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.

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.

This volume explores the socio-cultural dynamics of religious speeches through an analysis of Christian and Islamic sermons and preachers in the past and present. Part I focuses on the explicit contribution of sermons in socio-cultural transformation processes. It shows how the sermons’ connection to holy texts and religious norms of the specific group results in a tense relationship between preaching and the respective socio-cultural present. Part II intensifies this observation, analysing the dynamic tension between normativity and popularity. Rather than juxtaposing normative stances and popularity of sermons, it shows how that normativity can itself contribute to popularity and the quest of popularity carries its own normative stances. Part III explores the relevance of the ritual embeddedness of religious speech for the sermon as a catalyst of social dynamics and as a hybrid of normativity and popularity. It shows how speech and rituals are situated in a reciprocal relationship, where the performance of the speech, its own ritual character, and its positioning within religious practice must be individually examined.