Embodying Charisma pdf free download

Embodying Charisma Edited By Pnina Werbner And Helene Basu

EMBODYING  MODERNITY, LOCALITY AND THE PERFORMANCE OF EMOTION IN SUFI CULTS CHARISMA

This collection of essays from many of the subject’s leading researchers argues that the power of Sufi ritual derives not from beliefs as a set of abstracted ideas but rather from rituals as transformative and embodied aesthetic practices and ritual processes, Sufi cults reconstitute the sacred as a concrete emotional and as a dissenting tradition, they embody politically potent postcolonial counternarrative.

The book, therefore, challenges previous opposites, up until now used as a tool for analysis, such as magic versus religion, ritual versus mystical belief, body versus mind, and syncretic practice versus Islamic orthodoxy, by highlighting the connections between Sufi cosmologies, ethical ideas, and bodily ritual practices.

With its wide-ranging historical analysis as well as its contemporary research, this collection of case studies is an essential addition to courses on ritual and religion in sociology, anthropology, and Islamic or South Asian studies.

Its ethnographically rich and vividly written narratives reveal the important contributions that the analysis of Sufism can make to a wider theory of religious movements and charismatic ritual in the context of late-twentieth-century modernity and postcoloniality