Socio-religious Practices Research Articles

Resurrection of an Identity: The Sikh Community in Durban, South Africa

This article focuses on the Sikh community in Kwazulu/Natal (KZN), a province located on the east coast of South Africa. The Sikhs are usually distinguished by their socio-religious practices and outward appearances, their language, and their historical experiences. In KZN they are a small unknown community whose history and integration into South African society have yet to be fully understood. The aims of this paper are threefold: It examines the origins and nature of Sikhism in India and the gradual development of the Sikh identity. Secondly, it charts the history of Sikh migration and settlement to colonial Natal in the late 19th century. And thirdly, it examines ways in which the Sikh community in KZN have sustained their religious and cultural beliefs during the apartheid and post apartheid period.

Y no dejemos de congregarnos… Adecuaciones a la práctica de congregarse de tres iglesias cristianas evangélicas durante la pandemia de COVID-19 en Mexicali, México

La pandemia de COVID-19 trastocó las formas tradicionales de interacción social; motivó el replanteo de algunas prácticas y abrió nuevas oportunidades dentro de contextos digitales. Las iglesias no se escaparon de las consecuencias del confinamiento dictado por las autoridades. Esto implicó adaptar sus rituales y prácticas sociorreligiosas, así como replantear las formas de interacción con y entre sus congregantes en un nuevo contexto. El propósito de este texto es mostrar las adecuaciones de las prácticas socioculturales de tres iglesias cristianas evangélicas en este contexto. Se presentan resultados de un análisis coyuntural comparativo de las etnografías digitales, en las redes sociales utilizadas por cada una, durante la Jornada Nacional de Sana Distancia en la ciudad de Mexicali, en México. Los principales hallazgos muestran que los congregantes dan un nuevo significado a la interacción con sus iglesias online a través de las redes sociales y a la reconfiguración de sus prácticas sociorreligiosas.

Exploring the archaeology of Hinduism

'Hinduism' is an English word that was first used in 1816 and 1817 by Raja Rammohan Roy, an Indian social reformer. Rammohan Roy, a Hindu by birth and an eloquent critic of the faith as it was then practiced, used it to describe the religion of his ancestors who believed in the unity of God as 'real Hinduism' (Lorenzen 1999: 631). The word itself comes from the ancient Persian term 'Hindu', a derivation from 'Sindhu' (the name of the Indus river), which was originally used to characterize an inhabitant of the lands to the east of the Indus. How and when 'Hindu' with its ethno-geographical connotation came to mean a community with identifiable socio-religious beliefs and practices is less certain, although Al-Biruni in the eleventh century AD offered a precise and detailed account of such beliefs and practices. As the papers in this volume show, material traces that constitute the archaeology of Hindu worship and belief are observable in South Asia in the second half of the first millennium BC and in Southeast Asia beginning in the early-midfirst millennium AD. Hinduism remains a living religion, with more than 76 per cent of people in India, 85 per cent in Nepal and a very small percentage in Southeast Asia (as it lost its dominance in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and thus, for example, only about 5 per cent in Singapore, 2 per cent in Indonesia, though with more than 90 per cent of the Balinese, and a very small group of Chams in south-central Vietnam) continuing to describe themselves as Hindu. What are the forms of worship and ritual that mark out Hinduism as a religion? In an essay that bears the same title as this volume, the archaeologist Dilip Chakrabarti cites Alfred Lyall's description (based on his observations while employed in India from 1856 to 1861) of Hindu ritual behavior in India:

Children at work in rural northern Nigeria: patterns of age, space and gender

Children are increasingly recognised by geographers and other social scientists as independent actors who make valuable (albeit often overlooked) economic contributions to households and society. Hausa children in rural Northern Nigeria are highly mobile and play important economic roles supporting married women who spend much time in their walled residences ( gida) because of the local socio-religious practice of Muslim seclusion. Secluded Hausa women have low mobility and do not attend local periodic markets, but make essential day-to-day purchases from child house-to-house hawkers while sending children on errands to make purchases on their behalf. This study shows how children work both independently and alongside adults in the spheres of agricultural production (on farms), domestic reproduction (in homesteads) and trade (within markets). The research reported documents the variety of children's work activities, predominantly through time use measurement, in order to examine aspects of the socio-spatial construction of childhood in a rural Northern Nigerian community. This is innovative on two counts. First, most earlier discussions of divisions of labour in Muslim Hausaland neglect both the work of children, and reproductive work. Second, even work that considers reproduction, or children's work, does not provide detailed time measurements of reproductive burdens. The paper examines divisions of children's labour and analyses how gender, space, age and other factors shape young people's experiences of rural life. The evidence presented here of children as competent agents making significant economic contributions in rural society challenges prevailing conceptions of children as mere dependent burdens on adult society.

聖者が砂漠にやってくる

Among the Bedouin living in the Mediterranean coastal zone of the Egyptian Western Desert, a word ‘faqih’ (fgi in the dialect) denotes a distinguished religious person living and having lived with them in the desert. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this paper analyses how the Bedouin talk about and behave towards faqihs, which should give insight to the Bedouin's traditional practice of lslam.Faqihs, both alive and dead, are frequently requested by the Bedouin to grant various kinds of wishes. Here two concepts, knowledge and grace, are crucial to understand the two different modes of being a faqih; living faqihs provide some religious services because they know Islam much better than the Bedouin; dead fagihs are thought to provide similar favors because they are given the grace of God as power to cause miracles on them and to be mediated to the Bedouin.That faqih is usually a stranger coming from the outside of the desert is the third important point. In principle, Islamic knowledge is open to everyone and only God knows to whom He gives his grace. Therefore, faqihs' being privileged holders of such knowledge or grace is not normative but practical, which is highly convenient for the Bedouin's practice of Islam. As an articulate point to the God and to the Muslim community as a whole, faqihs create internal homogeneity among the Bedouin and facilitate their effective incorporation into the wider outside. An outsider living along with them is quite suitable to such a social position.In Bedouin saint worship, it seems that two opposite polarities are at work; one is toward the assimilation of all the Muslims and the other is toward the differentiation; they have created a balance in the form of social articulation as faqih, which I may suggest is just a possible solution and that we would also find many other different balances in every socio-religious practice of Islam in the world.