Social Security in Religious Networks

Social Security in Religious Networks PDF Author: Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459253
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the last decades, the world has been facing tremendous political transformations and new risks: epidemics such as HIV/Aids have had destabilizing effect on the caretaking role of kin; in post-socialist countries political reforms have made unemployment a new source of insecurity. Furthermore, the state’s withdrawal from providing social security is taking place throughout the world. One response to these developments has been increased migration, which poses further challenges to kinship-based social support systems. This innovative volume focuses on the ambiguous role of religious networks in social security and traces the interrelatedness of religious networks and state and family support systems. Particularly timely, it describes these challenges as well as social security arrangements in the context of globalization and migration. The wide range of case studies from various parts of the world that examine various religious groups offers an important comparative contribution to the understanding of religious networks as providers of social security.

Social Security in Religious Networks

Social Security in Religious Networks PDF Author: Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459253
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the last decades, the world has been facing tremendous political transformations and new risks: epidemics such as HIV/Aids have had destabilizing effect on the caretaking role of kin; in post-socialist countries political reforms have made unemployment a new source of insecurity. Furthermore, the state’s withdrawal from providing social security is taking place throughout the world. One response to these developments has been increased migration, which poses further challenges to kinship-based social support systems. This innovative volume focuses on the ambiguous role of religious networks in social security and traces the interrelatedness of religious networks and state and family support systems. Particularly timely, it describes these challenges as well as social security arrangements in the context of globalization and migration. The wide range of case studies from various parts of the world that examine various religious groups offers an important comparative contribution to the understanding of religious networks as providers of social security.

Sharing the Sacra

Sharing the Sacra PDF Author: Glenn Bowman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454870
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Shared” sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chinese funerals in late imperial Beijing or the refashioning of memorial commemoration in the wake of the Vietnam war) and particular events (the visit of Pope John Paul II to shared shrines in Sri Lanka or the Al-Qaeda bombing of an ancient Jewish synagogue on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia), the volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and intercommunalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat.

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes PDF Author: Samuli Schielke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Get Book Here

Book Description
Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

When God Comes to Town

When God Comes to Town PDF Author: Rik Pinxten
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455545
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
Around 1800 roughly three per cent of the human population lived in urban areas; by 2030 this number is expected to have gone up to some seventy per cent. This poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies. The authors in this volume question what the possible appeal of these old religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam could be in the new urban environment and, conversely, what impact global urbanization will have on learning and on the performance and nature of ritual. Anthropologists, historians and political scientists have come together in this volume to analyse attempts made by churches and informal groups to adapt to these changes and, at the same time, to explore new ways to study religions in a largely urbanized environment.

Fortune and the Cursed

Fortune and the Cursed PDF Author: Katherine Swancutt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 085745482X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Innovation-making is a classic theme in anthropology that reveals how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. This ethnographic study is an entrance into the world of Buryat Mongol divination, where a group of cursed shamans undertake the 'race against time' to produce innovative remedies that will improve their fallen fortunes at an unconventional pace. Drawing on parallels between social anthropology and chaos theory, the author gives an in-depth account of how Buryat shamans and their notion of fortune operate as 'strange attractors' who propagate the ongoing process of innovation-making. With its view into this long-term 'cursing war' between two shamanic factions in a rural Mongolian district, and the comparative findings on cursing in rural China, this book is a needed resource for anyone with an interest in the anthropology of religion, shamanism, witchcraft and genealogical change. Katherine Swancutt is a Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She has carried out fieldwork on shamanic religion across Inner Asia, working among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and China since 1999, and among the Nuosu of Southwest China since 2007.

The Rise of Network Christianity

The Rise of Network Christianity PDF Author: Brad Christerson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019063569X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why, when traditionally organized religious groups are seeing declining membership and participation, are networks of independent churches growing so explosively? Drawing on in-depth interviews with leaders and participants, The Rise of Network Christianity explains the social forces behind the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the U.S., which Brad Christerson and Richard Flory have labeled "Independent Network Charismatic." This form of Christianity emphasizes aggressive engagement with the supernatural-including healing, direct prophecies from God, engaging in "spiritual warfare" against demonic spirits--and social transformation. Christerson and Flory argue that macro-level social changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital revolution, have given competitive advantages to religious groups organized as networks rather than traditionally organized congregations and denominations. Network forms of governance allow for experimentation with controversial supernatural practices, innovative finances and marketing, and a highly participatory, unorthodox, and experiential faith, which is attractive in today's unstable religious marketplace. Christerson and Flory hypothesize that as more religious groups imitate this type of governance, religious belief and practice will become more experimental, more orientated around practice than theology, more shaped by the individual religious "consumer," and authority will become more highly concentrated in the hands of individuals rather than institutions. Network Christianity, they argue, is the future of Christianity in America.

Christian Politics in Oceania

Christian Politics in Oceania PDF Author: Matt Tomlinson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457462
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
The phrase "Christian politics" evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale, from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.

Believe and Destroy

Believe and Destroy PDF Author: Christian Ingrao
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 685

Get Book Here

Book Description
There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive. The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.

Aids and Religious Practice in Africa

Aids and Religious Practice in Africa PDF Author: Felicitas Becker
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047442695
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people’s resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.

Crossing Religious Boundaries

Crossing Religious Boundaries PDF Author: Marloes Janson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108983367
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religious pluralism, as encountered in multi-faith settings such as Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, challenges much of what we have long taken for granted about religion, including the ready-made binaries of Christianity versus Islam, religion versus secularism, religious monism versus polytheism, and tradition versus modernity. In this book, Marloes Janson offers a rich ethnography of religions, religious pluralism and practice in Lagos, analysing how so-called 'religious shoppers' cross religious boundaries, and the coexistence of different religious traditions where practitioners engage with these simultaneously. Prompted to develop a broader conception of religion that shifts from a narrow analysis of religious traditions as mutually exclusive, Janson instead offers a perspective that focuses on the complex dynamics of their actual entanglements. Including real-life examples to illustrate religion in Lagos through religious practice and lived experiences, this study takes account of the ambivalence, inconsistency and unpredictability of lived religion, proposing assemblage as an analytical frame for exploring the conceptual and methodological possibilities that may open as a result.