Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time ...of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from the United States to forge a fellowship with those workers. Luna examines the entanglements, both intimate and financial, that define their lives. Using the concept of obligar, she delves into the connections that tie sex workers to their families, their clients, their pimps, the missionaries, and the drug dealers—and to the guilt, power, and comfort of faith. Love in the Drug War scrutinizes not only la zona and the people who work to survive there, but also Reynosa itself—including the influences of the United States—adding nuance and new understanding to the current Mexico-US border crisis.
This volume brings together some of the most exciting current scholarship on these themes. This interdisciplinary and geographically broad-ranging volume pays tribute to the ground-breaking work of ...Charles Zika.
In the nineteenth century, a fascination with the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints made Mormons and Mormonism a common
trope in French journalism, art, literature, politics, and popular
...culture. Heather Belnap, Corry Cropper, and Daryl Lee bring to
light French representations of Mormonism from the 1830s to 1914,
arguing that these portrayals often critiqued and parodied French
society. Mormonism became a pretext for reconsidering issues such
as gender, colonialism, the family, and church-state relations
while providing artists and authors with a means for working
through the possibilities of their own evolving national identity.
Surprising and innovative, Marianne Meets the Mormons
looks at how nineteenth-century French observers engaged with the
idea of Mormonism in order to reframe their own cultural
preoccupations.
A significant collection of essays by leading scholars on the vital decade of the 1670s in Britain, Ireland, and North America. This was a period of profound tension and uncertainty which saw the ...breakdown of the political, religious and cultural settlement reached in 1660 with the return of the monarch after Oliver Cromwell’s republic, and the emergence of strange new issues such as religious toleration, England’s role in a newly threatening Europe and the emergence of a real public opinion expressed in the press and politicised conversation.
After more than 450 years of European intrusions into South America's rainforest, small groups of people across Europe now gather discreetly to participate in Amazonian ceremonies their local ...governments consider a criminal act. As devotees of a new Brazil-based religion called Santo Daime, they claim that they contact God by way of ayahuasca, a potent psychoactive beverage first developed by native communities in pre-Columbian Amazonia. This bitter, brown liquid is a synergy of plants containing DMT, a mind-altering chemical classified as an illicit "hallucinogen" in most countries. By contrast, Santo Daime members ( daimistas ) revere ayahuasca as a sacrament, combining it with rituals and theologies borrowed from Christian mysticism, indigenous shamanism, Afro-Brazilian spiritualism, and Western esotericism. The Santo Daime religion was founded in 1930 by an Afro-Brazilian rubber tapper named Raimundo Irineu Serra, now known as Mestre (Master) Irineu. Presenting results from more than a year of fieldwork with Santo Daime groups in Europe, Marc G. Blainey contributes new understandings of contemporary Westerners' search for existential well-being on an increasingly interconnected planet. As a thorough exploration of daimistas' beliefs about the therapeutic potentials of ayahuasca, this book takes readers on an ethnographic journey into the deepest recesses of the human psyche.
The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of ...social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent. Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne
Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyzes the presence and function of traces of religious narratives in contemporary western culture, from the ...perspective of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art.
The Demise of Religion Stausberg, Michael; Cusack, Carole M; Wright, Stuart A
2020, 2020-12-10
eBook
Odprti dostop
Why do religions fail or die? Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this open access book explores this important question that has received little scholarly attention to date. International ...contributors provide case studies from the United States, England, Sweden, Japan, New Guinea, and France resulting in a work that explores processes of attenuation, disintegration, transmutation, death, and extinction across cultures. These include: instances where mass suicides or homicides resulted in religious dissolution; the fall of Mars Hills Church and its larger-than-life megachurch pastor, accused of plagiarism and bullying in 2012; the death of the last member of the Panacea Society in England in 2012; and the disintegration of Knutby Filadelfia, a religious community in Sweden with Pentecostal roots that ceased to exist in May 2018 after a pastor shot his wife. Combining case studies and theoretical contributions, The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate fills a gap in literature to date and paves the way for future research The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre for Advanced Study at theNorwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
This open access book demonstrates the necessity, feasibility, and effectiveness of cultural adaptation in the translation of mental health scales into Chinese. It illustrates the key principles of ...culturally effective mental health translation, through offering in-depth discussions of the methods and techniques used to translate mental health materials into Chinese. This SpringerBrief title provides an essential reading for academics, researchers, students from language studies, public health and health communication who are interested to develop more advanced skills of translating and adapting mental health instruments for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
The localisation of a region, group, or culture was a common social phenomenon in pre-modern Asia, but global colonialism began to affect the lifestyle of local people. What was the political ...condition of the relationship between insiders and outsiders? The impact of colonial authorities over religious communities has not received significant attention, even though the Asian continent is the home of many religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Shintoism, and Shamanism. Colonial Transformation and Asian Religions in Modern History presents multi-angled perspectives of socio-religious transition. It uses the cultural religiosity of the Asian people as a lens through which readers can re-examine the concepts of imperialism, religious syncretism and modernisation. The contributors interpret the growth of new religions as another facet of counter-colonialism. This new approach offers significant insight into comprehending the practical agony and sorrow of regional people throughout Asian history.
