Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2016.1085240
E. Obadare
Abstract The paper postulates the emergence of a charismatic form of Islam in Western Nigeria, indexed by new modalities of prayer, modes of worship and proselytizing, organizational features, and repertoires of devotion that closely approximate forms and expressions normally exclusively associated with Pentecostal Christianity. It is argued that this new formation of Islam, while apparently triggered by Pentecostalism’s recent success in a competitive religious field, is not simply mimetic; but also reflects internal discourses and tensions within Islam, which unfold against the backdrop of political competition with Christianity in Nigeria.
{"title":"The Muslim response to the Pentecostal surge in Nigeria: Prayer and the rise of charismatic Islam","authors":"E. Obadare","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2016.1085240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2016.1085240","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper postulates the emergence of a charismatic form of Islam in Western Nigeria, indexed by new modalities of prayer, modes of worship and proselytizing, organizational features, and repertoires of devotion that closely approximate forms and expressions normally exclusively associated with Pentecostal Christianity. It is argued that this new formation of Islam, while apparently triggered by Pentecostalism’s recent success in a competitive religious field, is not simply mimetic; but also reflects internal discourses and tensions within Islam, which unfold against the backdrop of political competition with Christianity in Nigeria.","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121754036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2016.1085735
Sanal Mohan
Abstract Control over social space was central to the everyday practice of caste in Kerala, India. Caste system in Kerala had evolved extreme forms of control over social space, which was critiqued by European missionaries in the nineteenth century. The missionary work among the slave castes that emphasized learning prayers and the Gospel provided the untouchable slaves with a new conceptual language. This was central to the claims of slave castes to the social space as they could come together defying the caste rules and regulations of distance pollution for prayer meetings which began in the slave schools and chapels in the evening after a day’s back-breaking labor in their landlords’ fields. The slave schools and chapels created a new social space that enabled the slave castes to claim all other modern social spaces. The slaves took over new cultural practices such as forming social organizations from the missionaries and used them effectively in their congregational activities. The experiences of social movements such as the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS) show that the former slave castes could effectively use prayer as a powerful instrument to claim social space which was highly structured and in egalitarian.
{"title":"Creation of social space through prayers among Dalits in Kerala, India","authors":"Sanal Mohan","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2016.1085735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2016.1085735","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Control over social space was central to the everyday practice of caste in Kerala, India. Caste system in Kerala had evolved extreme forms of control over social space, which was critiqued by European missionaries in the nineteenth century. The missionary work among the slave castes that emphasized learning prayers and the Gospel provided the untouchable slaves with a new conceptual language. This was central to the claims of slave castes to the social space as they could come together defying the caste rules and regulations of distance pollution for prayer meetings which began in the slave schools and chapels in the evening after a day’s back-breaking labor in their landlords’ fields. The slave schools and chapels created a new social space that enabled the slave castes to claim all other modern social spaces. The slaves took over new cultural practices such as forming social organizations from the missionaries and used them effectively in their congregational activities. The experiences of social movements such as the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS) show that the former slave castes could effectively use prayer as a powerful instrument to claim social space which was highly structured and in egalitarian.","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"186 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115747710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2016.1085243
R. Marshall
Abstract This paper focuses on contemporary charismatic Christian practices of spiritual warfare and its techniques of warfare prayer. The paradigm of “global spiritual warfare” with its apocalyptic visions, violent language and its obsession with enemies, appears as a particularly polemical instance of Christian supersessionism and expansionism. Drawing on material from Nigeria and the United States, I briefly explore two related axes in order to bring to light the centrality of prayer conceived as a form of political praxis. First, the ways in which charismatic Christianity self-consciously and antagonistically constructs itself as a global force. In this global expansion, prayer as an embodied form of inspired speech is central both to the construction of militant subjects and the occupation of public space. Secondly, since the violence of spiritual warriors is mostly effected through their prayers and testimonies, we are led to question the place of an activist, pragmatist, or even performative model of truth for a political problematics of emancipation and democratization.
{"title":"Destroying arguments and captivating thoughts: Spiritual warfare prayer as global praxis","authors":"R. Marshall","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2016.1085243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2016.1085243","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper focuses on contemporary charismatic Christian practices of spiritual warfare and its techniques of warfare prayer. The paradigm of “global spiritual warfare” with its apocalyptic visions, violent language and its obsession with enemies, appears as a particularly polemical instance of Christian supersessionism and expansionism. Drawing on material from Nigeria and the United States, I briefly explore two related axes in order to bring to light the centrality of prayer conceived as a form of political praxis. First, the ways in which charismatic Christianity self-consciously and antagonistically constructs itself as a global force. In this global expansion, prayer as an embodied form of inspired speech is central both to the construction of militant subjects and the occupation of public space. Secondly, since the violence of spiritual warriors is mostly effected through their prayers and testimonies, we are led to question the place of an activist, pragmatist, or even performative model of truth for a political problematics of emancipation and democratization.","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"69 6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116285783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1074794
P. Veer
{"title":"JRPP’s Forthcoming Special Issue titled “Prayer and Politics”","authors":"P. Veer","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1074794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1074794","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126123159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1047696
P. van der Veer
Abstract This paper argues that religious and political practice in the modern word is in important ways shaped and framed by nationalism. This argument qualifies the general critique of methodological nationalism that is a feature of current literature on transnationalism. It first analyzes the general features of the relation between religion and nationalism. Through a comparison of the development of nationalism in India and China it further argues that while the relation between religion and nationalism in these societies shows some of the general features that have been laid out in the previous section, there are also significant differences that can be understood through an anthropological understanding of the generality of the nation-form and the specificity of its historical articulation. Finally, it exemplifies the argument at the level of practice by showing how secular nationalism has framed ritual and political practice in Singapore without being able to entirely control it.
{"title":"Nation, Politics, Religion","authors":"P. van der Veer","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1047696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1047696","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper argues that religious and political practice in the modern word is in important ways shaped and framed by nationalism. This argument qualifies the general critique of methodological nationalism that is a feature of current literature on transnationalism. It first analyzes the general features of the relation between religion and nationalism. Through a comparison of the development of nationalism in India and China it further argues that while the relation between religion and nationalism in these societies shows some of the general features that have been laid out in the previous section, there are also significant differences that can be understood through an anthropological understanding of the generality of the nation-form and the specificity of its historical articulation. Finally, it exemplifies the argument at the level of practice by showing how secular nationalism has framed ritual and political practice in Singapore without being able to entirely control it.","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130836063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1047692
J. Timmer
Anthropological scholarship of Christianity has been thriving over the last one and a half decades. While studies of Pentecostalism have played an important role in the growth of this field, research on elements of religion that are typically associated with studies of Catholicism (experience, motivation, personhood and movement or pilgrimage) has been less influential. While Protestant and in particular Pentecostal believers tend to explicitly position themselves against local culture, Catholic identity formation is often less coherent. It is therefore no surprise that in many studies of conversion to Pentecostalism, much analytical emphasis is put on the deployment of rituals that have an uncompromising character. As a result, the anthropological focus of the Anthropology of Christianity tends to elaborate on the causes of social and cultural change at the expense of how people experience and deal with such changes, as Simon Coleman (2014) suggests. Coleman laments the particular “semiotics of theory” in the Anthropology of Christianity and, in response he pushes for a reconciliation between studies of Pentecostalism and pilgrimage studies (in which “Catholic elements” have been prominent). The two studies reviewed here engage with the Anthropology of Christianity, albeit mostly implicitly, and Coleman’s attractive agenda nicely help us to highlight their merits and limitations. Jeffrey Sissons’s historical analysis of Polynesian iconoclasm takes ritual as uncompromisingly structuring social and cultural life, as “largely ‘systemic’” (7), a revolutionary mode of historical agency that was arranged by both chiefs and priests in the Society Islands, Southern Cook Islands and Hawai’ian Islands. The main argument of the book is that because all the people in this region shared ritual and seasonal precedent, the Polynesian iconoclasm was destined to become a regional event, and, “as a ground for historical being, the ritually-produced seasonality of life was fundamental to the indigenous agency through which Christian conversion was affected” (11). The iconoclasm is the destruction or desecration of temples and god-images that began on the island of Mo’orea, near Tahiti, in the winter of 1815 and spread rapidly to the neighboring islands. Chapter 2 details the iconoclasm on Mo’orea as led by the high chief Pomare and his new god, Jehovah, and suggests that hierarchical divisions in society were dissolved in collective feasts. The following two chapters consider the extension of the Mo’orean iconoclasm on the other islands. Analytically these chapters build on Arthur Maurice
{"title":"Patterns and Iconoclasm in Motion","authors":"J. Timmer","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1047692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1047692","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropological scholarship of Christianity has been thriving over the last one and a half decades. While studies of Pentecostalism have played an important role in the growth of this field, research on elements of religion that are typically associated with studies of Catholicism (experience, motivation, personhood and movement or pilgrimage) has been less influential. While Protestant and in particular Pentecostal believers tend to explicitly position themselves against local culture, Catholic identity formation is often less coherent. It is therefore no surprise that in many studies of conversion to Pentecostalism, much analytical emphasis is put on the deployment of rituals that have an uncompromising character. As a result, the anthropological focus of the Anthropology of Christianity tends to elaborate on the causes of social and cultural change at the expense of how people experience and deal with such changes, as Simon Coleman (2014) suggests. Coleman laments the particular “semiotics of theory” in the Anthropology of Christianity and, in response he pushes for a reconciliation between studies of Pentecostalism and pilgrimage studies (in which “Catholic elements” have been prominent). The two studies reviewed here engage with the Anthropology of Christianity, albeit mostly implicitly, and Coleman’s attractive agenda nicely help us to highlight their merits and limitations. Jeffrey Sissons’s historical analysis of Polynesian iconoclasm takes ritual as uncompromisingly structuring social and cultural life, as “largely ‘systemic’” (7), a revolutionary mode of historical agency that was arranged by both chiefs and priests in the Society Islands, Southern Cook Islands and Hawai’ian Islands. The main argument of the book is that because all the people in this region shared ritual and seasonal precedent, the Polynesian iconoclasm was destined to become a regional event, and, “as a ground for historical being, the ritually-produced seasonality of life was fundamental to the indigenous agency through which Christian conversion was affected” (11). The iconoclasm is the destruction or desecration of temples and god-images that began on the island of Mo’orea, near Tahiti, in the winter of 1815 and spread rapidly to the neighboring islands. Chapter 2 details the iconoclasm on Mo’orea as led by the high chief Pomare and his new god, Jehovah, and suggests that hierarchical divisions in society were dissolved in collective feasts. The following two chapters consider the extension of the Mo’orean iconoclasm on the other islands. Analytically these chapters build on Arthur Maurice","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131641710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1047687
G. Anidjar
Abstract The relation between the concept of religion and its Christian determinations has surely become increasingly visible. In the study of religion, Christianity (vera religio, western Christendom) has served as a paradigmatic occasion, a prime focus, of constant research and investigation. Its history and transformations have rightly been studied in a plethora of ways and approaches. Throughout, the question of Christianity – if there is one – lingers as a question of religion. Everything is therefore as though the interrogation of the concept of religion does not unsettle our understanding of Christianity as a religion. A strange essentialism. For what if Christianity were not a religion? Not exclusively so? What if, for two thousand years, it had been more than a religion? Or something else altogether? What if it became a religion (in the restricted, modern sense) only latterly? Having learned what we can from and about the concept of religion – its novelty, its questionable disappearance, its containment – should we not reconsider what we mean by Christianity?
{"title":"Christianity, Christianities, Christian","authors":"G. Anidjar","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1047687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1047687","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The relation between the concept of religion and its Christian determinations has surely become increasingly visible. In the study of religion, Christianity (vera religio, western Christendom) has served as a paradigmatic occasion, a prime focus, of constant research and investigation. Its history and transformations have rightly been studied in a plethora of ways and approaches. Throughout, the question of Christianity – if there is one – lingers as a question of religion. Everything is therefore as though the interrogation of the concept of religion does not unsettle our understanding of Christianity as a religion. A strange essentialism. For what if Christianity were not a religion? Not exclusively so? What if, for two thousand years, it had been more than a religion? Or something else altogether? What if it became a religion (in the restricted, modern sense) only latterly? Having learned what we can from and about the concept of religion – its novelty, its questionable disappearance, its containment – should we not reconsider what we mean by Christianity?","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127614967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1047689
I. Ahmad, B. Turner
{"title":"Inaugural Statement","authors":"I. Ahmad, B. Turner","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1047689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1047689","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133756704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1047693
McComas Taylor
{"title":"Rattling the Indological Cage: Fifty Years of Doniger","authors":"McComas Taylor","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1047693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1047693","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126225110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-01-01DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2015.1047690
M. Herzfeld
Abstract City spaces not only reflect doctrinal religious ideas in orientation and monumental architecture, they also both reflect and enable pragmatic accommodations to human frailty. Long-term immersion in ethnographic research reveals the linkages and tensions between the structure of official religious morality and the reality of everyday social practice. Using field materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I offer suggestive examples of such practical accommodations, both in the religious principles underlying bureaucratic approaches to urban spatiality and in the construction of local places of worship and commemoration. Displays of orthopraxy overlie locally pertinent (and sometimes divergent) conceptions of religiosity that are nevertheless historically and formally linked to doctrinal orthodoxy. Formal religions, like nation-states, often depend on the covert presence of cultural intimacy (here “religious intimacy”) – spaces for the recognition and quiet toleration of divergent attitudes and practices – for their long-term survival. Displays of loyalty and religiosity are thus primarily practices of identity rather than expressions of the complexity of innermost belief, and, as such, they form a protective façade of structural consistency that hides the internal tensions and accommodations generated between doctrine and practice by the human foibles and social ambiguities of everyday life.
{"title":"Practical Piety: Intimate Devotions in Urban Space","authors":"M. Herzfeld","doi":"10.1080/20566093.2015.1047690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2015.1047690","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract City spaces not only reflect doctrinal religious ideas in orientation and monumental architecture, they also both reflect and enable pragmatic accommodations to human frailty. Long-term immersion in ethnographic research reveals the linkages and tensions between the structure of official religious morality and the reality of everyday social practice. Using field materials from Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I offer suggestive examples of such practical accommodations, both in the religious principles underlying bureaucratic approaches to urban spatiality and in the construction of local places of worship and commemoration. Displays of orthopraxy overlie locally pertinent (and sometimes divergent) conceptions of religiosity that are nevertheless historically and formally linked to doctrinal orthodoxy. Formal religions, like nation-states, often depend on the covert presence of cultural intimacy (here “religious intimacy”) – spaces for the recognition and quiet toleration of divergent attitudes and practices – for their long-term survival. Displays of loyalty and religiosity are thus primarily practices of identity rather than expressions of the complexity of innermost belief, and, as such, they form a protective façade of structural consistency that hides the internal tensions and accommodations generated between doctrine and practice by the human foibles and social ambiguities of everyday life.","PeriodicalId":252085,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religious and Political Practice","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128516736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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