Showing papers on "Communalism published in 2008"

Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890-1950

Abstract: Many of the central issues in modern Indian politics have long been understood in terms of an opposition between ideologies of secularism and communalism. Observers have argued that recent Hindu nationalism is the symptom of a crisis of Indian secularism and have blamed this on a resurgence of religion or communalism. Shabnum Tejani unpacks prevailing assumptions about the meaning of secularism in contemporary politics, focusing on India but with many points of comparison elsewhere in the world. She questions the simple dichotomy between secularism and communalism that has been used in scholarly study and political discourse. Tracing the social, political, and intellectual genealogies of the concepts of secularism and communalism from the late nineteenth century until the ratification of the Indian constitution in 1950, she shows how secularism came to be bound up with ideas about nationalism and national identity.

Cautious Commemoration: Localism, Communalism, and Nationalism in Palestinian Memorial Monuments in Israel

Abstract: In March 1998, the political leadership of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel was looking for ways to commemorate al-Nakba (“The Disaster,” in Arabic), referring to the war of 1948, during which about 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted and hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. This leadership, organized in the Follow-Up Committee (FUC), nominated a Nakba and Steadfastness Committee (NSC) chaired by the author Muhamad Ali Taha. Among the Committee's several initiatives, one gained front-page headlines in the Arabic media: a call for Arab municipalities to establish memorial monuments for the Palestinian martyrs (shuhada) of 1948.

Communal Societies and the Emergence of Elites in the Prehistoric American Southeast

Abstract: The emergence of elites in the prehistoric American Southeast takes place within the context of communal societies. Incipient elites exacerbate contradictions that appear under conditions of population growth, subsistence intensification, decreased mobility, and technological reorganization within the communal mode of production to undermine egalitarianism and consolidate their positions of status. Archaeological data from the Plum Bayou culture of central Arkansas suggest that the elite had not completely transformed communal life despite attempts at accumulation and monopolization. Their strategies of aggrandizement were effectively resisted by non-elites and communalism was ultimately restored in the region. The dynamic that pushes egalitarian, kinbased societies towards inequality in the Southeast appears to be cyclical rather than linear.

Fire's Queer Anti-Communalism

Abstract: While many critics have pointed out how Fire’s (1996) reception reveals much about the Hindutva agenda of fundamentalists and their use of women as symbols for the nation, no one has traced the critique of fundamentalism embedded in the film itself in the haunting figure of the Hindu–Muslim union that is visible, and, in fact, audible throughout. Two of the songs in Fire come from Bombay (1995) and reference that film’s allegory of an inclusive, secular India. In contrast to other critics who focus only on Fire’s reception, I read scenes such as the ones featuring the Bombay score in order to show how a number of interrelated fundamentalist debates are alluded to in the text itself.

Meet the Abrahams: Colonial Law and a Mixed Race Family from Bellary, South India, 1810–63

Abstract: To what extent did legal notions of identity conceal more porous and dynamic social relationships experienced outside of court? This article reconstructs events surrounding a famous court case, Abraham v. Abraham (1863), involving a property dispute within a mixed race family from Bellary, South India. Using the case's original documents it presents a narrative about the Abraham family, highlighting their negotiations of identity within the domains of family, market and law. The narrative shows how Indians, even under colonialism, could experience far more dynamic and flexible boundaries than what is often portrayed in the literature on communalism. At the same time, it demonstrates the very real impact of personal law categories upon the choices and litigation strategies of Indians. Indians had real agency in crafting their identities, but only as they adopted the conceptual tools of the colonial judiciary to pursue their interests.

The Encyclopedia of Australian Utopian Communalism

Abstract: The project makes an attempt to record the details of all known state wise Australian 'utopian' texts till the mid-1970s, such as "The New Arcadia: An Australian Story" by Horace Tucker and "The Curse and its Cure" by Thomas Pennington Lucas. It also provides information of Australian 'intentional communities' or 'communal groups' such as the 'Co-operative Home' and 'Kalevan Kansa' whose members strived to lead a utopian way of life.

Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel

Abstract: The fierce debates about the Eucharist during the Reformation era highlight a central tension between individuals’ desire to secure confessional purity and their instinct to protect the communal nature of Christian worship. Preserving confessional coexistence required balancing these forces, often by expelling nonconformists or driving them underground. Instead, civic leaders in sixteenth-century Wesel demanded that residents of all confessions attend communion together. This policy emerged as a result of leaders’ fear of unmanageable disorder in the face of waves of Calvinist immigrants, even as the town was still reeling from struggles between Lutherans and Catholics. In practice, this policy preserved the sacral communalism of the pre-Reformation church, while leaving individuals latitude to express confessional difference in informal but visible ways.

Was there discrimination in the distribution of resources after the earthquake in Gujarat? Imagination, epistemology, and the state in western India

Abstract: In this paper, I analyse and reason with the patterns of discrimination evident in the reconstruction initiatives following the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. I do so in order to explain what discrimination there was, and how and why such discrimination was related to broader patterns of social polarisation. After the earthquake, the political state of Gujarat made the headlines following widespread violence in 2002. This led to a flurry of publications in which anger and indignation led to the over-statement of the links between the government, social life in the state, and the politics of religious (Hindu-Muslim) communalism. This paper is an attempt to chip away to the impression thus created of a land consumed only by the violent compulsions of Hindu nationalism. I do so not through polemic, but ethnography, as a way of suggesting it is simply wrong to conflate state complicity in the anti-Muslim violence of 2002 with all other routine operations performed by government. Given Gujarat’s reputation for Hindu nationalism, my analysis unsurprisingly confirms the scholarship of others by showing how some powerful Hindu-oriented non-governmental organisations have drawn power and resources away from the state to parade before the people as if they govern. However, more importantly, the ethnography of the mixed-fortunes of Muslims in the rubble also illustrates some of the limits to the power of the Hindu nationalists: the data shows that the Hindu nationalists have not hijacked the state in its entirety and their influence is clearly curtailed and imperfect. By clothing the Hindu nationalist in unassailably powerful terms, the academic critic, I argue, has paradoxically almost become culpable in the success of the nationalist, by conferring on their rhetoric the status of reality, and on them power.

Intercultural Communication and New Forms of Citizenship

Abstract: This paper presents some thoughts focusing on the problems of ethnico-cultural communalism, its meaning in the current global socio-political context and its implications with regard to principles of democracy, citizenship and the nation-state. It gives particular attention to the issues of interculturality and intercultural communication (IC) as central markers in the contemporary socio-political landscape. The author claims that IC (particularly in its communal and ethnic forms) may prevent or resolve the communal separation that threatens many groups throughout the world. Apart from the essential role it has in production, reproduction and circulation of meaning within, as well as outside, the group, the discourse developed by communal communication media is an ideological, reflexive construction whose aim it is to create an impact on the social cognition of its receivers. This is why ethnicocultural groups scattered around the world generally have effective communal media that reinforce their social, ...

Literary strains of négritude and consciencism in Joseph Brahim Seid: envisioning nation and a new multicultural Chadian identity

Abstract: This study introduces Joseph Brahim Seid, one of Africa's intellectuals of the first generation of independence, in relation to the ideologisation of his contemporaneous counterparts, to Leopold Sedar Senghor's negritude and Kwame Nkrumah's consciencism. Two stories from J. B. Seid's 1962 collection, Au Tchad sous les Etoiles (translated as Told By Starlight in Chad, 2007) are read as envisioning nation and a new multicultural Chadian identity at the moment of independence. Unpacking literary strains of negritude and consciencism lays bare neglected and overlooked tensions that thwart reconciliation of the different segments of Chadian society: African/tradition–Arab/Islam–Western/Christianity. One story envisions modernisation in the reconciliation between Africa and the West, but in real life modernisaton does not occur within the context of African communalism as the story has it, but in the neo-colonial context, where it benefits the few, and mostly international stakeholders. Possibly with the intent of building nation, Seid tends to harmonize African-Arab cultures and traditional-Islamic religions, neglecting the tyranny of Islamisation and Arabisation in the past. In the present, as we know, rivalry between Arab and African populations in the Chad region has resurfaced. Superimposing Biblical motifs and understating traditional African beliefs and religious practices in a story that tends to reconcile Christianity, Islam and the traditional society, Seid overlooks the colonial context in which “civilising” Christianity is implicated, especially the distaste it engendered towards the traditional society and religions. Double-standards result from the higher prestige attaching to Islam, associated with literacy, and Christianity, associated with modernisation, thus African societies have yielded to the perceived progress imperative. While J. B. Seid's stories elevate the traditional societal value of communalism, portrayed with positive affect, in real life it has not transformed itself into a socialism sufficient to build nation and promote the multiculturalism envisioned and desired. Keywords : negritude, consciencism, Joseph Brahim Seid, Chadian identity. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Vol. 45 (2) 2008: pp. 149-160