Vikash Singh

Uprising of the Fools

Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Vikash Singh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. März 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9781503600379
• ISBN-10: 1503600378
• Artikelnr.: 45583202

Autorenporträt

Vikash Singh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Illegitimate Religion
chapter abstract
This chapter introduces the pilgrimage and the dominant scholarly
perception of most contemporary religious actors as people unable to face
the freedom and choices offered by modernity. Instead, the chapter argues
that these young religious subjects are trying to master through practice
and performance the norms, scarcity, and unpredictable outcomes of
precarious, informal economic conditions at a critical point of transition
into adulthood. It argues that representations of religion are often
premised on an epistemology of domination that treats human beings as
things, and in a teleological frame that knows no death. This chapter
instead presents an orientation drawing on the finitude of
being-in-the-world, and a psychoanalytically informed perception of human
subjectivity and ethics, which operates as the analytical undercurrent of
the book.
1Mastering Uncertainty: Performance and Recognition in Religion
chapter abstract
This is an ethnography of desperate household finances, participants' fears
about the safety and health of their loved ones, affirmations of their
moral sincerity and resolve, their desire to prove themselves, as well as
tales of everyday humiliation and despondency. Weaving the empirical data
with Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy,
phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian metaphysical
texts, it demonstrates how religious practice is a means of performing and
preparing for an informal economy. The narrative places participants'
performances, art works, ritual expressions, and the excessive labor of the
journey in the context of their ordinary works (or lack thereof). Unlike
exclusive formal institutions, which are increasingly governed by
neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open, freely
accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove
their resolve, gifts, and sincerity.
2"Everything is a Gift, Bhole": Custom and the Ethics of Care
chapter abstract
Scholars have often pictured religious participation as a kind of market
exchange. But in the Kanwar, participants' express fears and anxieties
regarding obligations for the life, health, well-being, and expectations of
loved ones, expressly denying their interest in material gain. Analyzing
such wishes, and the speech acts of the religious vow in the context of
highly precarious living conditions and widespread suffering, this chapter
looks at the role that ego deferral plays. Participants feel justified to
ask for a divine gift only insofar as it can be seen as an obligation or
gift to someone else. Engaging these concerns in reference to a customary
ethic of care, and through conversations with Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and
Vedic texts, the chapter interrogates the dominant utilitarian notion of
the "individual" to demonstrate a subjectivity that is from the outset
relational and morally embedded.
3Ominous Signs: Of Dread, Desires, and Determination
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the repetitive, obsessive, and mortifying character
of the religious practices, showing how they manifest the dread of everyday
life. I argue that there is a lack of representation of some of the most
overwhelming experiences, fears, and desires of social and psychic life in
dominant discourses of the nation, economy, celebrities, or individual
merit. These forms of understanding suppress the concrete realities of life
in the social margins, which instead are deferred, displaced to, and play
out in religious practice. This analysis of participants' narratives
focuses on personal historicity, and the profound lived time of the
subject, as opposed to historical time with its focus on abstract
collectivities, demonstrating the importance of an analytical approach
which is alert to the continuities of religious, moral, and economic
practices.
4Damning Corpses: Violence, Religious or Secular?
chapter abstract
The chapter continues with ethnographic description of the author's
journey, and corpses floating in the Ganga Canal while police officers turn
a blind eye. Evoking the ubiquity of violence and apathy interspersed with
moments from the exceptionally violent history of the region, it documents
the tense moments where this "Hindu" procession passed through Muslim
neighborhoods. Analyzing such episodes in relation to recent Hindu-Muslim
conflicts, along with imaginaries of religious violence from India's
medieval history, it shows that conflict over religion is usually provoked
by interests of power and politics. Differences in faith take the form of
actual violence only when stoked by statist actors seeking power. In a
state where a politics of religion and identity has been systematically
engineered through extensive organization, and where every political party
tries to outwit the others in the diligent capitalization of differences,
"religious conflicts" are inevitably the product of secular politics.
5Caste and the Informal Economy: Subversive Aesthetics of Popular Religion
chapter abstract
While the Kanwar obviously has a wide following, it is also frowned upon,
and indeed reviled by a large sections of society. To mainstream ideals,
these indiscriminate, carnivalesque performances, the low- brow culture of
the Kanwar, present a poor, botched, illegitimate version of religion which
lacks the composure of adult religiosity. In the context of a nationalist
project, it comes across as offensive and uncanny, provoking disgust. While
such aversion is partly an effect of postcolonial anxieties, national
self-consciousness is itself driven by the uncertainties of a highly
unequal and poor society. This aesthetic chasm is aggravated by India's
caste heritage-a differentiation between the subtle and the gross, the pure
and the abject, which is simultaneously aesthetic and metaphysical. The
Kanwar thus enacts a conflict over habitus where sedimented hierarchies are
overturned, and the stigmatized occupy the highways for several days,
publicly performing its religious and sublime character.
6Wishful Nightmares: Triumphant Neoliberalism and the Resistances of
Religion
chapter abstract
Despite the complex social conflicts apparent here, religious practices
such as the Kanwar are rarely treated in sociological scholarship as forms
of "resistance." They are usually seen as substitutions for other, explicit
social and political causes and interests. Anchored in an exegesis of
rituals and enunciations in the Kanwar, this chapter advances an alternate
understanding of resistance. I conceptualize resistance in hermeneutic
terms, focusing on the temporality of being-in-the-world instead of an
abstract teleological universal Good. Bringing the lessons of
psychoanalytic practice with critical ethnography, this chapter argues that
such re-articulation is indispensable for a radical epistemology that can
make sense of new, global infrastructures of power and violence.
7War, Nation, and the Human as a Thing
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that an idiom of war dominates modern political
consciousness. This leads into the characterization of religious subjects
as calling for war, which in turn makes them legitimate targets of
political warfare. There are fundamental misrecognitions-say in the
vicissitudes of market fundamentalism, state terrorism, Cartesian
Individualism- involved in such construction of the other as uncompromising
bigots. Epistemologically, this is because of the apathetic treatment of
the individual as just another entity, a thing, a commodity; a system of
thought based on the cognitive, at the cost of material conditions. This
chapter analyzes the discourse of Hindu nationalism and revisits the
performative and moral significations of religion in reference to the
realities of global neo-liberalism. Religion, its cries, ethic and order,
are being called on here for existential meaning and predictability, the
possibility of trust, community, and hope in circumstances otherwise
bolstering a state of paranoia.