The pursuit of certainty: religious and cultural formulations
"The peoples of the world are now facing economic integration and social interaction on a wider scale than ever before. But has this produced a greater sense of common reason, or shared world citizenship? Contemporary global communication, itself celebrating diversity, has paradoxically stimula...
| Résumé: | "The peoples of the world are now facing economic integration and social interaction on a wider scale than ever before. But has this produced a greater sense of common reason, or shared world citizenship? Contemporary global communication, itself celebrating diversity, has paradoxically stimulated local commitments to exclusive ethnic, cultural and religious identity. The chapters in this book explore the ways in which anthropology can throw light on these diverging new 'certainties', often possessive of place, bodily substance or cultural heritage and often claiming divine justification." "The Pursuit of Certainty is a convincing demonstration of anthropology's relevance to the contemporary world and its turbulence. It offers ground-level insights into a growing global consensus about the primacy of cultural difference; into the shrill new certainties which are spreading in some areas though being resisted in others: and into the 'post-Enlightenment' rise of religious justification in human affairs."--Jacket Introduction: whatever happened to the Enlightenment? / Wendy James -- Managing tradition: 'superstition' and the making of national identity among Sudanese women refugees / Janice Boddy -- History and the discourse of underdevelopment among the Alur of Uganda / Aidan Southall -- Race, culture and- what?: pluralist certainties in the United States / Paul Dresch -- Certain knowledge: the encounter of global fundamentalism and local Christianity in urban south India / Lionel Caplan -- Inventing certainties: the dakwah persona in Malaysia / Shamsul A.B. -- Powerful knowledge in a global Sufi cult: reflections on the poetics of travelling theories / Pnina Werbner -- Topophilia, Zionism and 'certainty': making a place out of the space that became Israel again / Robert Paine -- The politics of tolerance: Buddhists and Christians, truth and error in Sri Lanka / Jonathan Spencer -- Changing certainties and the move to a 'global' religion: medical knowledge and Islamization among Anii (Baseda) in the Republic of Bénin / Georg Elwert -- Bourdieu and the diviner: knowledge and symbolic power in Yoruba divination / F. Niyi Akinnaso -- Choking on the Quran: and other consuming parables from the western Indian Ocean front / Michael Lambek -- Cultural certainties and private doubts / Roger Just. |
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| Description: | Based on papers from the 4th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth held in Oxford in 1993. - Includes bibliographical references and indexes. - Description based on print version record Includes bibliographical references and indexes |
| ISBN: | 0415107903 |