The Construction Of Religious Boundaries

In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through an examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikhism recognized multiple identities based in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties. As a result, religious identities were highly blurred and competing definitions of Sikhism were possible. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Singh Sabha, a powerful new Sikh movement, began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with suspicion and hostility. Aided by cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj, the Singh Sabha sought to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of diversity, bringing about the highly codified culture of modern Sikhism. A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

Contributed articles.

A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

When asked to distinguish between different faiths, Mughal prince Dara Shikoh is said to have replied, “How do you draw a line in water?” Inspired by this question, the essays in this volume illustrate how ordinary people in South Asia and the diaspora negotiate their religious identities and encounters in creative, complex, and diverse ways. Taking the approach that narratives “from below” provide the richest insight into the dynamics of religious pluralism, the authors examine life histories, oral traditions, cartographic practices, pilgrimage rites, and devotional music and songs. Drawing on both ethnographic and historical data, they illuminate how, like lines in water, religious boundaries are dynamic, fluid, flexible, and permeable rather than permanently fixed, frozen, and inviolable. A distinct feature of the volume is its proposition of a fresh and innovative typology of boundary dynamics. Boundaries may be attractive or porous, firmly drawn or transcended. Attractive boundaries invite confluence while affirming the differences between self and other, whereas permeable boundaries facilitate exchanges that create new identities and in turn form new lines. Although people may recognize the significance of religious borders, they can choose to transcend them. Throughout this volume, the authors highlight the fascinating range of South Asian religious and cultural traditions.

Focusing on important issues in Sikh religious identity and memory, Harjot Oberoi shows how premodern techniques of narrating the past and truth-telling in South Asia were deeply transformed by colonialism. Indian historiographical praxis has long been problematic. Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century polymath, was puzzled by how people in the subcontinent treated the protocols of history; it escaped his learning that Indian narrative constructions of the past were embedded in an intricate canon of poetical traditions and represented a radical departure from historical narratives in the Islamic, Sinic, and Greco-Roman worlds. Where others tended to search for "facts," people in South Asia looked for "affect." This alternative model for comprehending and evaluating the past—through aesthetics and gradients of taste—generated a crucially different variety of historical consciousness. Oberoi's examination of the Sikh tradition demonstrates what modern critical narrative achieves when it moves away from classical models, traversing significant moments in colonialism, coercion and protest in the Raj, the production of knowledge, the rise of secular nationalism, and modern notions of the self within and outside India.

‘Boundaries, Dynamics and Construction of Traditions in South Asia’ explores the dynamic constructions and applications of the concept of ‘tradition’ that occurred within the South Asian context during the ancient and pre-colonial periods. This collection of essays features a significant selection of the specialized fields of knowledge that have shaped classical South Asian intellectual history, and the aim of this volume is to offer a stimulating anthology of papers on the different and complex processes employed during the ‘invention’, construction, preservation and renewal of a given tradition.

Has conflict in Northern Ireland kept political dimensions of religion alive, and has religion played a role in fuelling conflict? Conflict in Northern Ireland is not and never will be a holy war. Yet religion is more socially and politically significant than many commentators presume. In fact, religion has remained a central feature of social identity and politics throughout conflict as well as recent change. There has been an acceleration of interest in the relationship between religion, identity and politics in modern societies. Building on this debate, Claire Mitchell presents a challenging analysis of religion in contemporary Northern Ireland, arguing that religion is not merely a marker of ethnicity and that it continues to provide many of the meanings of identity, community and politics. In light of the multifaceted nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Mitchell explains that, for Catholics, religion is primarily important in its social and institutional forms, whereas for many Protestants its theological and ideological dimensions are more pressing. Even those who no longer go to church tend to reproduce religious stereotypes of 'them and us'. Drawing on a range of unique interview material, this book traces how individuals and groups in Northern Ireland have absorbed religious types of cultural knowledge, belonging and morality, and how they reproduce these as they go about their daily lives. Despite recent religious and political changes, the author concludes that perceptions of religious difference help keep communities in Northern Ireland socially separate and often in conflict with one another.

A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era. Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.