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Resisting the Place of Belonging
People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.
Ritual Innovation
Challenges prevailing conceptions of what religious ritual does and how it achieves its ends. Religious rituals are often seen as unchanging and ahistorical bearers of long-standing traditions. But as this book demonstrates, ritual is a lively platform for social change and innovation in the religions of South Asia. Drawing from Hindu and Jain examples in India, Nepal, and North America,the essays in this volume, written by renowned scholars of religion, explore how the intentional, conscious, and public invention or alteration of ritual can effect dramatic social transformation, whether in dethroning a Nepali king or sanctioning same-sex marriage. Ritual Innovation shows how the very idea o...
Crisis of Transcendence
From the Internet to the iPhone, digital technology is no mere cultural artifact. It affects how we experience and understand our world and ourselves at the deepest levels-it is a fundamental condition of living. The digitization of modern life constitutes an essential field of religious concern because it impacts our individual and cultural sensibilities so profoundly. Despite this, it has yet to be thematized as the subject of religious or theological reflection. The Crisis of Transcendence remedies this by asking a single significant question: How is digital technology impacting the moral and spiritual depth of culture? How can something as ineffable and nebulous as the depth of culture b...
Architecture of Sovereignty
Demonstrates how religious spaces are sites of contestation over sovereignty and broader debates about governance as they have been reconceived repeatedly.
Tantra, Ritual Performance, and Politics in Nepal and Kerala
In previous studies of South Asian Tantric ritual, scholars tend to focus on one region or context. For the first time, Tantra, Ritual Performance and Politics in Nepal and Kerala: Embodying the Goddess-clan offers a comparative approach to Tantric mediumship as observed in two locales: Navadurgā rituals in Bhaktapur, Nepal, and Teyyāṭṭam in North Kerala. In this book, Matthew Martin advances a new theory of ritual, which spotlights the way dancer-mediums embody medieval goddess-clans and ancestor deities, through offerings of food and sacrifice, that synchronize their denizens with the land in spiralling web-like ritual networks. Uniquely interdisciplinary in style, this study synthesizes cultural history, ethnography, and theory to explore the continuities – historical, societal, and political – that characterize these ritual traditions across the subcontinent.
Suffer the Little Children
Examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children’s literature Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children’s literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts. In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levin...
Encyclopedia of Hinduism
The Encyclopedia of Hinduism contains over 900 entries reflecting recent advances in scholarship which have raised new theoretical and methodological issues as well as identifying new areas of study which have not been addressed previously. The debate over the term 'Hinduism' in the light of post-Orientalist critiques is just one example of how once standard academic frameworks have been called into question. Entries range from 150-word definitions of terms and concepts to 5,000-word in-depth investigations of major topics. The Encyclopedia covers all aspects of Hinduism but departs from other works in including more ethnographic and contemporary material in contrast to an exclusively textua...
The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena
Explores the activities and political personas of women activists in Shiv Sena, a militant Indian political party. Rich in detail, this book tells the stories of women of Shiv Sena (Shivajis Army), a militant political party in Western India. It provides insight into the political networks powered by lower-level women politicians in postcolonial, globalizing cities and on their margins. Based on more than ten years of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with the women of Shiv Sena, the work shows how women political activists in urbanizing India conjure political authority through the inventive, dangerous, and transgressive political personas known as dashing ladies. Tarini Bedi develops a feminist theory of brokerage politics, arguing that political grids where women employ political, symbolic, and material resources through the political system may be seen as channels of what can be termed political matronage.
What Is Hinduism?
This book is an engaging introduction to the complex religious tradition of Hinduism. With study questions, glossaries, and lists of key contemporary figures, this book is an essential and comprehensive resource for students encountering the multiplicity of Hinduism for the first time.
