Every literate person today will encounter the word “tribe” in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why?This book offers answers to all the above. In order to keep it manageable, these questions are investigated only for the span of Asia that runs from Siberia...

In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imaginati...

Every literate person today will encounter the word “tribe” in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why?This book offers answers to all the above. In order to keep it manageable, these questions are investigated only for the span of Asia that runs from Siberia...

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci's writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of 'history from below'. Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance shee...

Michael Carrithers guides us through the complex and sometimes conflicting information that Buddhist texts give about the life and teaching of the Buddha. He discusses the social and political background of India in the Buddha's time, and traces the development of his thought. He also assesses the rapid and widespread assimilation of Buddhism and its contemporary relevance. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in alm...

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology’s most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major de...

This study identifies paganism as a viable religion, exploring its practices and theology as they are expressed in religious communities across the world.Long dismissed as a miscellany of fringe ideas and practices, Paganism is one of the fastest-growing spiritual orientations in the West. In Pagan Theology, Michael York reframes Paganism as a world religion. He provides an overview of pagan theology and practice while expanding on the concept of paganism ...

The origin of world civilization can be traced to the Indus Valley cradle, where brilliant and original thinkers made groundbreaking discoveries. The history of these discoveries is recorded in the vast Sanskrit literature.In this study, author M. K. Agarwal explores the cultural and historical significance of the region. He explores Indus Valley culture, which encouraged creative thoughtas opposed to the Abrahamic faiths, which herded followers into dogmatic thinking. He holds tha...

Everyone has a past: the question is what one does with it. If earlier scholars are to be believed, South Indian society before colonial rule showed an indifference to its past - or approached the past through myth, legend and phantasmagoria. This book sets out not merely to disprove this idea, but to demonstrate the complex forms of historiography produced in South India between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. It argues that the usual division between Indo-Persian and vernacul...

In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth century but also to reaffirm the stereotypes of Buddhism as a peaceful, rational philosophy and Islam as an inherently violent and irrational religion. But if Buddhist-Muslim history was simply repeated instances of...

World Philosophies presents in one volume a superb introduction to all the world’s major philosophical and religious traditions. Covering all corners of the globe, Ninian Smart’s work offers a comprehensive and global philosophical and religious picture.In this revised and expanded second edition, a team of distinguished scholars, assembled by the editor Oliver Leaman, have brought Ninian Smart’s masterpiece up to date for the twenty-first century. Chapters have been revis...

In this present work, the matter of faith based cultures is addressed as a developmental cultural stage corresponding to adolescence during which ideologies compete in violent confl icts which, with the present state of armament, promise human annihilation. The path towards an evolution towards a spiritual ecological maturity is discussed at length with particular emphasis on the relevance of spiritual teachings from both the Eastern and the Christian traditions. The work is an attempt to ...