Lynching, Religion, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Puebla

Author(s):  
GEMA SANTAMARÍA
Author(s):  
Richard K. Wolf

Based on extensive research in India and Pakistan, this book examines the ways drumming and voices interconnect over vast areas of South Asia and considers what it means for musical instruments to be voice-like and carry textual messages in particular contexts. The book employs a hybrid, novelistic form of presentation in which the fictional protagonist Muharram Ali, a man obsessed with finding music he believes will dissolve religious and political barriers, interacts with the book's field consultants, to communicate ethnographic and historical realities that transcend the local details of any one person's life. The result is a daring narrative that follows Muharram Ali on a journey that explores how the themes of South Asian Muslims and their neighbors coming together, moving apart, and relating to God and spiritual intermediaries resonate across ritual and expressive forms such as drumming and dancing. The story charts the breakdown of this naiveté. A daring narrative of music, religion and politics in late twentieth century South Asia, the book delves into the social and religious principles around which Muslims, Hindus, and others bond, create distinctions, reflect upon one another, or decline to acknowledge differences.


Author(s):  
Gema Santamaría

Focusing on medieval Nepal, in this chapter Yogesh Raj argues that existing sociohistorical accounts of lynching and other extreme forms of collective cruelty are inadequate for developing “a credible historical account” due to what he considers their “narratological bias.” Raj asserts that the problematic nature of the Event Catalogues, the main methodological innovation in these accounts composed by scholars of European rioting and American lynching, “call for a radically different approach to historiography.” Using Newari medieval records of lynching, Raj argues for “employing analogy, and not argumentation, to develop a deeper historical understanding of lynching in Nepal and across societies.”


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This book examines how Kansas became known as one of the most conservative states in America. Kansas was one of the first to pass mandatory Prohibition and one of the last to overturn it. Kansas schools regularly included Bible reading and prayer, and by the end of the twentieth century were a battleground for proponents of creationism and intelligent design. The Republican Party was a strong contender among the possible explanations for Kansas conservatism. Religion was another. The connections between faith and politics in Kansas would begin and end with arguments about the self-perpetuating power of conservative ideas and leaders in the nation's heartland. However, the book suggests that red state religion and politics in Kansas had less to do with contentious moral activism than it did with local communities and relationships among neighbors, friends, and fellow churchgoers.


Author(s):  
Karissa Haugeberg

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of the American antiabortion movement. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, women prolife activists founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on clinic records, oral histories, organizational records, and interviews with prominent figures, Women against Abortion examines American women's fight against abortion. It also elucidates the complicated relationship between gender politics, religion, and politics as notions of equality, secularism, and partisanship were recast in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, it looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward, it traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. The book also looks at the activism of Shelley Shannon, a prominent evangelical Protestant pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Women against Abortion explores important questions, including the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Mohammed Bashir Salau

Until the second half of the twentieth century, the role of religion in Africa was profoundly neglected. There were no university centers devoted to the study of religion in Africa; there was only a handful of scholars who focused primarily on religious studies and most of them were not historians; and there were relatively few serious empirical studies on Christianity, Islam, and African traditional religions. This paucity of rigorous research began to be remedied in the 1960s and by the last decade of the twentieth century, the body of literature on religion in Africa had expanded significantly. The burgeoning research and serious coverage of the role of religion in African societies has initially drawn great impetus from university centers located in the West and in various parts of Africa that were committed to demonstrating that Africa has a rich history even before European contact. Accordingly scholars associated with such university centers have since the 1960s acquired and systematically catalogued private religious manuscripts and written numerous pan-African, regional, national, and local studies on diverse topics including spirit mediumship, witchcraft, African systems of thought, African evangelists and catechists, Mahdism, Pentecostalism, slavery, conversion, African religious diasporas and their impact on host societies, and religion and politics. Although the three works under review here deal with the role of religion in an African context, they mainly contribute to addressing three major questions in the study of religion and politics: How do Islam and other religious orientations shape public support for democracy? What is the primary cause of conflict or religious violence? What strategies should be employed to resolve such conflicts and violence?


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUGATA BOSE

This article elucidates the meaning of Indian nationalism and its connection to religious universalism as a problem of ethics. It engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo Ghose on the relationship between ethics and politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both secularist and subalternist histories have contributed to misunderstandings of Aurobindo's political thought and shown an inability to comprehend its ethical moorings. The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo's thought are related to more general infirmities afflicting the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India. In exploring how best to achieve Indian unity, Aurobindo had shown that Indian nationalism was not condemned to pirating from the gallery of models of states crafted by the West. By reconceptualizing the link between religion and politics, this essay suggests a new way forward in Indian intellectual history.


AHSANA MEDIA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Abd. Ghoffar

The tug of war regarding the perception of Islam whether as a series of religious teachings or also at the same time a part of the state system that regulates the political power of the state has actually exposed the surface as a central issue since the end of the nineteenth century and entered the early twentieth century. This perception of Islam is very significant for the development of religious and political discourses which until now are still being discussed. From the discussion of this topic also was born a series of intellectual figures who had filled out the history sheet and carved gold ink through their ideas or concepts about religion and the state that reached the processor of our brain today. Through them we can transfer thoughts so that trans ideas occur. The discussion that is oriented towards Muslim intellectual thinking is very useful for us in order to reformulate our perceptions of religion and politics in order to be more applicable in Islamic and state-of-the-art insight.


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