The Modern Spirit of Asiachallenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in ...unique and distinctive ways. Peter van der Veer begins with nineteenth-century imperial history, exploring how Western concepts of spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic were used to translate the traditions of India and China. He traces how modern Western notions of religion and magic were incorporated into the respective nation-building projects of Chinese and Indian nationalist intellectuals, yet how modernity in China and India is by no means uniform. While religion is a centerpiece of Indian nationalism, it is viewed in China as an obstacle to progress that must be marginalized and controlled.
The Modern Spirit of Asiamoves deftly from Kandinsky's understanding of spirituality in art to Indian yoga and Chinese qi gong, from modern theories of secularism to histories of Christian conversion, from Orientalist constructions of religion to Chinese campaigns against magic and superstition, and from Muslim Kashmir to Muslim Xinjiang. Van der Veer, an outspoken proponent of the importance of comparative studies of religion and society, eloquently makes his case in this groundbreaking examination of the spiritual and the secular in China and India.
Understanding religion from a material and corporeal angle, this open access book addresses the ways in which refugees practice their religions and convert or develop new faiths. It also evaluates ...how secular institutions in Europe frame and determine what is classified as religion according to the law, and delineate the limits of religious authority, religious practice, and religious speech. The question of nationalism and migration has been shaping the political landscape in Europe for more than a decade, resulting in a nationalist upsurge. This volume places the current trajectories of people from Asia and Africa who flee from conditions such as oppression and conflict, and who are seeking refuge in Europe in a broader historical and comparative perspective. In so doing, it addresses past experiences in Europe with the role of religion in both producing and accommodating refugees, in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, World War II, and in the context of the Cold War.
What Transcends the Nation? van der Veer, Peter
Asian ethnology,
01/2021, Letnik:
80, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The invocation of “the people” as the foundation of the nation state raises the specter of “belonging” and involves a staging of the essence of the nation. In India, religion is taken to be the ...essence of the nation within the framework of hindutva ideology. Muslims are regarded not only as secondary citizens but also as enemy targets for national mobilization. The sovereignty of the Indian state thus necessarily depends on violence directed at the Pakistani national outside of its borders and at the Muslim population residing within.
Portrait Yang, Mayfair; Veer, Peter van der; Gauthier, François ...
Religion and society (New York, N.Y.),
09/2023, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
My BA was a double major in anthropology and what was then called ‘Oriental languages’, and my MA and PhD were in anthropology, all at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley instilled in me ...a strong sense of politics and power dynamics and a penchant for social critique in my work. My PhD advisers were Jack Potter, a cultural Marxist who had done fieldwork on peasants in rural Hong Kong and Guangdong Province in China; Paul Rabinow, a philosophical anthropologist and early science and technology studies scholar who hosted Michel Foucault at Berkeley and introduced me to the world of French theory; and Robert Bellah, a sociologist of Japanese religion and American civil religion. As an immigrant originally born in Taiwan but who had grown up in multiple countries, I was very drawn to knowledge about Mainland China, the land from where both my parents fled the Communists. In the late 1970s, there was still very little knowledge about China in the outside world, but I was lucky to go there on a new graduate student exchange program between Berkeley and Beijing universities in 1981.
This open access book argues that contrary to dominant approaches that view nationalism as unaffected by globalization or globalization undermining the nation-state, the contemporary world is ...actually marked by globalization of the nation form. Based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and drawing, among others, on Peter van der Veer’s comparative work on religion and nation, it discuss practices of nationalism vis-a-vis migration, rituals of sacrifice and prayer, music, media, e-commerce, Islamophobia, bare life, secularism, literature and atheism. The volume offers new understandings of nationalism in a broader perspective. The text will appeal to students and researchers interested in nationalism outside of the West, especially those working in anthropology, sociology and history.
This is a book about the emerging patterns of consumption among the middle classes of India and China. The book compares cultural shifts as a result of liberalization and globalization in these two ...emerging Asian powers. This volume does not compare India and China to the West, as books on similar subjects have done in the past. Instead they are compared with each other. This book is well-timed, considering that both these countries have so much in common in terms of scale, civilization, history, and as emerging economies.The chapters in this book have been written by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists rather than by economists, so the emphasis is on cultural shifts rather than economic statistics. Transnational developments, like tourism, karaoke, soap operas, and the art market, have all been extensively covered in this book
Handbook of Religion and the Asian Cityhighlights the creative and innovative role of urban aspirations in Asian world cities. It does not assume 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 Citymakes 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.
In this paper, I want to focus on some aspects of the political process in India that have an impact on the treatment of religious minorities. Much of the discussion on multicultural jurisdictions ...deals with differentiated citizenship rights that allow religious groups to maintain their normative universe. This literature shows the tensions surrounding individual and group rights. I want to approach the question of religious freedom from a rather different angle. I want to first focus on the protection of bare life in the face of religious violence and then examine the issue of conversion from one religion to another. The issues of human security and conversion are linked in India, since Hindu nationalists see Muslims as forcibly converted Hindus who should be reconverted. To highlight the importance of majoritarian nationalism rather than political systems in the treatment of religious minorities, I offer a brief comparison with China.
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