The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modes Of Life

The foundation of Hindu law is the voluminous textual tradition called Dharmaśāstra, the expert tradition on dharma. This book seeks to delineate the historical development of Dharmaśāstra, even though the tradition presented dharma as timeless and ahistorical. The volume establishes the importance of law for the history and study of Hinduism by providing interpretive descriptions of all the major topics of Hindu dharma according to this tradition. First, two broad introductions to the historical development of the textual sources of Hindu law suggest new ways to understand both the original texts (smṛti) and the later commentaries and digests. Next, groundbreaking research into the origin of the householder (gṛhastha), who is at the center of the Dharmaśāstric enterprise, provides new insights into both the origin of this genre and many of its topics, such as the āśrama system and married household life. The book devotes its central chapters to each of the major topics of Dharmaśāstra: epistemology of dharma, caste and social class, orders of life, rites of passage, Vedic student and graduate, marriage, children, inheritance, women, daily duties, food, gifting, funeral and ancestral offerings, impurity and purification, ascetic modes of life, dharma during emergencies, king, punishment, legal procedure, titles of law, penances, vows, pilgrimage, images, and temples. The final chapters then explore both the reception of Dharmaśāstra in other religious traditions, both Hindu and Buddhist, and the relevance of Dharmaśāstra to studies of critical concepts in religious studies—the body, emotions, material culture, subjectivity, animal studies, and vernacular culture.

Material Culture and Embodiment in American Religion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Will

In recent years, the study of religion has undergone a useful materialization in the work of many scholars, who are not inclined to define it in terms of ideas, creeds, or doctrines alone, but want to understand what role sensation, emotion, objects, spaces, clothing, and food have played in religious practice. If the intellect and the will dominated the study of religion dedicated to theology and ethics, the materialization of religious studies has taken up the role of the body, expanding our understanding of it and dismantling our preconceptions, which were often notions inherited from religious traditions. As a result, the body has become a broad register or framework for gauging the social, aesthetic, and practical character of religion in everyday life. The interest in material culture as a primary feature of religion has unfolded in tandem with the new significance of the body and the broad materialization of religious studies.

scholarly journals Historical development of linguistics’ bibliography in Russia (1860-2013)

Bibliosphere ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
V. V. Goncharova
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Slavic Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rich Information ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Norms ◽  
Further Development

The interdisciplinary character of the science of language causes great difficulties in bibliographic support in this field. The object of bibliographing in linguistics is not only literature on the language, but also a variety of linguistic resources, which represent a special object to study a branch of linguistics - lexicography. Bibliography of linguistics is the least studied field by specialists among humanitarian bibliographic complexes. The paper first studied the array of domestic bibliographic sources for more than 150 years; the most significant of them are shown. The subject of research is national bibliographic resources in the linguistics field. The objective is to characterize the historical development of the linguistic bibliography in Russia. To achieve this goal we had to solve a number of tasks: identify existing sources for ongoing historical research; to trace the history of forming bibliographic sources, bibliography of bibliographies of linguistics; to form and analyze the body of bibliographic materials; to characterize the problematic areas in the bibliographic software of linguistics. Using the bibliometric analysis it was studied an array of bibliographic products published between 1860 and 2013, the dynamics of bibliographic resources formation was determined, the degree of bibliographic support of some topics and issues in linguistic science and prior directions of their development were revealed. The main results of the study should be considered: 1. The nuclear of fundamental indices on general and applied linguistics is singled out in analyzed literature sources covering the period 1918-1977, as well as in Slavic linguistics for 1825-1981. The complex of current and retrospective bibliographic products was formed and replenished in the country in 1963-1988. 2. The largest share of bibliographic sources in linguistics is presented by book and article bibliography (over 70%), many of which remain bibliographically unrecorded and unused. 3. The following subject areas of linguistics are considered to be bibliographically supported: inter-linguistics, culture of speech and language norms, lexicography, linguistic geography, linguistics regional geography, onomastics. 4. An obvious need to continue the index or database of bibliographic aids in the field of linguistics over the past 50 years is marked. 5. Further development of the linguistics bibliography is impossible to imagine without creating an electronic guide on the bibliographic resources of linguistics, which would reflect the diversity of bibliographical resources and provide their rich information potential for professionals and remote users

Sermons as Practical and Linguistic Performances: Insights from Theory and History

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-144
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Historical View ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Marking Time

Abstract Sermons lend themselves to ambiguous identification in the study of religions. On the one hand, they are easily recognisable practices, delivered on particular days of the week, or when special occasions or needs arise. They are usually given in clearly defined places at clearly defined times. They are given by designated or recognized individuals that vary according to the respective religious traditions. On the other hand, sermons are speech performances that may and often do vary from one occasion to the next. While prone to a certain formalism, sermon speech acts are open to variation from time to time, and from preacher to preacher. To extend the possibilities offered by sermons for reflection and analysis, I explore some of the theoretical insights suggested for sermons in ritual studies and from the history of sermons within religious traditions. There is no consensus within ritual studies, but there are some useful ideas and suggestions that cover and extend the practices and speech acts that constitute sermons. More significantly, I found the longue durée of the sermon in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to be more resourceful. The historical view of the sermon in comparable religious traditions brings forth enduring elements such as reading texts, employing rhetoric, producing effects (including affect), signifying and challenging authority, and marking time and space. More than the theoretical models for rituals from anthropology and religious studies, this historical perspective brings out the value of the practices and speech elements that constitute sermons.

A Dictionary of Sikh Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pashaura Singh
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
South Asian Studies ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Over 350 entries This new dictionary provides accessible definitions of the terms that the growing number of students of Sikhism will encounter. It covers beliefs, practices, festivals, sacred sites, and principal languages, as well as the social and religious processes through which Sikhism has evolved. A major focus is the teachings of the founder of Sikhism, Gurū Nānak, and doctrinal developments under subsequent Gurūs. Incorporating the 500-year history of Sikhism, from its birth in northern India to its more recent spread around the world, it covers the interplay between the Sikh tradition and other religious traditions, including Hindu and Sufi. It is an invaluable first reference for students and teachers of Sikhism, religious studies, South Asian studies, philosophy, and the related disciplines of history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as for all practising Sikhs and anyone with an interest in Sikh religion and culture.

Ideas of Race in Early America

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean P. Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early America ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Purity Of Blood

“Race,” as a concept denoting a fundamental division of humanity and usually encompassing cultural as well as physical traits, was crucial in early America. It provided the foundation for the colonization of Native land, the enslavement of American Indians and Africans, and a common identity among socially unequal and ethnically diverse Europeans. Longstanding ideas and prejudices merged with aims to control land and labor, a dynamic reinforced by ongoing observation and theorization of non-European peoples. Although before colonization, neither American Indians, nor Africans, nor Europeans considered themselves unified “races,” Europeans endowed racial distinctions with legal force and philosophical and scientific legitimacy, while Natives appropriated categories of “red” and “Indian,” and slaves and freed people embraced those of “African” and “colored,” to imagine more expansive identities and mobilize more successful resistance to Euro-American societies. The origin, scope, and significance of “racial” difference were questions of considerable transatlantic debate in the age of Enlightenment and they acquired particular political importance in the newly independent United States. Since the beginning of European exploration in the 15th century, voyagers called attention to the peoples they encountered, but European, American Indian, and African “races” did not exist before colonization of the so-called New World. Categories of “Christian” and “heathen” were initially most prominent, though observations also encompassed appearance, gender roles, strength, material culture, subsistence, and language. As economic interests deepened and colonies grew more powerful, classifications distinguished Europeans from “Negroes” or “Indians,” but at no point in the history of early America was there a consensus that “race” denoted bodily traits only. Rather, it was a heterogeneous compound of physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics passed on from one generation to another. While Europeans assigned blackness and African descent priority in codifying slavery, skin color was secondary to broad dismissals of the value of “savage” societies, beliefs, and behaviors in providing a legal foundation for dispossession. “Race” originally denoted a lineage, such as a noble family or a domesticated breed, and concerns over purity of blood persisted as 18th-century Europeans applied the term—which dodged the controversial issue of whether different human groups constituted “varieties” or “species”—to describe a roughly continental distribution of peoples. Drawing upon the frameworks of scripture, natural and moral philosophy, and natural history, scholars endlessly debated whether different races shared a common ancestry, whether traits were fixed or susceptible to environmentally produced change, and whether languages or the body provided the best means to trace descent. Racial theorization boomed in the U.S. early republic, as some citizens found dispossession and slavery incompatible with natural-rights ideals, while others reconciled any potential contradictions through assurances that “race” was rooted in nature.

Feasting and Fasting

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasia R. Diner ◽  
Jonathan Safran Foer
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

This book explores how the making of Judaism and the making of Jewish meals have been intertwined throughout history and in contemporary Jewish practices. It is an invitation not only to delve into the topic but to join in the growing number of conversations and events that consider the intersections between Judaism and food. Seventeen original chapters advance the state of both Jewish studies and religious studies scholarship on food in accessible prose. Insights from recent work in growing subfields such as food studies, sex and gender studies, and animal studies permeate the volume. Encompassing historical, ethnographic, critical theoretical, and history of religions methodologies, the volume introduces readers to historic and ongoing Jewish food practices and helps them engage the charged ethical debates about how our food choices reflect competing Jewish values. The book’s three sections respectively include chronologically arranged historical overviews (first section), essays built around particular foods and theoretical questions (second section), and essays addressing ethical issues (third and final section). The first section provides the historical and textual overview that is necessary to ground any discussion of food and Jewish traditions. The second section provides studies of food and culture from a range of time periods, and each chapter addresses not only a particular food but also a theoretical issue of broader interest in the study of religion. The final section focuses on moral and ethical questions generated by and answered through Jewish engagements with food.

The Politics of Poetics: Nonnus' Dionysiaca and the World of Late Antiquity

Ramus ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Shorrock
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Focus

Over the last thirty years or so our understanding of the world of late antiquity has undergone a radical transformation. In addition to the important contributions by historians such as Peter Brown (on the body and society) and Averil Cameron (on the evolution of Christian discourse), new perspectives have also been opened up on the material culture of the later empire. In the arena of literary criticism, however, signs of any analogous transformation have been much less obvious. Though, of course, it is easy to overstate the case, it is nevertheless clear from the bibliographic record that the literature of the late antique period has not yet been subject to the intense critical attention of other epochs, such as the Second Sophistic. This article will attempt on a necessarily modest scale to address this lack of critical attention.My primary focus is the fifth-century CE epic poem, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a product of Roman Egypt, written in Greek in forty-eight chapter-length books. It runs to over 21,000 hexameter lines—some five thousand lines longer than Homer's Iliad—and tells the story of the wine-loving Dionysus, the hero whose destiny it is to become a god. Though its influence on the wider literary culture of late antiquity was profound, it has remained a marginalised and neglected text within the history of modern classical scholarship. The Dionysiaca exists as an often quoted yet rarely read compendium of obscure mythological information, and is periodically mined for allusions to earlier and implicitly ‘better’ poets whose works have only survived in fragmentary form, but it is rarely considered on its own terms.

Al Fārūqī between the History of Religions and Islamic Theology

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract Ismāʿīl Rājī al Fārūqī (1921–1986) played a considerable role in the academic study of Islam as it was developing in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper is a critical examination of how he employed the categories of religion and religious studies in his scholarly, dialogical, and Islamist work. The paper follows his ideas of religious traditions, their truth claims, and ethical engagement in the world. For Al Fārūqī, these constituted the main foundations of all religions, and provided a distinctive approach to the study of religions. Al Fārūqī was critical of the then prevailing approaches, asserting that they were either too subjective or too reductionist. He offered an approach to the study of religions based on a Kantian approach to values. Al Fārūqī’s method and theory, however, could not escape the bias and prejudice that he tried to avoid. Following his arguments, I show that his reflections on religion and its systematic study in academia charted an approach to religions, but also provided a language for a particular Islamic theology that delegitimized other approaches, particularly experiential ones, in modern Islam.

scholarly journals Mäṣḥafä fǝlsätu lä-abunä Täklä Haymanot: a Short Study

Aethiopica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 137-167
Author(s):  
Denis Nosnitsin
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Two Stages

The account of the translation of the relics of abunä Täklä Haymanot, usually attached to his Acts, is one of the less-studied elements of the Saint’s hagiographic tradition. The article starts with a typology of translation reports in Ethiopian literature and deals in detail with the analysis of the textual tradition of the so-called Mäṣḥafä fǝlsätu lä-abunä Täklä Haymanot (‘Book of [the History] of the Translation [of the Body] of our father Täklä Haymanot’, BHT) and the problem of its sources. At least two stages can be distinguished in the development of the text (BHT1, BHT2), a long period of about two centuries separating them. The narrative of the first translation of the body of the Saint, which is said to have taken place in 1370, only becomes central in the later version of the work (BHT2). Among the literary relations around the BHT revealed in this study, the connection with the so-called Death of Moses, mostly known as a text affiliated to the literary tradition of the Betä Ǝsraʾel, is the most interesting one.

Images of Mithra

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Adrych ◽  
Robert Bracey ◽  
Dominic Dalglish ◽  
Stefanie Lenk ◽  
Rachel Wood
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
History Of Use ◽  
Historical Accounts

Images of Mithra begins with the seemingly simple question: what’s in a name? With a history of use extending back to Vedic texts of the second millennium BC, derivations of the name Mithra appear in the Roman Empire, across Sasanian Persia, and in the Kushan Empire of southern Afghanistan and northern India during the first millennium AD. Even today, this name has a place in Yazidi and Zoroastrian religion. But what connection have Mihr in Persia, Miiro in Kushan Bactria, and Mithras in the Roman Empire to one another? Over the course of the volume, specialists in the material culture of these diverse regions explore appearances of the name Mithra from six distinct locations in antiquity. In a subversion of the usual historical process, the authors begin not from an assessment of texts, but by placing images of Mithra at the heart of their analysis. Careful consideration of each example’s own context, situating it in the broader scheme of religious traditions and ongoing cultural interactions, is key to this discussion. Such an approach opens up a host of potential comparisons and interpretations that are often sidelined in historical accounts. What Images of Mithra offers is a fresh approach to figures that we identify as ‘gods’, and the ways in which they were labelled and depicted in the ancient world. Through an emphasis on material culture, a more nuanced understanding of the processes of religious formation is proposed in what is but the first part of the Visual Conversations series.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document