This book presents a systematic approach to the literary analysis of cultural practices. Based on a postcolonial framework of diaspora, the book utilizes literary theory to investigate cultural phenomena such as food preparation and song. Razia Parveen explores various diverse themes, including the female voice, genealogy, space, time, and diaspora, and applies them to the analysis of community identity. This volume also demonstrates how a literary analysis of oral texts helps to provide insight into women's lived narratives. For example, Parveen discusses how the notion of the 'third space' creates a distinctly feminine spatiality.

This book explores the contours of a transformational sociology which seeks to reconsider the horizons of sociological imagination. It questions accepted modernist assumptions such as the equation of society and nation-state, the dualism of individual and society and that of ontology and epistemology. Arguing that contemporary sociology suffers from what Ulrich Beck calls the Nato-like fire power of western sociology, it argues that sociology has to open itself to transcivilizational dialogues and planetary conversations about self, culture and society. The book also challenges scholars to go beyond a privileging of the post-traditional telos of modernist sociology and puts forward a foundational interrogation of modernist sociology. It underscores the limitations of established conventions of sociology and considering an alternative sociology based upon Confucian vision and practice of self-transformation. This collection offers a way to go beyond dominant structures of modern sociology and contemporary dominant ways of thinking about and doing sociology helping us cultivate a transdisciplinary sociology.

The Religious Lives of Older Laywomen draws on ethnographic fieldwork, cross-cultural comparisons, and relevant theories exploring the beliefs, identities, and practices of 'Generation A'-Anglican laywomen born in the 1920s and 1930s. Now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, they are often described as the 'backbone' of the Church and likely its final active generation. The prevalence of laywomen in mainstream Christian congregations is a widely accepted phenomenon that will cause little surprise amongst the research community or Christian adherents. What is surprising is that we know so little about them. Generation A laywomen have remained largely invisible in previous work on institutional religion in Euro-American countries, particularly as the focus on religion and gender has turned to youth, sexuality, and priesthood. Female Christian Generation A is on the cusp of a catastrophic decline in mainstream Christianity that accelerated during the 'post-war' (post-1945) age. The age profile of mainstream Christianity represents an increasingly aging pattern, with Generation A not being replaced by their children or grandchildren-the Baby-Boomers and generations X, Y, and Z. Generation A is irreplaceable and unique. 'Generation' shares specific values, beliefs, behaviours, and orientations, therefore, when this generation finally disappears within the next five to 10 years, their knowledge, insights, and experiences will be lost forever. Abby Day both documents and interprets their religious lives and what we can learn about them and more widely, about contemporary Christianity and its future.

Religion can heal, but it can hurt as well. This collection of essays addresses some key issues of religious stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and considers a wide range of important topics which haunt our societies today. When stereotyping becomes the oxygen we inhale, when it is so important to us that we cannot see how we can survive without it - what can and should we do? Twenty-two scholars from Australia, Europe, the Middle East and North America explore the anatomy of various forms of stereotyping and ways to oppose them.

This book uses political process theory to examine the three most successful cultural movements that have mobilized around Christopher Columbus, a figure whose surrounding myths have served many interests. The author examines the religious, ethnic, and anti-colonial movements that were most successful in rewriting national origin myth, providing a clear application of the political process model while telling the story of how a powerless public mobilized to rewrite its past.

Honorable Mention for the 2008 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion!The roots of contemporary Islamic militancy in Southeast Asia lie in the sixteenth century, when Christian Europeans first tried to dominate Indian Ocean trade. Through a detailed analysis of sacred scriptures, epic narratives and oral histories from the region, this book shows how Southeast Asian Muslims combined cosmopolitan Islamic models of knowledge and authority with local Austronesian models of divine kingship to first resist and then to appropriate Dutch colonial models of rational bureaucracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these models continue to shape regional responses to contemporary trends such as the rise of global Islamism.

What is the place of pluralism in the context of a dominant religion? How does the perception of religion as "tradition" and "culture" affect pluralism? Why do minorities' demands for recognition often transform into exclusion? Through her ethnography of a multireligious community in rural Poland, Agnieszka Pasieka demonstrates how we can better understand the nature of pluralism by examining how it is lived and experienced within a homogenous society. Painting a vivid picture of everyday interreligious sociability, Pasieka reveals the constant balance of rural inhabitants between ideas of sameness and difference, and the manifold ways in which religion informs local cooperation, relations among neighbors and friends, and common attempts to "make pluralism." The book traces these developments through several decades of the community's history, unveiling and exposing the paradoxes inscribed into the practice and discourse of pluralism and complex processes of negotiation of social identities.

This volume explores the extraordinary variety of Islamic organizations in Europe and the United States. It focuses on the question of how local, national and transnational environments and changing public discourses on Muslims and Islam affect Islamic organizations and their members. The contributions all employ a bottom-up research approach and uncover diverse reactions of Islamic organizations in their forms of organization, strategies and practices. Compiling twelve studies from researchers of a variety of disciplines, this volume provides theoretical and empirical findings on Islamic organizations from the Baltic States, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of 'belonging' which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

This book is an original application of rhetoric and moral-emotions theory to the sociology of social movements. It promotes a new interdisciplinary vision of what social movements are, why they exist, and how they succeed in attaining momentum over time. Deepening the affective dimension of cultural sociology, this work draws upon the social psychology of human emotion and interpersonal communication. Specifically, the book revolves around the topic of anger as a unique moral emotion that can be made to play crucial motivational and generative functions in protest. The chapters develop a new theory of the emotional power of protest rhetoric, including how abolitionist performances of heterodoxic racial and gender status imaginaries contributed to the escalation of the 'sectional conflict' over American slavery.

Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears: the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, not Puritan New England. In contrast, Van Engen's work unearths the pervasive presence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons, treatises, tracts, poems, journals, histories, and captivity narratives. Sympathetic Puritans also demonstrates how two types of sympathy - the active command to fellow-feel (a duty), as well as the passive sign that could indicate salvation (a discovery) - pervaded Puritan society and came to define the very boundaries of English culture, affecting conceptions of community, relations with Native Americans, and the development of American literature. By analyzing Puritan theology, preaching, prose, and poetry, Van Engen re-examines the Antinomian Controversy, conversion narratives, transatlantic relations, Puritan missions, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative - and Puritan culture more generally - through the lens of sympathy. Demonstrating and explicating a Calvinist theology of sympathy in seventeenth-century New England, the book reveals the religious history of a concept that has largely been associated with more secular roots.

In this edited volume, authors analyze how symbolic boundaries of belonging are negotiated and reflected upon by school actors in different educational contexts and how that contributes to a richer understanding of the ways in which "we-ness" acts as a fundamentally structuring force in immigrant incorporation. The analyses draw on cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's work on civil sphere theory, thus grasping both the solidaristic dimensions of incorporation and processes of exclusion. Chapters are guided by two major themes: school choice/ethnic school segregation and religion/faith in schooling. Both of these themes provide rich examples of how immigrant school actors negotiate the symbolic codes that define boundaries of belonging/non-belonging in different communities. This focus will broaden the understanding of how educational practices and formal schooling works in relation to immigrant incorporation into different school cultures, as well as in the Swedish civil sphere.

In this interdisciplinary collection leading experts and scholars from criminology, psychology, law and history provide a compelling analysis of practices and beliefs that lead to violence against women, men and children in the name 'honour'.

Based on interview material with a wide range of Protestant clergy in Northern Ireland, this text examines how Protestant identity impacts on the possibility of peace and stability and argues for greater involvement by the Protestant churches in the transition from conflict to a 'post-conflict' Northern Ireland.

This book is the summation of many decades of work by Peter L. Berger, an internationally renowned sociologist of religion. Secularization theory-which saw modernity as leading to a decline of religion-has been empirically falsified. It should be replaced by a nuanced theory of pluralism. In this new book, Berger outlines the possible foundations for such a theory, addressing a wide range of issues spanning individual faith, interreligious societies, and the political order. He proposes a conversation around a new paradigm for religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities. The book also includes responses from three eminent scholars of religion:Nancy Ammerman, Detlef Pollack, and Fenggang Yang.

It is a truism that religion has to do with social cohesion, but the precise nature of this link has eluded scholars and scientists. Drawing on new research in religiously motivated prosociality, evolution of cooperation, and system theory, this book describes how fluctuations in individuals' strategic environment give impetus to a self-organizatory process where ritual behavior works to alleviate uncertainties in social commitment. It also traces the dynamic roles played by emotions, social norms, and socioeconomic context. While exploring the social functions of ritual and revivalist behavior, the book seeks to avoid the fallacies that result from disregarding their explicit religious character. To illustrate these processes, a case study of Christian revivals in early 19th-century Finland is included. The thesis of the book is relevant to theories of the evolution of religion and the role of religion in organizing human societies.

Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners' beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism-especially in post-Soviet societies-and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

This book challenges some of the most basic assumptions underpinning the growing interest in religion, including: that religion is increasing and secularisation is decreasing and that religion is the main component of identity for all minority ethnic people.

This was the first in-depth examination of relations between the Church of England and other faiths in the Prison Service Chaplaincy. It shows how the struggle for equal opportunities in a multi-faith society is politicising relations between the Church, the state and religious minorities. Drawing on a wealth of data, it considers the increasingly controversial role of Anglican chaplains in facilitating the religious and pastoral care of prisoners from non-Christian backgrounds, whose numbers among the prison population have been growing. Comparison with the United States underlines the closeness of the tie between the state and Christian churches in English prisons, and this book argues that it is time to reconsider the practice of keeping ethnic and religious minorities dependent on Anglican 'brokering' of their access to prison chaplaincy.

This creative study explores how Mohandas Gandhi's celebrated concept of "satyagraha" (non-violence) was eclipsed by the xenophobic Hindu nationalist movement that has organized ferocious episodes of ethnic cleansing against minority communities in contemporary India. By means of a close reading of Gandhi's writing on popular mobilization and resistance, and a detailed historical investigation of hitherto understudied episodes of "satyagraha" that took place in the first half of the twentieth century, Valiani illuminates debates on politics in South Asian history, anthropology, and sociology. Among other insights, this inquiry underscores the continuities and discontinuities between physical culture and various contending modes of popular political protest and activism in Gandhi's satyagraha movement and the militant Hindu nationalist movement in the western Indian state of Gujarat in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Interpreting his own direct observation of Hindu nationalist pogroms in contemporary Gujarat, in addition to testimonies and ethnographic observations of the inner workings of the movement that were revealed to the author when he was a "trainee" within it, this brilliant account offers readers a rare insider perspective on the social and religious world that historically and culturally produces militants.

With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.

When Psy's (Park Jae-sang) music video "Gangnam Style" went viral, it achieved not only overnight global appeal, but also made the Korean sensation an unexpected pop star breaking into the mainstream American music market. The popularity of Gangnam Style in the American scene has as much to say about our racialized society as is does about the man who fashioned a rap music with an infectious dance routine. Those who oppose this view maintain that Gangnam Style has achieved an overnight global appeal in part because of its catchy tune and a dance that is easy for audiences to imitate. As we listen to his music video, do we Americans laugh at him or with him? In this book, the authors respond to this question from historical and theological perspectives, that tackle the pressing issues concerning racial stereotypes, imposed masculinity, and imitating another in order to ridicule him/her.

This book discusses modern aspects of Japanese religion in terms of cultural geography. To understand the function of religion, it is essential to examine it in the context of local societies. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Japanese religion is its diversity; indeed, it is often remarked that "Japan is a museum of religions." In this work, the author clarifies some geographical aspects of the complex situation of Japanese religion. Chapter 1 discusses the trend of geographical studies of religion in Japan, of which four types can be identified. Chapter 2 focuses on certain characteristics of Japanese religious traditions by discussing tree worship and the landscape of sacred places. Chapter 3 clarifies regional divisions in the catchment areas of Japanese Shintoism by analyzing the distribution of certain types of believers. The author discusses two case studies: the Kasama Inari Shrine and the Kanamura Shrine. Chapter 4 discusses some modern aspects of sacred places and tourism through two case studies. The first part of the chapter focuses on changes in the types of businesses at the Omotesando of the Naritasan Shinshoji-Monzenmachi, and the following sections examine the revitalization of the local community through the promotion of religious tourism.

This collection examines the impact of East Asian religion and culture on the public sphere, defined as an idealized discursive arena that mediates the official and private spheres. Contending that the actors and agents on the fringes of society were instrumental in shaping the public sphere in traditional and modern East Asia, it considers how these outliers contribute to religious, intellectual, and cultural dialog in the public sphere. Jurgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as the discursive arena which grew within Western European bourgeoisie society, arguably overlooking topics such as gender, minorities, and non-European civilizations, as well as the extent to which agency in the public sphere is effective in non-Western societies and how practitioners on the outskirts of mainstream society can participate. This volume responds to and builds upon this dialogue by addressing how religious, intellectual, and cultural agency in the public sphere shapes East Asian cultures, particularly the activities of those found on the peripheries of historic and modern societies.