The Emirate of Kuwait hardly resembles the city-State it was at the start of the 20th century. The discovery of oil in 1938 rapidly transformed the tiny tribal sheikhdom of the Al-Sabah into a modern oil-producing state where, by the early 1980s, citizens were enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. While much has been written on the reasons why and how the Al-Sabah became a ruling dynasty, little is known about the nature of their authority and its relationship to Kuwait's social structure. Rivka Azoulay shows how despite the rapidity of change in the oil-rich, family-run emirate, it is the pre-oil dynamics of social and political life that dictate how society operates. The author shows that Kuwait's ambitious diversification plans to reduce oil-dependence by 2035 require a renegotiation of the regime's pact with society, which threatens the pre-oil alliances upon which the Al-Sabah's regime has been built.

Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas explores spirit-based religious traditions across vast geographical and cultural expanses, including Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Using interdisciplinary research methods, this collection of original perspectives breaks new ground by examining these traditions as typologically and historically related. This curated selection of the traditions allows readers to compare and highlight convergences, while the description and comparison of the traditions challenges colonial erasures and expands knowledge about endangered cultures. The inclusion of spirit-based traditions from a broad geographical area emphasizes the typology of religion over ethnic compartmentalization. The individuals and communities studied in this collection serve spirits through ritual, singing, instruments, initiation, embodiment via possession or trance, veneration of nature, and, among some indigenous people, the consumption of ritual psychoactive entheogens. Indigenous and African diaspora practices focused on service to ancestors and spirits reflect ancient substrates of religiosity. The rationale to separate them on disciplinary, ethnic, linguistic, geographical, or historical grounds evaporates in our interconnected world. Shared cultural, historical, and structural features of American indigenous and African diaspora spirit-based traditions mutually deserve our attention since the analyses and dialogues give way to discoveries about deep commonalities and divergences among religions and philosophies. Still struggling against the effects of colonialism, enslavement, and extinction, the practitioners of these spirit-based religious traditions hold on to important but vulnerable parts of humanity's cultural heritage. These readings make possible journeys of recognition as well as discovery.

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. This final volume in the five-volume series deals with the two key concepts of performance and knowledge of the indigenous people from all continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues and ideas of the indigenous peoples in the context of imagination, creativity, performance, audience, arts, music, dance, oral traditions, aesthetics and beauty in North America, South America, Australia, East Asia and India from cultural, historical and aesthetic points of view. Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book, with its wide coverage, will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, cultural studies, media studies and performing arts, literary and postcolonial studies, religion and theology, politics, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.

This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. The book, the third in a five-volume series, deals with the two key concepts of indigeneity and nation of indigenous people from all the continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues and ideas of indigeneity, nationhood, nationality, State, identity, selfhood, constitutionalism, and citizenship in Africa, North America, New Zealand, Pacific Islands and Oceania, India, and Southeast Asia from philosophical, cultural, historical and literary points of view. Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book with its wide coverage will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, politics, religion and theology, cultural studies, literary and postcolonial studies, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.

Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the "spirit realm." In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city. Take Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna's encounters with the supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both ethnographic and personal, Onaje X. O. Woodbine's portrait of her spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women's religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed. Woodbine explores Donna's religious creativity and her sense of multireligious belonging as she blends together Catholic, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Baptist traditions. Through the gripping story of one local prophet, this book offers a deeply original account of the religious experiences of Black women in contemporary America: their bodies, their haunted landscapes, and their spiritual worlds.

Theology has a rich tradition across the African continent, and has taken myriad directions since Christianity first arrived on its shores. This handbook charts both historical developments and contemporary issues in the formation and application of theologies across the member countries of the African Union. Written by a panel of expert international contributors, chapters firstly cover the various methodologies needed to carry out such a survey. Various theological movements and themes are then discussed, as well as biblical and doctrinal issues pertinent to African theology. Subjects addressed include: * Orality and theology * Indigenous religions and theology * Patristics * Pentecostalism * Liberation theology * Black theology * Social justice * Sexuality and theology * Environmental theology * Christology * Eschatology * The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament The Routledge Handbook of African Theology is an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the theological landscape of Africa. As such, it will be a hugely useful volume to any scholar interested in African religious dynamics, as well as academics of Theology or Biblical Studies in an African context.

The whole world is changing with incredible speed towards something radically new, yet people across the globe also show resistance to the forces that homogenize our lives. This book deals with a community that has found its niche in the remote Niamgiri mountain range of Odisha (India) and is struggling to preserve its way of life: the Dongria Kond. In recent years, they made the headlines as the real "Avatars" because they successfully fought a multinational company's plans to mine the mountains. From the perspective of the Dongria Kond, these mountains are the seat of gods, and the whole environment is animated by spiritual forces. This highly complex cosmic order includes humans and non-humans and rests on a divine law (niam). This book captures the viewpoint of the Dongria Kond and provides deep insights into their vision of the world. It offers elaborate accounts of how the Dongria relate to the outside world, conceive of their own society and engage in complex rituals in order to (re-)establish the cosmos. The book confronts the reader with radically different imaginings of familiar human concerns: love, fertility, wealth, status and well-being.

In the realm of African spiritual pathways, no tradition has been so widely embraced and practiced as the West African religion Orisa. Profoundly enriched and challenged by her own spiritual journey, Tobe Melora Correal, an initiated priestess in the Yoruba-Lukumi branch of Orisa, guides us along this blessed road Finding Soul on the Path of Orisa. Providing a fresh look at the soul of these ancient teachings, she emphasizes introspection and inner work over the outward manifestations of Orisa's practices. She also debunks misconceptions surrounding the tradition, drawing us into a lushly textured, Earth-centered spiritual system and shedding light on the nature of all spirituality. In the first part, of the book she gives an introduction to the basic teachings and metaphysical underpinnings of the tradition. She explores the history, branches, stories, and principles of Orisa, and discusses the Yoruba vision of God, comparing it to other traditions' versions of God. She also discusses how Orisa/Yoruba has been misunderstood by outsiders or misused by initiates as "black magic" or "voodoo," and leaffirms it as a positive, Earth-centered religion. In the second part, she discusses how to integrate these principles into our daily life, by building meaningful and authentic relationships with the spirits of your ancestors. The third part gives and overview of the tradition's structure and covers the purpose and function of the rites of initiation. First and foremost the book offers a personal approach to the tradition, emphasing that the principles and rituals of Orisa cannot be accepted and performed blindly but must adhered to with active participation. Correal describes her personal struggle to find a spiritual road, finally discovering what she was looking for in Orisa. More than just a book for a single religion, Finding Soul on the Path of Orisa offers a compassionate and useful roadmap for revering God's myriad and sometimes challenging faces. It explores the essential principles of the tradition and integrating them into daily life. Combining the Orisa based principles of deity and ancestor worship with such universal spiritual necessities as surrender- self-care, and service, Correal provides a practical approach to purposeful living that will benefit both seasoned Orisa practitioners and uninitiated students of all traditions.

Contextualizing Eschatology in African Cultural and Religious Beliefs addresses the African consciousness and nuances of eschatological beliefs as part and parcel of the holistic African Indigenous worldviews within the context of the people's traditional heritage. The concept of eschatology is usually explained from the perspective of "endtimes" in relation to either the human individual or the cosmos. Within these contexts, the primary interests, particularly with regard to human eschatology, have centred on the questions of death, afterlife, immortality, destiny, judgment, reward and punishment, and the final destination or eternal "home" of humans. This book explores the characteristic nature, the modes, the process as well as the dynamics associated with the various features culminating the functional expression of the "reality" of eschatological beliefs demonstrated in varied but fundamentally the same subject matter of practices among different African ethnic groups. It also discusses the influences of other religious traditions, particularly Christianity and Islam, on contemporary African eschatological thoughts and their attendant consequences. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African studies, eschatology, religious studies, and the philosophy of religion.

This book explores representations of Obeah - a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-derived, syncretic Caribbean religious practices - across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century by West Indian authors. In the Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah often manifests in the casting of spells, the administration of baths and potions of various oils, herbs, roots and powders, and sometimes spirit possession, for the purposes of protection, revenge, health and well-being. In most Caribbean territories, the practice - and practices that may resemble it - remains illegal. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature analyses fiction that employs Obeah as a marker of the Black 'folk' aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production, either in resistance to colonial ideology or in service of the same. These texts foreground Obeah as a social and cultural logic both integral to and troublesome within the creation of such a thing as 'West Indian' literature and culture, at once a product of and a foil to Caribbean plantation societies. This book explores the presentation of Obeah as an 'unruly' narrative subject, one that not only subverts but signifies a lasting 'Afro-folk' sensibility within colonial and 'postcolonial' writing of the West Indies. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature will be of interest to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, and African and Caribbean religious studies; it will also contribute to dialogues of spirituality in the wider Black Atlantic.

The Nso' Concept of Time explores cosmology among the Nso' people of north-western Cameroon. It examines the concept of time within the Nso' world view, along with its implications for culture and traditional religion. The author addresses a wide range of metaphysical, ethical, anthropological, existential, and epistemological issues not only in relation to wider African philosophy, but also in relation to Western conceptions of time. The book is an important new contribution to African philosophy, cultural anthropology, African traditional religion, cosmology, and African metaphysics. It will appeal to scholars and students in a wide range of related disciplines. "This book is most certainly a first in the study of the Nso concept of time. Remi Prospero Fonka has excavated, carefully analyzed, and presented in readable form, a complex metaphysics of time within the Nso worldview. Students and researchers in African cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology will find this book a useful resource. Those interested in comparative philosophy will also find in this book a cross-cultural phenomenological confrontation with Western cosmo-metaphysical models."-Nelson Shang, Lecturer of Philosophy, The University of Bamenda and The Catholic University of Cameroon, Bamenda "By highlighting the importance of always considering the concept of time alongside aspects of the universe or cosmos, Remi Prospero Fonka succinctly and with meticulous methodology, avails the opportunity for an understanding of the measurement of African time. The cross-cultural confrontations especially with phenomenological existentialists makes this book a necessary tool for students and researchers in multicultural studies, African philosophy, cosmology, African traditional religion, and African metaphysics."-Valentine Banfegha Ngalim, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The University of Bamenda, Cameroon

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Baum seeks to reconstruct the religious and social history of the Diola communities in southern Senegal during the precolonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade was at its height. Baum shows that Diola community leaders used a complex of religious shrines and priesthoods to regulate and contain the influence of the slave trade. He demonstrates how this close involvement with the traders significantly changed Diola religious life.

Community and Trinity in Africa recasts the African tradition of community from a theological perspective. Ibrahim S. Bitrus explains the new Trinitarian hermeneutics of God as the fundamental framework for constructing an authentic African tradition of community. The book explores the tripartite structural evils of the patriarchal tradition, the Big Man/Woman syndrome, and ethnic-religious nepotism, which distort the African tradition of community. It analyzes Trinitarian proposals that liberate the distorted African tradition of community and concludes that an authentic African tradition of community is one that embodies individuality without libertarian individualism, communality without patriarchy, and mutual multi-ethnic and religious relations without nepotism and domination. Arguing that the communion of the Triune God is not a moral ideal, but a gift for restructuring the church and society, this book is an essential read for scholars of African Christianity and Christian theology.

India is a highly diverse country, home to a wide array of languages, religions, and cultural traditions. Analyzing the dynamic religious traditions of this democratic nation sheds light on the complex evolution from India's past to today's modern culture. Written by leading experts in the field, Religions of India provides students with an introduction to India's vibrant religious faiths. To understand its heritage and core values, the beginning chapters introduce the indigenous Dharmic traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, while the later chapters examine the outside influences of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These chapters are designed for cross-religious comparison, with the history, practices, values, and worldviews of each belief system explained. The final chapter helps students relate what they have learnt to religious theory, preparing the way for future study. This thoroughly revised second edition combines solid scholarship with clear and lively writing to provide students with an accessible and comprehensive introduction to religion in India. This is the ideal textbook for students approaching religion in Asia, South Asia, or India for the first time. Features to aid study include: discussion questions at the end of each chapter, images, a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and an Companion Website with additional links for students to further their study.

In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed "crime hot spots." The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring "the rule of law." In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of Crime Watch, the nation's most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: obeah. From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving "spiritual work" have been criminalized under the label of "obeah." Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as "science" and "experiments," Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states.

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing's contributors describe ways of being in the world that reflect a worldview that guided humanity for 99% of human history: They describe the practical traditional wisdom that stems from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, and native art.

Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas explores spirit-based religious traditions across vast geographical and cultural expanses, including Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Using interdisciplinary research methods, this collection of original perspectives breaks new ground by examining these traditions as typologically and historically related. This curated selection of the traditions allows readers to compare and highlight convergences, while the description and comparison of the traditions challenges colonial erasures and expands knowledge about endangered cultures. The inclusion of spirit-based traditions from a broad geographical area emphasizes the typology of religion over ethnic compartmentalization. The individuals and communities studied in this collection serve spirits through ritual, singing, instruments, initiation, embodiment via possession or trance, veneration of nature, and, among some indigenous people, the consumption of ritual psychoactive entheogens. Indigenous and African diaspora practices focused on service to ancestors and spirits reflect ancient substrates of religiosity. The rationale to separate them on disciplinary, ethnic, linguistic, geographical, or historical grounds evaporates in our interconnected world. Shared cultural, historical, and structural features of American indigenous and African diaspora spirit-based traditions mutually deserve our attention since the analyses and dialogues give way to discoveries about deep commonalities and divergences among religions and philosophies. Still struggling against the effects of colonialism, enslavement, and extinction, the practitioners of these spirit-based religious traditions hold on to important but vulnerable parts of humanity's cultural heritage. These readings make possible journeys of recognition as well as discovery.

Walter E. A. van Beek draws on over four decades of extensive fieldwork to offer an in-depth study of the religion of the Kapsiki/Higi, who live in the Mandara Mountains on the border between North Cameroon and Northeast Nigeria. Concentrating on ritual as the core of traditional religion, van Beek shows how Kapsiki/Higi practices have endured through the long and turbulent history of the region. Kapsiki rituals reveal a focus on two fundamental concepts: dwelling and belonging. Van Beek examines their sacrificial practices, through which the Kapsiki show a complex and pervasive connection with the Mandara Mountains, as well as the character of their relationships among themselves and with outsiders. Van Beek also explores their rituals of belonging, rites of passage which take place from birth through initiation and marriage - and even death, with the tradition of the ''dancing dead,'' when a fully decorated corpse on the shoulders of a smith ''dances'' with his mourning kinsmen. The Dancing Dead is the result of the author's lifelong study of the Kapsiki/Higi. It gives a unique description of the rituals in an African traditional religion based not upon ancestors, but on a completely relational thought system, where in the end all rituals are integrated into one major cycle.

J.D. Lewis-Williams, one of the leading South African archaeologists and ethnographers, excavates meaning from the complex mythological stories of the San-Bushmen to create a larger theory of how myth is used in culture. He extracts their "nuggets," the far-reaching but often unspoken words and concepts of language and understanding that are opaque to outsiders, to establish a more nuanced theory of the role of these myths in the thought-world and social circumstances of the San. The book -draws from the unique 19th century Bleek/Lloyd archives, more recent ethnographic work, and San rock art;-includes well-known San stories such as The Broken String, Mantis Dreams, and Creation of the Eland;-extrapolates from our understanding of San mythology into a larger model of how people create meaning from myth.

Medicine Bundle Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932 Joshua David Bellin "An excellent book about the way in which performance constitutes (rather than merely reflects) cultural differences between and among Native American and Anglo-American peoples."--Joseph Roach, Yale University "Bellin's important book challenges readers to rethink questions of colonization and acculturation. . . . Highly recommended. "--"Choice" From the 1820s to the 1930s, Christian missionaries and federal agents launched a continent-wide assault against Indian sacred dance, song, ceremony, and healing ritual in an attempt to transform Indian peoples into American citizens. In spite of this century-long religious persecution, Native peoples continued to perform their sacred traditions and resist the foreign religions imposed on them, as well as to develop new practices that partook of both. At the same time, some whites began to explore Indian performance with interest, and even to promote Indian sacred traditions as a source of power for their own society. The varieties of Indian performance played a formative role in American culture and identity during a critical phase in the nation's development. In "Medicine Bundle," Joshua David Bellin examines the complex issues surrounding Indian sacred performance in its manifold and intimate relationships with texts and images by both Indians and whites. From the paintings of George Catlin, the traveling showman who exploited Indian ceremonies for the entertainment of white audiences, to the autobiography of Black Elk, the Lakota holy man whose long life included stints as a dancer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a supplicant in the Ghost Dance movement, and a catechist in the Catholic Church, Bellin reframes American literature, culture, and identity as products of encounter with diverse performance traditions. Like the traditional medicine bundle of sacred objects bound together for ritual purposes, Indian performance and the performance of Indianness by whites and Indians alike are joined in a powerful intercultural knot. Joshua David Bellin is a member of the faculty of La Roche College and the author of "The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature," also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007 272 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-4034-4 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 World Rights Literature, Native American Studies, Cultural Studies Short copy: Joshua David Bellin examines the complex issues surrounding Indian sacred performance in its manifold and intimate relationships with texts and images by both Indians and whites.

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing's contributors describe ways of being in the world that reflect a worldview that guided humanity for 99% of human history: They describe the practical traditional wisdom that stems from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, and native art.

Since time immemorial indigenous people have engaged in legal relationships with other-than-human-persons. These relationships are exemplified in enspirited sacred natural sites, which are owned and governed by numina spirits that can potentially place legal demands on humankind in return for protection and blessing. Although conservationists recognise the biodiverse significance of most sacred natural sites, the role of spiritual agency by other-than-human-persons is not well understood. Consequently, sacred natural sites typically lack legal status and IUCN-designated protection. More recent ecocentric and posthuman worldviews and polycentric legal frameworks have allowed courts and legislatures to grant 'rights' to nature and 'juristic personhood' and standing to biophysical entities. This book examines the indigenous literature and recent legal cases as a pretext for granting juristic personhood to enspirited sacred natural sites. The author draws on two decades of his research among Tibetans in Kham (southwest China), to provide a detailed case study. It is argued that juristic personhood is contingent upon the presence and agency of a resident numina and that recognition should be given to their role in spiritual governance over their jurisdiction. The book concludes by recommending that advocacy organisations help indigenous people with test cases to secure standing for threatened sacred natural sites (SNS) and calls upon IUCN, UNESCO (MAB and WHS), ASEAN Heritage and EuroNatura to retrospectively re-designate their properties, reserves, parks and initiatives so that SNS and spiritual governance are fully recognised and embraced. It will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers in environmental law, nature conservation, religion and anthropology.