Deathpower

Deathpower
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 318
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780231540667
ISBN-13 : 0231540663
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Deathpower by : Erik W. Davis

Download or read book Deathpower written by Erik W. Davis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs. Buddhist monks perform funeral rituals rooted in the embodied practices of Khmer rice farmers and the social hierarchies of Khmer culture. The monks' realization of death underwrites key components of the Cambodian social imagination: the distinction between wild death and celibate life, the forest and the field, and moral and immoral forms of power. By connecting the performative aspects of Buddhist death rituals to Cambodian history and everyday life, Davis undermines the theory that Buddhism and rural belief systems necessarily oppose each other. Instead, he shows Cambodian Buddhism to be a robust tradition with ethical and popular components extending throughout Khmer society.


Deathpower Related Books

Deathpower
Language: en
Pages: 318
Authors: Erik W. Davis
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-12-08 - Publisher: Columbia University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically reorients approaches toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactio
The Body Incantatory
Language: en
Pages: 397
Authors: Paul Copp
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-09-09 - Publisher: Columbia University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were perva
Ritual Imagination
Language: en
Pages: 340
Authors: Hilde Nielssen
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-10-06 - Publisher: BRILL

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, Hilde Nielssen shows how tromba possession wor
Imagination and the Journey of Faith
Language: en
Pages: 203
Authors: Sandra M. Levy
Categories: Psychology
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008-09-05 - Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"What makes us open to mystery, to glimpses of the Transcendent in our daily lives? The power of the imagination, according to Sandra Levy - a power that has be
Neither Cargo Nor Cult
Language: en
Pages: 252
Authors: Martha Kaplan
Categories: Political Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1995-06-15 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the 1880s an oracle priest, Navosavakadua, mobilized Fijians of the hinterlands against the encroachment of both Fijian chiefs and British colonizers. Britis