The Oxford History of Hinduism

The central purpose of the book is the critical exposition of the Hindu idea of the divine feminine, or Devī, conceived as a singularity expressed in many forms. With the theological principles examined in the opening chapters, the book proceeds to describe and expound historically how individual manifestations of Devī have been imagined in Hindu religious culture and their impact upon Hindu social life. In this quest the authors draw upon the history and philosophy of major Hindu ideologies, such as the Purāṇic, Tantric, and Vaiṣṇava belief systems. A particular feature of the book is its attention not only to the major goddesses from the earliest period of Hindu religious history but also—and especially—to goddesses of later origin, in many cases of regional provenance and influence. Viewed through the lenses of worship practices, legend, and literature, belief in goddesses is discovered as the formative impulse of much of public and private life. The influence of the goddess culture is especially powerful on women’s life, often paradoxically situating women between veneration and subjection. This apparent contradiction arises from the humanization of goddesses while acknowledging their divinity, which is central to Hindu beliefs. In addition to studying the social and theological aspect of the goddess ideology, the essays in this book take anthropological, sociological, and literary approaches to delineate the emotional force of the goddess figure that claims intense human attachments and shapes personal and communal lives.

Author(s):  
Mandakranta Bose

Beginning by recognizing that the idea of female divinity in Hinduism has been a mystery from the inception of Hindu theology, this Introduction proceeds to an overview of the contents of this volume. Presenting the chapters, arranged thematically and historically into four related parts, this Introduction shows how Hindu philosophy and worship practices have expounded the idea of the divine feminine by conceptualizing it as a personified goddess at once singular and manifested in multiple forms. Drawing upon a variety of Hindu philosophical traditions, the authors relate the goddess as an abstraction to belief systems that render the goddess as humanized figures. In both formal theology and popular belief, this conception has resulted in an emotional and spiritual closeness to goddesses that continues deeply to influence Hindu social life and its cultural expressions, especially in its impact on the lives of women.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-124
Author(s):  
Ronald S. Stade

Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in-motion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.


Author(s):  
Ю.В. Ковалева

Представлен историографический анализ развития понятия большие социальные группы и историко-психологический анализ социальных феноменов , связанных с массовыми общественными явлениями в России. Сформулированы актуальные проблемы психологии больших социальных групп, к которым относятся неоднородность оснований для их выделения, недостаточная дифференцированность со сходными понятиями, неравномерность исследований в различные временные периоды и идеологическая нагруженность их разработки. Данная работа была ответом на необходимость восполнения знаний о процессах в таких группах, происходивших в различные исторические периоды развития социальной психологии, с соответствующим им уровнем научного осмысления, а также обобщением этой целостной картины на уровне современного понимания и формулировка перспективных направлений исследований. Целью исследования является установление связи между определением и основными свойствами понятия «большие социальные группы» (его синонимов, аналогов) и особенностями социальной ситуации в определенный период времени, а также реконструкция социальных процессов данного исторического этапа. Проверялась гипотеза о том, что большие социальные группы как феномены социальной жизни формировались в соответствии с историческим временем, а соответствующее им понятие и его свойства с одной стороны отвечали уровню развития гуманитарного знания, а с другой - пытались удовлетворить общественный и политический запрос в объяснении и управлении социальной ситуацией. Использовались методы историографии социальной психологии и психолого-исторической реконструкции . Первая часть статьи посвящена анализу первых двух этапов развития социальной психологии - с середины XIX до начала XX вв. и в 1920-е гг. XX в. The historiographic analysis of the development of the concept of large social groups and historical and psychological study of social phenomena associated with mass social phenomena was presented. Topical problems of the psychology of large social groups are formulated, including heterogeneity of the grounds for their isolation, insufficient differentiation with similar concepts, uneven research in various periods, and ideological loading of the history of its development. The study's main problem was the need to replenish the processes in such groups that took place in various historical periods of social psychology development as well as a synthesis of this holistic picture at the level of modern understanding and the formulation of promising areas of research. The study's purpose was to establish a connection between the definition and the basic properties of the concept of "large social groups" (and its synonyms, analogs) and the peculiarities of the social situation in a certain period, as well as the reconstruction of social processes of this historical segment. The hypothesis was tested that large social groups as phenomena of social life were formed under the past time. The concept and its properties were corresponding to them, on the one hand, compared to the level of development of humanitarian knowledge. On the other, they tried to satisfy the social and political requests to understand and manage the social situation. Methods of the historiography of the history of social psychology and psychological and historical reconstruction were used. The article's first part was devoted to the analysis of the early two stages of the development of social psychology - from the middle of the XIX to the beginning of the XX centuries and 1920 of the XX century.


In trying to show you the character of social anthropology as an academic discipline, I might try to sketch some substantive and perhaps intriguing findings in the field, or the history of its development, or some of its major intellectual problems today. I have chosen the last of these alternatives, because by showing the general problems we are grappling with I hope to reveal to you, in part no doubt inadvertently, the ways that anthropologists think, and also how our difficulties in part arise from the character of the social reality itself, which we confront and try to understand. The fundamental questions which social anthropology asks are about the forms, the nature, and the extent of order in human social life, as it can be observed in the different parts of the world. There is no need to prejudge the extent of this order; as members of one society we know how unpredictable social life can be. But concretely, human life varies greatly around the world, and it seems possible to characterize its forms to some extent. We seek means systematically to discover, record and understand these forms.


1982 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 165-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
John V. Pickstone

I know the historical sociology of religion only as an outsider; as an historian of medicine helped by that literature to a better understanding of early industrial society and perhaps to a clearer vision of what the social history of medicine ought to be. To read a recent review of the social history of religion, such as A. D. Gilbert’s Religion and Society in Industrial England, Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914, is to recognise how underdeveloped by comparison is the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine have the equivalent of church histories, of histories of theology and, of course, biographies of divines, but we lack the quantitative and comprehensive surveys of the chronological and geographical patterns in lay attendance and membership, and in professional recruitment and modes of work. For as long as medicine was generally only a transaction between an individual and his medical attendant, few statistics were produced and there is little national data. Yet there are very few local studies of how diseases were handled and how the various kinds of practitioner interacted with each other and with their various publics, so it will be some time before we shall be able to generalise on such matters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Petrović

The article discusses the social world formed around canneries in small coastal and insular towns in the northeastern Adriatic. Although associated with hard, unpleasant labor and demanding work conditions, the fish canning industry, particularly in the period of late socialism, offered a framework in which a meaningful social life was organized and lived. In this way, the local impact of canneries reached much beyond providing financial means to its employees. To understand the social meaning of fish canning in the Yugoslav Adriatic, the article focuses on the relationship between the now largely vanished local fish canning industry and tourism that is increasingly becoming the dominant (and the only) source of income for local communities. Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis proves to be a productive lens to view the complex and often ambiguous relationship between the two industries, and to narrate the history of fish canning through the senses – what was seen, heard, smelled, felt. These intense, embodied, sensorial memories caution us that the dominant claims and narratives which interpret the replacement of industry with tourism (and other tertiary sector activities) as a necessary, inevitable and desirable developmental step should not be taken for granted.


Antiquity ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 5 (19) ◽  
pp. 277-290
Author(s):  
Flinders Petrie

When we look at the great diversity of man’s activities and interests, it is evident how much space they afford for reviewing his history in many different ways. To most of our historians the view of the political power and course of legislation has seemed all that need be noticed; others have dealt with history in religion, or the growth of mind in changes of moral standards, as in Lecky’s fine work. In recent years the history of knowledge in medicine, in the applied sciences, and in abstract mathematics, has been profitably studied, as affording the basis of civilization. The purely mental view is shown in the social life and customs of each age, and expressed in the growth of Art. This last expression of man’s spirit has great advantages in its presentation; the material from different ages is of a comparable nature, and it is easily placed together to contrast its differences. Moreover it covers a wider range of time than we can et observe in man’s scope, but it is as essential to his nature as any of the other aspects that we have named.


2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERICH DeWALD

AbstractCompared with other public media, the colonial state showed a relative lack of interest in radio broadcasting, which developed in Vietnam in the 1930s under the aegis of two organizations based in Hanoi and Saigon, the Radio-Club de l'Indochine du Nord and Radio Saigon. These two groups were largely responsible for the new technology's expansion and for determining the content of broadcasting. The groups actively consulted the growing radio public, and that vocal audience played a role in determining not just what was heard but also in the social life of radio in late-colonial Vietnam. The content of radio was limited to a non-political domain and this fact, along with the particular position that many radios took in the social geography of towns and cities, lent itself to the easy entry of the radio into day-to-day life. Indeed, the early history of radio in Vietnam is remarkable for how rapidly it became commonplace, even banal.


Author(s):  
S.P. Shendrikova ◽  
N.E. Vishnyakova

The article reveals the main issues of charitable activities of German landowners of the Tauride province of the 19th century, who not only created large model farms, but also devoted themselves to the social life of the Peninsula. The events of the Second World War (1939-1945) provoked the formation of negative public opinion about the German people, although the positive role of representatives of this nation is known in the history of Russia. However, today, the topic of charitable activities, patronage and philanthropy among the Ger-mans of the Crimea in the 19th - beginning of the 20th century is very inquisitive. The authors focus on the social activities of the German ethnic group in the territory of the Tauride province. Charitable activities in the Russian Empire initially did not have a sufficiently clear legal basis, however, with the adoption of the necessary legislative aspects, this direction became popular among a wealthy group of interested persons.


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