Religious Fragmentation Research Articles

Political Performances of Surviving Oppression

Abstract In light of the societal and structural changes that have occurred in Palestine since the signing of the Oslo Agreements in the 1990s, the present work aims to analyse the enhanced role of individuals and individual actions as opposed to actions led by collective and/or top-down organisations in the unarmed resistance of Palestinian people to the State of Israel, both in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and in 1948 Palestine/Israel. To understand the main tracts, limits, and potential of this contemporary trend I resort to the work and ideas developed by Bayat on social nonmovements. A further aim is to highlight how the resistance of the individuals intersects with individual-right movements, to understand the changing relation between the fight for individual rights and the fight against occupation. Hence, an in-depth analysis of the village realities of al-Walaja and al-Laqiya will be provided, by examining land defense in reaction to illegal acquisition of Palestinian property. Moreover, the results will be confronted with the broad events of May 2021, to better understand how new resistance dynamics have unfolded in different local realities as well as nationwide. Nowadays Palestine is marked by geographical, social, political, and religious fragmentation, together with economic difficulties. In such an environment I suggest that individuals adapted to the new reality of NGOs’ aid and relief and, with the boost of social media and the discourse brought forward by Palestinian women, have taken the lead of the leaderless Palestinian resistance, as proved by the events of the Habba of May 2021. As for the claims over individual rights, I believe this new resistance paradigm has the potential to prompt social and political reform, while the capabilities of individuals to practice such resistance in a sustained manner have to be carefully thought out.

Philosophy of Religion in a Fragmented Age: Practice and Participatory Realism

What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political polarization, cultural ferment, and religious fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Amy Hollywood and others, I argue that philosophers seeking to understand what seem to be incommensurable moral and religious communities ought to attend more fully to the role of spiritual practice and moral formation as irreducible components of certain beliefs and ethical intuitions. However, while such an account might invite a reductive reading in which the object of religious belief is taken to be simply the practice, ritual, etc., I engage the thought of Michael Polanyi to argue that such irreducibly participatory truth claims can be understood to aim at a reality that exceeds the structures of formation and ways of life to which they are indexed.

Islamic Televangelism: Controversy and Da'wah Contest in Television Media

Digital technology has had a significant impact on several aspects of human life, especially on religious aspects. The birth of this religious fragmentation encouraged the presence of new religious, contemporary preachers and new audiences who contribute to revitalizing the debate over religious symbols. This article proposes thinking around the aspects that led to the development of the debate and contestation surrounding da'wah within the context of Islamic televangelism. The method used in this study is a qualitative descriptive method utilizing field observations and direct interviews with one of the Ustaz on television. The results of this study indicate that da'wah programs that are broadcast through television media give birth to a religious authority that is built between preaching actors thanks to the Islamic televangelism media. The contestation regarding religious authority, which was obtained thanks to its popularity in the television media, gave birth to the figure of a religious entrepreneur. Islamic televangelism has also sparked various controversies through preaching on television media, such as reprimands from KPI and even among fellow scholars.

Church Competition During the Pandemic: the Case of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

The collapse of the USSR resulted in religious revivals in all former republics, including Ukraine. Religion provided security and emotional support. It legitimized political elites, while some churches also offered public goods, substituting the state. With time, religion became a crucial component of the national identities. Despite many similarities to other primely Orthodox countries, Ukraine has been unique in its religious landscape. Several Orthodox jurisdictions have competed for the status of the national church, which allowed religious fragmentation in all regions of Ukraine. This paper shows the importance of religious pluralism in Ukraine during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

The Tangut Manuscript <i>The First [Shamanistic] Ritual</i> from IOM, RAS Collection. Textual Research and Translation

The Tangut manuscript Танг 1621 is recorded evidence of the Tangut shamanistic tradition that existed in the Xixia state, but had originated from the religious beliefs of the Tanguts ancestors. This text was discovered among unidentified Tangut texts in the process of cataloguing work. Prior to this this discovery, we came across some indirect references to Tangut shamanism in various sources such as historical documents (The Tangut Codex), ritual or religious text fragments. Most likely, the text in question is an original Tangut text that had originally existed in verbal tradition and was later recorded. Structurally, it consists of 14-syllable verses, including archaisms, unclear metaphors and symbolism. It is a complete manuscript with a title, a short preface, and a logical ending. The titles translation can be only interpreted tentatively, as it literally means The Origin of [Religious] Ecstasy (Russian kamlaniye). However, I guess that to translate the Tangut word 影 as [religious] ecstasy would not be entirely correct in this case, because we find in this text a description of a shamanistic ritual that includes kamlaniye only as its part. The main goal of the rite described here is to defend the world of living beings from the disasters that astral spirits visit on some tribes or ethnic groups for being neglectful of the rules of sacrificial rites or for damaging sacred items. Therefore, this ritual, when it was performed for the first time, was aimed at procuring Heavens support for people. On can assume that, once performed, this rite had laid the foundation for a ritual tradition that preserved the wealth and stability of the community that observed it, and later it became the most basic, principal ritual of the state. I can also assume that it was this archetypal rite that emperor Yuanhao performed as he proclaimed himself emperor of the Xixia State. I should add that the above-mentioned linguistic traits pose a serious challenge to the textual research into this sourcefirst of all, to its proper translation. That is why this study is only a preliminary one. The main goal of interpreting this text is to determine the place of the Tangut shamanistic tradition within the context of the long-time scholarly definition of such religious beliefs.

Lives, Lives, and Afterlives

Caesarius of Arles in his role as bishop struggled to guide his growing Christian community amid the political and religious fragmentation of early sixth-century Gaul. This article examines the ways in which he shaped his pastoral pedagogy to address the ecclesiological challenges of the post-Roman world. In his own life, in retelling the lives of saints, and in publishing his sermons, Caesarius variously reconceptualized “example” in order to teach ordinary Christians how to live out their faith in a universal church – a stable, if idealized, community that brought comfort in uncertain times. His innovative pedagogy also reshaped the complex administration of the expanding Gallic church. Caesarius thus created a pedagogy of example to fit the needs of his post-Roman community.

Religious fragmentation, social identity and other-regarding preferences: Evidence from an artefactual field experiment in India

We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on other-regarding preferences. We report on a series of two-player binary Dictator experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. Both Muslims’ and Hindus’ aversion to advantageous inequality declines as the probability of facing an out-group member increases. We find no evidence of aversion to disadvantageous inequality on either religious sample. Both Muslim and Hindu participants display aversion to advantageous inequality in both fragmented villages and homogeneous villages. The effect of village fragmentation on aversion to disadvantageous inequality differs across religious groups.

Religious Fragmentation, Social Disintegration? Social Networks and Evangelical Protestantism in Rural Andean Bolivia

Latin America remains, much more than any other region in the world, dominated by a single religion: Catholicism. But in the second half of the twentieth century, a so-called “Protestant wave” spread across the region increasing religious diversity. This wave was spurred on by Pentecostal and other evangelical Protestant churches, denominations that challenge the religious syncretism, state-church relationships, and many of the institutions and relationships that structure social and cultural life in Latin America. These changes can bring tensions, conflicts, or abuses that can have a socially disintegrating effect. This paper uses “religious fragmentation” as a lens to examine this process in rural highland Bolivia. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork in two communities, this paper first examines the motivations for and contestations surrounding increasing Protestant affiliation and second asks how religious fragmentation interacts with existing social networks and relationships. Paying special attention to reciprocity networks, which are culturally and economically significant in these indigenous communities, this paper argues that non-religious social relationships and activities can act as intervening variables that overcome the social fragmentations of religious change.

The Practice of Religion & Its Influence on Hatuhaha Language Shift in Central Moluccas

By the trade and the spread of Islam, Malay language (BM) was introduced. Hatuhaha language (BHT) and Malay language (BM) were used based on their needs. When Portuguese and The Netherlands ruled there, Hatuhaha communities (HA) forced down from the mountain and occupied the coastal areas. The use of Hatuhaha language (BHT) began to be prohibited; especially in the Hulaliu village which have been Christianized. On the contrary, in the four villages which were not Christianized, Hatuhaha language (BHT) was limited use because they did not always have business with the colonial. Furthermore, religious fragmentation occurs gradually, and impacted sosiologically on the development of Hatuhaha language (BHT). This phenomenon is then examined by quantitative and qualitative approaches that utilize the library study method, observation, survey, and interview. The results showed that in addition to the factors of colonization and Christianization, religious practice in Hatuhaha community (HA) has given more significant impact on Hatuhaha language (BHT) shift. It could be shown through correlation test by using Chi-Square on the level of frequency in using Hatuhaha language (BHT) on the domain of family, religious, and custom.

Территориальное устройство Индии в условиях этнокультурного многообразия

In the article the constitutional arrangements of territorial structure of India are discussed in the context of ethnic, linguistic and religious fragmentation of Indian society. The author highlights the three main approaches to territorial structurization of a plural multiethnic state: federalism, territorial autonomy, and creation of territories with special constitutional regime and reveals the mechanism of each of them on the example of India. Pluralism in approaches to territorial organization of India is stipulated by complex and extremely mosaic ethnic and cultural structure of population of the state. Federalism is applied in India mainly for accommodation of concentrated linguistic groups. Now federalism is also applied for reducing militant separatism in the Indian North-East. At the same time, federalism aims at integration of different ethnic groups into a common political and legal space. Accommodation of a range of tribes in the North-East is achieved through territorial autonomy as well. But tribal peoples living in the central part of India don’t enjoy autonomy. The lands occupied by them have a special constitutional regime (so-called “scheduled territories”) instead. It is emphasized that the choice of a certain solution for an ethnic group is often “situational” and depends on a degree of separatism. From the author’s opinion sometimes territorial solutions are implemented as compromises between the Indian government and political leaders of ethnic separatist movements.
 Also the article briefly describes ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of Indian society and its territorial fragmentation. It contains examples connected with creation of Indian States such as Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Nagaland. The information and conclusions in the article rely on materials gathered by the author during the research trip to India in summer 2016.

Religious diversity and regional development in China

This paper investigates possible impacts of religious diversity on regional development in China. We developed the religious fragmentation and polarization indices as measurements for the religious diversity by using the religious site data from the 2004 economic Census data in China. The results from the panel data regressions within national coverage suggest that the religious diversity has positive and significant impacts on regional development in general. The results from the panel data regressions within regional coverage also suggest that religious fragmentation has a positive and significant association with the economic development in the eastern region of China while religious polarization has a positive and significant association with the economic development in the central and western regions of China.

Religious Fragmentation, Social Identity and Conflict: Evidence from an Artefactual Field Experiment in India.

We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on behavior in Tullock contests. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. Our main finding is that the effect of social identity is small and inconsistent across the two religious groups in our study. While we find small but statistically significant results in line with our hypotheses in the Hindu sample, we find no statistically significant effects in the Muslim sample. This is in contrast to evidence from Chakravarty et al. (2016), who report significant differences in cooperation levels in prisoners’ dilemma and stag hunt games, both in terms of village composition and identity. We attribute this to the fact that social identity may have a more powerful effect on cooperation than on conflict.

Colin M. MacLachlan.Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture.

First, it is important to note what this book is not: it is not a deeply researched monograph or an up-to-date historiographical exploration of Mexican history and culture. Rather, its scope is different: it is macro, overarching, and “interpretive” (32). It embodies the author’s decades’ long reflections on the history and meetings of empires. According to Colin M. MacLachlan, “Hispano-Indo Mexico became an heir to a lengthy historical process including early Iberian tribalism, Rome, the Visigoths, Spanish Islam, Judaism and Western Civilization in general” (29–30). Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture traces specifically how these civilizations might have contributed to shape the history of Mexico. MacLachlan does not focus solely on the “hybridization that took place,” the “mestizo culture,” but also delineates “a continuum” that located “Indo-Mexico, Europe and Spain on the same road to modernity” (32). There are a number of preconceptions—Indo-Mexico, mestizo, continuum, and modernity—that needed more explanation at the start. Why introduce the term Indo-Mexico and never define it or justify its practice? The elaboration of “New Spain’s mestizo culture” also falls short (249). The proffered definition recognizes “mestizo” as “both a biological and cultural term,” given that “one could be a cultural mestizo by adopting elements of European culture” including “language” while “retaining religious fragments, words, customs and food from the indigenous side” (23). Yet such interpretation fails to engage with a cohort of research post A. Magnus Morner (R. Douglas Cope, Matthew Restall, Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, and Joanne Rappaport) that has fruitfully complicated shifting constructions of socio-racial identity while also including African contributions to the postconquest Mexican mix.

Religious fragmentation, social identity and cooperation: Evidence from an artefactual field experiment in India

We study the role of village-level religious fragmentation on intra- and inter-group cooperation in India. We report on data on two-player prisoners׳ dilemma and stag hunt experiments played by 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of village-level religious heterogeneity. In religiously heterogeneous villages, cooperation rates in the prisoners׳ dilemma, and to a lesser extent the stag hunt game, are higher when subjects of either religion play with a fellow in-group member than when they play with an out-group member or with someone whose identity is unknown. Interestingly, cooperation rates among people of the same religion are significantly lower in homogeneous villages than in fragmented villages in both games.

Religious Diversity and Economic Development in China

This paper investigates the interaction between religious diversity and economic development in China. We use religious fragmentation and polarization to measure the diversity of religion. Based on the panel data of religious sites by province from economic census in China, we apply panel data regression to find the following evidence: (1) Religious fragmentation demonstrates a positive and significant impact on regional economic development while religious polarization has a negative and significant impact on regional economic development with different patterns in the eastern, central and western regions of China. (2) Economic development shows a positive and significant influence on religious fragmentation while its impact on polarization is positive but insignificant. A significant two-way relationship exists between religious diversity and economic development in China. We discussed policy implication with convincible results.

How Islamic is al-Qaeda? The politics of Pan-Islam and the challenge of modernisation

This article investigates the contested ideology of al-Qaeda through an analysis of Osama bin Ladin’s writings and public statements issued between 1994 and 2011, set in relation to the development of Islamic thought and changing socio-political realities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Challenging popular conceptions of Wahhabism and the “Salafi jihad”, it reveals an idealistic, Pan-Islamic sentiment at the core of his messages that is not based on the main schools of Islamic theology, but is the result of a crisis of meaning of Islam in the modern world. Both before and after the death of al-Qaeda’s iconic leader, the continuing process of religious, political and intellectual fragmentation of the Muslim world has led to bin Ladin’s vision for unity being replaced by local factions and individuals pursuing their own agendas in the name of al-Qaeda and Islam.

Explaining the strength of civil society: Evidence from cross-sectional data

A number of societal and institutional factors enhance the development of a vibrant civil society, such as a country’s socioeconomic traditions and societal structure, political institutions, or foreign influence. But the question of which one of these factors contributes most to a vibrant civil society still remains unanswered. Using ordinary least square techniques, this article statistically tests the competing factors with a large- N design that includes 42 countries. Our dependent variable is the new Civil Society Index, composed of a structural and a value dimension of civil society. The results show that a country’s quality of political institutions and a high degree of religious fragmentation have the strongest impact on the development of a vibrant civil society. In order to examine the causal relationship, we reassess our findings by conducting two case studies on Chile and Russia. The case studies corroborate the causal direction from the quality of political institutions to a stronger civil society.

Religión y espiritualidad, ¿dos modelos enfrentados?. Trayectorias poscatólicas entre budistas Soka Gakkai

In the context of the privatization of religion, still ongoing, many contemporary religious biographies seem to be motivated by the individual search for a religious alternative far away from the repertoires of beliefs, rituals and institutions of traditional religion. Following the increasing use of this term by many social actors at least since the sixties of the twentieth century, part of the Sociology of Religion has referred to the alternative religiosity as Spirituality (Wood 2009) (Heelas 2008) (McGuire 2008) (Flanagan 2007) (Giordan 2007). The new models of spirituality account both for the decay of traditional forms of religiosity (based on the community of faith, the participation in collective rituals and the congregational identity) and for the spreading of a new spiritual subjectivism, whose high individualism have moved some authors to assert that a reconstitution of collective religiosity is impossible, as Steve Bruce (1996) and Daniele Hervieu-Leger (2003) have argued. This paper tries to explore the possibilities of this theoretical framework analyzing some discourses, discourses and practices of Buddhist converts in Spain, who have previously developed an extensive spiritual ride through several varieties of the so-called New Age milieu, the most important style of religious fragmentation and subjective revolution in the religious fields.

Questions of religion and cultural policy in France

This article explores how questions of religion have impinged on or informed various dimensions of culture‐shaping policy in France. Firstly, it considers not only how religious references have been orchestrated in high‐level attempts to frame secular national identities, but also how such processes have assumed quasi‐religious forms and functions. Secondly, it analyses the changing place of religion in French educational curricula and recent contested endeavours to introduce it as a cultural ‘fact’ into those curricula. Thirdly, the article examines influential framings of art policies in their relation to religion. It considers the pivotal function of religious fragments and debris in Malraux’s vision of the imaginary museum and the use by Bourdieu of sustained religious metaphors to describe the sacralizing dynamics of secular art world. Finally, the article examines, in a long‐term perspective, the implicit and explicit cultural policies of religious bodies themselves in their attempts to act upon prevailing cultures.

Population heterogeneity and growth

I investigate the robustness of the link between growth and heterogeneity in a population along ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socio-economic class lines using cross-country data covering the period 1960–92 and 72 countries. In addition to 21 distinct explanatory variables extensively used in the empirical growth literature, I consider several fragmentation and polarization indices capturing the heterogeneity in a population to deal with measurement uncertainty, and utilize Bayesian Model Averaging techniques to address uncertainty issues regarding model specification. My results indicate that while substantial data evidence favors the inclusion of population heterogeneity as a theory when proxied by fragmentation indices, it does not support the inclusion of this theory when proxied by polarization indices. Furthermore, the religious fragmentation index has the strongest evidence in favor of its inclusion as opposed to ethnic and linguistic fragmentation indices and income inequality.