scholarly journals Songs of Dissent and Consciousness: Pronouncements of the Bauls of Rural Bengal

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1018
Author(s):  
Uttaran Dutta ◽  
Panchali Banerjee ◽  
Soham Ghosh ◽  
Priyam Ghosal ◽  
Samya Srimany ◽  
...  

Bauls, the wandering minstrels of rural Bengal (of both Bangladesh and India), are a socio-religiously marginalized cultural group. While the ritualistic practices and spiritual discourses of the Bauls have received scholarly attention, scholarship on Bauls’ songs about material and communicative adversities and their emancipatory visions is lacking. Bauls’ performances and discourses are precursors to envisioning alternative emancipatory possibilities that question dominant intolerances, oppressions, and exploitations. This article documents and reflects on the works of two contemporary Bauls—Shah Abdul Karim and Manimohan Das. Through their songs and performances, they (i) question the power structure and legitimize the sufferings and struggles of the downtrodden, and (ii) seek to raise societal consciousness in imagining a free and just society.

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Bender

Abstract Tomasello argues in the target article that, in generalizing the concrete obligations originating from interdependent collaboration to one's entire cultural group, humans become “ultra-cooperators.” But are all human populations cooperative in similar ways? Based on cross-cultural studies and my own fieldwork in Polynesia, I argue that cooperation varies along several dimensions, and that the underlying sense of obligation is culturally modulated.


ALQALAM ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Joko Priyanto

Religion Blasphemy addressed to Jakarta Governor who is also a candidate for Jakarta Governor Election 2017 is the beginning of a series of polemic along process of Jakarta Governor Election 2017. This case triggers friction between Islamic society as a civil society and government as authority. This research explored this case by using theory of power relations Foucault. The result shows that the mass movement of Islamic society is power from Islamic society knowledge. Power structure tries to discipline this movement by hegemony in form of discourse. However, hegemonic discourse from civil society (Islamic society) also tries to challenge. The fight of hegemonic in form of discourse becomes so viral in all media, element and institution. This research shows that the discourse of Leader and Diversity is a signifier empty which be contestation of giving meaning.   Keywords: knowledge, power, Foucoult, religion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Potocki

The activities of John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society have been analysed in terms of liberating Catholics from clerical dictation in political matters. Yet, beyond the much-discussed clerical backlash against Wheatley, there has been little scholarly attention paid to a more constructive response offered by progressive elements within the Catholic Church. The discussion that follows explores the development of the Catholic social movement from 1906, when the Catholic Socialist Society was formed, up until 1918 when the Catholic Social Guild, an organisation founded by the English Jesuit Charles Plater, had firmly established its local presence in the west of Scotland. This organisation played an important role in the realignment of Catholic politics in this period, and its main activity was the dissemination of the Church's social message among the working-class laity. The Scottish Catholic Church, meanwhile, thanks in large part to Archbishop John Aloysius Maguire of Glasgow, became more amenable to social reform and democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Ayman Abu-Shomar

This article discusses how Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author's ability to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawkat M. Toorawa

Q. 19 (Sūrat Maryam) – an end-rhyming, and, by general consensus, middle to late Meccan sura of 98 (or 99) verses – has been the subject of considerable exegetical and scholarly attention. Besides commentary, naturally, in every tafsīr of the Qur'an, Sura 19 has also benefited from separate, individual treatment. It has been the object of special attention by modern Western scholars, in particular those of comparative religion and of Christianity, whose attention has centred largely on the virtue and piety of Mary, on the miraculous nature of the birth of Jesus, on Jesus' ministry, and on how Jesus' time on Earth came to an end. In addition, Sura 19 is a favourite of the interfaith community. Given this sustained and multivectored scrutiny, it is remarkable how little analysis has been devoted to its lexicon. This article is a contribution to the study of the lexicon of this sura, with a particular emphasis on three features: rhyming end words, hapaxes, and repeating words and roots, some of which occur in this sura alone.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Martha Finch

Each week in my religion and food course during Spring 2016, a student or I brought foods related to the religious group we were studying into the classroom for all to try. With the first dish they tasted, students asked, “So what makes this food ‘religious’?” This question formed the central theme throughout the semester as we wrestled with what religion is in the context of food and foodways: the network of material aspects (food itself; practices like growing, distributing, cooking, eating; sensory experiences such as taste) and conceptual aspects (ideas, meanings, metaphors, symbols, values such as taste) of food in a particular social/cultural group. The familiar and unfamiliar foods elicited visceral reactions from students. This essay argues that paying closer attention to religion as an independent interpretive category and especially to food itself, as a material agent eliciting powerful sensory effects that precede religious ideas and enable those ideas, provides an alternative to dependence on common food studies’ interpretive categories and on the Protestant-influenced focus on food as abstracted symbol or metaphor of ‘meaning.’


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