Books in the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion series

Natural disasters in Asian countries have brought global attention to the work of local Buddhist communities and groups. Here, the contributors examine local Buddhist communities and international Buddhist organizations engaged in a variety of relief work in countries including India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan.

According to Max Weber, charisma is opposed to bureaucratic order. This collection reveals the limits of that formula. The contributors show how charisma is a part of cultural frameworks while retaining its ecstatic character among American and Italian Catholics, Syrian Sufis, Taiwanese Buddhists, Hassidic Jews, and Amazonian shamans, among others.

Based on an ethnographic study of rural Poland, this book investigates the challenges of maintaining pluralism in a religiously homogenous society. By examining a multireligious and multiethnic community, Pasieka reveals paradoxes inscribed into the practice and discourse of pluralism.

Spirits without Borders is an ethnographic study of the transnational and multicultural expansion of Vietnam's Mother Goddess Religion and its spirit possession ritual. The work explores how and why the ritual spread from Vietnam to the US and back again and the impact of ritual transnationalism in both countries.

Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative powers.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book examines how the Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, is actively negotiating both modernity and tradition in the contexts of nation-building, globalisation, and a supposed clash of civilizations.

In October of 1943, the Danish resistance rescued almost all of the Jews in Copenhagen from roundups by the occupying Nazis. This book explores the questions that such inclusion raises for the Danish Jews, and what their answers can tell us about the meaning of religion, ethnicity and community in modern society.

Talk about Prayer is an experiment in writing ethnography, a commentary on a conversation with Mama Regine Tshitanda, the leader of a Charismatic prayer group (groupe de priere) in Lubumbashi (Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and members of her family in 1986. Fabian's research on expressions and practices of popular culture, including popular religion, was conducted during two visits to Katanga in 1985 and 1986. He discusses controversial issues in the study of the Global Charismatic Movement as seen at the time and gives a detailed account of the circumstances and events that led to the recorded meeting and how the ethnographic document on which this book is based was made. Central to the book is the authors understanding of anthropology of religion, in that research should be based on communicative ethnography, an approach that involves confrontation between researchers and interlocutors as well between their views of the world. Talk about Prayer is one such argument for keeping open the debate on a critical stance toward religion.

Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen tells a story of a Yemeni hereditary elite which was overthrown in the 1962 revolution in North Yemen.

In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument and intellectual exploration.

This innovative book explores the role of evangelical religion in the conflict in Northern Ireland, including how it may contribute to a peaceful political transition. Ganiel offers an original perspective on the role of a 'strong' religion in conflict transformation, and the misunderstood role of evangelicalism in the process.

In three congregations, representing three distinct social locations, Howell goes beneath the surface to argue that even with these Western forms, these Filipino Baptists are actively constructing themselves and the locality itself in terms of this global faith they have made their own.

Many voices clamor to be heard in debates about whether shamans cure, and whether shamanic spirituality is worth continuing or recovering in the twenty-first century. This book provides newinsights into the fascinating resurgence of shamanism through an exploration of the politicalrepression of religion and its transcendence

Hasinoff brings the untold history of the World in Boston of 1911, 'America's First Great Missionary Exposition,' to light, focusing on how the material culture of missions shaped domestic interactions with evangelism, Christianity, and the consumption of ethnological knowledge.

In this richly contextualized study, Liana Chua explores how a largely Christian Bidayuh community has been reconfiguring its relationship to its old animist rituals through the trope and politics of "culture."

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary charges of anthropology as a discipline: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange.

Exactly where is the common ground between religion and medicine in phenomena described as 'religious healing?' In what sense is the human body a cultural phenomenon and not merely a biological entity?

In The Weight of the Past , Michael Lambek explores the complex ways that history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life.

In October of 1943, the Danish resistance rescued almost all of the Jews in Copenhagen from roundups by the occupying Nazis. This book explores the questions that such inclusion raises for the Danish Jews, and what their answers can tell us about the meaning of religion, ethnicity and community in modern society.