Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World PDF Author: Leah Elizabeth Comeau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350122912
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition.

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World PDF Author: Leah Elizabeth Comeau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350122912
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition.

Devotional Visualities

Devotional Visualities PDF Author: Karen Pechilis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350214191
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book's identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World PDF Author: Leah Elizabeth Comeau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350122904
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition.

Body, History, Myth

Body, History, Myth PDF Author: Anna Lise Seastrand
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069125799X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"The first major scholarly history of the important South Indian mural tradition in the early modern period, and a reconception of their role in negotiating the relationship between art and devotion"--

Rituals and Practices in World Religions

Rituals and Practices in World Religions PDF Author: David Bryce Yaden
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030279537
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book codifies, describes, and contextualizes group rituals and individual practices from world religious traditions. At the interface of religious studies, psychology, and medicine, it elucidates the cultural richness of practices and rituals from numerous world religions. The book begins by discussing the role that religious rituals and practices may play in the well-being of humans and the multi-dimensional cultural and psychological complexity of religious rituals and practices. It then discusses rituals and practices within a number of religions, including Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, Sikh, Hindu, Confucian, and other traditions. There is a need for a more inclusive collection of religious rituals and practices, as some practices are making headlines in contemporary society. Mindfulness is one of the fastest-growing psychological interventions in healthcare and Yoga is now practiced by tens of millions of people in the U.S.A. These practices have been examined in thousands of academic publications spanning neuroscience, psychology, medicine, sociology, and religious studies. While Mindfulness and Yoga have recently received widespread scientific and cultural attention, many rituals and practices from world religious traditions have remained underexplored in scholarly, scientific, and clinical contexts. This book brings more diverse rituals and practices into this academic discourse while providing a reference guide for clinicians and students of the topic.

Museums of World Religions

Museums of World Religions PDF Author: Charles Orzech
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135001625X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Critically examining the notion of 'world religions', Charles D. Orzech compares five purpose-built museums of world religions and their online extensions. Inspired by the 19th and 20th century discipline of comparative religion, these museums seek to promote religious tolerance by representing religious diversity and by arguing for underlying kinship among religions. From locations in Europe (Marburg, Glasgow and St Petersburg), to North America (Quebec) to Asia (Taipei), each museum advances a particular cultural history. This book shows how the curation of the objects they contain shapes public perceptions of religion, giving material form to the discourses about religion and world religions. Raising important questions about religion and secularity, museum displays and religious piety, Museums of World Religions questions the ideology that informs these museums. Building on recent anthropological work on the agency of religious objects, the author critiques these museums and suggests new approaches to displaying the matter of religion.

Qur'anic Matters

Qur'anic Matters PDF Author: Natalia K. Suit
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350121401
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In Qur'anic Matters, Natalia Suit explores the materiality of books, focusing on the mushaf. With its paper, binding, ink, and script, the mushaf is not simply a carrier of the Qur'anic text but, by the virtue of its material body, it also has the ability to engender reformulations of religious knowledge and practice. Reading the Qur'an on a screen of a phone, for example, does not require the same forms of ritual ablutions as reading a printed text. The rules of purity limiting the access to the Qur'anic text for menstruating woman change when the Qur'anic text is mediated by digital bytes instead of paper. Qur'anic Matters spans the time between two important technological shifts-the introduction of printed Qur'anic books in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the digitization of the Qur'an almost two centuries later. Throughout, Natalia Suit weaves together the theological, legal, economic, and social “presences” of the Qur'anic books into a single account. She argues that the message and the materiality of the object are not separate from each other, nor are they separate from the human bodies with which they come in contact.

Islam through Objects

Islam through Objects PDF Author: Anna Bigelow
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350132837
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Islam through Objects represents the state of the field of Islamic material cultural studies. With contributions from scholars of religion, anthropologists, art historians, folklorists, historians, and other disciplines, Anna Bigelow brings together a wide range of perspectives on Islamic materiality to debunk myths of Islamic aversion to material aspects of religion. Each chapter focuses on a single object in daily use by Muslims-prayer beads, coins, amulets, a cistern well, clothing, jewellery, bodily and domestic adornments-to consider both generic and particular aspects of the object in question. These narratives will engage the reader by describing and analyzing each object in terms of its provenance, materials, uses, and history, as well as the broader history, variety and uses of the object in Islamic history and cultures. Temporal, regional, and sectarian variations in the styles, uses, and theological perspectives are also considered. Framed by an introduction that assesses the various approaches to Islamic material culture in recent scholarship, Islam through Objects provides a template for the study of religion and material culture, which engages current theory, subtle and nuanced narratives, and the creative and imaginal capacities of Muslims through history.

Textual Amulets from Antiquity to Early Modern Times

Textual Amulets from Antiquity to Early Modern Times PDF Author: Christoffer Theis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350254541
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Comparing amulets over time and space, this volume focuses on the function of written words on these fascinating artefacts. Ranging from Roman Egypt to the Middle Ages and the Modern period, this book provides an overview on these artefacts in the Mediterranean world and beyond, including Europe, Iran, and Turkey. A deep analysis of the textuality of amulets provides comparative information on themes and structures of the religious traditions examined. A strong emphasis is placed on the material features of the amulets and their connections to ritual purposes. The textual content, as well as other characteristics, is examined systematically, in order to establish patterns of influence and diffusion. The question of production, which includes the relationships that linked professional magicians, artists and craftsmen to their clientele, is also discussed, as well as the sacred and cultural economies involved.

Sensational Piety

Sensational Piety PDF Author: Murtala Ibrahim
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350282316
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Grounded in anthropological comparison and the concept of materiality, this book offers an in-depth ethnographic study of the similarities and differences among various forms of religious practices in a Pentecostal Church (Christ Embassy) and an Islamic group (NASFAT) in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. Scholarship in this area tends to focus on inter-religious contestations and conflicts; however, this book proposes that another dynamic is unfolding between Christians and Muslims that is characterised by conviviality, interfaith joint action programmes, mutual influences and even the exchange of religious forms. The comparative approach reveals that, notwithstanding the seemingly opposed worldviews and divergences between Muslims and Christians, they all face similar challenges and apply similar techniques for meeting the challenges posed by the precarious Nigerian urban environment. It is through practices – especially those conducted in (semi-) public settings – that people from different religious persuasions define, encroach on and feel the weight of each other's presence.