Genealogies of Religion
... w wyniku fermentacji octowej etanolu. 4 O religii jako zachodniej kategorii pisał Talal Asad (1993). Apelował, by używać tego nieodzownego terminu pamiętając o źródle i historii. ...
Where have all the to mebalun gone? Leaders of funeral services
in Toraja, Indonesia
Where have all the to mebalun gone? Leaders of funeral services in Toraja, Indonesia Torajas from the highlands of South Sulawesi form a relatively small but widely recognizable ethnic group. I conducted field research in the context of well-known Toraja funerals – Rambu Solo’. Toraja funeral traditions originated from an indigenous belief system which is today commonly referred to as Aluk To Dolo. Rambu Solo’ are still vivid in predominantly Christianized forms. Protestants make up around 2/3 of the local population, their largest and oldest church dates back to 1913. The second biggest religion of the region is Catholicism; moreover, Muslims form a significant minority. The Rambu Solo’ traditions have continued in the changed religious landscape. However, the same does not hold true for funeral priests. To mebalun have all gone. What happened to them? Who does perform their duties today?
... Sociologist Martin Riesebrodt emphasises the need to understand religion in terms of its actions and interactions, which connect to other social systems (Riesebrodt 2003). Intensification of such interconnectedness has reduced the isolation of little traditions, and so local and urban ways of life now coexist in a global continuum (Redfield 1956;Asad 1993). The worship of Om Banna can be seen as an 'extrapolation of culture,' which anthropologist Jack Eller (2007: 9-10) describes: ...
This article describes a religious belief, based on folklore but arising within Hindu culture, that has evolved over the last three decades in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It describes how this belief is spreading in North-West India and has moved closer to traditional Hindu customs. The study involves qualitative research, participant observation, and dialogue with devotees and observers who visit the Om Banna shrine. It assesses this adaptive process in a holistic way – fr om the intersection of anthropology, comparative religion, and folklore. With insights into how people develop new beliefs as a way to accommodate to a changing world, the paper provides a window into modernity and the spiritual-emotional needs of humanity.
... Não só as definições destes três termos continuam a ser debatidas, mas a sua difusão histórica e geográfica também é contestada. Alguns argumentaram que, como produtos dos estudos ocidentais, estes conceitos, especialmente a religião, só são relevantes para as experiências ocidentais contemporâneas (por exemplo, Asad, 1993;Klass, 1995). E mesmo nos contextos ocidentais, os seus significados e os significados das palavras associadas mudaram ao longo do tempo (por exemplo, Smith, 1998). ...
Tradução de Sport as a meaning-making system: insights from the study of religion, publicado originalmente na revista Religion, v. 13, n. 10, 2022, com as devidas permissões dos autores, dos editores acadêmicos (Hans Zollner e Carles Salazar) da revista Religion e da editora MDPI.
... Turner was already dissatisfi ed with the a priori abstractionism of Durkheimian functionalism and with a relatively fl at materialism that excluded much of the lived fi eld experience of the fi eldwork encounter in the interests of the confi rmation of the then commanding theoretical discourses. Ritual was an example, with so much of its anthropological conceptualization or defi nition being determined within the rationalism and frames of Western scientifi c positivism, not to downplay the tendency to subordinate what is identifi ed to be ritual to Western cultural/religious assumptions (Asad 1993). In other words, ritual, its defi nition and understanding, was subordinated to dominant and dominating discourses that obfuscated or refused key dimensions of the phenomenon at hand. ...
Research on religion and migration has often focused on institutions and belief systems, while overlooking how mediation links migrants, sacred objects, rituals, and religious imaginaries. This study advances mediation as a core analytic in religion–migration studies by examining the practices of ten Thai migrant students in South Korea through semi-structured interviews on Buddhist amulets, Hindu deity pendants, Catholic rosaries, merit-making, and the elevation of sacred objects. Guided by Meyer’s religion-as-mediation framework and Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary, the analysis shows that quotidian, embodied engagements with sacred objects mediate and materialize Thai Buddhist–Animist imaginaries in Korean settings, expanding, transnationalizing, and hybridizing them through encounters with the host environment. These practices not only sustain spiritual continuity, but also generate sacred transnational social spaces that bridge both the ontological divide between the human and the transcendent and the geographical divide between Thailand and Korea. Rather than being preserved through institutional affiliation, migrant religiosity is continually reconstituted through everyday embodied practices of mediation that render the sacred experientially real in the host society. By foregrounding mediation, this study offers a reconceptualization of migrant religion as an embodied, material, and world-making process—one through which migrants actively reimagine and inhabit sacred spaces across borders.
Marshall Sahlins’ The New Science of the Enchanted Universe proposes a new description of cosmologies which Sahlins describes as “immanentist.” Sahlins offers both a novel account of immanent cosmologies and a critique of the existing theoretical presumptions of anthropology, derived from the logic of “transcendentalism.” This article constructs an exegesis of Sahlins’ major arguments and a critical evaluation of the concepts Sahlins creates. This includes questioning the ontological status of “metapersons” in different cosmologies and the universal presence of hierarchy. Ultimately, this article challenges both Sahlins’ account of anthropological comparison and the symbolic reality of immanent cosmologies, which, it argues, remain marked by ongoing transcendentalism. By critiquing the effects of this transcendentalism, this article opens a theoretical experiment: how far can anthropology take its commitment to understand immanence on its own terms? How might this transform what it means to practice anthropological theory and perform anthropological comparison?
This study used a multidisciplinary approach to map Islamic solidarity within spacetime through tawhidic and embodied epistemologies, using sociological theories and the interplay between collective actions and identity. Through the five pillars, Islam fosters solidarity, enforcing Ummah and brotherhood . Ummah transcends spacetime, encompassing past and future, integrating social responsibilities with divine obligations. Brotherhood is rooted in the present, extending vertically beyond space, enabling Muslims to see themselves as brothers. Both forms coexist, intersecting different levels and dimensions in the present. This solidarity framework supports macro boycotts, leveraging collective religious and social practices. However, the Ummah ’s identity crisis stems from the contrast between their tawhidic embodied experience and secular reality, creating dissonance and confusion, sometimes making the body feel alienated.
Technologists frequently promote self-tracking devices as objective tools. This book argues that such glib and often worrying assertions must be placed in the context of precarious industry dynamics. The author draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with developers of self-tracking applications and wearable devices in New York City's Silicon Alley and with technologists who participate in the international forum called the Quantified Self to illuminate the professional compromises that shape digital technology and the gap between the tech sector's public claims and its interior processes. By reconciling the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurity that power the self-tracking market with device makers' often simplistic promotional claims, the book offers an understanding of the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world.
This introduction to the special section of the issue outlines the genesis of the section, provides a brief history of publics and counterpublics in South Asian contexts, and highlights key themes and questions that the section covers. It discusses its contributions, how they trouble the concept of the South Asian public, and the new vistas of inquiry that the section invites. It also presents a survey of relevant literature on South Asian publics to situate the special section in the context of existing scholarly work on religion and publics as well as the specific affordances and aspects that shape how we understand the concept of the public within South Asian spaces. The introduction also describes each article in the section and concludes with a discussion what the special section may tell us about the possible futures of religion and its publics in South Asia, the value and scope of theorizing publics within South Asia, and future areas of inquiry that could prove productive in building on the themes, issues, and concerns raised here.
This article thinks ethnographically with phylloxera, an insect with a lethal proclivity for Vitis vinifera. The infamous louse traveled from North America to Eurasia during the nineteenth century. Fatefully, this tiny bug's journey to Lebanon overlapped with the Jesuit Return Mission to the Orient, which began in 1831. Around 1882, Jesuits successfully imported “French” grape vines that would eventually displace local varieties as well as the bodies of knowledge and taxonomies about them. The tiny bug, barely visible to the naked eye, crept into Jesuit correspondence about these plantations. Creepy-crawly feelings of phylloxera also plagued the oral histories and conversations of residents across the Bekaa Valley that the author documented during fieldwork between 2006 and 2008. By examining these entwined disjointed feelings forged over generations, the article explores how humans and bugs appeared to one another as they sensed dislocating worlds that surfaced in the political afterlife of colonialism. By doing so, it traces the seemingly incorporeal legacy of the Jesuits across Lebanon's viniculture landscape to a colonial logic aimed at generating life in terms of its properties.
A Yoruba ritual – the Oodua ritual festival in Ile-Ife – has been sustained over a long period, but has been adjusted under the pressure of modernity. Its relevance as a cultural practice is being asserted in multiple ways in today’s Nigeria. Ethno-nationalism is a key factor in the ritual in contemporary Ile-Ife in the sense that the Olokun Festival Foundation (OFF) is the agency through which the ethno-nationalism of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) is inscribed on the ritual. Although it professes to be a culture-promoting affiliate of the OPC, the OFF’s involvement in the ritual facilitates the presence of the OPC – a popular Yoruba ethno-nationalist movement – and thereby results in significant modifications to the ritual. Hence, the ritual has become an embodiment of new significations through which understandings of the contemporary face of Yoruba ethno-nationalism in Nigeria can be expanded. In sum, a combination of symbolic anthropological and sociological approaches reveal that the ritual in its modified form is culturally restrictive and socially integrative.
The Muslim Judicial Council SA (MJC SA) is the central Muslim religious institution in the Western Cape and has pioneered the consumer discourse on ḥalāl (permissible) consumption in South Africa. The discursive discourse of what constitutes ḥalāl and ḥarām (not permissible to consume) has provoked a variety of responses and was the cause of the establishment of other ḥalāl certifying authorities in South Africa, like the South African National Halaal Authority (SANHA). The genres of fatāwā (singular fatwᾱ, refers to the formation of a legal opinion) constitute the distinctive nature of twentieth century discursive discourses and debates within the ḥalāl industry in South Africa. Contentious fatāwā such as the beef saga in 1970, mechanical slaughtering, the recital of the basmalah, and the discourse on gelatine were the cause of many controversies which had a direct impact upon the ḥalāl industry in the country. These fatāwā were the outcomes of exploring new methods within Islamic legal frameworks on how ḥalāl is viewed, thereby shifting the discourse into a realm of robust debates. This was preceded by the discursive traditions of previous fiqh scholars. This discursive discourse relied on reframing classical fiqh by adding a contemporary character to it. This article explores the critical debates of gelatine fatāwā between the MJC and SANHA which has divided the ḥalᾱl industry in South Africa and Muslim consumers over the past three decades. The gelatine fatāwā discourse is considered one of the most contentious issues today amongst leading ḥalᾱl certifying authorities in South Africa. This article provides a historical background which traces the formation of the gelatine fatwā, and offers clarity and insight to some of the key issues in this debate.
The aesthetics of the sublime, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, has frequently been seen as part of a process of secularization: What is “absolutely great” now becomes the object of an aesthetic experience that need have no reference to the divine or to religion. Kant in particular has been accorded a key role in the development of a modern aesthetics that establishes the autonomy of art and of the aesthetic vis-à-vis both religion and politics. Setting out from a seldom-read passage in Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” on the power of the sublime to liberate the imagination from tutelage by the church and by the state, this chapter traces the intimate connection in Kant’s text between religion, political emancipation, and the sublime in order to challenge widely shared if frequently unstated assumptions about the secular status of the sublime and of Kantian aesthetics more broadly. The sublime emerges as power that resists containment within the modern divisions between politics, religion, and aesthetics. In the process, Kant’s text is read as providing an implicit critique of the logic of secularism avant la lettre.
This article focuses on how religion is exhibited in new museums in the Arab Gulf states. The article focuses in particular on the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a ranch of the Louvre Paris, which opened in 2017 with the ambition of being a ‘universal’ museum that, among other things, makes religion central to the history of civilizations and innovatively, both in the Gulf but also in general, exhibits different religions side by side. In recent years, a number of new, large museums have been built in the Arab Gulf states – and more are on the way. The Louvre is part of Abu Dhabi’s launch of several different museums on Saadiyat Island, and Qatar is known for its Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) and a spectacular National Museum. The article also shows how these new museums further develop a museum tradition which was founded in the first years of the Gulf states as independent states, among other things with great involvement from archeology and anthropology in Aarhus.
This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about ‘religion’ and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and messes, and face others openly without losing heart.
This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about ‘religion’ and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and messes, and face others openly without losing heart.
This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about ‘religion’ and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and messes, and face others openly without losing heart.
This Element proposes that, in addition to using traditional historical methodologies, historians need to find extra-textual, embodied ways of understanding the past in order to more fully comprehend it. Written by a medieval historian, the Element explains why historians assume they cannot use reperformance in historical inquiry and why they, in fact, should. The Element employs tools from the discipline of performance studies, which has long grappled with the differences between the archive and the repertoire, between the records of historical performances and the embodied movements, memories, and emotions of the performance itself, which are often deemed unknowable by scholars. It shows how an embodied epistemology is particularly suited to studying certain premodern historical topics, using the example of medieval monasticism. Finally, using the case of performance-lectures given at The Met Cloisters, it shows how using performance as a tool for historical investigation might work.
The work of a triumvirate of social thinkers – Adam Ferguson, Bruno Latour and Roger Friedland – is used to argue for the ontological centrality of law to the construction of human societies. Confirming its place as a central institutional order supports the contention by Roger Friedland that the law has a set of distinctive practices animated by the substance ‘justice’. Together, these practices constitute a distinctive logic that can impact on organizations not just by specifying their form but also by providing dominant logics. Such logics can vary dependent on the historical development of particular societies, as illustrated by the distinction between civil and common law systems. Law enters into forms of relation with other logics and is conditioned by relations of class and power. The implications for students of organizations are drawn out.
In Eastern Indonesia, young male Islamic activists articulate a notion of religious authority that reorients community life toward neighborhood mosques. By providing local communities with Qur'anic classes and religious services, these activists—affiliated with Indonesia's largest Salafi organization—have created a network of spaces in which they promote new religious lifeworlds grounded in the substantive relationships they build across these neighborhoods. But “being present” in the mosque pertains to more than physically existing in a space; it speaks to the processes and strategies through which activists draw from local Islamic histories, legal codes, nationalist tropes, and moral anxieties to make and remake an ethical image of Islamic belonging. Such practices reveal the relational, spatial, but also contingent nature of contemporary religious authority. Moreover, they refocus anthropological analysis onto the experiential and collective moments through which new moral worlds emerge.
This chapter argues that Thai Yunnanese transnational entrepreneurs have multiple identities in interstitial and relational contexts through everyday practice and performance. Set within a marginalised stigmatised background, these Yunnanese descendants with Thai citizenship have attempted various strategies to reconstruct their identity: business aestheticisation, professionalism, and socialisation; identifying with a Taiwanese identity; accentuating a Thai identity; distinguishing Thai Yunnanese identity; translocalising a People’s Republic of China (PRC) Yunnanese identity; and transnationalising a Chinese identity. Through these aspects, this chapter demonstrates how the Thai Yunnanese transnational entrepreneurs have ingeniously adopted polychotomisation and multi-complementarisation in their assertion of multiple identities to gain diverse positive outcomes. Critically, this chapter, based on qualitative research, has contributed to the understanding of ethnic identities through the lens of an oft-neglected group—Thai Yunnanese—in the nexus of transnationalism, entrepreneurship, and other cultural markers. Finally, this chapter departs from the debilitating nature of assimilation explanation and dualistic perspective in articulating the remaking of a new wave of entrepreneurs that has gone beyond the narrow definition of utilising common background and migrant experience in identity construction.
The United States is undergoing a remarkable religious transformation: in just a few decades, the proportion of religious “nones” surged from 1 in 20 to more than 1 in 4. Through four waves of National Study of Youth and Religion surveys and in-depth interviews (2003–2013) linked with administrative data, this study follows a cohort of adolescents coming of age during the rapid rise of the “nones” and shifting social values, including growing support for same-sex marriage. When young people perceive religious institutions as stifling self-actualization, marginalizing sexual minorities, constraining women, or demonstrating hypocrisy, they experience conflict between their religious commitments and deeply held values related to concern for others and the sacredness of the individual. Many manage this conflict by disengaging from religious institutions while reimagining spirituality on their own terms. The findings reveal individuals breaking free from modernity’s iron cage of bureaucratization and rationalization, seeking self-actualization and a more authentic connection to others and to the sacred. The authors propose that these trends represent the individualization of American religion, a transformation that illuminates how personal quests for authenticity can fundamentally reshape the religious landscape.
Religion ist ein Zentrum geschlechterpolitischer Auseinandersetzungen. Im Hintergrund steht ein neuer antifeministischer Konsens gegenüber Geschlechterrechten; sie werden gleichzeitig instrumentalisiert, um rassistische Politiken zu rechtfertigen. Dies wirft die Frage nach der Form, den Möglichkeiten und der Reichweite feministischer Religionskritik auf. Der Beitrag diskutiert hierzu das Verhältnis säkularer und religiös-feministischer Kritik aus phänomenologischer Perspektive als Problem kontrastierender Episteme.
In Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islamic Philosophy, Tom Woerner-Powell combines historical analysis and contemporary interviews with Muslim peace advocates in an effort to develop an empirically grounded survey of Islamic philosophies of nonviolence and a general analysis of the phenomenon. The first monograph on Islamic nonviolence to engage substantively with contemporary debates in the field of moral philosophy, his study is critical and descriptive rather than apologetic and polemical. His approach is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Drawing on methods from the fields of peace studies, Islamic studies, and moral philosophy, he identifies, critiques, and addresses the shortcomings within the dominant approaches in these fields regarding the question of pacifism and nonviolence in contemporary Islam. Woerner-Powell's book sheds new light not only on Islamic cases of nonviolence but also on the manner in which Islamic thought might play a larger role in secular and inter-religious debates. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Though not known as a thinker on music, the prolific and wide-ranging early twentieth-century anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in essays published in the early 1920s, put forward a striking series of arguments about lamentation and ritual song. Positing these forms of collective vocality as richly multidimensional sites of overlap between the sociological, the psychological, and the physiological, Mauss's account offers a compelling alternative to the primacy of the symbolic in much twentieth-century anthropological thought. Consequently, considering Mauss's reflections on song in dialogue with recent theories of neo-Peircean biosemiosis opens up novel ways of positioning ethnomusicological questions vis-à-vis anthropological theories of culture.
The sociology of religion has often missed the mark with Islam and Muslims, by forcing external frameworks that are not fit for purpose, by neglecting already-existing constitutive theories that more authentically explain the Muslim experience, and by devoting comparatively fewer studies to Islam and Muslims. This paper offers a small contribution to redress these issues, by examining the religious lives of everyday Melbourne Muslims in Ramadan, using theories first proposed by Ibn Khaldun. By extending Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiyya (social binding), this paper explores for the first time the interdependent roles of hardship and Islam in generating a nourishing sense of community cohesion. The research was conducted through anonymous diaries kept over an extended period, providing unprecedented and novel insights into the lives of participants. The findings suggest that the physical and spiritual challenges of Ramadan, combined with the influence of “transnational” Islam, contribute to the formation of ‘asabiyya. Sociological instruments used to understand Muslims are too often external and not fit-for-purpose. This paper expands theories first proposed by Ibn Khaldun 600 years ago, particularly ‘asabiyya, and then applies them in new ways to better explain the modern Muslim experience in Ramadan.
Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies.
Contributors. Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, Ayça Kurtoglu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward
In the holy city of Mecca, crowds and numbers matter. A hadith or saying of the Prophet reports that when pilgrims number fewer than seven hundred thousand, angels will perform the rituals in their stead. One of the names of Mecca is umm al-zuhm or “Mother of Crowds.” Thinking about crowds in Mecca requires an alternate, Islamic genealogy of “the crowd.” But in contemporary Saudi Arabia, the crowd is becoming a resource in new ways. As part of the Vision 2030 national transformation plan, the Saudi government wants to intensify Mecca's crowds, increasing the annual number of pilgrims from eight million to thirty million. Under this plan, the holy city is to become a laboratory for new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics, and optimization. This article demonstrates how Mecca comes to be constitutive of these new crowd sciences. The author shows how a range of knowledges (both religious and more secular) compete and collaborate through the building of a massive hajj infrastructure (the Jamarāt Bridge) and its system of logistical optimization (tafwīj). While the author is generally interested in how Mecca comes to be useful for these new crowd sciences and technologies, he is particularly interested in how Islamic law is deployed as “optimization” and as a crowd management “solution.” These strategies of crowd efficiency and optimization not only transform the performance of ritual itself but also diminish the cosmopolitanism that undergirds the hajj and its knowledge worlds.
Affected by the intersection of their religious, class, and gender identities, Muslim women experience both economic and political marginalization in India, and gendered inequalities in the public and private spheres. In this context, they are often depicted as helpless victims, not as agents who draw on available resources to effect change. Moreover, obscuring the very real political and economic forces that create precarity in the lives of Muslim women, Islam is often constructed as the primary force inhibiting women’s agency and power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Old Delhi’s diverse Muslims to problematize such representations, I show how religion creates space for women to reimagine and re-inscribe their lives. I focus on three Muslim women who represent different class, educational, and sectarian backgrounds to examine how they variously draw on religion to make place for themselves and their communities. Each case reveals the centrality of religion as a source of power in women’s lives, inspiring their actions, bolstering their hopes for a different future, and creating an arena where they try to effect change. Their stories force us to reconfigure notions of agency, and challenge stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women that prevail in India and elsewhere.
This article takes as its starting point the deep and enduring attachments between scholars of religion and their religious subjects to which the secular study of religion sometimes gives rise—attachments that can have profoundly transformative intellectual and existential consequences for the scholar. The methodological posture of critique, however, forecloses the possibility of such attachments. As an alternative to critique, the postcritical both renders these attachments legible and plumbs their epistemological potential to generate new insights into religion, religions, and religious phenomena. A promising methodological horizon for the future of religious studies, the postcritical makes room for the kinds of attachments that follow from taking religion seriously, making room for the possibility that close engagements of the religious kind might not inhibit but, to the contrary, advance scholarship on religion.
Despite its western Christian origin, the notion of religious fundamentalism has been employed by western and non-western scholars alike to describe a variety of religious groups perceived to manifest antagonism to aspects of modernity and secularism, especially western ideals of gender equality as enforced in many cases by state policies. Within religion and gender studies and Gender and Development scholarship, fundamentalism has been often invoked in reference to faith communities opposing feminist ideals, but without due recognition being given to the western metaphysics of feminist theories of gender, or the epistemological and ethical problems of “naming” such communities as “fundamentalist” within Western/Anglophone scholarship. This lack of reflexivity risks essentializing religious communities as being opposed to feminist gender ideals when their reactions might reflect more complex underlying reasons, and can also be counterproductive in effectively responding to gender inequalities and women’s abuse in religious societies. This paper proposes that a more intimate engagement with non-western religious traditions grounded in a study of theological teachings and the lived religious experience of specific communities can remedy such tendencies and achieve a better understanding of the nexus of gender, faith, and tradition/modernity in diverse cultural contexts. It illustrates this by drawing key insights from a study of conjugal abuse in an Orthodox Täwahәdo community in Ethiopia that demonstrated intricate associations between understandings of and attitudes toward conjugal abuse and the local religious tradition, the significance of a culture-as-religion discourse in the maintenance of rigid gender norms, and the potential of Orthodox theology to counter ideas about abusiveness that contributed to its implicit tolerance. The paper relates these findings to Ethiopian women activists’ efforts and the multi-religious societal fabric of Ethiopian society to explore the possibilities for integrated responses to intimate partner violence in the country.
In this commentary, I engage with the epistemic direction that Sidaway suggests geographers should take to decolonize Muslim geographies. Instead, I argue that geography will benefit from closing the gap with the anthropology of Islam where similar questions have long been debated following the influential work of Talal Asad and his conceptualization of Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’.
The purpose of this Element is to analyse the assiduous attempts of two Islamic political thinkers-the 12th century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd and the contemporary Sudanese reformist Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im-to theorise Islamic politics through an approach the author refers to as 'pluralistic frameworks'. A pluralistic framework, is a systematic mediation of Islamic ethics and politics that incorporates extra-Islamic traditions of thought from diverse sources. Pluralistic frameworks selectively and self-consciously enable dialogue, synthesis, and hybridity and seek to maintain a distinct conception of Islamic ethics that concords with a preferred set of political arguments. They enable reflexivity within the ethical purview of Islam and with an awareness of the normativity of sharī'a.Both Ibn Rushd and An-Na'im reconcile sharī'a in two very different ways, but to a common end; Ibn Rushd lays out a method of harmonisation with Greek thought, while An-Na'im resorts to the radical subversion of sharia under liberal thought.
After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. 1 What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. An example of this is the idea that tantric practice is simply a ritual technology, separate and autonomous from doctrinal formulation. This is a persisting academic trope, one that conceptualizes doctrine and practice dichotomously. The effect that dichotomizing doctrine from practice has on the study of contemplative practices is considered in this essay, which first introduces the trope and then explores its supports in Western intellectual culture. Despite its prevalence, the dichotomous representation of doctrine and practice is methodologically dysfunctional. As an alternative, it is proposed that the relation between doctrine and practice is better understood as dialectical, sometimes represented in Buddhist literature by the image of "the two wings of a bird." 2 This relation is explored by examining a particular tantric ritual, a Shingon homa.
This article is an attempt to understand the vexed question of how the Boros of Assam have come to define and realize their ‘traditional’ religious identity amid contemporary assertions of Hindu nationalism in India. Since the early twentieth century, shaped by colonial anthropology and the consolidation of Hinduism, there have been attempts to categorize the Boros as either Hindus or animists. Subsequently, there have been efforts on the part of the Boros themselves to assert and consolidate their ‘traditional’ religious practices into a unified religion called Bathou. ¹ The process has continued in the complex arena of Boro identity assertion. As this article demonstrates, contemporary efforts at the consolidation of Hinduism by the Sangh Parivar and of Bathou by the Boros have often coincided and, at times, collided with each other,therein producing intricate transactions between traditional religionists and the votaries of Hindutva.
Political theology is a flourishing field of research, examining the various ways in which modern political ideas, institutions, and practices have been and continue to be shaped by theology. However, conceptualizations of political theology are often implicit and diverge widely. This article traces the origins and development of the multiple meanings of the concept to reorient contemporary research and debates on the topic. It argues that Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology provided the first modern determination of political theology and shaped the field fundamentally. It also shows that this central work actually contained three discrete conceptions of political theology, which it reconstructs alongside their complex and contradictory interrelations and implications for subsequent research on political theology. The article differentiates these three conceptions of political theology and develops an analysis of their interrelations that can and should be used to reorient and advance contemporary research on political theology.
Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India is a research inquiry in interfaith studies that uses hermeneutical phenomenology to address vexing issues arising in the study of mysticism and enlightened sages.
This book raises the following questions: If all human beings have access to mystical consciousness, and some do access it, how is it that only a few become luminary sages, displaying extraordinary power? What is the ethical responsibility of such sages? And how is the encounter among sages/mystics of different traditions contributing to the harmonious unfolding of religious diversity? The author provides original answers and a renewed vision of Hinduism through the lens of two of the most loved and admired sages of modern India—Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo.
This book is a blueprint for transformative research on religion: it envisions an innovative method— integrative hermeneutical phenomenology—contributing to the development of interfaith mysticism. Bringing to the fore key themes such as Self-realization, the Hari-Hara mystery, and Mystic Fire, the author shows the importance of mystical experience in the understanding of the religious “Other” and the future of religion.
The book will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, interreligious/interfaith studies, comparative religion/theology, and interfaith relations, and to thoughtful readers with an interest in Asia and spiritual practice. Those interested in the mysteries of India and Hindu spirituality will find in this book a pioneering analysis of Hindu mystical consciousness and the Christian encounter with it.
Endorsements:
“Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India is a remarkable book, a deep and perceptive study of two monumental spiritual giants of the last century, Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo. The book is meticulous and scholarly, yet at the same time sensitive to the mystical currents flowing so vitally through those holy visionaries’ lives and words. Isaac Portilla writes carefully, making his case point by point, and yet with great and bold imagination, as he aims to provide spiritual foundations for interreligious learning in the century to come, and indeed, nourishment for the spiritual journey to which we are all called.”
— FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University, USA
“In this at once very profound yet admirably clear work, Isaac Portilla dives deeply into a comparative study of Hindu and Christian mysticism. The author’s masterful scholarship encompasses figures of both traditions such as, from the Hindu tradition, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Ramakrishna, and from the Christian tradition, Raimon Panikkar and Francis Clooney. Portilla is clearly drawing on a deep well of both scholarship and experience in his work. The book itself thus becomes an example of the methods it commends, helping to pave the way to the multifaith future that humanity must embrace if it is to survive the twenty-first century.”
—JEFFEREY D. LONG, Professor of Religion and Asian Studies, Elizabethtown College, USA
“Through the prism of 'hermeneutic phenomenology', Isaac Portilla highlights the centrality of mystical consciousness across Hindu and Christian traditions, and its significance for an experientially grounded interfaith dialogue. In conversation with sage-mystics such as Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, and Henri Le Saux, Portilla configures – with interpretive insight and attention to sociohistorical context – thoughtful patterns of engaging with the “other” who may inhabit a rich continuum of mystical experience. Foregrounding the vital dimension of inwardness, Portilla gestures towards certain Hindu-Christian complementarities on the mystical path. This is a highly creative work of constructive theology which draws on Hindu conceptions of the triadic structure of ultimate reality and inflects them towards the horizon of the mystery of divine-human relationality.”
—ANKUR BARUA, Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies, University of Cambridge, UK
“In Interfaith dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India, Dr Portilla has provided a cogent and innovative analysis to blaze new ground on the important subject of interreligious dialogue and encounter, specifically Hindu-Christian, with potential repercussions for all such dialogue.”
—WILLIAM P. HYLAND, OSB Oblate, Senior Lecturer in Church History, University of St. Andrews, UK
O que a noção de espiritualidade opera quando é empregada como uma categoria analítica? O que esse termo descreve? E qual enquadramento induz cada vez que é mobilizado? A amplitude dessas perguntas dimensiona os desafios que essa noção impõe e a urgência da tarefa de tornar mais consciente seu uso nas ciências sociais. Afinal, apesar da longa trajetória histórica dos debates acerca da categoria espiritualidade na filosofia clássica e na teologia, no campo da antropologia a análise pormenorizada dos usos e das apropriações da “espiritualidade” é um tema pouco frequente e sistematizado. Este artigo consiste em uma reflexão teórica sobre a noção de espiritualidade nas ciências sociais.
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