Religious Hair Display and Its Meanings

Religious Hair Display and Its Meanings PDF Author: William C. Innes, Jr
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030699749
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book explores the fascinating world of religious hair observances within six religious traditions that account for 77% of the world’s adherents: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Symbolic use of hair has been, and remains, prevalent in all six and carries significant amounts of religious and social meaning. Hair is a unique body substance. It can be shaped and colored, removed from us without pain but still retain an individual’s essence, signal our age, sex, and sexual maturity, and much, much more. The book’s approach is to situate each practice within its tradition. That requires a study of its foundational leaders and their teachings, sacred texts (where they mention hair), its rites and rituals, ideas of religious power and subsequent historical development. Contemporary practitioners are interviewed for their motivations. Even more insight can be gleaned by searching beyond an overt religious purpose. Social scientists from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related fields bring their research to deliver added perceptions. The author reveals how hair practices are created from ancient psychological and cultural impulses, become modified by time, culture and religious intent, and are adopted by adherents for reasons ranging from personal religious expression to group identity. This book is written for the interested observer of our increasingly diverse society and for the student of comparative religion and sociology. It will change forever how you see hair.

Religious Hair Display and Its Meanings

Religious Hair Display and Its Meanings PDF Author: William C. Innes, Jr
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030699749
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the fascinating world of religious hair observances within six religious traditions that account for 77% of the world’s adherents: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Symbolic use of hair has been, and remains, prevalent in all six and carries significant amounts of religious and social meaning. Hair is a unique body substance. It can be shaped and colored, removed from us without pain but still retain an individual’s essence, signal our age, sex, and sexual maturity, and much, much more. The book’s approach is to situate each practice within its tradition. That requires a study of its foundational leaders and their teachings, sacred texts (where they mention hair), its rites and rituals, ideas of religious power and subsequent historical development. Contemporary practitioners are interviewed for their motivations. Even more insight can be gleaned by searching beyond an overt religious purpose. Social scientists from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related fields bring their research to deliver added perceptions. The author reveals how hair practices are created from ancient psychological and cultural impulses, become modified by time, culture and religious intent, and are adopted by adherents for reasons ranging from personal religious expression to group identity. This book is written for the interested observer of our increasingly diverse society and for the student of comparative religion and sociology. It will change forever how you see hair.

Religious Hair Display and Its Meanings

Religious Hair Display and Its Meanings PDF Author: Innes, Jr (William C.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030699758
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book explores the fascinating world of religious hair observances within six religious traditions that account for 77% of the world's adherents: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Symbolic use of hair has been, and remains, prevalent in all six and carries significant amounts of religious and social meaning. Hair is a unique body substance. It can be shaped and colored, removed from us without pain but still retain an individual's essence, signal our age, sex, and sexual maturity, and much, much more. The book's approach is to situate each practice within its tradition. That requires a study of its foundational leaders and their teachings, sacred texts (where they mention hair), its rites and rituals, ideas of religious power and subsequent historical development. Contemporary practitioners are interviewed for their motivations. Even more insight can be gleaned by searching beyond an overt religious purpose. Social scientists from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related fields bring their research to deliver added perceptions. The author reveals how hair practices are created from ancient psychological and cultural impulses, become modified by time, culture and religious intent, and are adopted by adherents for reasons ranging from personal religious expression to group identity. This book is written for the interested observer of our increasingly diverse society and for the student of comparative religion and sociology. It will change forever how you see hair.

Encyclopedia of Hair

Encyclopedia of Hair PDF Author: Victoria Sherrow
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This popular volume on the culture of hair through human history and around the globe has been updated and revised to include even more entries and current information. How we style our hair has the ability to shape the way others perceive us. For example, in 2017, the singer Macklemore denounced his hipster undercut hairstyle, a style that is associated with Hitler Youth and alt-right men, and in 2015, actress Rose McGowan shaved her head in order to take a stance against the traditional Hollywood sex symbol stereotype. This volume examines how hair-or lack thereof-can be an important symbol of gender, class, and culture around the world and through history. Hairstyles have come to represent cultural heritage and memory, and even political leanings, social beliefs, and identity. This second edition builds upon the original volume, updating all entries that have evolved over the last decade, such as by discussing hipster culture in the entries on beards and mustaches and recent medical breakthroughs in hair loss. New entries have been added that look at specific world regions, hair coverings, political symbolism behind certain styles, and other topics.

Medusa's Hair

Medusa's Hair PDF Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618921X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying. The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as Gananath Obeyesekere shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology.

Who's Afraid of Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

Who's Afraid of Madalyn Murray O'Hair? PDF Author: Siarlys Jenkins
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1450069495
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book is not about Madalyn Murray O ́Hair. It may help to exorcise her pale wan ghost from our legal system. She really doesn ́t amount to anything at all. She is irrelevant. There is nothing to be afraid of. But so many people don ́t know that. This book IS about who our laws belong to, and what our federal Constitution really means. Understanding the law is not the monopoly of lawyers, judges, elected officials, or people with advanced graduate degrees. All of those have an important role to play, but in a democratic republic, the law belongs to all of us. There is no reason that each and every American citizen cannot understand, and contribute to, the shape of our laws. That is especially true of our constitutional law - the supreme law of the land. One book can ́t cover everything in constitutional law. It can ́t even introduce everything. This book provides some simple introduction to Supreme Court cases, and federal appeals court cases, on the role of religion in public life. That means digging up court rulings from around 1869 right up until 2005. Really, the government and churches do have to interact with each other in all kinds of ways. Why? Because "We are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being." (That was written by Justice William O. Douglas in 1952. It has never been abandoned by the Supreme Court in all the years since). A consistent line of principle There is a consistent line of principle to be found in Supreme Court cases developed over at least 150 years. Each chapter helps to present what those fundamental principles are, using the words of actual Supreme Court opinions. Of course, the author relies on his own reading of these cases. The author offers some original thoughts on questions the courts have not fully resolved. Most important, this is a book on how to find, and read, the actual words of court rulings. Not what the newspapers squeeze into an article, not what the opposing lawyers shout into the microphone, after the decision comes down, but what the court really said, in full. There is an appendix which provides some longer cites from actual cases, for readers who want to read for themselves. There is a chapter on how to find cases, in law libraries or on the internet, for readers who really want to read it all for themselves. To understand the law, we do not need to rely on news reporters, analysts, or fundraising letters from interest groups. Those all have an important role to play, but neither God nor man authorized them to do our thinking for us. None of them tell us a complete story. Perhaps they cannot, perhaps they do not want to. It doesn ́t really matter what their reasons or motives are. No citizen needs to depend on these sources alone. Good News: Read it for yourself We can read federal court decisions for ourselves, think about what the courts wrote for ourselves, and come to our own conclusions about what it means for our lives and our country. There is a lot of very good news available to those who read what the law really says, instead of believing everything we hear on the street. There are a few common sense solutions to problems that have taken us around and around in legal circles without ever seeming to arrive anywhere. For example, how to offer a simple prayer before a football game without putting the school superintendent in the position of Establishing a religion. It ́s really very simple - Justices William O. Douglas, Potter Stewart, and Antonin Scalia have all pointed the way, and so has Justice Sandra Day O ́Connor. People who don ́t want to hear it don ́t have to. People who want to hear it can do so, or even say "Amen" at the closing. It is not necessary to sneeze in unison for a commencement speaker to say "God bless you." Here are the chapter headings, an outline of what is waiting for each r

A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance

A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance PDF Author: Edith Snook
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350122807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In the period 1450 to 1650 in Europe, hair was braided, curled, shaped, cut, colored, covered, decorated, supplemented, removed, and reused in magic, courtship, and art, amongst other things. On the body, Renaissance men and women often considered hair a signifier of order and civility. Hair style and the head coverings worn by many throughout the period marked not only the wearer's engagement with fashion, but also moral, religious, social, and political beliefs. Hair established individuals' positions in the period's social hierarchy and signified class, gender, and racial identities, as well as distinctions of age and marital and professional status. Such a meaningful part of the body, however, could also be disorderly, when it grew where it wasn't supposed to or transgressed the body's boundaries by being wild, uncovered, unpinned, or uncut. A natural material with cultural import, hair weaves together the Renaissance histories of fashion, politics, religion, gender, science, medicine, art, literature, and material culture. A necessarily interdisciplinary study, A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance explores the multiple meanings of hair, as well as the ideas and practices it inspired. Separate chapters contemplate Religion and Ritualized Belief, Self and Society, Fashion and Adornment, Production and Practice, Health and Hygiene, Sexuality and Gender, Race and Ethnicity, Class and Social Status, and Cultural Representations.

Wild Religion

Wild Religion PDF Author: David Chidester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520273079
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This book examines South Africa's political journey of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the context of religious diversity and the recent revitalization of indigenous religion and rituals.

Religion

Religion PDF Author: David Chidester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520969936
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Religion: Material Dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. The book is divided into three sections: Part One revitalizes basic categories—animism and sacred, space and time—by situating them in their material production and testing their analytical viability. Part Two examines religious formations as configurations of power that operate in material cultures and cultural economies and are most clearly shown in the power relations of colonialism and imperialism. Part Three explores the material dynamics of circulation through case studies of religious mobility, change, and diffusion as intimate as the body and as vast as the oceans. Each chapter offers insightful orientations and surprising possibilities for studying material religion. Exploring the material dynamics of religion from poetics to politics, David Chidester provides an entry into the study of material religion that will be welcomed by students and specialists in religious studies, anthropology, and history.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala PDF Author: John P. Hawkins
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826362265
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Mayas, and indeed all Guatemalans, are currently experiencing the collapse of their way of life. This collapse is disrupting ideologies, symbols, life practices, and social structures that have undergirded their society for almost five hundred years, and it is causing rapid and massive religious transformation among the K’iche’ Maya living in highland western Guatemala. Many Maya are converting to Christian Pentecostal faiths in which adherents and leaders become bodily agitated during worship. Drawing on over fifty years of research and data collected by field-school students, Hawkins argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed. Guatemala serves as a window on religious change around the world, and Hawkins examines the rapid pentecostalization of Christianity not only within Guatemala but also throughout the global South. The “pentecostal wail,” as he describes it, is ultimately an acknowledgment of the angst and insecurity of contemporary Maya.

Key Terms in Material Religion

Key Terms in Material Religion PDF Author: S. Brent Plate
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472595483
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Material religion is a rapidly growing field, and this volume offers an accessible, critical entry into these new areas of research. Each "key term" uses case studies and is accompanied by a color image – an object, practice, space, or site. The entries cut across geographies, histories, and traditions, offering a versatile and engaging text for the classroom. Key topics covered include: - Icon, ritual, magic, gender, race - Sacred, spirit, technology, - Space, belief, body, brain - Taste, touch, smell, sound, vision Each entry demonstrates in clear and jargon-free prose how the key term figures prominently in understanding the materiality of religion. Written by leading international scholars, all entries are linked by the ways materiality stands at the forefront of the understanding of religion, whether that comes from humanistic, social scientific, artistic, curatorial, or other perspectives. Brent Plate brings his expertise and extensive teaching experience to the comprehensive introduction which introduces students to the themes and methods of the material cultural study of religion. Key Terms in Material Religion provides a much-needed resource for courses on theory and method in religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and the ever-increasing number of courses focused on material religion.