Bøger i Contemporary Anthropology of Religion serien

This book raises the question of what an Indigenous church is and how its members define their ties of affiliation or separation. Establishing a pioneering dialogue between Amazonian and Gran Chaco studies on Indigenous Christianity, the contributions address historical processes, cosmological conceptions, ritual practices, leadership dynamics, and material formations involved in the creation and diversification of Indigenous churches. Instead of focusing on the study of missionary ideologies and praxis, the book explores Indigenous peoples' interpretations of Christianity and the institutional arrangements they make to create, expand, or dismantle their churches. In doing so, the volume offers a South American contribution to the theoretical project of the anthropology of Christianity, especially as it relates to the issue of denominationalism and inter-denominational relations.

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary charges of anthropology as a discipline: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange.

In this novel and lucid work, Christopher Houston clarifies a particular modern style and practice of politics that he calls anthropocracy. In the name of popular sovereignty, anthropocracies de-legitimize the rule of God(s) even as they re-deploy it to stabilize the rule of the representatives of the people, all the while obfuscating their political conscription of the divine. In distinguishing anthropocracy from varieties of other secular and laicist political arrangements, as well as from theocracy, this book also gives readers a brilliant solution to what it calls the Turkish puzzle, the dilemma over how to best describe and analyze state-religion and state-society relations in the Turkish Republic. This work convincingly undermines two orthodox presumptions about Turkish politics: the claim that Turkish modernity should be considered an example of secularity; and the accusation that the current AKP government should be interpreted as Islamic. On the contrary, it argues that both Kemalism and the AKP continue to institute an anthropocratic Republic.

This book explores the social life of Muslim women and Christian minorities amid Islamic and Christian movements in urban Java, Indonesia.

This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of "missionaries" that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee.

Based on an ethnographic study of rural Poland, this book investigates the challenges of maintaining pluralism in a religiously homogenous society. By examining a multireligious and multiethnic community, Pasieka reveals paradoxes inscribed into the practice and discourse of pluralism.

This historical ethnography from Central Sudan explores the century-old intertwining of zar , spirit possession, with past lives of ex-slaves and shows that, despite very different social and cultural contexts, zar has continued to be shaped by the experience of slavery.

In this richly contextualized study, Liana Chua explores how a largely Christian Bidayuh community has been reconfiguring its relationship to its old animist rituals through the trope and politics of "culture."

In The Halal Frontier Johan Fischer shows that halal (literally lawful or permitted) is no longer an expression of esoteric forms of production, trade and consumption, but part of an expanding globalised market. This book explores modern forms of halal understanding and practice in the halal consumption of middle-class Malays in the diaspora.

Selby argues that the complex "fetishization" of headscarves in public, governmental, and feminist French discourse positions publicly-visible Muslim women in ways that obscure their engagement with laicite (French secularism).

Hasinoff brings the untold history of the World in Boston of 1911, 'America's First Great Missionary Exposition,' to light, focusing on how the material culture of missions shaped domestic interactions with evangelism, Christianity, and the consumption of ethnological knowledge.

Many voices clamor to be heard in debates about whether shamans cure, and whether shamanic spirituality is worth continuing or recovering in the twenty-first century. This book provides newinsights into the fascinating resurgence of shamanism through an exploration of the politicalrepression of religion and its transcendence

Communitas is inspired fellowship; a group's pleasure in sharing common experiences; being 'in the zone' - as in music, sport, and work; the sense felt by a group when their life together takes on full meaning. The experience of communitas, almost beyond strict definition and with almost endless variations, often appears unexpectedly.

Since 1990, direct sales have attracted over two million recruits in Mexico and are characterized by a belief in the power of positive thinking. Through an ethnographic portrait, Peter S. Cahn demonstrates that the quasi-religious commission of self-empowerment accounts for the explosive growth of commission-based sales in the developing world.

Spirits without Borders is an ethnographic study of the transnational and multicultural expansion of Vietnam's Mother Goddess Religion and its spirit possession ritual. The work explores how and why the ritual spread from Vietnam to the US and back again and the impact of ritual transnationalism in both countries.

Through his ethnographic study of the fishermen and their religious beliefs, Webster speaks to larger debates about religious radicalism, materiality, economy, language, and the symbolic. These debates also call into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern industrial societies.

This is a literary and anthropological analysis of historical narratives that illuminate regional notions of cosmological kingship, cosmopolitan notions of Islamic law and mysticism, and global notions of the modern bureaucratic state. These notions have coexisted in Southeast Asia since the Sixteenth century and influence politics to this day.

Ethnographers have observed Muslims nearly everywhere Islam is practiced. Varisco's analysis goes beyond the rhetoric over what Islam is to the information from ethnographic research about what Muslims say they do and actually are observed to do.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book examines how the Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, is actively negotiating both modernity and tradition in the contexts of nation-building, globalisation, and a supposed clash of civilizations.

In October of 1943, the Danish resistance rescued almost all of the Jews in Copenhagen from roundups by the occupying Nazis. This book explores the questions that such inclusion raises for the Danish Jews, and what their answers can tell us about the meaning of religion, ethnicity and community in modern society.

Talk about Prayer is an experiment in writing ethnography, a commentary on a conversation with Mama Regine Tshitanda, the leader of a Charismatic prayer group (groupe de priere) in Lubumbashi (Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and members of her family in 1986. Fabian's research on expressions and practices of popular culture, including popular religion, was conducted during two visits to Katanga in 1985 and 1986. He discusses controversial issues in the study of the Global Charismatic Movement as seen at the time and gives a detailed account of the circumstances and events that led to the recorded meeting and how the ethnographic document on which this book is based was made. Central to the book is the authors understanding of anthropology of religion, in that research should be based on communicative ethnography, an approach that involves confrontation between researchers and interlocutors as well between their views of the world. Talk about Prayer is one such argument for keeping open the debate on a critical stance toward religion.

Exploring the roles of Muslim guards and guides in Jewish cemeteries in Morocco, Cory Thomas Pechan Driver suggests that these custodians use performances of ritual and caring acts for Jewish graves for multiple reasons.

Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative powers.

This volume examines the significance of spiritual kinship-or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine-in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia-where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft.

How have the Aluni Valley Duna people of Papua New Guinea responded to the challenges of colonial and post-colonial changes that have entered their lifeworld since the middle of the Twentieth-Century?

This collection revisits classical anthropological treatments of the gift by documenting how people may be valued both through the requests they make and through what they give.