The Powerful Ephemeral

Download The Powerful Ephemeral full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Powerful Ephemeral ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

The Powerful Ephemeral

Author : Carla Bellamy
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520950453
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Powerful Ephemeral by : Carla Bellamy

Download or read book The Powerful Ephemeral written by Carla Bellamy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violent partitioning of British India along religious lines and ongoing communalist aggression have compelled Indian citizens to contend with the notion that an exclusive, fixed religious identity is fundamental to selfhood. Even so, Muslim saint shrines known as dargahs attract a religiously diverse range of pilgrims. In this accessible and groundbreaking ethnography, Carla Bellamy traces the long-term healing processes of Muslim and Hindu devotees of a complex of dargahs in northwestern India. Drawing on pilgrims’ narratives, ritual and everyday practices, archival documents, and popular publications in Hindi and Urdu, Bellamy considers questions about the nature of religion in general and Indian religion in particular. Grounded in stories from individual lives and experiences, The Powerful Ephemeral offers not only a humane, highly readable portrait of dargah culture, but also new insight into notions of selfhood and religious difference in contemporary India.

Islam Translated

Author : Ronit Ricci
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226710882
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Islam Translated by : Ronit Ricci

Download or read book Islam Translated written by Ronit Ricci and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.

Our Most Troubling Madness

Author : T.M. Luhrmann
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520291093
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Our Most Troubling Madness by : T.M. Luhrmann

Download or read book Our Most Troubling Madness written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schizophrenia has long puzzled researchers in the fields of psychiatric medicine and anthropology. Why is it that the rates of developing schizophrenia—long the poster child for the biomedical model of psychiatric illness—are low in some countries and higher in others? And why do migrants to Western countries find that they are at higher risk for this disease after they arrive? T. M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow argue that the root causes of schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural. This book gives an intimate, personal account of those living with serious psychotic disorder in the United States, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It introduces the notion that social defeat—the physical or symbolic defeat of one person by another—is a core mechanism in the increased risk for psychotic illness. Furthermore, “care-as-usual” treatment as it occurs in the United States actually increases the likelihood of social defeat, while “care-as-usual” treatment in a country like India diminishes it.

Religious Journeys in India

Author : Andrea Marion Pinkney
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 143846603X
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Religious Journeys in India by : Andrea Marion Pinkney

Download or read book Religious Journeys in India written by Andrea Marion Pinkney and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions. In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra. Its rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide. John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

Deceptive Majority

Author : Joel Lee
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108843824
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Deceptive Majority by : Joel Lee

Download or read book Deceptive Majority written by Joel Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an ethnographic history of religious majoritarianism and its sly subversion by one of India's most oppressed minorities.

Highways to the End of the World

Author : Edward Simpson
Publisher : Hurst Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1787389952
Total Pages : 483 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (873 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Highways to the End of the World by : Edward Simpson

Download or read book Highways to the End of the World written by Edward Simpson and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-11-04 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that road-building was naturalised in the twentieth century to the point of common sense, integrating roadbuilding into a system of climate change denial hidden within a broad international development imperative. But if we can ‘read’ South Asian roads as forms of governance and knowledge, we can challenge the region’s established geopolitical narratives, and the idea of a never-ending future. Highways to the End of the World explores the political economy of these ideas by focusing on the history of this phenomenon, and on the road-builders of South Asia themselves. How do these flamboyant and controversial ‘roadmen’ think about their work and the future of the planet? What do roads do, and why? And how did they become central to the region’s nationalist and developmental projects in the first place? Simpson’s fascinating ethnographic account takes us from fume-filled toll booths in the heart of India, via overworked government offices in Pakistan, to pharaonic bridges in the Indian Ocean. Simpson follows the money, explores the politics of evidence, and argues against the utopian hyperbole of present-day ‘road talk’, finding both humanitarian crises and freewheeling international capital in the hedgerows. Roads have never been so interesting, or so controversial.

Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia

Author : Michel Boivin
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317379993
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia by : Michel Boivin

Download or read book Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia written by Michel Boivin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muslim shrine is at the crossroad of many processes involving society and culture. It is the place where a saint – often a Sufi - is buried, and it works as a main social factor, with the power of integrating or rejecting people and groups, and as a mirror reflecting the intricacies of a society. The book discusses the role of popular Islam in structuring individual and collective identities in contemporary South Asia. It identifies similarities and differences between the worship of saints and the pattern of religious attendance to tombs and mausoleums in South Asian Sufism and Shi`ism. Inspired by new advances in the field of ritual and pilgrimage studies, the book demonstrates that religious gatherings are spaces of negotiation and redefinitions of religious identity and of the notion of sainthood. Drawing from a large corpus of vernacular and colonial sources, as well as the register of popular literature and ethnographic observation, the authors describe how religious identities are co-constructed through the management of rituals, and are constantly renegotiated through discourses and religious practices. By enabling students, researchers and academics to critically understand the complexity of religious places within the world of popular and devotional Islam, this geographical re-mapping of Muslim religious gatherings in contemporary South Asia contributes to a new understanding of South Asian and Islamic Studies.

Modern Sufis and the State

Author : Katherine Pratt Ewing
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231551460
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Modern Sufis and the State by : Katherine Pratt Ewing

Download or read book Modern Sufis and the State written by Katherine Pratt Ewing and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sufism is typically thought of as the mystical side of Islam. In recent years, it has been held up as a supposedly peaceful alternative to the spread of forms of Islam associated with violence, an embodiment of democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Are Sufis in fact as otherworldy and apolitical as this stereotype suggests? Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present. Contributors foreground the effects and unintended consequences of efforts to link Sufism with the spread of democracy and consider what roles scholars and governments have played in the making of twenty-first-century Sufism. They critique the belief that Salafism and Sufism are antithetical, offering nuanced analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements and self-representations in Pakistan and India. Essays question the portrayal of Sufi shrines as sites of toleration, peace, and harmony, exploring cases of tension and conflict. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection, Modern Sufis and the State is a timely call to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of Sufism.

Document Raj

Author : Bhavani Raman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226703274
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Document Raj by : Bhavani Raman

Download or read book Document Raj written by Bhavani Raman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-11-07 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Possessed by the Virgin

Author : Kristin C. Bloomer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190615095
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Possessed by the Virgin by : Kristin C. Bloomer

Download or read book Possessed by the Virgin written by Kristin C. Bloomer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Possessed by the Virgin is an ethnographic account of three Roman Catholic women in Tamil Nadu, south India who claim to be possessed by Mary, the mother of Jesus. The author follows the lives of these women over many years, investigating questions about gender, social power, agency, and authenticity.

Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism

Author : Merin Shobhana Xavier
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350026700
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism by : Merin Shobhana Xavier

Download or read book Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism written by Merin Shobhana Xavier and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds light on the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship (BMF), one of North America's major Sufi movements, and one of the first to establish a Sufi shrine in the region. It provides the first comprehensive overview of the BMF, offering new insight into its historical development and practices, and charting its establishment in both the United States and Sri Lanka. Through ethnographic research, Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism shows that the followers of Bawa in the United States and Sri Lanka share far more similarities in the relationships they formed with spaces, Bawa, and Sufism, than differences. This challenges the accepted conceptualization of Sufism in North America as having a distinct “Americanness”, and prompts scholars to re-consider how Sufism is developing in the modern American landscape, as well as globally. The book focuses on the transnational spaces and ritual activities of Bawa's communities, mapping parallel shrines and pilgrimages. It examines the roles of culture, religion, and gender and their impact on ritual embodiment, drawing attention to the global range of a Sufi community through engagement with its distinct Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian followers.

Spaces and Places in Western India

Author : Bina Sengar
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000691551
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Spaces and Places in Western India by : Bina Sengar

Download or read book Spaces and Places in Western India written by Bina Sengar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies places and spaces in Western India both as geographical locations and as imagined constructs. It uncovers the rich history of the region from the perspective of places of pilgrimage, commerce, community, expression and indigeneity. The volume examines how spaces are intrinsically connected to the lived experiences of people. It explores how spaces in Western India have been constructed over time and how these are reflected in both historical and contemporary settings – in the art, architecture, political movements and in identity formation. The rich examples explored in this volume include sites of Bhakti and Sufi literature, Maharashtrian-Sikh identity, Mahanubhav pilgrimage, monetary practices of the Peshwas and the internet as an emancipatory space for the Dalit youth in Maharashtra. The chapters in this book establish and affirm the forever evolving cultural topography of Western India. Taking a multidimensional approach, this book widens the scope of academic discussions on the theme of space and place. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, cultural studies, geography, the humanities, city studies and sociology.

Lines in Water

Author : Eliza F. Kent
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815652259
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (156 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Lines in Water by : Eliza F. Kent

Download or read book Lines in Water written by Eliza F. Kent and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-12 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When asked to distinguish between different faiths, Mughal prince Dara Shikoh is said to have replied, “How do you draw a line in water?” Inspired by this question, the essays in this volume illustrate how ordinary people in South Asia and the diaspora negotiate their religious identities and encounters in creative, complex, and diverse ways. Taking the approach that narratives “from below” provide the richest insight into the dynamics of religious pluralism, the authors examine life histories, oral traditions, cartographic practices, pilgrimage rites, and devotional music and songs. Drawing on both ethnographic and historical data, they illuminate how, like lines in water, religious boundaries are dynamic, fluid, flexible, and permeable rather than permanently fixed, frozen, and inviolable. A distinct feature of the volume is its proposition of a fresh and innovative typology of boundary dynamics. Boundaries may be attractive or porous, firmly drawn or transcended. Attractive boundaries invite confluence while affirming the differences between self and other, whereas permeable boundaries facilitate exchanges that create new identities and in turn form new lines. Although people may recognize the significance of religious borders, they can choose to transcend them. Throughout this volume, the authors highlight the fascinating range of South Asian religious and cultural traditions.

Text to Tradition

Author : Deven M. Patel
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023116680X
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Text to Tradition by : Deven M. Patel

Download or read book Text to Tradition written by Deven M. Patel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the twelfth century, the Naisadhiyacarita (The Adventures of Nala, King of Nisadha) is a seminal Sanskrit poem beloved by South Asian literary communities for nearly a millennium. This volume introduces readers to the poem’s author, his reading communities, the modes through which the poem has been read and used, the contexts through which it became canonical, its literary offspring, and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it. The study privileges the intellectual, affective, and social forms of cultural practice informing a region’s people and institutions. It treats literary texts as traditions in their own right and draws attention to the critical genres and actors involved in their reception.

Receptacle of the Sacred

Author : Jinah Kim
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520273869
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Receptacle of the Sacred by : Jinah Kim

Download or read book Receptacle of the Sacred written by Jinah Kim and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In considering medieval illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of cultic innovation, Receptacle of the Sacred explores how and why the South Asian Buddhist book-cult has survived for almost two millennia to the present. A book “manuscript” should be understood as a form of sacred space: a temple in microcosm, not only imbued with divine presence but also layered with the memories of many generations of users. Jinah Kim argues that illustrating a manuscript with Buddhist imagery not only empowered it as a three-dimensional sacred object, but also made it a suitable tool for the spiritual transformation of medieval Indian practitioners. Through a detailed historical analysis of Sanskrit colophons on patronage, production, and use of illustrated manuscripts, she suggests that while Buddhism’s disappearance in eastern India was a slow and gradual process, the Buddhist book-cult played an important role in sustaining its identity. In addition, by examining the physical traces left by later Nepalese users and the contemporary ritual use of the book in Nepal, Kim shows how human agency was critical in perpetuating and intensifying the potency of a manuscript as a sacred object throughout time.

The Hegemony of Heritage

Author : Deborah L. Stein
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520968883
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Hegemony of Heritage by : Deborah L. Stein

Download or read book The Hegemony of Heritage written by Deborah L. Stein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambika Temple in Jagat and the Ékalingji Temple Complex in Kailaspuri—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality

Author : Vincent J. Cornell
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1118529405
Total Pages : 612 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (185 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality by : Vincent J. Cornell

Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality written by Vincent J. Cornell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking and comprehensive collection on various facets of Islamic spirituality throughout history and in the modern world The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality is an authoritative reference work comprising twenty-eight scholarly essays that explore the expressive and performative dimensions of Islamic spirituality. Edited by two of its most prominent scholars, and bringing together a stellar cast of contributors, this wide-ranging volume covers religious practices, sacred texts, history and places, gender, music, poetry, the visual arts, and politics. Spirituality has had a long and important history in Islam, where a focus on spirituality is required of every believer. Each Muslim is asked to achieve a state of devotion through prayer, fasting, supplications, recitations, pilgrimage, and ascetic practices. The essays in this volume explain the role of spirituality in Islam—from its beginnings, through the development of its institutions, and into the present day. They also reflect important new research, and discuss contemporary debates and issues affecting Islamic spirituality such as the Internet, social justice, the role of women, ethics, and religious fundamentalism. Offering readers a thought-provoking way to engage with the topic, this comprehensive work includes: The spirituality of words and letters, including the Qur’an, prophetic traditions in Islam, and litanies, invocations, and devotional texts Devotional practices in Islam, including the spirituality of prayer, ascetic spirituality, Qur’an recitation, and spirituality of the Sufi path Spirituality in literature, including Arabic and Persian poetry, spirituality in the modern novel, and the art of translation Spirituality in the arts, including the visual arts, music, song, and film Islamic spirituality and post-modern practices, including the Internet, Islamic hip-hop, and Salafism From the personal to the political, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality offers a fresh and revitalized view of all aspects of spirituality in Islam. It is a must-have scholarly resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, instructors and scholars studying Islam, spirituality, and Asian and Middle Eastern history as well as general readers with an interest in the subject.