Possessing Christianity in Northeast India: Kelkang, 1937

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
KYLE JACKSON
Keyword(s):  
Northeast India ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Logics

Abstract In 1937, a spirit moved in the mountains of Northeast India. It presented local villagers with a visceral anticolonial vision, laicized religious practices, and offered alternative definitions of expertise and literacy that sidelined colonial and missionary authorities. Its message pulled together a complex range of clans, pilgrims, and roadworkers, and reconciled them according to contemporary local logics. This article uses the ‘Kelkang incident’ of the Lushai Hills District (today: Mizoram) to reverse the polarity of conventional writings on prophetic rebellion in two ways. First, it asks not how the colonial state dealt with a prophetic rebellion, but how a prophetic rebellion dealt with the state. Second, it asks not what the moving spirit of Kelkang symbolized, but what it did and how people interacted with it. Placing upland spirits, humans, terminology, and concepts at the centre of the analysis, the article argues that a more open-minded approach to the history of religion can better reveal processes of mediumship and rapidly indigenizing Christianities as well as the much broader malleability of concepts like ‘conversion’, ‘revival’, and ‘Christianity’.

Scarab Amulet-Beads from 1st–2nd Century Children’s Burials at a Necropolis on the Iluraton Plateau, Eastern Crimea

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
M. O. Tarasenko ◽  
Z. V. Khanutina
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
State Museum ◽  
Eastern Crimea ◽  
History Of

We describe a group of Egyptian faience scarabs unearthed from the necropolis on the Iluraton Plateau, Eastern Crimea, by the expedition from the State Museum of the History of Religion (St. Petersburg) in 1987–1990. Artifacts made of so-called Egyptian faience were found in eight of the sixty-two burials—those of g irls aged below 1.5, dating to the 1st to early 2nd centuries AD. The most numerous among the faience items were beads in the form of scarabs. The analysis shows them to fall into three groups in terms of presence and nature of images on the reverse side: those without images (3 spec.), those with abstract images (3 spec.), and those with anthropo-zoomorphic images (2 spec.). In two cases, representations point to specifi c Egyptian workshops. Scarabs in girls’ burials of the Roman period elaborate on the thanatological imagery, which originated among the Scythian-Saka tribes of Eurasia in the mid-1st millennium BC.

Psychiatrists and psychiatry in late colonial India

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-548
Author(s):  
Shilpi Rajpal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
History Of

The history of professionalisation of psychiatry in India is an array of parallel histories. The article describes the variegated processes of professionalisation, modernisation and Indianisation and the impediments that colonialism created in their path. It charts the reification of the professional identity of a psychiatrist which was uniquely different from the Western counterpart. The process that began at the turn of the twentieth century was far from complete even on the eve of independence. It argues that psychiatry remained at the margins of medicine and the colonial state maintained an indifferent attitude towards development of the mental sciences. Highlighting contributions of individual psychiatrists and juxtaposing them with those of the state, this article situates psychiatrists as historical actors and how the emergence of psychiatry was enmeshed with political histories of the period.

Rethinking sovereignty with reference to history and anthropology

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Wachspress
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anthropological Literature

While legal practice and scholarship are driven by the use and understanding of complex legal terminology, there has been little effort to incorporate the humanistic scholarship of anthropologists and historians into theoretical or practical accounts of these words and their usages. This paper attempts to historicise and complicate a term that serves as a bridge or meeting point between the legal and the political; sovereignty has been conceptualised since the sixteenth century as both a framing device that produces unity within the state while establishing mutual equality within the interstate order, and as the capacity to make law without being subject to that law. Recent anthropological literature has challenged the personification implicit in political–theoretical definitions of sovereignty, arguing instead for a theory of sovereignty that can be applied to ‘complicated’, post-colonial contexts, where legal orders are plural or overlapping and the state is weak or non-existent. What such critiques cannot explain, however, is how the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ became so central to political discourse on a global scale. This paper draws upon legal historical case-studies concerned with the production of the colonial or post-colonial state or the deployment of ‘sovereignty’ as a justificatory concept in colonial settings. In doing so, this paper argues for understanding sovereignty both as a practice across time and space that organises legal institutions and as a justificatory strategy in the intellectual and social history of those institutions, an approach that allows scholars to draw upon the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and historians. While primarily intended to instigate a broader interdisciplinary conversation, this paper also suggests a preliminary conclusion: sovereignty has historically been deployed as a means of including that which cannot be considered the same, mediating the colonial tension between ‘otherness’ and legal homogeneity.

scholarly journals Peak-experience and the entheogenic use of cannabis in world religions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Ferrara
Keyword(s):  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Peak Experiences ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Abraham Maslow ◽  
Peak Experience ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unitive Consciousness ◽  
Self Transcendence

AbstractThis paper demonstrates that cannabis can evoke “peak-experiences”—the name psychologist Abraham Maslow gave to fleeting moments of expanded perception indicative of self-transcendence—when used alongside more traditional religious practices such as meditation, fasting, contemplative prayer, and sacramental ritual. For that reason, religious seekers around the globe have deployed cannabis as a deliberate psychoactive to trigger the peak-experiences that stir feelings of ecstasy, wonder, and awe and resolve the “dichotomies, polarities, and conflicts of life.” As such, peak-experiences exemplify a form of spiritual revelation that has played a pivotal role in the history of religion, and because of its ability to elicit unitive consciousness at the heart of mystical insight, cannabis has been utilized as a mild entheogen across culture and tradition for millennia.

scholarly journals What Comes to an End When a “Religion” Comes to an “End”? Reflections on a Historiographical Trope and Ancient Mediterranean History of Religion

Numen ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 204-229
Author(s):  
Jörg Rüpke
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Mediterranean History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Dimensions

Abstract This article argues that the neglect of narratives about the end of religious traditions is due to a complex entanglement of our positions as historical narrators and specifics of the sources for histories of religions, that is of emic and academic narrators. Typically, academic histories are not only based on emic narratives, but also tend to accept their conceptual frameworks with regard to the unities of description. It will be shown that such an entanglement has consequences for the neglect of the end of religious practices or groups. Against this background an analytical grid for change and discontinuation of different dimensions of “religion” will be offered and exemplified in an analysis of the “end of Paganism” in the late ancient Roman Empire. The most problematic implications of such narratives, the article will argue, are assumptions about the coherence of the religious protagonists brought center-stage.

The State of the Japanese State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavan McCormack
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Japan ◽  
Client State ◽  
Constitutional Revision

In this his latest work, Gavan McCormack argues that Abe Shinzo’s efforts to re-engineer the Japanese state may fail, but his radicalism continues to shake the country and will have consequences not easy now to predict. The significance of this book will be widely recognized, particularly by those researching contemporary world politics, international relations and the history of modern Japan. McCormack here revisits and reassesses his previous formulations of Japan as construction state (doken kokka), client state (zokkoku), constitutional pacifist state, and colonial state (especially in its relationship to Okinawa). He adds a further chapter on what he calls the ‘rampant state’, that outlines the increasingly authoritarian or ikkyo (one strong) turn of the Abe government in the fifth year of its second term. And he critically addresses the Abe agenda for constitutional revision.

The History of Sierra Leone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gibril R. Cole
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The State ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Economic Exchanges ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial

The geographical boundaries of contemporary Sierra Leone resulted from the intense quest for imperial domains by European powers, specifically by Britain and France, during the 19th-century scramble for colonies. However, the country’s history runs deep into the past. While the peoples of the present-day republic did not have a history of large polities, there were, nonetheless, organized states with social, political, and economic structures, some of them based on conventional understandings of relations between the rulers and their peoples. Agricultural production, local, regional, and long-distance commerce facilitated not just economic exchanges, but also cross-cultural encounters between peoples from near and far. This engendered an integrative process that allowed for population growth and state expansion prior to the arrival of Europeans in the region of West Africa in the 15th century and the subsequent rise of the Atlantic slave trade. While the transatlantic system disrupted the existing political, economic, and social systems, the remarkable resilience of the peoples enabled them to rebound, only to be later subjugated to British colonial rule from 1808 to 1961. British colonialism encountered resistance in one form or another from its initial establishment until 1896, when a civil uprising devolved into a war of attrition between the people of the interior of Sierra Leone and the British colonial state. British rule and control of the colonial economy continued until the post-World War II period, when educated Africans across the continent sought to attain their independence. Sierra Leone’s educated elite organized, albeit along ethno-regional lines, to demand independence, which was granted in 1961. The post-independence experiment in democracy was subverted by political megalomania, the entrenchment of ethno-regionalism, corruption, and frequent military interventions in the state. The use of subaltern youth in the politics of the country by the state ultimately had the effect of producing a group of youths who sought to transform themselves from foot soldiers of the political groups to a military junta through violence, which engulfed the country in a decade-long civil war from 1991 to 2002.

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