The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Formulations

by Wendy James (Editor)

Overview

Although the world population faces movement, mixing and displacement on a larger scale than ever before, the result has not been a collapse of boundaries but an increase in the rise of new forms of ethnic, cultural and religious identity. Those based in the highly developed countries can extend global influence through wealth and sophisticated technology.
The Pursuit of Certainty presents original case studies which explore the effect anthropology's inherited tradition of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding has on the new pursuits of truth. Several chapters focus on the rise of new certainties while others examine notions of diversity providing a critical perspective on the new religious movements and current popular orthodoxies relating to society and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415107907
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/03/1995
Series:	ASA Decennial Conference Series: The Uses of Knowledge
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wendy James is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Introduction: whatever happened to the Enlightenment? Part I Displacement and the search for redefinition 1 Managing tradition: ‘superstition’ and the making of national identity among Sudanese women refugees2 History and the discourse of underdevelopment among the Alur of Uganda Part II Emerging world forms 3 Race, culture and—what?: pluralist certainties in the United States 4 Certain knowledge: the encounter of global fundamentalism and local Christianity in urban south India 5 Inventing certainties: the dakwah persona in Malaysia 6 Powerful knowledge in a global Sufi cult: reflections on the poetics of travelling theories 7 Topophilia, Zionism and ‘certainty’: making a place out of the space that became Israel again Part III Vernacular contexts of public reason and critique 8 The politics of tolerance: Buddhists and Christians, truth and error in Sri Lanka 9 Changing certainties and the move to a ‘global’ religion: medical knowledge and Islamization among Anii (Baseda) in the Republic of Bénin 10 Bourdieu and the diviner: knowledge and symbolic power in Yoruba divination 11 Choking on the Quran: and other consuming parables from the western Indian Ocean front Part IV Epilogue: a professional dilemma? 12 Cultural certainties and private doubts