Randall G. Styers
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195151077
- eISBN:
- 9780199835263
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195151070.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The chapter begins by exploring various psychological theories in which magic is seen as a product of inchoate or inordinate desire. Whether asserting that magic is socially reactionary and ...
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The chapter begins by exploring various psychological theories in which magic is seen as a product of inchoate or inordinate desire. Whether asserting that magic is socially reactionary and authoritarian or fundamentally anti-social and anarchical, theorists have regularly seen magic as a threat to a productive social order. The dominant scholarly construction of magic has legitimated two distinct channels through which human needs are to be constructed and resolved: a spiritualized religious realm (to shape certain aspects of human identity and assuage internal tensions) and a rationalized scientific realm (to govern appropriate manipulation of the material world). With magic deployed as the stigmatized mediator between religion and science, the secularizing separation between these two channels is reinforced, and capitalism and Western science are relegated broad instrumental control of the material world. Even recent scholarly efforts to reverse the negative valence of magic maintain important elements of the traditional distinctions among religion, magic, and science and reinforce the paradigm in which rationalized religion and science are aligned with capitalist social relations.Less
The chapter begins by exploring various psychological theories in which magic is seen as a product of inchoate or inordinate desire. Whether asserting that magic is socially reactionary and authoritarian or fundamentally anti-social and anarchical, theorists have regularly seen magic as a threat to a productive social order. The dominant scholarly construction of magic has legitimated two distinct channels through which human needs are to be constructed and resolved: a spiritualized religious realm (to shape certain aspects of human identity and assuage internal tensions) and a rationalized scientific realm (to govern appropriate manipulation of the material world). With magic deployed as the stigmatized mediator between religion and science, the secularizing separation between these two channels is reinforced, and capitalism and Western science are relegated broad instrumental control of the material world. Even recent scholarly efforts to reverse the negative valence of magic maintain important elements of the traditional distinctions among religion, magic, and science and reinforce the paradigm in which rationalized religion and science are aligned with capitalist social relations.
Randall G. Styers
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195151077
- eISBN:
- 9780199835263
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195151070.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter offers an account of the social and intellectual contexts within which definitions of magic emerged in the modern West, beginning with various early modern philosophical responses to the ...
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This chapter offers an account of the social and intellectual contexts within which definitions of magic emerged in the modern West, beginning with various early modern philosophical responses to the European witchcraft persecutions. Following the Reformation and the Enlightenment, intellectualized and privatized notions of religion gained prominence, particularly in Protestant anti-Catholic polemics. Coupled with this development was the proliferation of capitalism and Western science, both of which assert distinctive forms of mechanistic and rational manipulation of nature. Finally, with the European conquest of much of the non-Western world, the discourse on “primitive” culture came to play a significant role in legitimating colonial conquests and exploitation. In this context, magic came to serve as a particularly pliable tool in efforts to prescribe norms for liberal religious piety, modern scientific rationality, and capitalist social relations.Less
This chapter offers an account of the social and intellectual contexts within which definitions of magic emerged in the modern West, beginning with various early modern philosophical responses to the European witchcraft persecutions. Following the Reformation and the Enlightenment, intellectualized and privatized notions of religion gained prominence, particularly in Protestant anti-Catholic polemics. Coupled with this development was the proliferation of capitalism and Western science, both of which assert distinctive forms of mechanistic and rational manipulation of nature. Finally, with the European conquest of much of the non-Western world, the discourse on “primitive” culture came to play a significant role in legitimating colonial conquests and exploitation. In this context, magic came to serve as a particularly pliable tool in efforts to prescribe norms for liberal religious piety, modern scientific rationality, and capitalist social relations.
Linda A. Newson and John King (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264461
- eISBN:
- 9780191734625
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264461.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
These chapters celebrate Mexico City as a centre of cultural creativity, diversity and dynamism; trace its history from the founding of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to the present day; and explore ...
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These chapters celebrate Mexico City as a centre of cultural creativity, diversity and dynamism; trace its history from the founding of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to the present day; and explore how the varied experiences of its inhabitants have been represented in poetry, film and photography. Looking at the pre-Columbian city, colonial city and modern city, chapters show how Mexico City has grown organically, largely developed by waves of immigrants with new ideas and aspirations. While they have often envisioned the city in new ways, they have been unable to escape totally its historical past, and indeed at times have positively embraced it to serve contemporary political ends. As the city has grown, what it symbolises to its inhabitants and how they experience the city has become fragmented by social class and ethnicity. There is not one Mexico City, but many. The volume explores how these varied experiences have been represented in poetry, film and photography. Drawing from the fields of archaeology, history, political sociology, literature, cinema and photography, this volume provides an insight into the history and culture of Mexico City.Less
These chapters celebrate Mexico City as a centre of cultural creativity, diversity and dynamism; trace its history from the founding of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to the present day; and explore how the varied experiences of its inhabitants have been represented in poetry, film and photography. Looking at the pre-Columbian city, colonial city and modern city, chapters show how Mexico City has grown organically, largely developed by waves of immigrants with new ideas and aspirations. While they have often envisioned the city in new ways, they have been unable to escape totally its historical past, and indeed at times have positively embraced it to serve contemporary political ends. As the city has grown, what it symbolises to its inhabitants and how they experience the city has become fragmented by social class and ethnicity. There is not one Mexico City, but many. The volume explores how these varied experiences have been represented in poetry, film and photography. Drawing from the fields of archaeology, history, political sociology, literature, cinema and photography, this volume provides an insight into the history and culture of Mexico City.
Hugh B. Urban
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195139013
- eISBN:
- 9780199871674
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195139011.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This book is a companion volume to the author's The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal, but while The Economics of Ecstasy engages the theoretical issues of secrecy ...
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This book is a companion volume to the author's The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal, but while The Economics of Ecstasy engages the theoretical issues of secrecy and concealment associated with the Kartābhajās — a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra, an Indian religious movement notorious for its alleged use of shocking sexual language and rituals, this book presents the first English translation of the sect's body of highly esoteric, mystical poetry and songs. The period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, during which these lyrics were written, was an era of change, experimentation, and transition from the older medieval styles to the new literary forms of “modern” Bengal. The original songs presented are an important part of this transitional period, reflecting the search for new literary forms and experimentation in new poetic styles. Long disparaged as an inferior, low‐class, or corrupt form of Bengali literature, these songs are concerned with contemporary social life in colonial Calcutta and with the real lives of common lower‐class men and women. With their vision of a universal “religion of humanity,” open to men and women of all classes, the Kartābhajā songs offer an alternative model of community, which made a special appeal to the working classes of colonial Calcutta. They delight in ridiculing and satirizing the foppish British rulers and pretentious upper classes, although at the same time, however, the satirical urban imagery is mingled with older Tantric connotations and employed in ingenious new ways to express profoundly esoteric and mystical religious ideas.Less
This book is a companion volume to the author's The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal, but while The Economics of Ecstasy engages the theoretical issues of secrecy and concealment associated with the Kartābhajās — a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra, an Indian religious movement notorious for its alleged use of shocking sexual language and rituals, this book presents the first English translation of the sect's body of highly esoteric, mystical poetry and songs. The period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, during which these lyrics were written, was an era of change, experimentation, and transition from the older medieval styles to the new literary forms of “modern” Bengal. The original songs presented are an important part of this transitional period, reflecting the search for new literary forms and experimentation in new poetic styles. Long disparaged as an inferior, low‐class, or corrupt form of Bengali literature, these songs are concerned with contemporary social life in colonial Calcutta and with the real lives of common lower‐class men and women. With their vision of a universal “religion of humanity,” open to men and women of all classes, the Kartābhajā songs offer an alternative model of community, which made a special appeal to the working classes of colonial Calcutta. They delight in ridiculing and satirizing the foppish British rulers and pretentious upper classes, although at the same time, however, the satirical urban imagery is mingled with older Tantric connotations and employed in ingenious new ways to express profoundly esoteric and mystical religious ideas.
Holiday Powers (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266748
- eISBN:
- 9780191938146
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266748.003.0008
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter proposes a feminist reading of Franco–Algerian multimedia artist Zineb Sedira’s video and installation work from the early 2000s to today in order to consider the potential for global ...
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This chapter proposes a feminist reading of Franco–Algerian multimedia artist Zineb Sedira’s video and installation work from the early 2000s to today in order to consider the potential for global feminist art histories that are intersectional and relational through the ways in which Sedira focuses on memory. Memory and its transmission across generations is treated in three distinct but overlapping ways: memory within the context of Sedira’s only family, using Sedira’s personal story as a means of reckoning with larger histories and the construction of the gendered subject within them; collective memory in the context of post–colonial Algeria; and memory as held by the land itself, read especially through the lens of ecofeminism. In Sedira’s work, the gendered subject is constructed through women’s stories told from inside the perspective of family, that is, women considering their roles as daughters, mothers, and wives, told against and overlaid on top of the history of colonialism.Less
This chapter proposes a feminist reading of Franco–Algerian multimedia artist Zineb Sedira’s video and installation work from the early 2000s to today in order to consider the potential for global feminist art histories that are intersectional and relational through the ways in which Sedira focuses on memory. Memory and its transmission across generations is treated in three distinct but overlapping ways: memory within the context of Sedira’s only family, using Sedira’s personal story as a means of reckoning with larger histories and the construction of the gendered subject within them; collective memory in the context of post–colonial Algeria; and memory as held by the land itself, read especially through the lens of ecofeminism. In Sedira’s work, the gendered subject is constructed through women’s stories told from inside the perspective of family, that is, women considering their roles as daughters, mothers, and wives, told against and overlaid on top of the history of colonialism.
Nicola Lacey, David Soskice, Leonidas Cheliotis, and Sappho Xenakis (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their ...
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The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.Less
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.
Javed Majeed
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198117865
- eISBN:
- 9780191671098
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117865.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th ...
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Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. It focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of James Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, the book highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, the book demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.Less
Drawing on contemporary critical work on colonialism and the cross-cultural encounter, this book is a study of the emergence of utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. It focuses on the relationship between this language and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Examining the work of James Mill and Sir William Jones, and also that of the poets Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, the book highlights the role played by aesthetic and linguistic attitudes in the formulation of British views on India, and reveals how closely these attitudes were linked to the definition of cultural identities. To this end, Mill's utilitarian study of India is shown to function both as an attack on the conservative orientalism of the period, and as part of a larger critique of British society itself. In so doing, the book demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts.
Jon Hegglund
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199796106
- eISBN:
- 9780199932771
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199796106.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal ...
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This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.Less
This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.
Charles Forsdick
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198160144
- eISBN:
- 9780191673795
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198160144.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The Victor Segalen who has emerged from this reading is a complex, occasionally contradictory figure. His exoticism is a statement of the bipolarity of ...
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The Victor Segalen who has emerged from this reading is a complex, occasionally contradictory figure. His exoticism is a statement of the bipolarity of the experience of otherness, a precursory realization that in the meeting of self and other neither party has the guaranteed privilege of objectivity that description of the exotic is ultimately revelatory of the self. Segalen's aesthetics of exoticism is an early consideration of colonialism as a process of contact between cultures. Recent ascendancy of his status in the social sciences indicates Segalen's role as a precursory theorist of the exotic on whose distinction between difference and alterity current consideration of otherness increasingly draws. The figures of travel proposed in this study of Segalen remain those of his physical circumnavigation through Polynesia and China back to his native Brittany. The resultant Aesthetics of Diversity is one that stresses, however, the ultimate relativity not only of the exotic, but also of home itself.Less
The Victor Segalen who has emerged from this reading is a complex, occasionally contradictory figure. His exoticism is a statement of the bipolarity of the experience of otherness, a precursory realization that in the meeting of self and other neither party has the guaranteed privilege of objectivity that description of the exotic is ultimately revelatory of the self. Segalen's aesthetics of exoticism is an early consideration of colonialism as a process of contact between cultures. Recent ascendancy of his status in the social sciences indicates Segalen's role as a precursory theorist of the exotic on whose distinction between difference and alterity current consideration of otherness increasingly draws. The figures of travel proposed in this study of Segalen remain those of his physical circumnavigation through Polynesia and China back to his native Brittany. The resultant Aesthetics of Diversity is one that stresses, however, the ultimate relativity not only of the exotic, but also of home itself.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Roland Bénabou, and Dilip Mookherjee
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195305197
- eISBN:
- 9780199783519
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195305191.001.0001
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Development, Growth, and Environmental
This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The ...
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This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss issues such as how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, and how to design welfare policies that work better. The third section presents new ways of thinking about poverty such as the integration of psychology and economics, nonmarket institutions, and interconnections between race and economic inequality.Less
This volume presents 28 essays on poverty by some of the leading experts in the field of economics. The book is divided into three sections, beginning with an essay about how poverty is measured. The first section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of “excessive” population growth, corruption, and ethnic conflict. The second section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss issues such as how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, and how to design welfare policies that work better. The third section presents new ways of thinking about poverty such as the integration of psychology and economics, nonmarket institutions, and interconnections between race and economic inequality.
John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- August 2004
- ISBN:
- 9780199266579
- eISBN:
- 9780191601446
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199266573.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, UK Politics
The chapter discusses the use of the comparative method by Northern Ireland's political partisans and academics. It shows how analogies with other conflicts have been used by partisans to further ...
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The chapter discusses the use of the comparative method by Northern Ireland's political partisans and academics. It shows how analogies with other conflicts have been used by partisans to further their political agendas. These analogies are tied to important international norms, and their use by Northern Ireland's politicians are an attempt to influence international opinion, as well as cement group solidarity. The second part of the chapter summarizes how Northern Ireland has been analysed by academics employing important comparative political theories, including consociationalism and integrationism.Less
The chapter discusses the use of the comparative method by Northern Ireland's political partisans and academics. It shows how analogies with other conflicts have been used by partisans to further their political agendas. These analogies are tied to important international norms, and their use by Northern Ireland's politicians are an attempt to influence international opinion, as well as cement group solidarity. The second part of the chapter summarizes how Northern Ireland has been analysed by academics employing important comparative political theories, including consociationalism and integrationism.
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195304343
- eISBN:
- 9780199785063
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195304349.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
This chapter further describes the context of the author’s participant-observation fieldwork situation in the towns of Udaipur and Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It also presents the ...
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This chapter further describes the context of the author’s participant-observation fieldwork situation in the towns of Udaipur and Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It also presents the scholarly understandings of South Asian society that ground the book’s arguments. It is demonstrated how changes in caste relations in the modern colonial and postcolonial periods, and especially the decline in importance of elite bardic communities, provided the author’s Bhat informants with opportunities to remake their caste identity in the particular manner explored in the pages of this book. This chapter takes pains to demonstrate continuities of experience between the formerly untouchable Bhats and other low status Dalit (“oppressed”) communities. The remainder of the book, however, points to the distinctive manner than Bhats, as low status bards participating in a declining village exchange economy referred to as jajmani, take advantage of changing historical contexts to rework themselves and the institution of caste in ways unique to this community of performers.Less
This chapter further describes the context of the author’s participant-observation fieldwork situation in the towns of Udaipur and Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It also presents the scholarly understandings of South Asian society that ground the book’s arguments. It is demonstrated how changes in caste relations in the modern colonial and postcolonial periods, and especially the decline in importance of elite bardic communities, provided the author’s Bhat informants with opportunities to remake their caste identity in the particular manner explored in the pages of this book. This chapter takes pains to demonstrate continuities of experience between the formerly untouchable Bhats and other low status Dalit (“oppressed”) communities. The remainder of the book, however, points to the distinctive manner than Bhats, as low status bards participating in a declining village exchange economy referred to as jajmani, take advantage of changing historical contexts to rework themselves and the institution of caste in ways unique to this community of performers.
Simon Chesterman
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- April 2004
- ISBN:
- 9780199263486
- eISBN:
- 9780191600999
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199263485.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
Despite the conceit that transitional administration was invented in the 1990s, much can be learned concerning the development of an institutional capacity to administer territory from examining the ...
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Despite the conceit that transitional administration was invented in the 1990s, much can be learned concerning the development of an institutional capacity to administer territory from examining the manner in which the colonial empires were regulated and subsequently dismantled. An age less attuned to political sensitivities also provides a clearer‐eyed assessment of the requirements of such administration, challenging the conventional wisdom that ‘ownership’ on the part of the local population is essential to the process.Less
Despite the conceit that transitional administration was invented in the 1990s, much can be learned concerning the development of an institutional capacity to administer territory from examining the manner in which the colonial empires were regulated and subsequently dismantled. An age less attuned to political sensitivities also provides a clearer‐eyed assessment of the requirements of such administration, challenging the conventional wisdom that ‘ownership’ on the part of the local population is essential to the process.
Philip Lutgendorf
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195309225
- eISBN:
- 9780199785391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309225.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in ...
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Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in popular practice has generally been marginalized or overlooked in academic scholarship. It seeks the roots of this paradox in the Orientalism of Euro-American scholarship, especially during the period of the British Empire, which applied conceptual categories derived from Judeo-Christian discourse to the understanding of Indian religious traditions. Deities in animal-like forms were especially troubling to Western scholars, who invented labels like “theriomorph”, “fetish”, and “totem” to describe them, and created (e.g., in the folklore research of William Crooke) a false dichotomy between “major” and “minor” deities. After describing the present study's remedial approach and outlining the material to be presented in subsequent chapters, the chapter concludes with an explanation of the most common names and epithets by which Hanuman is known in various regions of India.Less
Opening with a brief tour of modern Hindu temples that feature increasingly monumental icons of Hanuman, this introductory chapter poses the question of why a deity of such apparent prominence in popular practice has generally been marginalized or overlooked in academic scholarship. It seeks the roots of this paradox in the Orientalism of Euro-American scholarship, especially during the period of the British Empire, which applied conceptual categories derived from Judeo-Christian discourse to the understanding of Indian religious traditions. Deities in animal-like forms were especially troubling to Western scholars, who invented labels like “theriomorph”, “fetish”, and “totem” to describe them, and created (e.g., in the folklore research of William Crooke) a false dichotomy between “major” and “minor” deities. After describing the present study's remedial approach and outlining the material to be presented in subsequent chapters, the chapter concludes with an explanation of the most common names and epithets by which Hanuman is known in various regions of India.
Philip Lutgendorf
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195309225
- eISBN:
- 9780199785391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309225.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
This chapter focuses on a theme implicit in much of the book: the relationship of Hanuman's simian form to the mediatory religious role he assumes and to the “messages” he so effectively delivers. It ...
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This chapter focuses on a theme implicit in much of the book: the relationship of Hanuman's simian form to the mediatory religious role he assumes and to the “messages” he so effectively delivers. It first considers the preoccupation of some modern Indian authors with the “problem” of Hanuman's monkey form, situating their interventions within colonial and post-colonial debates about history, race, and cultural and biological evolution. For comparative purposes, it surveys a wider range of human responses to anthropoid primates, including the cults of simian deities in Chinese and Japanese religions and the discourse of modern primatology. Returning to India, it considers Hanuman's role in modern Hindu nationalism and in the religious patronage of the emerging middle class. Finally, it examines evidence of Hanuman's continuing rise as a comprehensive and encompassing deity, signaled by new iconography and a proliferating theological discourse. An epilogue speculates on the potential for Hanuman's role in movements promoting ecology and environmental ethics.Less
This chapter focuses on a theme implicit in much of the book: the relationship of Hanuman's simian form to the mediatory religious role he assumes and to the “messages” he so effectively delivers. It first considers the preoccupation of some modern Indian authors with the “problem” of Hanuman's monkey form, situating their interventions within colonial and post-colonial debates about history, race, and cultural and biological evolution. For comparative purposes, it surveys a wider range of human responses to anthropoid primates, including the cults of simian deities in Chinese and Japanese religions and the discourse of modern primatology. Returning to India, it considers Hanuman's role in modern Hindu nationalism and in the religious patronage of the emerging middle class. Finally, it examines evidence of Hanuman's continuing rise as a comprehensive and encompassing deity, signaled by new iconography and a proliferating theological discourse. An epilogue speculates on the potential for Hanuman's role in movements promoting ecology and environmental ethics.
Nicola Lacey and David Soskice
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.003.0001
- Subject:
- Law
The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are ...
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The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox. This introduction examines some of the main intersections and points of productive dialogue emerging from the essays, organised around two key themes: the insights to be gained by moving between different levels of analysis; and the importance of the perspective provided by comparative and historical lenses. It concludes that a high crime/punishment/inequality equilibrium is associated with deep failures of incorporation, integration and inclusion in the social, political and economic systems which it afflicts. And these failures of inclusion operate in terms of certain key dynamics: segregation; de facto or de jure disenfranchisement; and failures of coordinating capacity which are premised not only on institutional design but also on the diversity of and conflict between interests.Less
The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox. This introduction examines some of the main intersections and points of productive dialogue emerging from the essays, organised around two key themes: the insights to be gained by moving between different levels of analysis; and the importance of the perspective provided by comparative and historical lenses. It concludes that a high crime/punishment/inequality equilibrium is associated with deep failures of incorporation, integration and inclusion in the social, political and economic systems which it afflicts. And these failures of inclusion operate in terms of certain key dynamics: segregation; de facto or de jure disenfranchisement; and failures of coordinating capacity which are premised not only on institutional design but also on the diversity of and conflict between interests.
Lisa L. Miller
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.003.0006
- Subject:
- Law
‘American exceptionalism in imprisonment’ has become a useful heuristic for analyzing the extremely high rates of imprisonment in the United States that emerged in the late 20th century. This ...
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‘American exceptionalism in imprisonment’ has become a useful heuristic for analyzing the extremely high rates of imprisonment in the United States that emerged in the late 20th century. This perspective, however, has largely marginalized violent crime as an important and distinguishing feature of the United States in contrast to most of the (largely western) countries to which it is usually compared. But violent crime in the United States – particularly murder – is extraordinarily high, making violence almost as exceptional as imprisonment. In fact, American exceptionalism may be better understood as exceptionalism of the Americas. By linking crime, punishment, and inequality, the relevant comparisons for the United States look less like Europe and more like Latin America. This chapter develops a conceptual framework for understanding state-building in the Americas, which the author refers to as racialized state-building. This framework proposes that the roots of high violence in the Americas (from both fellow citizens and from the state) lie in the fragmented state capacity and accountability that characterize the vast majority of countries in the Americas, including the United States. These state features are a function of extractive, settler, and slave colonialism which created incentives – to varying degrees – for elites to avoid institutional configurations that would result in power-sharing across populations. The resultant states are institutionally disjointed and excessively complex with high levels of mistrust and inequality, conditions which are ripe for violence in many forms.Less
‘American exceptionalism in imprisonment’ has become a useful heuristic for analyzing the extremely high rates of imprisonment in the United States that emerged in the late 20th century. This perspective, however, has largely marginalized violent crime as an important and distinguishing feature of the United States in contrast to most of the (largely western) countries to which it is usually compared. But violent crime in the United States – particularly murder – is extraordinarily high, making violence almost as exceptional as imprisonment. In fact, American exceptionalism may be better understood as exceptionalism of the Americas. By linking crime, punishment, and inequality, the relevant comparisons for the United States look less like Europe and more like Latin America. This chapter develops a conceptual framework for understanding state-building in the Americas, which the author refers to as racialized state-building. This framework proposes that the roots of high violence in the Americas (from both fellow citizens and from the state) lie in the fragmented state capacity and accountability that characterize the vast majority of countries in the Americas, including the United States. These state features are a function of extractive, settler, and slave colonialism which created incentives – to varying degrees – for elites to avoid institutional configurations that would result in power-sharing across populations. The resultant states are institutionally disjointed and excessively complex with high levels of mistrust and inequality, conditions which are ripe for violence in many forms.
Adom Getachew
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780691179155
- eISBN:
- 9780691184340
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691179155.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to ...
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Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this book reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. The book shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, this book recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today's international order.Less
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this book reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. The book shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, this book recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today's international order.
Daniel Butt
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199218240
- eISBN:
- 9780191711589
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199218240.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations and Politics
This introductory chapter outlines the empirical context of the debate over reparations for historic international injustice, with particular reference to colonialism and the slave trade. It ...
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This introductory chapter outlines the empirical context of the debate over reparations for historic international injustice, with particular reference to colonialism and the slave trade. It characterizes the argument of the book as a specific type of non-ideal theory, and explains the book's commitment to a particular kind of practicality, whereby its arguments can be employed by real world political actors. It outlines an approach to international justice labelled ‘international libertarianism’, advocated by writers including John Rawls, David Miller, Michael Walzer, and Thomas Nagel, which is analogous to domestic libertarianism in terms of its commitment to respect for sovereignty, self-ownership, and the minimal state. This is distinguished from alternative accounts of international justice such as cosmopolitanism and realism. The book's focus on rectificatory duties, rather than rights, is explained, and the terminological relation between terms such as restitution and compensation, and nation and state, is explicated.Less
This introductory chapter outlines the empirical context of the debate over reparations for historic international injustice, with particular reference to colonialism and the slave trade. It characterizes the argument of the book as a specific type of non-ideal theory, and explains the book's commitment to a particular kind of practicality, whereby its arguments can be employed by real world political actors. It outlines an approach to international justice labelled ‘international libertarianism’, advocated by writers including John Rawls, David Miller, Michael Walzer, and Thomas Nagel, which is analogous to domestic libertarianism in terms of its commitment to respect for sovereignty, self-ownership, and the minimal state. This is distinguished from alternative accounts of international justice such as cosmopolitanism and realism. The book's focus on rectificatory duties, rather than rights, is explained, and the terminological relation between terms such as restitution and compensation, and nation and state, is explicated.
Satoshi Mizutani
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199697700
- eISBN:
- 9780191732102
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199697700.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History, British and Irish Modern History
The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but ...
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The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of education were deemed able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness defined by these terms were the ‘domiciled community’, which was made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of which lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or rather those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly made the meaning of whiteness ambiguous and even contradictory in fundamental ways. The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The prime task of Boundaries of Whiteness under the Raj is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem—or as what was then called the ‘Eurasian Question’—and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. Through such inquiry, the book aims to demystify the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.Less
The edifice of whiteness in British India remained complex and even contradictory during the period from 1858 to 1930. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was thoroughly pervasive, but paradoxically, or perhaps all the more for it, whiteness was never taken as self-evident whether as a concept or as a code of praxis. Rather it was constantly called into question, while its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices. Only those whites with sufficient degrees of attainment in terms of social status, cultural refinement and level of education were deemed able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness defined by these terms were the ‘domiciled community’, which was made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of which lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or rather those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly made the meaning of whiteness ambiguous and even contradictory in fundamental ways. The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The prime task of Boundaries of Whiteness under the Raj is to reveal the precise ways in which the existence of the community was identified as a problem—or as what was then called the ‘Eurasian Question’—and to ponder the deeper historical meanings of such problematization itself. Through such inquiry, the book aims to demystify the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.
