How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, ...

Wild Religion is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South Africa’s political journey and religious diversity, David Chidester explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. Wild Religion analyzes indigeno...

First published in 1992, this title explores the religious diversity of South Africa, organizing it into a single coherent narrative and providing the first comparative study and introduction to the topic. David Chidester emphasizes the fact that the complex distinctive character of South African religious life has taken shape with a particular economic, social and political context, and pays special attention to the creativity of people who have suffered under conquest, colonialism and ap...

An "ambitious and courageous" examination of the Jonestown cult viewed through the lens of theology ( Journal of the American Academy of Religion).Re-issued in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicides at Jonestown, this revised edition of David Chidester's groundbreaking book features a new prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world.For Chidester, the murder-suicide of some 900 members of the...

Religion: Material Dynamics is a lively resource for thinking about religious materiality and the material study of religion. Deconstructing and reconstructing religion as material categories, social formations, and mobile circulations, the book explores the making, ordering, and circulating of religious things. The book is divided into three sections: Part One revitalizes basic categories—animism and sacred, space and time—by situating them in their material production and testin...

Religion and Global Culture draws together the work of a group of historians of religion who are concerned with situating the contemporary study of religion within the cultural complexity of the modern world. The writing of each of the volume's contributors relates to the work of leading historian of religion Charles H. Long, who has identified religious meanings in the contacts and exchanges of the colonial and postcolonial periods. Together with Long, these scholars explore reli...

Examines the various ways in which archaeologists can and do use their research to forge a partnership with the past and guide the ongoing dialogue between the archaeological record and various contemporary stakeholdersCould archaeologists benefit contemporary cultures and be a factor in solving world problems? Can archaeologists help individuals? Can archaeologists change the world? These questions form the root of “archaeology activism” or “activist arch...

Across the U.S. immigrants, laborers, domestic workers, low-income tenants, indigenous communities, and people experiencing homelessness are conducting research to fight for justice. Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Research Casebook documents the stories of a dozen community-based research projects. Academics and their partners share authorship about the importance of gathering credible evidence, both for organizing and persuading. The emphasis is on community org...

The United States is suffering its greatest upheaval since the Civil War—politically, economically, socially, religiously. With elegant, sweeping vision, Gus diZerega explores the complex causes leading us to this point, comparing them to giant fault lines that, when they erupt, create enormous disturbance and in time new landscapes. He traces the disruption, first, to America's first countercultural movement originating in the antebellum South and coming into later conflict with the "coun...

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet in many ways equally legitimate interpretations ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book Catherine Bell offers a...

Anderson reveals the reality of postmodernism in politics, popular culture, religion, literary criticism, art, and philosophy -- making sense of everything from deconstructionism to punk.

The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies is both informative and provocative, introducing readers to key debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggesting future research possibilities. A group of distinguished scholars takes up some of the most pressing theoretical questions in the field. What is a 'religious tradition'? How are religious texts read? What takes place when a religious practitioner stands before a representation of gods or goddesses, ghosts, ancestors, saints...