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Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism
In Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism, Urmila Mohan explores the materiality and visuality of cloth and clothing as devotional media in contemporary Hinduism. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the global missionizing group “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” (ISKCON), she studies translocal spaces of worship, service, education, and daily life in the group’s headquarters in Mayapur and other parts of India. Focusing on the actions and values of deity dressmaking, devotee clothing and paraphernalia, Mohan shows how activities, such as embroidery and chanting, can be understood as techniques of spirituality, reverence, allegiance—and she proposes the new term “efficacious intimacy” to help understand these complex processes. The monograph brings theoretical advances in Anglo-European material culture and material religion studies into a conversation with South Asian anthropology, sociology, art history, and religion. Ultimately, it demonstrates how embodied interactions as well as representations shape ISKCON’s practitioners as devout subjects, while connecting them with the divine and the wider community.
Masking in Pandemic U.S.
This anthropological study explores the beliefs and practices that emerged around masking in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. Americans responded to this illness as unique subjects navigating the flux of social and corporeal boundaries, supporting certain beliefs and acting to shape them as compelling realities. Debates over health and safety mandates indicated that responses were fractured with varied subjectivities in play—people lived in different worlds and bodies were central in conflicts over breathing, masking and social distancing. Contrasting approaches to practices marked the limits and possibilities of imaginaries, signaling differences and similarities between groups, and...
The Material Subject
The Material Subject emphasises how bodily and material cultures combine to make and transform subjects dynamically. The book is based on the French Matière à Penser (MaP) school of thought, which draws upon the ideas of Mauss, Schilder, Foucault and Bourdieu, among others, to enhance the anthropological study of embodiment, practices, techniques, materiality and power. Through theoretical sophistication and empirical field research, case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia bring MaP’s ideas into dialogue with other strands of material culture studies in the English-speaking world. These studies mediate different scales of engagement through a sensori-motor, affective and cognitive focu...
A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age
A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to the present, a time of extraordinary developments in colour science, philosophy, art, design and technologies. The expansion of products produced with synthetic dyes was accelerated by mass consumerism as artists, designers, architects, writers, theater and filmmakers made us a 'color conscious' society. This influenced what we wore, how we chose to furnish and decorate our homes, and how we responded to the vibrancy and chromatic eclecticism of contemporary visual cultures.The volume brings together research on how philosophers, scientists, linguists and artists debated color's polyvalence, its meaning to different cult...
Digital Humanities and Material Religion
Building from a range of essays representing multiple fields of expertise and traversing multiple religious traditions, this important text provides analytic rigor to a question now pressing the academic study of religion: what is the relationship between the material and the digital? Its chapters address a range of processes of mediation between the digital and the material from a variety of perspectives and sub-disciplines within the field of religion in order to theorize the implications of these two turns in scholarship, offer case studies in methodology, and reflect on various tools and processes. Authors attend to religious practices and the internet, digital archives of religion, deco...
Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion
This book analyses hundreds of votive body parts to examine how ideas about the human body changed throughout classical antiquity.
Everyday Political Objects
Everyday Political Objects examines a series of historical case studies across a very broad timescale, using objects as a means to develop different approaches to understanding politics where both internal and external definitions of the political prove inadequate. Materiality and objects have gradually made their way into the historian’s toolbox in recent years, but the distinctive contribution that a set of methods developed for the study of objects can make to our understanding of politics has yet to be explored. This book shows how everyday objects play a certain role in politics, which is specific to material things. It provides case studies which re-orientate the view of the politica...
Living in a Landscape of Scarcity
In her close ethnography of a Dogon village of Mali, Laurence Douny shows how a microcosmology develops from people's embodied daily and ritual practice in a landscape of scarcity. Viewed through the lens of containment practice, she describes how they cope with the shortage of material items central to their lives—water, earth, and millet. Douny’s study is an important addition to ecological anthropology, to the study of West African cultures, to the understanding of material culture, and to anthropological theory.
Anthropology and Disaster in Japan
This book focuses on the 3.11 disaster in Japan, involving a powerful earthquake and tsunami, from an anthropological perspective. It critically reflects on the challenges of conducting anthropological research when encountering disaster at home and the position of social scientist as sufferer. Emphasizing the role of culture in disaster mitigation, the book offers theoretical consideration of the role of cultural heritage in risk management, in line with recent trends in international policy on disaster risk reduction. Taking an approach “with the people in,” the author explores how culture features in disaster recovery at community level and considers implications for policy. The chapters explore the response and adaptation by local cultural practitioners and performing arts groups as well as farmers and fishers. Japanese farming and fishing are presented as an innovative and dynamic part of the recovery process. The book will be of interest to scholars and policymakers working in disaster studies, Japan studies, and fields including anthropology, geography, sociology, and heritage management.
The Place of Devotion
"The anthropology of Hinduism has amply established that Hindus have strong involvement with sacred geography. The Hindu sacred topography is dotted with innumerable pilgrimage places, and popular Hinduism is abundant with spatial imaginings. Thus Shiva and his partner, the mother goddess, live in the Himalayas, goddesses descend on earth as beautiful rivers, the goddess Kali's body parts are imagined to have fallen in various sites of Hindu geography sanctifying them as sacred centres, and yogis meditate in forests. Bengal similarly has a thriving culture of exalting sacred centres and pilgrimage places, one of the most important among them being the Navadvip-Mayapur sacred complex, Bengal'...
