Bücher der Reihe Contemporary Anthropology of Religion

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Here, eleven international scholars examine Islamic law in several contemporary sociopolitical contexts, focusing specifically on Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Tunisia, Nigeria, the United States, and the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (IIFA) of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Nigerian diaspora is now world-wide, and when Yoruba travel, they take with them their religious organizations. As a member of the Cherubim and Seraphim church in London for over thirty years, anthropologist Hermione Harris explores a world of prayer, spirit possession, and divination through dreams and visions.

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

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.

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.

The Nigerian diaspora is now world-wide, and when Yoruba travel, they take with them their religious organizations. As a member of the Cherubim and Seraphim church in London for over thirty years, anthropologist Hermione Harris explores a world of prayer, spirit possession, and divination through dreams and visions.

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.

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?

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.

Exactly where is the common ground between religion and medicine in phenomena described as 'religious healing?' In what sense is the human body a cultural phenomenon and not merely a biological entity?

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.

In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument and intellectual exploration.

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.

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.