Gregory D. Alles

What counts as 'indigenous religion' in today´s world? Who claims this category? What are the processes through which local entities become recognisable as 'religious' and 'indigenous'? How is all of this connected to struggles for power, rights and sovereignty? This book sheds light on the contemporary lives of indigenous religion(s), through case studies from Sápmi, Nagaland, Talamanca, Hawai`i, and Gujarat, and through a shared focus on translations, performances, mediation and sovereignty. It builds on long term case-studies and on the collaborative comparison of a long-term project, including shared fieldwork. At the center of its concerns are translations between a globalising discourse (indigenous religion in the singular) and distinct local traditions (indigenous religions in the plural). With contributions from leading scholars in the field, this book is a must read for students and researchers in indigenous religions, including those in related fields such as religious studies and social anthropology.

What counts as 'indigenous religion' in today´s world? Who claims this category? What are the processes through which local entities become recognisable as 'religious' and 'indigenous'? How is all of this connected to struggles for power, rights and sovereignty? This book sheds light on the contemporary lives of indigenous religion(s), through case studies from Sápmi, Nagaland, Talamanca, Hawai`i, and Gujarat, and through a shared focus on translations, performances, mediation and sovereignty. It builds on long term case-studies and on the collaborative comparison of a long-term project, including shared fieldwork. At the center of its concerns are translations between a globalising discourse (indigenous religion in the singular) and distinct local traditions (indigenous religions in the plural). With contributions from leading scholars in the field, this book is a must read for students and researchers in indigenous religions, including those in related fields such as religious studies and social anthropology.

Rudolf Otto exerted a major formative influence on the study of religions in the first half of the 20th century. His landmark book, Das Heilige (1917), translated into English as The Idea of the Holy (1923), identified as central to religion the experience of the numinous, a word he coined. That numinous was, in his terms, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans-a fascinating yet terrifying mystery. This influential view set the agenda for most professional scholars of religion until well into the 1960s. It also introduced a set of concepts that has enjoyed wide cultural currency. Still today creative writers and artists occasionally refer to the numinous. This book introduces general readers to Otto's thought in The Idea of the Holy and helps them develop a fuller understanding of it. It presents the problems with which Otto wrestled, among them questions about evolution and religion, the historical development of Christianity, and religion's role in making a better society. It sets Otto's ideas about the numinous in the broader currents of thought to which they belong. It also examines criticisms of Otto's ideas and concludes with an examination of how scholars today approach the topics Otto addressed.

One often reads that literature works to construct worlds of meaning. This book argues that the Iliad and the Ramayana did not construct worlds so much as address them. It argues further that the worlds the Iliad and the Ramayana addressed were worlds in which words did not mean so much as persuade. In both ancient Greece and India, persuasion was central to harmonious social interaction. The failure of persuasion marked the limits of the patterns that configured human society; it also threatened social chaos. The work of the Iliad and the Ramayana was to transcend the limits and mystify the threat. In performing this work, the two poems made the configurations of social order fundamentally tenable. They also enabled them to endure up to the present day. Gregory Alles seeks to bring an awareness of some of the limits of significant ideological practices in the academic study of religions, especially the pursuit known as the history of religions. In the twentieth century, the history of religions has been formulated as a hermeneutical discipline. Its task has been to understand religious meanings, in whatever way the process of understanding meanings has been conceived. This investigation suggests, however, that a hermeneutical history of religions is too narrow. Among other things, it overlooks the religious work that these two poems perform. This study proposes that historians of religions conceive of their task not as hermeneutics but as history, that is, as a principled investigation of events in which religion occurs.