Ritual and Ethnic Identity

Ritual and Ethnic Identity PDF Author: Jack N. Lightstone
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889207283
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this innovative and comprehensive collection of essays Jack Lightstone and Frederick Bird document and interpret ritual practice among contemporary Canadian Jews. They particularly focus on the character and meaning of the public performance of the Sabbath liturgy in six urban Canadian synagogues, ranging from Orthodox to Reform, and from large congregations to a small house synagogue-yeshiva (rabbinic academy). Their examination of synagogue ritual is complemented with accounts of the ritual life of contemporary Canadian Jews outside the synagogue — amongst their families, within their homes and beyond. In contrast with other studies of Jewish observance, Lightstone and Bird document not simply which rituals are practised and how often; rather they stress the meaning, including the social meaning, of these rituals and treat them as complex symbolic systems. Their multidisciplinary approach together with their openness to include a wide variety of phenomena in their study (for example, the organization of the physical setting of the Sabbath, dress codes and patterns of greeting and handshaking) place this work at the very forefront of current research. Ritual and Ethnic Identity will be of great value to historians and sociologists of religion, anthropologists and all those concerned with religion, ritual and Canadian Jewish and ethnic studies.

Ritual and Ethnic Identity

Ritual and Ethnic Identity PDF Author: Jack N. Lightstone
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889207283
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book

Book Description
In this innovative and comprehensive collection of essays Jack Lightstone and Frederick Bird document and interpret ritual practice among contemporary Canadian Jews. They particularly focus on the character and meaning of the public performance of the Sabbath liturgy in six urban Canadian synagogues, ranging from Orthodox to Reform, and from large congregations to a small house synagogue-yeshiva (rabbinic academy). Their examination of synagogue ritual is complemented with accounts of the ritual life of contemporary Canadian Jews outside the synagogue — amongst their families, within their homes and beyond. In contrast with other studies of Jewish observance, Lightstone and Bird document not simply which rituals are practised and how often; rather they stress the meaning, including the social meaning, of these rituals and treat them as complex symbolic systems. Their multidisciplinary approach together with their openness to include a wide variety of phenomena in their study (for example, the organization of the physical setting of the Sabbath, dress codes and patterns of greeting and handshaking) place this work at the very forefront of current research. Ritual and Ethnic Identity will be of great value to historians and sociologists of religion, anthropologists and all those concerned with religion, ritual and Canadian Jewish and ethnic studies.

Rituals of Ethnicity

Rituals of Ethnicity PDF Author: Sara Shneiderman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229100X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Rituals of Ethnicity is a transnational study of the relationships between mobility, ethnicity, and ritual action. Through an ethnography of the Thangmi, a marginalized community who migrate between Himalayan border zones of Nepal, India, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, Shneiderman offers a new explanation for the persistence of enduring ethnic identities today despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives. She shows that ethnicization may be understood as a process of ritualization, which brings people together around the shared sacred object of identity. The first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, Rituals of Ethnicity is framed by the Maoist-state civil conflict in Nepal and the movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland in India. The histories of individual nation-states in this geopolitical hotspot—as well as the cross-border flows of people and ideas between them—reveal the far-reaching and mutually entangled discourses of democracy, communism, development, and indigeneity that have transformed the region over the past half century. Attentive to the competing claims of diverse members of the Thangmi community, from shamans to political activists, Shneiderman shows how Thangmi ethnic identity is produced collaboratively by individuals through ritual actions embedded in local, national, and transnational contexts. She builds upon the specificity of Thangmi experiences to tell a larger story about the complexities of ethnic consciousness: the challenges of belonging and citizenship under conditions of mobility, the desire to both lay claim to and remain apart from the civil society of multiple states, and the paradox of self-identification as a group with cultural traditions in need of both preservation and development. Through deep engagement with a diverse, cross-border community that yearns to be understood as a distinctive, coherent whole, Rituals of Ethnicity presents an argument for the continued value of locally situated ethnography in a multisited world. Cover art: Lost Culture Can Not Be Reborn, painting by Mahendra Thami, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India.

Roots & Rituals

Roots & Rituals PDF Author: Ton Dekker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethnicity
Languages : de
Pages : 838

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Book Description


Ritual, Heritage and Identity

Ritual, Heritage and Identity PDF Author: Christiane Brosius
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000087239
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This book explores the importance of ritual and ritual theory to discourses of authenticity and originality, thereby deepening our insight into concepts of cultural heritage, identity and nation in a globalised world. The volume is the first interdisciplinary attempt to understand the significance of rituals and related performative traditions in the creation of grounded cultural identities, ‘home’ and heritage as geographically experienceable locations. It assembles perspectives from social and cultural anthropology, performance studies, education and arts that can deal with the politics of revitalisation and preservation of ritualised traditions. While some chapters in this book emphasise on the ritualisation of cultural heritage by concentrating on power relations and politics, as well as actual processes of identification, especially for marginalised ethnic groups or migrant communities, others explore how rituals as intangible heritage are strategically employed by different groups all over the world to make their claims public and to improve and negotiate their position on a local, national or global platform. This book recognises ritualised performances as transnational and cross-cultural phenomena, which are not only tied to and defined via national territories and identities but which also demand new theoretical and methodological approaches towards the discussion of rituals and heritage.

Celebrating the Family

Celebrating the Family PDF Author: Elizabeth H. Pleck
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674002791
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Pleck examines changes in the way Americans celebrate holidays like Christmas or birthdays.

Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora

Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora PDF Author: Nancy J. Wellmeier
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815331179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book analyzes the lives and the continuing ritual traditions of the Mayas who live in the United States. Focusing on a predominantly Maya town in rural Florida, it shows how members of this ancient Central American civilization use their religious tradition to maintain their ethnic identity in an unfamiliar environment. Bringing together studies of Mesoamerican fiesta or cargo systems, religious ritual and migration studies, this interdisciplinary work describes the religious traditions of indigenous Guatemala, the crisis migration of the 1980s, and the Mayas' daily life in the United States, including Maya women's reflections on their new challenges. The book is unique in its focus on the transfer of the fiesta cycle to the diaspora and its analysis of the behind-the-scenes aspects of ritual. The rise of leadership, contested interpretations of ethnic identity, choices about symbolic representation, and maintenance of ties to villages of origin all take place in the context of organizing public ritual events. Through these strategies, the Maya people not only cope materially and spiritually with the chaotic experience of uprootedness, but find ways to strengthen their unique identity. Bibliography. Index.

Theorizing Rituals

Theorizing Rituals PDF Author: Jens Kreinath
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004153438
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory. Instead of proposing yet another theory of ritual, the bibliography is a comprehensive monument documenting four decades of theorizing rituals.

Pluralism and Identity

Pluralism and Identity PDF Author: Platvoet
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004378898
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The subject of this book is ritual behaviour, in particular of groups with a distinctive religious, ethnic or other identity which use rituals to pursue strategic ends ad intra and ad extra. Five essays offer theoretical perspectives on ritual in plural and pluralist societies, on similarity and demarcation, on the negative case of the Australian Aboriginals, on Brazilian religious pluralism, and on Ghanaian churches in the Netherlands. Three essays describe the ritualization of the encounter, or confrontation, between religions in India (between Buddhists and Hindus, and between Hindus and Muslims), and in Yemen between Muslims and Jews. Four essays study the responses to internal religious plurality, in early Israel, on Java, in Indonesia, and in Spain and North Africa. One essay explores responses to external religious plurality. In the epilogue, the social nature of pluralism and identity is highlighted.

Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace

Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace PDF Author: Kirstin C. Erickson
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816527342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this illuminating book, anthropologist Kirstin Erickson explains how members of the Yaqui tribe, an indigenous group in northern Mexico, construct, negotiate, and continually reimagine their ethnic identity. She examines two interconnected dimensions of the Yaqui ethnic imagination: the simultaneous processes of place making and identification, and the inseparability of ethnicity from female-identified spaces, roles, and practices. Yaquis live in a portion of their ancestral homeland in Sonora, about 250 miles south of the Arizona border. A long history of displacement and ethnic struggle continues to shape the Yaqui sense of self, as Erickson discovered during the sixteen months that she lived in Potam, one of the eight historic Yaqui pueblos. She found that themes of identity frequently arise in the stories that Yaquis tell and that geography and location—space and place—figure prominently in their narratives. Revisiting Edward Spicer’s groundbreaking anthropological study of the Yaquis of Potam pueblo undertaken more than sixty years ago, Erickson pays particular attention to the “cultural work” performed by Yaqui women today. She shows that by reaffirming their gendered identities and creating and occupying female-gendered spaces such as kitchens, household altars, and domestic ceremonial spaces, women constitute Yaqui ethnicity in ways that are as significant as actions taken by males in tribal leadership and public ceremony. This absorbing study contributes new empirical knowledge about a Native American community as it adds to the growing anthropology of space/place and gender. By inviting readers into the homes and patios where Yaqui women discuss their lives, it offers a highly personalized account of how they construct—and reconstruct—their identity.

Ethnicity and Mobility (Emerging Ethnic Identity and Social Mobility Among the Waddars of South India)

Ethnicity and Mobility (Emerging Ethnic Identity and Social Mobility Among the Waddars of South India) PDF Author: Chandrashekhar Bhat
Publisher: Concept Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
India is the home of religion, philosophy and spirituality. Every age, she provides the world with armies of spiritual masters. The beauty of the Indian philosophy is the grand unification of a Metaphysical God who is the Absolute Reality and the substratum of all existence, and a Personal God who is the basis of all morality, ethics and the inspiration to lead a meaningful life. Amongst those Indian philosophers who accepted the separation of mind and body and argued for the existence of the soul, there was considerable dedication to the scientific method and to developing the principles of deductive and inductive logic. As keen observers of nature and the human body, India's early scientist/philosophers studied human sensory organs, analysed dreams, memory and consciousness. The best of them understood dialectics in nature-they understood change, both in quantitative and qualitative terms-they even posited a prototype of the modern atomic theory. The novelty of this book consists of the fact that it introduces the reader to the basic of Indian philosophers and their contribution in Indian philosophy.