Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a“Hindu” community

1980 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandria B. Freitag

Always have Indians identified themselves by their caste, by theirancestral village: “Our family were Khatris from the West Punjabcountryside.” “Murud, at one time a fairly prosperous village, is mynative place.” In the late nineteenth century, however, an important new process of forging group identities which transcended these local attributions came to characterize South Asian social history. This was in part prompted by the efforts of an alien British administration to identify the constituent units in Indian society. Drawing on European historical experience, the administrators applied the collective labels "Hindu" and "Muslim" to groups who were far from homogeneous communities.

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Spear ◽  
Avanthi Meduri

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva,The Powers of HorrorTHE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHINGis one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Adel M. Remali ◽  
Ashraf M. Salama ◽  
Florian Wiedmann

South Asian communities have lived in Scotland since the late nineteenth century, experiencing a substantial growth in the post-war period. This paper contributes a new understanding of the spatial practices of South Asian communities in the city of Glasgow based on statistics and surveys. The authors aim to address the gap in literature by analysing patterns of location and trends across the city region over the census period of 2011. The study furthermore integrates a walking tour assessment generated by checklists and a recording scheme. The attributes of cultural identity, economic diversity and socio-spatial practice of six urban spaces within three selected neighbourhoods are examined. Two urban spaces were chosen from each neighbourhood to interpret the diversity of land uses along each case study and the social interaction as well as economic activities of South Asian residents. This suggests that the idea of a coherent 'Asian community' obscures differences and generates assumptions regarding residential behaviour and 'in-group' identities. The research, therefore, provides an enhanced understanding of how these distinctive communities interact with a built environment, which has not been designed to cater certain spatial practices.


1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 408-418
Author(s):  
Frances Knight

In 1910, the Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouth revealed that the Church of England was the largest religious body in Wales, and attracted over a quarter of all worshippers. This indicated a significant improvement in the Church’s fortunes in the previous half century, and a different picture from that which had emerged from the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, which had suggested that the established Church had the support of only twenty per cent of Welsh worshippers. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the Church’s improving fortunes between 1851 and 1910 by exploring the liturgical patterns which were evolving in a particular Welsh county, Montgomeryshire, in the late nineteenth century. Montgomeryshire is part of the large rural heart of mid-Wales, bordered by Radnor to the south, Cardigan and Merioneth to the west, Denbigh to the north, and Shropshire to the east. The paper considers the annual, monthly, and weekly liturgical cycles which were developing in the county, and how the co-existence of the Welsh and English languages was expressed in different styles of church music and worship.


2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANIRBAN KARAK

AbstractThis article argues that to gauge the significance of state planning in mid-twentieth century India, it is necessary to study the trajectory of what was called ‘Indian political economy’ during the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. Through a close reading of selected texts, I demonstrate that the transmutation of Indian political economy into an abstract science of economics was a function of Indian nationalists’ inability to hold together the ‘social’, ‘economic’, and ‘ethical’ spheres within a single conceptual framework. The separation of these three spheres was the enabling factor behind the conceptualization of planning as a purely technical process of economic management. Further, the article contends that these conceptual developments cannot be adequately explained with reference to either ‘elite’ interests or the insidious effects of ‘colonial’ discourses. Rather, the narrative demonstrates that economic abstractions can—and must—be grounded in the historical development of capitalist social forms that transformed the internal fabric of Indian society. Drawing on a theory of capitalism as a historically specific form of social mediation, I argue that a Marxian social history of Indian state planning can overcome certain limitations inherent in extant approaches. Finally, the interpretation proposed here opens up the possibility of putting Indian history in conversation with a broader development during the first half of the twentieth century, namely the separation of political economy into economics and sociology.


Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


Author(s):  
Federico Varese

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-236
Author(s):  
Martin Braxatoris ◽  
Michal Ondrejčík

Abstract The paper proposes a basis of theory with the aim of clarifying the casual nature of the relationship between the West Slavic and non-West Slavic Proto-Slavic base of the Slovak language. The paper links the absolute chronology of the Proto-Slavic language changes to historical and archaeological information about Slavs and Avars. The theory connects the ancient West Slavic core of the Proto-Slavic base of the Slovak language with Sclaveni, and non-West Slavic core with Antes, which are connected to the later population in the middle Danube region. It presumes emergence and further expansion of the Slavic koiné, originally based on the non-West Slavic dialects, with subsequent influence on language of the western Slavic tribes settled in the north edge of the Avar Khaganate. The paper also contains a periodization of particular language changes related to the situation in the Khaganate of that time.


Author(s):  
Sorin Geacu

The population of Red Deer (Cervus elaphus L., 1758) in Tulcea county (Romania) The presence of the Red Deer in the North-western parts of Tulcea County is an example of the natural expansion of a species spreading area. In North Dobrogea, this mammal first occurred only forty years ago. The first specimens were spotted on Cocoşul Hill (on the territory of Niculiţel area) in 1970. Peak numbers (68 individuals) were registered in the spring of 1987. The deer population (67 specimens in 2007) of this county extended along 10 km from West to East and 20 km from North to South over a total of 23,000 ha (55% of which was forest land) in the East of the Măcin Mountains and in the West of the Niculiţel Plateau.


Author(s):  
Esraa Aladdin Noori ◽  
Nasser Zain AlAbidine Ahmed

The Russian-American relations have undergone many stages of conflict and competition over cooperation that have left their mark on the international balance of power in the Middle East. The Iraqi and Syrian crises are a detailed development in the Middle East region. The Middle East region has allowed some regional and international conflicts to intensify, with the expansion of the geopolitical circle, which, if applied strategically to the Middle East region, covers the area between Afghanistan and East Asia, From the north to the Maghreb to the west and to the Sudan and the Greater Sahara to the south, its strategic importance will seem clear. It is the main lifeline of the Western world.


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