1st Edition
The Pursuit of Certainty Religious and Cultural Formulations
Edited By Wendy James
Copyright 1995
328 Pages
by
Routledge
328 Pages
by
Routledge
328 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Although the world population faces movement, mixing and displacement on a larger scale than ever before, the result has not been a collapse of boundaries but an increase in the rise of new forms of ethnic, cultural and religious identity. Those based in the highly developed countries can extend global influence through wealth and sophisticated technology. The Pursuit of Certainty presents... Read more
Introduction: whatever happened to the Enlightenment? Part I Displacement and the search for redefinition 1 Managing tradition: ‘superstition’ and the making of national identity among Sudanese women refugees2 History and the discourse of underdevelopment among the Alur of Uganda Part II Emerging world forms 3 Race, culture and—what?: pluralist certainties in the United States 4 Certain knowledge: the encounter of global fundamentalism and local Christianity in urban south India 5 Inventing certainties: the dakwah persona in Malaysia 6 Powerful knowledge in a global Sufi cult: reflections on the poetics of travelling theories 7 Topophilia, Zionism and ‘certainty’: making a place out of the space that became Israel again Part III Vernacular contexts of public reason and critique 8 The politics of tolerance: Buddhists and Christians, truth and error in Sri Lanka 9 Changing certainties and the move to a ‘global’ religion: medical knowledge and Islamization among Anii (Baseda) in the Republic of Bénin 10 Bourdieu and the diviner: knowledge and symbolic power in Yoruba divination 11 Choking on the Quran: and other consuming parables from the western Indian Ocean front Part IV Epilogue: a professional dilemma? 12 Cultural certainties and private doubts
Biography
Wendy James is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.
