Kinship in Bengali culture

Kinship in Bengali culture PDF Author: Ronald B. Inden
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788180280184
Category : Bengal (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
The Book Analyzes The Kinship System Of A Major Human Society That Possesses An Ancient, Literate Civilization And A Tradition Of Analytical Thought.

Kinship in Bengali culture

Kinship in Bengali culture PDF Author: Ronald B. Inden
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788180280184
Category : Bengal (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
The Book Analyzes The Kinship System Of A Major Human Society That Possesses An Ancient, Literate Civilization And A Tradition Of Analytical Thought.

Ritual

Ritual PDF Author: Catherine Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199739471
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

From the Margins of Hindu Marriage

From the Margins of Hindu Marriage PDF Author: Lindsey Harlan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195081188
Category : Hinduism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Providing a unique and intimate view of Hindu marriage, the essays in this collection explore points at which the margins of marriage are traversed or transgressed. Rather than focus on normative expectations within marriage, they examine times in which norms are tested or rejected. Using stories, songs, and narrated accounts, the essays treat such topics as widowhood, adultery, levirate, divorce, and suttee, as well as the subversion of marriage by devotion to deities and by alternative constructions of conjugal duty and marital experience.

Marriage and Modernity

Marriage and Modernity PDF Author: Rochona Majumdar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures

Semiotics of Cities, Selves, and Cultures PDF Author: Milton Singer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110857758
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description


Virtuous Bodies

Virtuous Bodies PDF Author: Susanne Mrozik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198041497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Virtuous Bodies breaks new ground in the field of Buddhist ethics by investigating the diverse roles bodies play in ethical development. Traditionally, Buddhists assumed a close connection between body and morality. Thus Buddhist literature contains descriptions of living beings that stink with sin, are disfigured by vices, or are perfumed and adorned with virtues. Taking an influential early medieval Indian Mah=ay=ana Buddhist text-'S=antideva's Compendium of Training ('Sik,s=asamuccaya)-as a case study, Susanne Mrozik demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a process of physical and moral transformation. Mrozik chooses The Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing her to reveal a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies. The text is a training manual for bodhisattvas, especially monastic bodhisattvas. In it, bodies function as markers of, and conditions for, one's own ethical development. Most strikingly, bodies also function as instruments for the ethical development of others. When living beings come into contact with the virtuous bodies of bodhisattvas, they are transformed physically and morally for the better. Virtuous Bodies explores both the centrality of bodies to the bodhisattva ideal and the corporeal specificity of that ideal. Arguing that the bodhisattva ideal is an embodied ethical ideal, Mrozik poses an array of fascinating questions: What does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bodies? What kinds of bodies have virtuous effects on others? Drawing on a range of contemporary theorists, this book engages in a feminist hermeneutics of recovery and suspicion in order to explore the ethical resources Buddhism offers to scholars and religious practitioners interested in the embodied nature of ethical ideals.

The Defining Moments in Bengal

The Defining Moments in Bengal PDF Author: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199089345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
This work explores some of the constitutive elements in the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. The author addresses some frequently unasked questions about the history of modern Bengal. In what way was twentieth-century Bengal different from 'Renaissance' Bengal of the late-nineteenth century? How was a regional identity consciousness redefined? Did the lineaments of politics in Bengal differ from the pattern in the rest of India? What social experiences drove the Muslim community's identity perception? How did Bengal cope with such crises as the impact of World War II, the famine of 1943 and the communal clashes that climaxed with the Calcutta riots of 1946? The author has chosen a significant period in the history of the region and draws on a wealth of sources archival and published documents, mainstream dailies, a host of rare Bengali magazines, memoirs and the literature of the time to tell his story. Looking closely at the momentous changes taking place in the region's economy, politics and socio-cultural milieu in the historically transformative years 1920-47, this book highlights myriad issues that cast a shadow on the decades that followed, arguably till our times.

Conceptions

Conceptions PDF Author: Aditya Bharadwaj
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785332317
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in India lie at the confluence of multiple cultural conceptions. These ‘conceptions’ are key to understanding the burgeoning spread of assisted reproductive technologies and the social implications of infertility and childlessness in India. This longitudinal study is situated in a number of diverse locales which, when taken together, unravel the complex nature of infertility and assisted conception in contemporary India.

White Saris and Sweet Mangoes

White Saris and Sweet Mangoes PDF Author: Sarah Lamb
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520220010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
By examining both gender and aging in this ethnography of an Indian village, Sarah Lamb forces a re-examination of major debates in feminist anthropology and contributes to the small but growing literature on aging in contemporary culture.

Woman, Marriage and Family

Woman, Marriage and Family PDF Author: Man Singh Das
Publisher: M.D. Publications Pvt. Ltd.
ISBN: 9788185880785
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
The book discusses about various issues related to women's adjustment, role commitment, satisfaction, decision-making, etc, in marital relations. In general, the book is a good source material for those who are doing research in the related field.