The Anthropology of Religious Conversion
Title | The Anthropology of Religious Conversion PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Buckser |
Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
Pages | 260 |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9780742517783 |
Table of contents
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
Title | The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion PDF eBook |
Author | Lewis R. Rambo |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 829 |
Release | 2014-03-06 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0199713545 |
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.
Conversion to Christianity
Title | Conversion to Christianity PDF eBook |
Author | Robert W. Hefner |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 339 |
Release | 2023-04-28 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 052091256X |
One of the most striking developments in the history of modern civilizations has been the conversion of tribal peoples to more expansively organized "world" religions. There is little scholarly consensus as to why these religions have endured and why conversion to them has been so widespread. These essays explore the phenomenon of Christian conversion from this world-building perspective. Combining rich case studies with original theoretical insights, this work challenges sociologists, anthropologists and historians of religion to reassess the varieties of religious experience and the convergent processes involved in religious change. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994. One of the most striking developments in the history of modern civilizations has been the conversion of tribal peoples to more expansively organized "world" religions. There is little scholarly consensus as to why these religions have endured and why conv
Understanding Religious Conversion
Title | Understanding Religious Conversion PDF eBook |
Author | Lewis Ray Rambo |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 268 |
Release | 1993-01-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9780300065152 |
Looking at a wide variety of religions, this work offers an exploration of religious conversion. The phenomena is approached from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, theology and anthropology.
The Anthropology of Christianity
Title | The Anthropology of Christianity PDF eBook |
Author | Fenella Cannell |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 385 |
Release | 2006-11-07 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0822388154 |
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse
Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation
Title | Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation PDF eBook |
Author | Henri Gooren |
Publisher | Palgrave MacMillan |
Pages | 204 |
Release | 2010-09-15 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN |
The conversion career, defined as all episodes of participation in religious organizations during a person’s life, is a new and systematic approach to conversion and disaffiliation as a dynamic process. It is a tool to analyze the interplay of factors between the individual actor, the religious organization, and the wider social and cultural context. This book is the first in over a decade to attempt a systematic synthesis of the field of conversion studies, encompassing the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and theology. Gooren analyzes conversion and disaffiliation in a worldwide comparative framework, using data from North America, Europe, and Latin America.
Christian Moderns
Title | Christian Moderns PDF eBook |
Author | Webb Keane |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 339 |
Release | 2007-01-03 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0520939212 |
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.