{"title":":White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America","authors":"R. Balmer","doi":"10.1086/724947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724947","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85698994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the mid-1920s, the vernacular press in colonial Java and Sumatra printed advertisements and articles engaging the idea of halal products, from margarine to mortgages. This article unfolds how these early halal utterances connected with religious demands and motivations while also reflecting the impact of the contingent political and economic colonial context, including public health policies. This is evidenced, for example, by marketers’ choice to add the halal label to claims of cleanliness and nutritiousness as a strategy to expand their consumer base. Similarly, conversations about alcohol consumption and animal slaughter were shaped by reflections over Islamic compliance as well as by the powerful overtones of hygienic modernity amid the Great Depression. Islamic precepts were important for individuals’ life choices and anticolonial politics, but this article shows the complex web of relations that gave rise to Indonesia’s late colonial era claims of halal beyond “Islamization”—a trend usually associated with turn-of-the-century Cairene reformism and Saudi Wahhabism—and in close relation to questions of hygiene and nutrition instead.
{"title":"Bouillon for His Majesty: Healthy halal Modernity in Colonial Java","authors":"Chiara Formichi","doi":"10.1086/724544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724544","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-1920s, the vernacular press in colonial Java and Sumatra printed advertisements and articles engaging the idea of halal products, from margarine to mortgages. This article unfolds how these early halal utterances connected with religious demands and motivations while also reflecting the impact of the contingent political and economic colonial context, including public health policies. This is evidenced, for example, by marketers’ choice to add the halal label to claims of cleanliness and nutritiousness as a strategy to expand their consumer base. Similarly, conversations about alcohol consumption and animal slaughter were shaped by reflections over Islamic compliance as well as by the powerful overtones of hygienic modernity amid the Great Depression. Islamic precepts were important for individuals’ life choices and anticolonial politics, but this article shows the complex web of relations that gave rise to Indonesia’s late colonial era claims of halal beyond “Islamization”—a trend usually associated with turn-of-the-century Cairene reformism and Saudi Wahhabism—and in close relation to questions of hygiene and nutrition instead.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"57 1","pages":"373 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90906105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article asks how religious traditions make otherwise invisible worlds perceptible and real for religious practitioners and analyzes the specific case of Tibetan pilgrimage literature in order to propose a theoretical account for how they do so. Specifically, I show how the textual tradition of Tibetan pilgrimage guides plays a key role in structuring the pilgrimage experience, particularly in terms of the pilgrim’s visual encounter with the material landscape. Pilgrimage guides are particularly concerned with vision because the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition maintains that holy mountains have both an outer appearance visible to ordinary people and an inner reality that only advanced beings can see. As such, the goal for pilgrims is to transform their perception so as to see the hidden reality of the mountain. To show how guides seek to facilitate such a transformation, I first identify the key literary strategies that guides use to project a fantastic vision of the holy sites they describe. Next, I demonstrate how guides recontextualize pilgrims’ ordinary perception of the pilgrimage site such that they view the ordinary in tandem with the extraordinary. I refer to this facility as “co-seeing,” or the ability to see the place in two ways at once. This co-seeing serves to ground the fantastic vision of the site in the material landscape. The article thus draws on new theoretical developments in the so-called visual turn and new materialism to provide an account of how religious traditions engage both perception and landscape to shape practitioners’ experience of the world.
{"title":"How to See the Invisible: Attention, Landscape, and the Transformation of Vision in Tibetan Pilgrimage Guides","authors":"Catherine Hartmann","doi":"10.1086/724562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724562","url":null,"abstract":"This article asks how religious traditions make otherwise invisible worlds perceptible and real for religious practitioners and analyzes the specific case of Tibetan pilgrimage literature in order to propose a theoretical account for how they do so. Specifically, I show how the textual tradition of Tibetan pilgrimage guides plays a key role in structuring the pilgrimage experience, particularly in terms of the pilgrim’s visual encounter with the material landscape. Pilgrimage guides are particularly concerned with vision because the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition maintains that holy mountains have both an outer appearance visible to ordinary people and an inner reality that only advanced beings can see. As such, the goal for pilgrims is to transform their perception so as to see the hidden reality of the mountain. To show how guides seek to facilitate such a transformation, I first identify the key literary strategies that guides use to project a fantastic vision of the holy sites they describe. Next, I demonstrate how guides recontextualize pilgrims’ ordinary perception of the pilgrimage site such that they view the ordinary in tandem with the extraordinary. I refer to this facility as “co-seeing,” or the ability to see the place in two ways at once. This co-seeing serves to ground the fantastic vision of the site in the material landscape. The article thus draws on new theoretical developments in the so-called visual turn and new materialism to provide an account of how religious traditions engage both perception and landscape to shape practitioners’ experience of the world.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"95 1","pages":"313 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84379734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the parallel conceptualizations of “religion” developed by two intellectuals of distinct backgrounds in late Sasanian Iran, Burzōy and Paul the Persian, and the broader climate of incipient “secularity” their ideas, and the convergence between them, may reflect. The article shows how these authors made similar innovations within their respective religious and scholarly traditions (Zoroastrianism for Burzōy, specifically the genre of andarz or wisdom literature; East Syrian Christianity for Paul the Persian, along with late antique Neoplatonism), significantly breaking with their antecedents and contemporaries. Both Burzōy and Paul delineate a certain sphere of discourse, focused above all on questions of cosmology, eschatology, and the otherworldly consequences of action in this world, in which the members of various “traditions” or “religions” participate. These authors also share the assumption that the choice between these traditions or religions should be made on the basis of reason, and not tradition, and they are also each, in their way, emphatically noncommittal to any individual tradition or religion. Aspects of Burzōy and Paul the Persian’s shared late Sasanian context, including the popularity of the interreligious disputation, are brought forth to explain their parallel departures from tradition. The transmission and reception of these authors’ respective works and ideas in the medieval Islamic world are also considered, along with the broader intellectual legacy of the Sasanian Empire.
{"title":"The Conceptualization of Religion and Incipient Secularity in Late Sasanian Iran: Burzōy and Paul the Persian’s Parallel Departures from Tradition","authors":"Thomas Benfey","doi":"10.1086/724560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724560","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the parallel conceptualizations of “religion” developed by two intellectuals of distinct backgrounds in late Sasanian Iran, Burzōy and Paul the Persian, and the broader climate of incipient “secularity” their ideas, and the convergence between them, may reflect. The article shows how these authors made similar innovations within their respective religious and scholarly traditions (Zoroastrianism for Burzōy, specifically the genre of andarz or wisdom literature; East Syrian Christianity for Paul the Persian, along with late antique Neoplatonism), significantly breaking with their antecedents and contemporaries. Both Burzōy and Paul delineate a certain sphere of discourse, focused above all on questions of cosmology, eschatology, and the otherworldly consequences of action in this world, in which the members of various “traditions” or “religions” participate. These authors also share the assumption that the choice between these traditions or religions should be made on the basis of reason, and not tradition, and they are also each, in their way, emphatically noncommittal to any individual tradition or religion. Aspects of Burzōy and Paul the Persian’s shared late Sasanian context, including the popularity of the interreligious disputation, are brought forth to explain their parallel departures from tradition. The transmission and reception of these authors’ respective works and ideas in the medieval Islamic world are also considered, along with the broader intellectual legacy of the Sasanian Empire.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"1 1","pages":"340 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91212762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Moral Majorities across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right","authors":"Michael Amoruso","doi":"10.1086/724948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724948","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90752788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although quests for religious origins have been theoretically deconstructed by scholars, discourse about religion in much of the public sphere remains enamored with originality, especially to bolster claims among groups competing over shared spaces. At the Sri Lankan Sufi shrine of Dafther Jailani in Kuragala, an obsession with origins has dramatically reorganized the space, used to justify the physical deconstruction of Muslim pilgrim buildings by the Sri Lankan military. Dafther Jailani also faces other threats from arbiters of originality, including orthodox Sunni Muslims who claim to be stewards of authentic Islam, alongside the Buddhist nationalists who seek to make Kuragala a protected archeological site synonymous with non-Muslim space. Both Buddhists and Muslims have mixed mythical narratives and empirical evidence to advance their claims, and even artifacts from human prehistory at Kuragala are appropriated to provide a new secular excuse for extremist Buddhists to enact an absence of Muslims. Such debates over origins are shown to be a zero-sum game, as one group must lose for another to gain. Yet these gains are ultimately hollow, as mutually valued spaces are emptied of living history to better resemble an ideal past. To combat such erasures, historians of religion must strike a balance between the empirical and ethical, critiquing not only factual errors in these arguments, but also correct information being used incorrectly, to argue in the normative terms of the religious actors themselves that there is much lost and little gained in primordial preoccupations.
{"title":"The Deconstruction of Dafther Jailani: Muslim and Buddhist Contests of Original History in Sri Lanka","authors":"Alexander McKinley, M. Xavier","doi":"10.1086/723307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723307","url":null,"abstract":"Although quests for religious origins have been theoretically deconstructed by scholars, discourse about religion in much of the public sphere remains enamored with originality, especially to bolster claims among groups competing over shared spaces. At the Sri Lankan Sufi shrine of Dafther Jailani in Kuragala, an obsession with origins has dramatically reorganized the space, used to justify the physical deconstruction of Muslim pilgrim buildings by the Sri Lankan military. Dafther Jailani also faces other threats from arbiters of originality, including orthodox Sunni Muslims who claim to be stewards of authentic Islam, alongside the Buddhist nationalists who seek to make Kuragala a protected archeological site synonymous with non-Muslim space. Both Buddhists and Muslims have mixed mythical narratives and empirical evidence to advance their claims, and even artifacts from human prehistory at Kuragala are appropriated to provide a new secular excuse for extremist Buddhists to enact an absence of Muslims. Such debates over origins are shown to be a zero-sum game, as one group must lose for another to gain. Yet these gains are ultimately hollow, as mutually valued spaces are emptied of living history to better resemble an ideal past. To combat such erasures, historians of religion must strike a balance between the empirical and ethical, critiquing not only factual errors in these arguments, but also correct information being used incorrectly, to argue in the normative terms of the religious actors themselves that there is much lost and little gained in primordial preoccupations.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"1 1","pages":"254 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90100200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali","authors":"W. Schultz","doi":"10.1086/723306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723306","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79115027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation","authors":"Gregory M. Clines","doi":"10.1086/723305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72694362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article, with a focus on early Chan texts that predate received Chan texts, explores how Chan attitudes toward merit-making rituals developed from the eighth to the eleventh century. First, utilizing polemic texts composed by both Chan figures and their critics, this article details the articulation of ritual-related rhetoric in early Chan. Second, by focusing on a specific type of lineage-building ritual, this article examines the ambivalence toward the practice of hosting a memorial feast for a deceased Chan master. Third, this article demonstrates that aversion to ritual is deemphasized after Chan became mainstream in the Song and certain types of ritual are explicitly promoted in Chan materials.
{"title":"Antipathy, Ambivalence, and Acceptance: Chan Attitudes toward Ritual from the Eighth to the Eleventh Century","authors":"Yi Ding","doi":"10.1086/723304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723304","url":null,"abstract":"This article, with a focus on early Chan texts that predate received Chan texts, explores how Chan attitudes toward merit-making rituals developed from the eighth to the eleventh century. First, utilizing polemic texts composed by both Chan figures and their critics, this article details the articulation of ritual-related rhetoric in early Chan. Second, by focusing on a specific type of lineage-building ritual, this article examines the ambivalence toward the practice of hosting a memorial feast for a deceased Chan master. Third, this article demonstrates that aversion to ritual is deemphasized after Chan became mainstream in the Song and certain types of ritual are explicitly promoted in Chan materials.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":"355 1","pages":"284 - 305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80110036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}