Contemporary Asian societies bear the imprint of the experience and afterlives of colonialism, revolutionary socialism and religious and secular nationalism in dramatically contrasting ways. Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective draws together essays that demonstrate the role of these far-reaching transformations in the shaping of two Asian settings in particular – India and Vietnam. It traces historical and contemporary realities through a variety of compelling topics includ...

Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent modes of religiosity. Although these co...