| 1. |
- Gansten, Martin
(författare)
-
Patterns of Destiny : Hindu Nāḍī Astrology
- 2003
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Like all divination, Hindu astrology (jyotisa) is concerned with central religious issues such as man’s relation to the world, moral responsibility, and the revelation of a coherent divine order underlying human experience. Comprising a descriptive as well as a prescriptive aspect, jyotisa allows for both prediction and the exercise of free will. This double nature enables a seamless union of astrology with the concept of karman, its descriptive aspect referring to ‘fate’ (daiva) or actions of previous lives now bearing fruit (prarabdha-karman), its prescriptive aspect to present action (kriyamana-karman) or ‘human effort’ (purusakara). Astrological divination is based on observation of planetary movements relative to the earth and to the zodiac. By the employment of a hierarchy of interpretative principles, the qualities of a given point in space-time are determined, representing a number of potential life events which by various prognostic techniques are translated into predictions. While some authors ascribe a form of causality to the planets, perceiving them as divine supervisors of karman, others reject causal language in favour of a view of the planets as mere signs, related synchronically to human experiences. Nevertheless, propitiation of the planetary deities for the alleviation of undesired results is a practice universally supported. Occasionally the astrologer himself serves as an object of such propitiation, becoming a full-fledged mediator between man and the divine planets by simultaneously disclosing the fate they dictate and accepting on their behalf the worship intended to remedy any anticipated misfortune. While nadi reading is commonly perceived as a form of astrology, and generally moves within an astrological paradigm, most current practitioners do not base their interpretations on the client’s natal horoscope, but rather on a method of thumb reading. The (alleged) reading of predictions from preexistent texts of supposed antiquity and divine or semi-divine origin is, however, a common characteristic of all nadi divination. The Sanskrit nadi texts examined in the present study – the Gurunadi, Amsanadi, and Dhruvanadi – deal entirely with the interpretation of natal horoscopes. The texts, datable by the astronomical information they contain to the 18th and 19th centuries, originate in the Dravidian language area (as, most likely, does the term nadi itself), and may be seen as representing a common school or style of astrology, known as devakerala. Divided into a number of individual horoscope readings of varying length, the texts reverse the general trend of Sanskrit astrological works to concern themselves only with universals. The readings, generally expressing a mainstream smarta Hindu worldview, are invariably based on minute divisions of the zodiac known as nadi or amsa, a unique feature not found elsewhere in jyotisa literature. The amsas, numbering 150 in each zodiacal sign, are thought to embody certain fixed destiny patterns, which undergo permutations by superimposition on the natal horoscope. This concept of a limited number of predefinable, basic patterns of destiny, to one of which every human being is necessarily born, marks the most drastic deviation of the nadis not only from mainstream Hindu astrology, but also from orthodox teachings on karman.
|
|
| 2. |
- Halldén, Philip
(författare)
-
Islamisk predikan på ljudkassett : en studie i retorik och fonogramologi
- 2001
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation deals with Islamic preaching in theory and practice, with special focus on material recorded and published in the format of audiotapes/cassettes. One aim is to explore possible implications of the use of this special format of publication in the context of Islamic preaching. How is this new format of publication to be understood in relation to the norms regulating the activity of preaching in Arabo-Islamic tradition? As an empirical phenomenon, Islamic preaching on audiocassette also have bearing on more general issues concerning the difference between speech and writing. By highlighting the format of publication as an instance of recorded speech, the dissertation aims at contributing to what might be termed a “phonogramology”, i.e. the study of audiomedia and its special characteristics. The primary material consists of four publications: “al-Hadith ’an Yawm al-Qiyâma” by Ismâ’îl Hamîdî [Saudi Arabia/Egypt]; “Min warâ’i l-Qudbân” by Salmân al-’Awda [Saudi Arabia]; ”at-Tarîq ilâ l-Janna” and “Qisas wa-’Ibar” by Ahmad al-Qattân [Kuwayt]. The material is described and discussed in relation to a theoretical framework constructed in the introductory chapter of the dissertation and centered around the following concepts: text vis-à-vis context (with special reference to “mediated” forms of publication); forms of enunciation (narrative-descriptive-argumentative-hortative); genre (i.e. “emic” categories and labels); persona (the “mask” of the preacher as preacher). This theoretical framework is intended to serve as a map for identifying aspects which go beyond simple descriptions of “thematic contents”, i.e. what the preachers are “saying”. Though not unimportant, “contents analysis” tends to overlook the significance of forms and formats of publication. According to the present study, the issue of “modernity in relation to Islamic preaching, for example, cannot be properly understood and discussed by simply commenting on whether the propositions, narratives and elucidations put forward by Muslim preachers are “modern” or not. With reference to the samples under study here, Islamic preaching published on audiocassettes is actually “modern” not because of, but rather in spite of, what the preachers are “saying”, since what they are saying is generally “traditional”. The notion of Arabo-Islamic “rhetoric” is another issue which is discussed in the dissertation. An overview of some of the ideas and concepts surrounding the art of speech/preaching when made into an object for reflection by Muslim authors is provided. One question is how these reflections may be situated in relation to the notion of ”rhetoric”. What is “Islamic rhetoric”? In what sense may this be related to rhetoric in the “Western” tradition? The dissertation is somewhat tentative in trying to answer these questions, but explores similarities and affinities as well as differences between “Islamic rhetoric” and “Western rhetoric”. One major point to be taken into consideration is that there are at least two different “rhetorics” (’ilm al-khatâba and ’ilm al-balâgha). In previous studies is is sometimes taken for granted that “Islamic rhetoric” is just ’ilm al-balâgha, while ’ilm al-khatâba, which more properly refers to “rhetoric” in the sense of public speech or ars praedicandi, has been neglected.
|
|
| 3. |
- Hornborg, Anne-Christine
(författare)
-
A Landscape of Left-Overs : Changing Conceptions of Place and Environment among Mi'kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada
- 2001
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation seeks to explore historical changes in the lifeworld of the Mi’kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada. The Mi’kmaq culture hero Kluskap here serves as a key persona in discussing issues such as traditions, changing conceptions of land, and human-environmental relations. In order not to depict Mi’kmaq culture as timeless, two important periods in its history are examined. The first study reviews historical evidence of the ontology, epistemology, and ethics – jointly labeled animism – that stem from a premodern Mi’kmaq hunting subsistence. This evidence dates from the period between 1850 and 1930, which is also the period when the Mi’kmaq were gradually being forced to settle in the reserves. The second study situates the culture hero in the modern world of the 1990s, when allusions to Mi’kmaq tradition and to Kluskap played an important role in the struggle against a planned superquarry on Cape Breton. This study discusses the ecocosmology that has been formulated by modern reserve inhabitants and that could be labeled a “sacred ecology”. If the premodern ecocosmologies have been favorably treated by Westerners, the modern Natives’ attempt to create a “sacred ecology” has been received with ambivalence. It has been welcomed by some as an alternative to Western ways of treating nature, which threaten our global survival. But it has also been criticized as a modern construction designed by Natives to gain benefits from Canadian society. In the example of the Mi’kmaq struggle against the superquarry, this critique is discussed, with a focus on how the Mi’kmaq are rebuilding their traditions and environmental relations in interaction with modern society. In this process, environmental groups, pan-Indianism, and education play an important role, but so does reserve life. By anchoring their engagement in reserve life the Mi’kmaq traditionalists have to a large extent been able to confront both external and internal doubts about their authenticity.
|
|
| 4. |
- Janson, Torsten
(författare)
-
Your Cradle Is Green : The Islamic Foundation and the Call to Islam in Children's Literature
- 2003
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with the conceptualisation of da‘wa, ‘the call to Islam’, of the British organisation the Islamic Foundation, and focuses its 25 years of publication of Islamic-English children’s literature. In order to analyse the implications of the new modalities of da‘wa in the late modern Muslim minority context, the present study applies a genealogical perspective. The study explores the discursive order of da‘wa in history, and devotes particular attention to questions of power. Who has taken recourse to da‘wa and for what purposes? To what extent do the periods of recession and intensity of da‘wa reflect broader socio-historical tendencies? It argues that a new order of da‘wa has emerged in modernity, predominantly defined by Sunni revivalism. The study describes how the Islamic Foundation converts the post-colonial and post-migrant debates on da‘wa into a number of intellectual and pedagogic commitments. It offers an overview of the establishment of the British Muslim communities and its central concerns and debates. It goes on to describe how the Foundation has formed its discourse to accommodate interests of both the Muslim minorities and the public British society, through interfaith dialogue, research, Islamic economics, informational courses, engagement in higher education and, most notably, publication. The thesis explores how this discursive order of da‘wa is inscribed into the children’s literature published by the Islamic Foundation. It offers a detailed analysis of the instructions, narratives, imagery and norms of both texts and paratexts. Particular attention is devoted to the tendencies of creolisation: the inherently subversive attempts to find novel forms of cultural enunciation. It turns out that the order of references authorising the children’s literature is equally shaped by Islamic literary traditions and current socio-cultural concerns and conventions. The Foundation thus negotiates Islamic revivalism with the aesthetics and pedagogic models of British-global culture. The early works were predominantly defined by internal and traditional concerns, such as faith, worship and sacred history. Recently, however, the literature has come to display an increasingly self-confident depiction of contemporary Britain, from the vantage-point of Islamic injunctions and ideals. Today, the children’s literature of the Islamic Foundation combines a markedly inclusive cultural identity with strains of exclusive, Islamic particularism.
|
|
| 5. |
- Liljefors Persson, Bodil
(författare)
-
The Legacy of the Jaguar Prophet : An Exploration of Yucatec Maya Religion and Historiography
- 2000
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with Maya religion and history. The Books of Chilam Balam is the collective title of a body of texts ascribed to the Jaguar Prophet. They are written in the Yucatec Maya language, and tell the reader about Yucatec Maya cosmology, rituals, prophecies, calendars, medicine and they are as well considered as Yucatec Maya emic historiography. These manuscripts are considered enigmatic and difficult to understand, as indeed they are. It is the aim of this thesis to try to interpret and highlight them aided by a contextual approach. Other features of Classic Maya religion, such as the concept of the divine, other mythological categories, the ritual ballgame and the scaffold human sacrifice, are described and reconstructed by analysing and synthesising recent archaeological and epigraphical research results. The Cruzoob religion of the contemporary Yucatec Maya who live in the eastern parts of the Yucatan peninsula, is also presented and placed in its historical context. The Post-Colonial Cruzoob religion is analysed as a synthesis of both Yucatec Maya and Catholic religious traditions. This thesis is an exploration of Yucatec Maya religion and historiography, and the Books of Chilam Balam are considered collectively as a valuable Legacy of the Jaguar Prophet.
|
|
| 6. |
- Löwendahl, Lena
(författare)
-
Med kroppen som instrument : en studie av new age med fokus på hälsa, kroppslighet och genus
- 2002
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis New Age is studied from a sociological perspective, with a focus on health, body, and gender. One purpose is to examine how people within New Age view and relate to these problem areas. A parallel purpose is to find explanations to why women predominantly take an interest in New Age, and to discover how these explanations are related to the view on health, body and gender. The subjects in the thesis are discussed with the help of sociological theory, as well as 28 qualitative interviews with men and women interested in New Age. Topics discussed at the interviews were health, body, conventional medicine, alternative methods and interpretations of masculinity and femininity. The reasons why people take an interest in New Age can partly be explained from these subjects, but also in the life stories of the interviewees. The study shows that health generally was considered the individual’s normal state, which exists when everything is in balance. Health contains mental as well as transcendental factors, which sometimes includes religious elements. The body was generally viewed as secondary in relation to mental and transcendental factors, even though physical sensations legitimize different therapies and techniques. This turns the body into an instrument whose ability to feel and experience has great importance for how the individual interprets and creates her existence. Men and women speak in similar ways about health, but for women the body is more central. People’s interest in New Age in Swedish society can be linked to an increased pluralism, but also to extensive secularization. Both of these factors play a large role in the rise of new religious practices. The emphasis on abundant individual choice makes the New Age movement fit the late-modern individual’s reflexivity and individualism. In addition, many of the concepts within New Age, can be seen as reactions against the rationality and science of the modern era, expressed through conventional medicine and institutionalized religion. Furthermore, alternative methods in New Age provide a sense of control, which is an important part of the late-modern body-oriented culture. It is possible to see New Age as a free zone, where women can seek subject status on their own terms without having to affirm traditional male norms. Men within New Age are generally critical to the hegemonic masculinity. They set a standard for an alternative male role by expressing the feminine and “soft” values within them.
|
|
| 7. |
- Offermanns, Jürgen
(författare)
-
Der lange Weg des Zen-Buddhismus nach Deutschland : vom 16. Jahrhundert bis Rudolf Otto
- 2002
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- At the beginning of the 21st Century, Zen Buddhism is no longer an unknown religion in the West. Zen-meditation enjoys great popularity, the books regarding the subject are among the bestsellers and the auditoriums are crowed if the topic concerns the bringing home of Zen Buddhism to a Western audience. At the same time Zen Buddhism today is by no means merely the religion of Zen Buddhists, but practices and teachings of Zen Buddhism are being integrated into a Christian context or find themselves incorporated in the practice of religious groups that can be counted to the New Age movement. The reception of the East Asian religion, as well as the related adaptation to Western ideas and conditions of life are however of an older date. It began already during the 16th Century with the first letters from the Jesuit missionaries in China and Japan that reported about the strange religion of Fo. The reports of the Jesuit missionaries were translated in Europe, censored and then circulated with help of various ways, such as letter collections, the Jesuit theater or the scholastic literature. Since those days the Zen-Buddhist religion in Europe has most of all been an idea, a world of imagination, exposed to social, economical, theological and power political calculi. The information of the Jesuit missionaries from China and Japan, as well as the in-creasingly popular travel literature not only triggered the enthusiasm for China during the Age of Enlightenment, but were the basis for the entire reception of Buddhism during the 17th and 18th Century. These sources of infor-mation, formed the understanding of Zen-Buddhism of people like Athanasius Kircher, G.W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant or the French deist Francois Marie de Marsy. Only in the beginning of the 19th century the first Buddhist writings were translated and thus made available to a wider public. In particular during the 19th Century the reception of Zen Buddhism was exposed to the continuously changing influence of power political interests and diverging theological arguments. Among other things two occurrences were of particular importance for the reception of Zen-Buddhism in Germany; the Meiji-restoration in Japan (1868) and the attempts of various theologians, philosophers and psychologists to lead back "religion" to a universal essence, which is not accessible to rational reason. The Zen interpretations of both D.T. Suzuki and Rudolf Otto were decisively determined by these political and intellectual alterations of the 19th century.
|
|
| 8. |
- Otterbeck, Jonas
(författare)
-
Islam på svenska : tidskriften Salaam och islams globalisering
- 2000
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation focuses on written Islamic discourses in Swedish, especially the journal Salaam - Islamisk tidskrift. The journal first appeared in 1986 and is a part of the activities of Islamiska Informationsföreningen. From the beginning, Salaam has been edited by female converts to Islam in their twenties or early thirties. Female converts also account for a large number of the texts that have been published in Salaam, but other women and men have contributed. Only a small number of the articles in the journal, apart from some translations, are by Muslims with a formal Islamic education. The content of Salaam is described at length and commented upon. The dissertation also contains a descriptive overview of all other literature in Swedish produced by Muslims in Sweden during last century. Throughout the second half of the 20th century there has been a small, but ongoing production of texts on Islam written by Muslims themselves in the local languages of all Western European countries. This literature has received little attention from researchers involved in the research field of “Islam in Europe”. On of the main objects of the present study is to put these texts in focus. The central analytic question in the dissertation is why Salaam contains the interpretations of Islam that it does. This leads to a discussion on the genealogy of these interpretations. By combining the sociology of knowledge in the tradition of Peter Berger, the notions of power, discourse and genealogy of Michel Foucault, and theories of globalization and religion, the dissertation attempts to uncover a complex genealogy. Three globally spread discourses are identified as important in the genealogy of Salaam’s discourse: the da‘wa of the Islamic movement; the Western European and North American modernity; and globalization, especially a group of specific, global flows that are connected to certain key values in the above-mentioned modernity. The dissertation includes analytic discussions and descriptions of these three discourses and how they relate to Salaam. Finally, a theoretical discussion on religious interpretation leads to the question whether or not the discourse of Salaam can be called an example of Swedish Islam.
|
|
| 9. |
|
|
| 10. |
- Svensson, Jonas
(författare)
-
Women's Human Rights and Islam : a Study of Three Attempts at Accommodation
- 2000
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation focuses on interpretations of Islam that claim compatibility with international human rights norms in the context of women’s rights. These interpretations are seen as parts of an on-going contemporary international debate on women’s human rights and Islam that engages Muslims as well as non-Muslims. Existing UN-formulated international human rights schemes are a basic starting point. Texts by three internationally renowned Muslim scholars – philosopher and religious studies scholar Riffat Hassan, sociologist Fatima Mernissi and legal studies and human rights scholar Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na‘im – constitute the main part of the material studied. These three individuals become exponents for what is termed an “accommodation-position” among Muslims participating in the debate. The analysis covers methods used in the attempts to provide interpretations of the basic Islamic religious sources – the Qur’an, the hadith-literature and Muslim historiography – which accommodate international human rights norms in the context of women’s rights. Through this activity the exponents produce versions of Islam that compete with other contemporary versions of the religious tradition for general recognition, as the ‘correct’ representation of the divine will. The study also takes into consideration techniques used in the texts to convince different audiences both of the legitimacy of the interpretations presented, and of the interpreters’ authority. A general overview of the international debate on women’s human rights and Islam is provided in order to outline the context of the versions of Islam suggested by Hassan, Mernissi and an-Na‘im. The texts are analysed as parts of this international debate, including their social functions within the debate. One of the questions asked concerns why these interpretations receive international attention and what purposes they fulfil in the international debate. They are also analysed as parts of an on-going, worldwide discussion among Muslim religious activists concerning, for example, the role of religion in society and the issue of religious authority. Theoretical inspiration is found in the academic fields of Islamology, the sociology of knowledge, discourse analysis, gender theory and theories on cultural globalisation.
|
|
