The Archaeology of Sacred Spaces

The Archaeology of Sacred Spaces
Author: Susan Verma Mishra
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2016-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317193741

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This volume focuses on the religious shrine in western India as an institution of cultural integration in the period spanning 200 BCE to 800 CE. It presents an analysis of religious architecture at multiple levels, both temporal and spatial, and distinguishes it as a ritual instrument that integrates individuals and communities into a cultural fabric. The work shows how these structures emphasise on communication with a host of audiences such as the lay worshipper, the ritual specialist, the royalty and the elite as well as the artisan and the sculptor. It also examines religious imagery, inscriptions, traditional lore and Sanskrit literature. The book will be of special interest to researchers and scholars of ancient Indian history, Hinduism, religious studies, architecture and South Asian studies.

Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion: L-Z

Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion: L-Z
Author: David Adams Leeming
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 1023
Release: 2009-10-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 038771801X

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Integrating psychology and religion, this unique encyclopedia offers a rich contribution to the development of human self-understanding. It provides an intellectually rigorous collection of psychological interpretations of the stories, rituals, motifs, symbols, doctrines, dogmas, and experiences of the world’s religious traditions. Easy-to-read, the encyclopedia draws from forty different religions, including modern world religions and older religious movements. It is of particular interest to researchers and professionals in psychology and religion.

Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands

Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands
Author: Priya Swamy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release:
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 9781350079090

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"This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalisation. She shows that these 'traumas of absence' - the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces - can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues. This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as an ethnographic case study to detail the over thirty year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and utter devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home. By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localised but also globalised Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilise campaigns for Hindu spaces"--

Hindu Sacred Space

Hindu Sacred Space
Author: Emma Fraser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 89
Release: 1999
Genre:
ISBN:

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The Neighborhood of Gods

The Neighborhood of Gods
Author: William Elison
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2018-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022649490X

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There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world’s collective imagination—as a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia. Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India’s most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating space—first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition—is one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others? The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the “tribal art” practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. A pioneering ethnography, this book offers a creative intervention in debates on postcolonial citizenship, urban geography, and visuality in the religions of India.

Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands

Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands
Author: Priya Swamy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2024-09-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350079073

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This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these 'traumas of absence' – the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces – can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues. This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home. By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.

Hindu Tradition of Pilgrimage

Hindu Tradition of Pilgrimage
Author: Rana P. B. Singh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2013
Genre: Hindu pilgrims and pilgrimages
ISBN: 9789381406250

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Religious Journeys in India

Religious Journeys in India
Author: Andrea Marion Pinkney
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2018-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 143846603X

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Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions. In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra. “It’s rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars’ engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide.” — John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

Sacred Space, Sacred Thread

Sacred Space, Sacred Thread
Author: John W. Welch
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-04-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532635230

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The insightful studies contained in this book will be of significant value to anyone interested in experiencing more deeply the intersections between materiality and spirituality. Part 1 introduces readers into Egyptian, Israelite, Christian, and Hindu temples, shrines, or sanctuaries. Part 2 helps readers understand how items of colored fabrics, clothing, robes, and veils, convey ritual meanings. Part 3 reports two panel discussions that exemplify the pathway of fruitful conversation. Matter and spirit might seem to some to be polar opposites. But as these studies by distinguished and diverse scholars demonstrate, spiritual experiences are constructively defined and refined within the coordinates of place and time. Sacred space, as well as sacred cloth, define borders, but not necessarily boundaries, between the sacred and the profane. These material coordinates physically enclose and also spiritually disclose. They both symbolize and synergize, as they encompass and expansively inspire. These original and enjoyable presentations will help all readers to hold tenaciously to the tenets and also the tensions inherent in physical spiritual experiences.