Comprehensive survey based on secondary sources; Discusses relationship to land; theories of totemism; taboo; asceticism; ritual; rites of passage; myth; missionary influence; pentecostalism; neo-traditionalism; conditions for cultural revitalisation.

Based on secondary literature.

This volume is woven around the idea that wholeness (the firm) and fragmentation (risking formlessness) alternate in human affairs. This theme is applied to the history and the present condition of Australian Aboriginals. Their religion is seen as a way to bolster a precarious identity and to affirm order in an existence which would otherwise become formless. It deals with totemism as a form of ordering a variety of often conflicting identities. The author describes the modern predicament of Aborigines in Australian society and concludes that their revitalization will occur only when they manage to make economic self-sufficiency subordinate to a viable and firm view of existence. He critically integrates into his analyses and interpretations the positions of such well-known scholars as Frazer, Durkheim, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown, Eliade, and Stanner. The volume will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, and religion.

A complete religious topography of a mid-sized Canadian city in the early twenty-first century, inspired by the Harvard Pluralism Project.

In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice. Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.

This book is the collection of decades of talks between Ramakrishna and his disciples, devotees and visitors. Thus, it is a complete collection of his philosophic ideas, captured the very moments they were uttered and preserved for future generations. The book tells the stories of the divine origin of a human and nature, the energies that influence stand behind everything in our lives and influence our actions, and how to find peace and harmony by understanding what peace and harmony is. It also describes the lives of people, that found their spiritual way by worshipping their gods, or rather the embodiments of God, as the Higher Power. The text of this book was translated with the help of the prominent Americans of those times, such as the daughter of the President Woodrow Wilson and the poet John Moffit. Mahendranath Gupta (1854 –1932) was a disciple of the great 19-th century Hindu mystic Rama-krishna, a teacher to Paramahansa Yogananda, a famous 20th-century yogi and an author of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He met The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishnain his teens and since then he became his devoted disciple. Since the age of 13 Mahendranath wrote a diary, which later became a basis of the book about Sri Ramakrishna, which was his greatest achievement of the great influencer, as it helped spread the teachings of Ramakrishna around the world.