventions. In The World Ayahuasca Diaspora, leading scholars, including established academics and new voices in anthropology, religious studies, and law fuse case-study ethnographies with evaluations of relevant legal and anthropological knowledge. They explore how the substance has impacted indigenous communities, new urban religiosities, ritual healing, international drug policy, religious persecution, and recreational drug milieus. This unique book presents classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, providing rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe.
The term ’progress’ is a modern Western notion that life is always improving and advancing toward an ideal state. It is a vital modern concept which underlies geographic explorations and scientific and technological inventions as well as the desire to harness nature in order to increase human beings’ ease and comfort. With the advent of Western colonization and to the great detriment of the colonized, the notion of progress began to perniciously and pervasively permeate across cultures. This book details the impact of the notion of progress on the Nagas and their culture. The interaction between the Nagas and the West, beginning with British military conquest and followed by American m...
The twentieth century was a period of rapid change for religion. Secularisation resulted in a dramatic fall in church attendance in the West, and the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of new religions including the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), the Church of Scientology, and the Children of God. New religions were regarded with suspicion by society in general and Religious Studies scholars alike until the 1990s, when the emergence of a second generation of 'new new' religions – based on popular cultural forms including films, novels, computer games and comic books – and highly individualistic spiritualities confirmed the utter transformation of the religio-...
Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, culture, and media, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world. These monsters hail from Aboriginal Australia, the Pacific, Asia, and Europe, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt.
This comprehensive and comparative book makes clear what party families are and, in doing so, helps categorise and make sense of parties in different countries. It describes the ideology of the families in Western Europe as well as classifying political parties accordingly. Furthermore, the book examines who the party families’ supporters are in terms of their social background and political values. What role do class, education, and religion play in the 21st century? Finally, the book provides a discussion of the degree to which the concept of party families is still meaningful in the 21st century and how it needs to be studied comparatively and comprehensively. Is party family still valid as a conceptual device to classify and compare parties across countries in Western Europe? This text will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners working in the field of political behaviour, political parties and party politics, policy studies, and more broadly comparative and European politics.
Grace Davie, one of the world’s most influential scholars in contemporary sociology of religion, has furthered a tradition developed by David Martin and others in comparative sociology of religion and modernity in European and international perspective. Davie’s writings on belief and belonging, particularly in a context outside active Church participation, have contributed important understandings of the cultural role of religion as memory and practice in contemporary European societies. Through her most recent work on new roles of religion in relation to the political, legal and welfare sectors of society, she has addressed debates on the resurgence of religion and the ’post-secular c...