Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya” (eds. Sijapati and Birkenholtz)

In December, Routledge will release “Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya,” edited by Megan Adamson Sijapati (Gettysburg College) and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).  The publisher’s description follows:

Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined in modernity. Based on original fieldwork, this book documents understudied forms of religion in the region and presents unique perspectives on the phenomenon and experience of religion, discussing why, when, and where practices, discourses, and the category of religion itself, are engaged by varying communities in the region. It yields fruitful insights into both the religious traditions and lived human experiences of Himalayan peoples in the modern era.

Presenting new research and perspectives on the Himalayan region, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Modernity.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Alles, “Transnational Islamic Actors and Indonesia’s Foreign Policy”

In December, Routledge will release “Transnational Islamic Actors and Indonesia’s Foreign Policy: Transcending the State,” by Delphine Alles (Université Paris-Est, France).  The publisher’s description follows:

Taking a socio-historical perspective, this book examines the growing role of transnational Islamic Non-State Actors (NSAs) in post-authoritarian Indonesia and how it has affected the making of Indonesia’s foreign policy since the country embarked on the democratization process in 1998. It returns to the origins of the relationship between Islamic organisations and the Indonesian institutions in order to explain the current interactions between transnational Islamic actors and the country’s official foreign policies. The book considers for the first time the interactions between the “parallel diplomacy” undertaken by Indonesia’s Islamic NSAs and the country’s official foreign policy narrative and actions. It explains the adaptation of the state’s responses, and investigates the outcomes of those responses on the country’s international identity. Combining field-collected data and a theoretical reflexion, it offers a distanced analysis which deepens theoretical approaches on transnational religious actors.

Providing original research in Asian Studies, while filling an empirical gap in international relations theory, this book will be of interest to scholars of Indonesian Studies, Islamic Studies, International Relations and Asian Politics.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia” (eds. Wu and Chia)

In December, the Columbia University Press will release “Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon,” edited by Jiang Wu (University of Arizona) and Lucille Chia (University of California at Riverside).  The publisher’s description follows:

A monumental work in the history of religion, the history of the book, the study of politics, and bibliographical research, this volume follows the making of the Chinese Buddhist canon from the fourth century to the digital era. Approaching the subject from a historical perspective, the book ties the religious, social, and textual practices of canon formation to the development of East Asian Buddhist culture and opens up the study of Chinese Buddhist texts to readers interested in the evolution of Chinese writing in general and the Confucian and Daoist traditions in particular.

The collection undertakes extensive readings of major scriptural catalogs from the early manuscript era as well as major printed editions, including the Kaibao Canon, Qisha Canon, Goryeo Canon, and Taisho Canon. Contributors add fascinating depth to such understudied issues as the historical process of compilation, textual manipulation, physical production and management, sponsorship, the dissemination of various editions, cultic activities surrounding the canon, and the canon’s reception in different East Asian societies. The Chinese Buddhist canon is one of the most enduring textual traditions in East Asian religion and culture, and through this exhaustive, multifaceted effort, an essential body of work becomes part of a new, versatile narrative of East Asian Buddhism that has far-reaching implications for world history.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Ali, “Islam and Colonialism”

In December, the University of Edinburgh Press will release “Islam and Colonialism: Becoming Modern in Indonesia and Malaya,” by Muhamad Ali (University of California, Riverside).  The publisher’s description follows:

Focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia, this book looks at how European colonial and Islamic modernising powers operated in the common and parallel domains of government and politics, law and education in the first half of the twentieth century. It shows that colonialisation was able to co-exist with Islamisation, arguing that Islamic movements were not necessarily antithetical to modernisation, nor that Western modernity was always anathema to Islamic and local custom. Rather, in distinguishing religious from worldly affairs, they were able to adopt and adapt modern ideas and practices that were useful or relevant while maintaining the Islamic faith and ritual that they believed to be essential.

In developing an understanding of the common ways in which Islam was defined and treated in Indonesia and Malaysia, we can gain a new insight to Muslim politics and culture in Southeast Asia.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Serajuddin, “Cases on Muslim Law of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh”

In September, Oxford University Press released “Cases on Muslim Law of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh,” by Alamgir Muhammad Serajuddin (University of Chittagong, Bangladesh).   The publisher’s description follows:

Muslim law is an integral part of the South Asian legal system, and case law plays a major role in its interpretation, application, and development. Through a selection of principal judicial decisions and significant fact situations from pre- and post-independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this volume provides an easy access to the basic principles and rules of Muslim law, and shows how case law acts as a social barometer and an instrument of change.

The cases discussed cover such diverse areas as sources and interpretation of law, institution of marriage, polygamous marriages, dower, restitution of conjugal rights, talaq, khula, irreconcilable breakdown of marriage, legitimacy, guardianship, and maintenance of wives and divorced wives. Among the important legislations, it covers Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939, Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961, and Muslim Women Act 1986.

The book also shows how religion-based rules of personal law have been interpreted by secular courts during certain epochs in history and how the trend of interpretation has changed over the last 150 years.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Wong, “Discerning the Powers in Post-Colonial Africa and Asia”

This month, Springer Press releases “Discerning the Powers in Post-Colonial Africa and Asia: A Treatise on Christian Statecraft,” by Pak Nung Wong (University of Bath).  The publisher’s description follows:

Qualifying post-Westphalian sovereign statehood as a ‘power’ as argued for in Hendrik Berkhoff’s political theology, this book addresses the decades-long theological-spiritual debate between Christian realism and Christian pacifism in U.S. foreign policy and global Christian circles. It approaches the debate by delving into the pacifist Anabaptist political theology and delineates empirically how sovereign statehood in post-colonial Africa and Asia has fallen into the hands of the devil Satan, as a ‘fallen power’ in the Foucaultian terms of power structures, techniques and episteme. While the book offers intervention schemes and options, it holds that Christian statecraft remains the source of hope to effectively address a number of serious global issues. By extension, the book is thus an invitation to ignite debates on the suitability of Christian statecraft and the nexus between spirituality and world politics, making it especially interesting for scholars and students in the fields of International Politics, Politics of Asian and African States, Post-colonial Studies and Political Theology.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Hawley, “A Storm of Songs”

In March, the Harvard University Press published “A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement,” by John Stratton Hawley (Barnard College). The publisher’s description follows:

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely- accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built.

Challenging this canonical narrative, John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize—in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource.

A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there—and whether it can survive.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Deuchler, “Under the Ancestors’ Eyes”

This September, the Harvard University Press will release “Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea,” by Martina Deuchler (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London). The publisher’s description follows: 

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) to the late nineteenth century. This argument, underpinned by a fresh interpretation of the late-fourteenth-century Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition, illuminates the role of Neo-Confucianism as an ideological and political device through which the elite regained and maintained dominance during the Chosŏn period. Neo-Confucianism as espoused in Korea did not level the social hierarchy but instead tended to sustain the status system. In the late Chosŏn, it also provided ritual models for the lineage-building with which local elites sustained their preeminence vis-à-vis an intrusive state. Though Neo-Confucianism has often been blamed for the rigidity of late Chosŏn society, it was actually the enduring native kinship ideology that preserved the strict social-status system. By utilizing historical and social anthropological methodology and analyzing a wealth of diverse materials, Deuchler highlights Korea’s distinctive elevation of the social over the political.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Handbook of Religion and the Asian City” (van der Veer, ed.)

Last month, the University of California Press released “Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century,”  edited by Peter van der Veer (Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and University Professor at Large at Utrecht University). The publisher’s description follows: 

Handbook of Religion and the Asian City highlights the creative and innovative role of urban aspirations in Asian world cities. It does notassume that religion is of the past and that the urban is secular, but instead points out that urban politics and governance often manifest religious boundaries and sensibilities—in short, that public religion is politics. The essays in this book show how projects of secularism come up against projects and ambitions of a religious nature, a particular form of contestation that takes the city as its public arena.

Questioning the limits of cities like Mumbai, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok, and Shanghai, the authors assert that Asian cities have to be understood not as global models of futuristic city planning but as larger landscapes of spatial imagination that have specific cultural and political trajectories. Religion plays a central role in the politics of heritage that is emerging from the debris of modernist city planning.

Megacities are arenas for the assertion of national and transnational aspirations as Asia confronts modernity. Cities are also sites of speculation, not only for those who invest in real estate but also for those who look for housing, employment, and salvation. In its potential and actual mobility, the sacred creates social space in which they all can meet. Handbook of Religion and the Asian City makes the comparative case that one cannot study the historical patterns of urbanization in Asia without paying attention to the role of religion in urban aspirations.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wielander, “Christian Values in Communist China”

The rise of Christianity as a social force in China (unlike the decline of chinaChristianity as a social force in the West) is an underreported story. Even well-informed analysts who look to China as a rising power sometimes ignore it. This month, Routledge releases the paperback version of what looks to be an interesting corrective, Christian Values in Communist China, by Gerda Wielander (University of Westminster). The publisher’s description follows:

This book argues that as new political and social values are formed in post-socialist China, Christian values are becoming increasingly embedded in the new post-socialist Chinese outlook. It shows how although Christianity is viewed in China as a foreign religion, promoted by Christian missionaries and as such at odds with the official position of the state, Christianity as a source of social and political values – rather than a faith requiring adherence to a church is in fact having a huge impact. The book shows how these values inform both official and dissident ideology and provide a key underpinning of morality and ethics in the post-socialist moral landscape. Adopting a variety of different angles, the book investigates the role Christian thought plays in the official discourse on morality and love and what contribution Chinese Christians make to charitable projects. It analyses key Christian publications and dedicates two chapters to Christian intellectuals and their impact on political liberal thinking in China. The concluding chapter highlights gender roles, the role of the Chinese diaspora, and the overlap of the government and Christian agenda in China today. The book challenges commonly held views on contemporary Chinese Christianity as a movement in opposition to the state by showing the diversity and complexity of Christian thinking and the many factors influencing it.