Ethnic Revival and Religious Turmoil PDF Download

Author: Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This is a collection of essays on ethnic revival and identity crisis in the Himalayan region. Anthropologists analyze and discuss several cases from Gilgit in Pakistan to Eastern Napal.

Author: Mahendra Lawoti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415780977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Ethnic and nationalist movements surged forward in Nepal after restoration of democracy in 1990. This book analyses the rise in ethnic mobilization, the dynamics and trajectories of these movements and their consequences for Nepal.

Author: David N. Gellner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019099343X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The socio-political landscape of Nepal has been rocked by dramatic and far-reaching changes in the past thirty years. Following a ten-year Maoist revolution and civil war, the country has transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. The former Hindu kingdom has declared its commitment to secularism, without coming to any agreement on what secularism means or should mean in the Nepalese context. What happens to religion under conditions of such rapid social and political change? How do the changes in public festivals reflect and/or create new group identities? Is the gap between the urban and the rural narrowing? How is the state dealing with Nepal’s multicultural and multi-religious society? How are Nepalis understanding, resisting, and adapting ideas of secularism? In order to answer these important questions, this volume brings together eleven case studies by an international team of anthropologists and ethno-Indologists of Nepal on such diverse topics as secularism, individualism, shamanism, animal sacrifice, the role of state functionaries in festivals, clashes and synergies between Maoism and Buddhism, and conversion to Christianity. In an Afterword, renowned political theorist Rajeev Bhargava presents a comparative analysis of Nepal’s experiences and asks whether the country is finding its own solution to the conundrum of secularism.

Author: Anna Marie Stirr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190631996
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An ethnographic study of music, performance, migration, and circulation, Singing Across Divides examines how forms of love and intimacy are linked to changing conceptions of political solidarity and forms of belonging, through the lens of Nepali dohori song. The book describes dohori: improvised, dialogic singing, in which a witty repartee of exchanges is based on poetic couplets with a fixed rhyme scheme, often backed by instrumental music and accompanying dance, performed between men and women, with a primary focus on romantic love. The book tells the story of dohori's relationship with changing ideas of Nepal as a nation-state, and how different nationalist concepts of unity have incorporated marginality, in the intersectional arenas of caste, indigeneity, class, gender, and regional identity. Dohori gets at the heart of tensions around ethnic, caste, and gender difference, as it promotes potentially destabilizing musical and poetic interactions, love, sex, and marriage across these social divides. In the aftermath of Nepal's ten-year civil war, changing political realities, increased migration, and circulation of people, media and practices are redefining concepts of appropriate intimate relationships and their associated systems of exchange. Through multi-sited ethnography of performances, media production, circulation, reception, and the daily lives of performers and fans in Nepal and the UK, Singing Across Divides examines how people use dohori to challenge (and uphold) social categories, while also creating affective solidarities.

Author: Nosheen Ali
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108601316
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Delusional States is the first in-depth study of state-making and social change in Gilgit-Baltistan, a Shia-majority region of Sunni-dominated Pakistan and a contested border area that forms part of disputed Kashmir. For over seven decades, the territorial conflict over Kashmir has locked India and Pakistan in brutal wars and hate-centred nationalisms. The book illuminates how within this story of hate lie other stories - of love and betrayal, loyalty and suspicion, beauty and terror - that help us grasp how the Kashmir conflict is affectively structured and experienced on the ground. Placing these emotions at the centre of its analysis, the book rethinks the state-citizen relation in deeply felt and intimate terms, offering a multi-layered ethnographic understanding of power and subjection in contemporary Pakistan.

Author: Alexandra Coțofană
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800736630
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization.

Author: Brian K. Pennington
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438469047
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Religious rituals are often seen as unchanging and ahistorical bearers of long-standing traditions. But as this book demonstrates, ritual is a lively platform for social change and innovation in the religions of South Asia. Drawing from Hindu and Jain examples in India, Nepal, and North America, the essays in this volume, written by renowned scholars of religion, explore how the intentional, conscious, and public invention or alteration of ritual can effect dramatic social transformation, whether in dethroning a Nepali king or sanctioning same-sex marriage. Ritual Innovation shows how the very idea of ritual as a conservative force misreads the history of religion by overlooking ritual's inherent creative potential and its adaptability to new contexts and circumstances.

Author: Philipp Zehmisch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199091293
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Often called ‘Mini-India’, the Andaman Islands have been a crucial site of encounter between different regimes, subjects, castes, creeds, languages, and ethnicities. Since 1858, subaltern convicts, refugees, repatriates, and labourers from South and Southeast Asia have moved to the islands, condemned to, or in search of a new life. While some migrants have achieved social mobility, others have remained disenfranchised and marginalized. This ethnographic study of the Andaman settler society analyses various shades of inequality that arise from migrant communities’ material and representational access to the state. The author employs the concept of subalternity to investigate political negotiations of island history, collective identity, ecological sustainability, and resource access. Interpreting characteristic views, practices, and voices of subaltern interlocutors, the author untangles their collective agency and consciousness in migration, settlement, and place-making processes. Further, the book highlights particular subaltern strategies in order to achieve autonomy and peaceful cohabitation through movement, cultural and social appropriation, and multi-layered methods of resistance.

Author: Anne T. Mocko
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019049364X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
At the turn of the millennium, Nepal was the world's last remaining Hindu kingdom. Even the most skeptical of observers could hardly imagine that the institution of the monarchy could soon be in jeopardy. In 2001, however, Nepal's popular King Birendra was killed in the royal palace. Though the crown passed to his brother Gyanendra, the monarchy would never fully recover. Nepal witnessed an anti-king uprising in April 2006 and over the course of two years, an interim administration systematically took over all the king's duties and privileges. Most decisively, beginning in the summer of 2007 the government began blocking the king from participating in his many public rituals, sending the prime minister in his place instead. Demoting Vishnu argues that Nepal's dramatic political transformation from monarchy to republic was contested-and in key ways accomplished-through ritual performance. Mocko theorizes the role of public ritual in producing Nepal's state ideology. She examines how royal ritual once authorized kings to serve as the privileged apex of national governance and shows how in the twenty-first century those rituals stopped serving the king and began instead to authorize rule by a party-based "head of state." By co-opting state ritual, the king's opponents were able to attack the monarchy's social identity at its foundations, enabling the final legal dissolution of kingship in 2008 to take place without physically harming the king himself. All once-royal rituals continue to be performed, but now they are handled by the country's president-a position created in 2008 to take over state ceremonial functions. Demoting Vishnu illustrates how upheaval in ritual contexts undermined the institutional logic of the monarchy by demonstrating in very public ways that kingship was contingent, opposable, and ultimately dispensable.

Author: Chad Haines
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136449973
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The Karakoram Highway was constructed by the Pakistani state in the 1970s as a major development project that furthered the national interest and solidified state control over the disputed region of northern Pakistan. Focusing on this highway, this book provides a unique analysis of the links between space, travel and history in the formation of the Pakistani nation-state. The book discusses how the highway was a symbol for an imagined national identity, and goes on to look at how it offered Pakistan a pre-Partition history and a fixed territory, by providing a historical link to the Silk Route and a contemporary geographical linkage to Central Asia. Examining the influence of the diverse travellers along the Karakoram Highway, the book shows how global flows of development, trade, labour, and tourism have remapped the Pakistani nation-state and reshaped the local. Providing a fresh perspective on the nation-state of Pakistan, this book is an important contribution to studies on South Asian History, Anthropology, Politics and Geography.