Religion And Technology In India

Download or read book Religion and Technology in India written by Knut A. Jacobsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion tends to flourish when technological developments create new possibilities for communication and representation, and simultaneously change as a consequence of these developments. This book explores intersections between religion and technology in India, at the present and in the colonial past, and how various forms of techno-religious intersections transform and open up for new religious practices, discourses, communities, and institutions. With focus on Indian contexts and religions, it discusses various empirical and theoretical aspects of how technological innovations create, alter, and negotiate religious spaces, practices and authorities. The book provides rich and multifaceted empirical examples of different ways in which technological practices relate to meanings, ideas, and practices of religions. The techno-religious intersections generate several questions about authority and power, the politics and poetics of identity, community and place, and how religious agency, information, and experience are mediated, commodified, and adjusted to new demands of societies. The chapters explore the Hindu, Jain, and Sikh traditions in relation to new technological developments and media, such as photography, new means of visualization, TV serials, mobile phones, and online communication. The book will be of interest to academics studying modern and contemporary India and South Asia, and especially the role of religion and technology.

Download or read book Science and Religion in India written by Renny Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity’. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.

Download or read book Televising Religion in India written by Manoj Kumar Das and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how religion manifests itself in television. It focuses on how religious traditions, practices, and discourses have been incorporated into non-religious television programmes and how they bring both the community and the media into the fold of religion. The volume traces the cultural and institutional history of television in the state of Sikkim, India, to investigate how it became part of the cultural life of the communities. The author analyses three televised shows that captured the community's imagination and became ceremonial and religious engagement. Through these case studies, he highlights how rituals and myths function in mass media, how traditional institutions and religious practices redefine themselves through their association with the visual mass medium, and how identities based on religion, cultural tradition, and politics are reinforced, transformed, and amplified through television. The book further analyses the engagement of televised religion with audiences, its reach, relevance, and contents and its relationship with urbanity, tradition, and identity. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of media and communication studies, cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, cultural anthropology, and history.

Download or read book God and the Chip written by William A. Stahl and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2009-08-03 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our ancestors saw the material world as alive, and they often personified nature. Today we claim to be realists. But in reality we are not paying attention to the symbols and myths hidden in technology. Beneath much of our talk about computers and the Internet, claims William A. Stahl, is an unacknowledged mysticism, an implicit religion. By not acknowledging this mysticism, we have become critically short of ethical and intellectual resources with which to understand and confront changes brought on by technology.

Download or read book The Technological Indian written by Ross Bassett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1800s, Indians seemed to be a people left behind by the Industrial Revolution, dismissed as “not a mechanical race.” Today Indians are among the world’s leaders in engineering and technology. In this international history spanning nearly 150 years, Ross Bassett—drawing on a unique database of every Indian to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between its founding and 2000—charts their ascent to the pinnacle of high-tech professions. As a group of Indians sought a way forward for their country, they saw a future in technology. Bassett examines the tensions and surprising congruences between this technological vision and Mahatma Gandhi’s nonindustrial modernity. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to use MIT-trained engineers to build an India where the government controlled technology for the benefit of the people. In the private sector, Indian business families sent their sons to MIT, while MIT graduates established India’s information technology industry. By the 1960s, students from the Indian Institutes of Technology (modeled on MIT) were drawn to the United States for graduate training, and many of them stayed, as prominent industrialists, academics, and entrepreneurs. The MIT-educated Indian engineer became an integral part of a global system of technology-based capitalism and focused less on India and its problems—a technological Indian created at the expense of a technological India.

Download or read book Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia written by Lawrence A. Babb and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the effects of the religious transformation taking place in India as sacred symbols assume the shapes of media images. Lifted from their traditional forms and contexts, many religious symbols, beliefs, and practices are increasingly refracted through such media as god posters, comic books, audio recordings, and video programs. The ten original essays here examine the impact on India's traditional social and cultural structures of printed images, audio recordings, film, and video. Contributors: Lawrence A. Babb, Steve Derné, John Stratton Hawley, Stephen R. Inglis, John T. Little, Philip Lutgendorf, Scott L. Marcus, Frances W. Pritchett, Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, H. Daniel Smith, and Susan S. Wadley.

Download or read book Rethinking Religion in India written by Esther Bloch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically assesses recent debates about the colonial construction of Hinduism. Written by experts in their field, the chapters present historical and empirical arguments as well as theoretical reflections on the topic, offering new insights into the nature of the construction of religion in India.