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This ethnographic study of Gagauz religion offers an original perspective on ‘folk religion’ as discourse and object of study. It is also the first monograph published in a Western language on this little-known European people’s history and culture.
In a series of richly illustrated short essays, Hidden Galleries presents the ways in which the secret police of the communist-era and before collected and curated material religious images and objects in their archives. Based on painstaking documentation by a team of eight historians, anthropologists and scholars of religion in archives in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, this volume offers a rare window on the creativity of underground religious life, and its ideological representation as well as exploring the significance for religious communities and wider society today of this legacy of repression and surveillance.
n medieval and early modern Europe, the use of charms was a living practice in all strata of society. The essays in this latest CEU Press publication explore the rich textual tradition of archives, monasteries, and literary sources. The author also discusses texts amassed in folklore archives and ones that are still accessible through field work in many rural areas of Europe.
Ethnicity, in general, and Britishness, in its specific insular version, forms a perpetual theme of G. B. Shaw’s most well known plays. The main body of the plays analysed in this book reveal a series of cultural and ethnic differences as the plays’ constitutive elements, comprising oppositions on the basis of which the plays are structured. Arms and the Man, The Devil’s Disciple, John Bull’s Other Island and Caesar and Cleopatra are works in which ethnicity is directly present, as a structuring element. The extension of the viewpoint to the more inclusive framework of Anglo-Saxon attitudes also allows for a play like Pygmalion to be included in the list of works discussed in the book. Britain and Britishness in G. B. Shaw’s Plays will be of considerable interest to those concerned with the interdisciplinary field of language and literature. It offers a fresh insight into the Shavian oeuvre by highlighting the aspects of ethnic identity and paradox from a linguistic perspective. The book offers an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the Shavian plays as it integrates different fields of discourse analysis, cultural pragmatics and micro-sociolinguistics.
The re-emergence of religion as a significant cultural, social and political, force is not gender neutral. Tensions between claims for women’s equality and the rights of sexual minorities on one side and the claims of religions on the other side are well-documented across all major religions and regions. It is also well recognized in feminist scholarship that gender identities and ethno-religious identities work together in complex ways that are often exploited by dominant groups. Hence, a more comprehensive understanding of the changing role and influence of religion in the public sphere more widely requires complex, multidisciplinary and comparative gender analyses. Most recent discussio...
Drawing on multiple archives and primary sources, including secret police files and samizdat, Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia reconstructs the history of a spiritual movement that survived persecution by the Orthodox church and decades of official atheism, and still exists today. Since 1894, tens of thousands of Russians have found hope and faith through the teachings and prayers of the charismatic lay preacher and healer, Brother Ioann Churikov (1861–1933). Inspired by Churikov's deep piety, "miraculous" healing ability, and scripture-based philosophy known as holy sobriety, the "trezvenniki"—or "sober ones"—reclaimed their lives from the effects of alcoholism, unemployment, domestic a...
Religious ideas, practices, discourses, institutions, and social expressions are in constant flux. This volume addresses the internal and external dynamics, interactions between individuals, religious communities, and local as well as global society. The contributions concentrate on four areas: 1. Contemporary religion in the public sphere: The Tactics of (In)visibility among Religious Communities in Europe; Religion Intersecting De-nationalization and Re-nationalization in Post-Apartheid South Africa; 2. Religious transformations: Forms of Religious Communities in Global Society; Political Contributions of Ancestral Cosmologies and the Decolonization of Religious Beliefs; Esoteric Tradition as Poetic Invention; 3. Focus on the individual: Religion and Life Trajectories of Islamists; Angels, Animals and Religious Change in Antiquity and Today; Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar in Today’s Religion; Religion between Individuals and Collectives; 4. Narrating religion: Entangled Knowledge Cultures and the Creation of Religions in Mongolia and Europe; Global Intellectual History and the Dynamics of Religion; On Representing Judaism.
This volume highlights three intertwined aspects of the global context of Orthodox Christianity: religion, politics, and human rights. The chapters in Part I address the challenges of modern human rights discourse to Orthodox Christianity and examine conditions for active presence of Orthodox churches in the public sphere of plural societies. It suggests theoretical and empirical considerations about the relationship between politics and Orthodoxy by exploring topics such as globalization, participatory democracy, and the linkage of religious and political discourses in Russia, Greece, Belarus, Romania, and Cyprus. Part II looks at the issues of diaspora and identity in global Orthodoxy, presenting cases from Switzerland, America, Italy, and Germany. In doing so, the book ties in with the growing interest resulting from the novelty of socio-political, economic, and cultural changes which have forced religious groups and organizations to revise and redesign their own institutional structures, practices, and agendas.
In exploring ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visits to Britain, Brendan McNamara expands the jigsaw of our knowledge of how “the east came west”. More importantly, by exploring the visits through the motives of those that received him, The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West demonstrates that the “cultic milieu” thesis is incomplete. Focusing on a number of well-known Edwardian Protestant reformers, the book demonstrates that the arrival of eastern forms of religions in Britain penetrated more mainstream Christian forms. This process is set within significant developments in the early formation of the study of religions, the rise of science and orientalism. All these elements are shown to be linked together. Significantly the work argues that the advent of World War One changed the direction of new forms of religion leading to a ‘forgetfulness’ that has lasted until the present time.