Religiosity In Contemporary Sri Lanka

Download or read book Multi-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka written by Mark P. Whitaker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of original research about every day, innovative, interactive, and multiple religiosities among Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and devotees of New Religious Movements in post-war Sri Lanka. The contributors examine the unique and innovative religiosity that can be observed in Sri Lanka, which reveals a complex reality of mingled, and even simultaneous, cooperation and conflict. The book shows that innovative religious practices and institutions have achieved a new prominence in public life since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. Using the analytic framework of ‘innovative religiosity’ to allow researchers to look at this question between and across Sri Lanka’s plural religious landscape in order to escape both the epistemological and ethnographic isolation of studies that limit themselves to one form of religious practice, the chapters also investigate the extent to which inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of Sri Lanka’s religion-involving civil war, and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism, globalization and geopolitics on Sri Lanka’s post-war governance. The book offers a novel approach to the study of post-conflict societies and furthers the understanding of the status of tolerance between religious practitioners in contexts where both ethnic conflict and multi-religious sites are prominent. This book is an important resource for researchers studying Anthropology, Asian Religion, Religion in Context and South Asian Studies.

Download or read book Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting written by R. L. Stirrat and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of religious change and cultural fragmentation in contemporary Sri Lanka focuses on a series of new Catholic shrines that attract hundreds of pilgrims. Their fame is based, among other things, on their efficacy as centers for demonic exorcism, alleviating suffering and helping people to find jobs. The author looks at the rise of these shrines in relation to the historical experience of the Catholic community in Sri Lanka, rather than in terms of narrowly defined religious criteria. Central to this broader nonreligious context is the role of power and especially the impact of post colonialism on the small Roman Catholic population.

Download or read book Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices written by Anna Fedele and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social scientists and philosophers confronted with religious phenomena have always been challenged to find a proper way to describe the spiritual experiences of the social group they were studying. The influence of the Cartesian dualism of body and mind (or soul) led to a distinction between non-material, spiritual experiences (i.e., related to the soul) and physical, mechanical experiences (i.e., related to the body). However, recent developments in medical science on the one hand and challenges to universalist conceptions of belief and spirituality on the other have resulted in “body” and “soul” losing the reassuring solid contours they had in the past. Yet, in “Western culture,” the body–soul duality is alive, not least in academic and media discourses. This volume pursues the ongoing debates and discusses the importance of the body and how it is perceived in contemporary religious faith: what happens when “body” and “soul” are un-separated entities? Is it possible, even for anthropologists and ethnographers, to escape from “natural dualism”? The contributors here present research in novel empirical contexts, the benefits and limits of the old dichotomy are discussed, and new theoretical strategies proposed.

Download or read book Under Caesar's Sword written by Daniel Philpott and published by Law and Christianity. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic global study of how Christians respond to persecution, presenting new research by leading scholars of global Christianity.

Download or read book Religion Between Governance and Freedoms written by Olga Breskaya and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Medusa's Hair written by Gananath Obeyesekere and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-02-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka written by Mark P. Whitaker and published by . This book was released on 2021-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents a collection of original research about every day, innovative, interactive, and multiple religiosities among Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and devotees of New Religious Movements in post-war Sri Lanka. The contributors examine the unique and innovative religiosity that can be observed in Sri Lanka, which reveals a complex reality of mingled, and even simultaneous, cooperation and conflict. The book shows that innovative religious practices and institutions have achieved a new prominence in public life since the end of Sri Lanka's civil war in 2009. Using the analytic framework of 'innovative religiosity' to allow researchers to look at this question between and across Sri Lanka's plural religious landscape in order to escape both the epistemological and ethnographic isolation of studies that limit themselves to one form of religious practice, the chapters also investigate the extent to which inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of Sri Lanka's religion-involving civil war, and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism on Sri Lanka's post-war governance. The book offers a novel approach to the study of post-conflict societies and furthers the understanding of the status of tolerance between religious practitioners in regions where ethnic conflict and multi-religious sites remains prominent. This book is an important resource for researchers studying Anthropology, Asian Religion, Religion in Context and South Asian Studies"--