Women's Religious Practices Research Articles

Catholic devotion in the Americas

AbstractThis article surveys scholarly contributions to the study of Catholic devotional practice in the Americas, tracing how historical, sociological, and ethnographic studies have examined the relationship between devotion, gender, and embodiment. Scholars have explored how the saints have been brought to bear on the conditions of daily life including immigration and migration, suffering, and social change. Women's devotion has been at the center of studies of gender and lived religion, as scholars explore the creative and tensile ways, women's religious practice has exceeded the institutional authority and architectural boundaries of the church. This essay ends with a provocation about how the study of men and masculinities can challenge the portrayal of devotion as an exclusively feminine domain and complicate the binary of (male) clerical authorities/women that pervades studies of religious practice and materiality.

Religion and Politics in Heian‐Period Japan

AbstractThe religious culture of Japan's Heian period (794–1185), like that of other times and places, was structured by power differentials; it can therefore fruitfully be understood as political. Combining kami worship (popularly known as Shinto), esoteric and exoteric Buddhism, spirit possession, and local traditions, as well as moral and ritual practices derived from Confucianism and Daoism, Heian religious life was characterized by multiple religious affiliations and a syncretic outlook. From the era of the statutory (ritsuryō) state, through the court‐centered polity (ōchō kokka), to the Fujiwara regency (sekkan seiji) and rule by retired emperors (insei), religion proved indispensible to sovereignty, political authority, and power relations. Rhetoric of the ideal Buddhist monarch shaped political ideology, while rites of kami worship portrayed the emperor as a sacral king. Gender politics structured differences in men and women's religious practice and expression at the same time that patronage and pilgrimage served as important means for lay people to legitimate themselves and compete politically. By amassing landholdings in the form of manorial estates (shōen), religious institutions came to exercise juridical and economic control of extensive natural and human resources. Known as “power blocs,” institutions of this type shared in rights and functions conventionally viewed as being proper to the state.

Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (review)

Reviewed by: Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean Virginia Burrus Ross Shepard Kraemer Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Unreliable Witnesses is several things at once. First, it is an intellectual autobiography, progressing from Kraemer's days as a "neophyte graduate student" at Princeton in her early twenties (3) to her present position as a professor at Brown in her early sixties, poised to transmit her legacy to a new generation of scholars (274). Throughout the work, Kraemer balances emphasis on continuities in her views of women and religion in the ancient Mediterranean with careful demarcation of the changes that have resulted from her increased attentiveness to the rhetoricity of ancient texts and their consequent limitations as sources for women's history—a shift encapsulated in the book's title. Second, Unreliable Witnesses is an attempt to recapitulate and reframe the theoretical and methodological issues implicated in the study of religion and gender in antiquity. To this end, Kraemer initially invokes Elizabeth Clark's work as representative of historiographic trends arising from the influence of such post-structuralist theorists as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The hallmark of the "alternative reading strategies" associated with this approach is the eschewal of appeals to authorial intention, notes Kraemer, who at several points seems to elide the distinction between poststructuralism and its structuralist antecedents, suggesting that for poststructuralists authorial intention is displaced by "structures that are inherent in human thinking but not consciously present (although perceptible to trained observers)" (9). Kraemer observes that, for Clark, the embrace of theory produces pessimism regarding the possibility of reconstructing a history of women, as opposed to a history of social and linguistic constructions of gender. Kraemer herself is not only "cognizant of these discussions," as she asserts, but also apparently influenced by them in some measure: "my more recent work attends far more carefully to the degree to which the rhetorical uses of gender obscure our vision of antiquity." Nonetheless, she is wary of too close an identification with Clark and the poststructuralist company she keeps, pronouncing herself "equally cognizant of the extent to which some, if not much of the 'theory' that Clark invokes, is now on the wane, or even rejected" (11). [End Page 617] Her own interest is not in "postmodernism, 'literary-critical' theory, and Marxist-based 'cultural' theory, among others" but rather in "theory as explanation," Kraemer clarifies, without elaborating her objections to other kinds of theory. In this case, what she hopes to explain is "the relationships between [women's] behaviors and beliefs and ancient constructions of gender" (11). Taking hints from Pierre Bourdieu, she understands gender to be socially and culturally constructed (15) and religion to be "both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and human actions and ideas" (263). Religious behaviors and beliefs most typically enforce "proper" gender roles, but they can also be turned to transgressive ends. "Practices cannot have aims and intentions or purposes, which require agents," she stresses (265), without, however, entering into the theoretical debates over agency engaged by Bourdieu, among others. Kraemer also notes suggestively that aspects of religious practice tend to complicate conventional constructions of gender by privileging such feminine or feminizing acts as petitionary prayer, submissive postures, and erotically dependent or passive positions vis-à-vis the divine (265). Beyond autobiography and theory, Kraemer's book is finally (and in my view most significantly and successfully) a collection of well-chosen case studies illustrating the various challenges attending the construction of a history of women and religion in the ancient Mediterranean. Following the introduction, an initial chapter offers four "short stories" from Livy, the Acts of Thomas, the Mishnah, and Justin Martyr that collectively illustrate Kraemer's basic thesis: ancient texts that seem to offer reliable evidence of women's religious practices are in fact shaped by "gendered concerns" that render such evidence anything but reliable (54). Subsequent chapters focus in more depth on the Therapeutrides (Philo's On the Contemplative Life), Thecla of Iconium (Acts of Thecla), Artemisia of Minorca (Severus's Letter on the Conversion of the Jews), and the...

Support Networking Strategies of Female Chinese Immigrants in London, Ontario

Drawing on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with eighteen professional Chinese women with young children who have recently migrated to London, Ontario, this paper examines the social support networks of these women. Despite a range of barriers and difficulties, Chinese immigrant women actively mobilize their family resources and develop new support systems to meet their settlement needs in Canada. Their support networks are seen as being strategic in response to the challenges they face. Strong ties continue to be perceived as important sources of support for some immigrants, but weak ties that are established via post-migration religious participation and the use of modern communication technology, particularly the Internet, clearly provide these immigrant women vital support in dealing with settlement concerns, such as childcare and education. The findings also underscore the dramatic effect of immigration on some women's religious practices. The findings are discussed in relation to the ongoing debate about gender and social support networks of immigrants. The findings have implications for social service providers and policymakers involved in providing appropriate services to immigrant families and their children.

WOMEN'SMAWLIDPERFORMANCES IN SANAA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF “POPULAR ISLAM”

It has long been recognized that much of the richness of Muslim women's ritual lives has been found outside of both the mosque and the “five pillars of Islam,” in a wide set of devotional practices that have met with varying degrees of affirmation and censure from male religious scholars. This recognition has given rise to a valuable literature on such practices as shrine visitation, spirit-possession rituals, and Twelver Shiʿi women's domestic ceremonies. The prevalence of such noncanonical rituals in Muslim women's lives, although waning in many parts of the contemporary world, raises questions about the relationship between women's religious practices and the constitution of Islamic orthodoxies. Have women, often given lesser access to mosque-based and canonical rituals, historically resorted to autonomous and rewarding religious practices that are, nevertheless, fated to be marginalized in the male-dominated construction of Islamic normativity—a normativity that women may ultimately internalize and master only at great cost to their religious lives?

Agency

Many contemporary arguments about agency rely on implicit psychologies or conceptions of human mental functioning even as they attempt to direct attention away from the idea of a freely acting, completely autonomous individual. This article argues that even when the concept of agency is ‘displaced’ or reinterpreted away from the liberal subject, the concept always draws on such a psychological base whether those debts are hidden or declared. Drawing on literature from feminist theory, anthropology, and sociology on women's decisions to undergo elective cosmetic surgery, the first section of the article explores ways that agency has been conceptualized with regard to beauty culture and disciplinary bodily technologies in a US context. The second section of this article takes up women's religious practice in Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety (2005).

Feminine Matters: Women's Religious Practices in a Portuguese Town.:Feminine Matters: Women's Religious Practices in a Portuguese Town.

Feminine Matters: Women's Religious Practices in a Portuguese Town.:Feminine Matters: Women's Religious Practices in a Portuguese Town.

Biocultural Versatility as a Frontier Adaptation among Paliyan Foragers of South India.:Biocultural Versatility as a Frontier Adaptation among Paliyan Foragers of South India.

Feminine Matters: Women's Religious Practices in. Portuguese Town. Lena Gemzoe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000. 273 pp.