This dissertation documents the earliest stages in the emergence of the Smarta Saiva sectarian community of south India as captured by the theological writings of prominent Saiva theologians. I examine the sectarianization of Hinduism in microcosm by telling the story of a particular Hindu sect in the process of coming into being. The Smarta Saiva tradition of south India ranks among a handful of independent Hindu lineages that palpably dominates the public religious life of south India today. As a sectarian religious system, Smarta-Saivism comprises the institution of the Sankaracarya Jagadgurus and the extensive lay populace that has cultivated a relationship of personal devotion with these iconic figures. Historically speaking, however, the Smarta-Saiva tradition equally comprises the trailblazing theologians who first articulated the boundaries of the community, demarcating its distinct sectarian identity in contradistinction to its various Vaisnava and non-Smarta Saiva rivals. As it was these theologians whose pioneering inquiries crafted the systems of meaning that first gave birth to Smarta-Saivism as such, it is in their writings--their doctrine, polemic, ritual procedures, and devotional poetry--that this dissertation grounds its inquiry. My analysis centers on the textual contributions of Nilakantha Diksita--minister, poet laureate, and public theologian of Nayaka-period Madurai, and those connected with him by virtue of kinship, collegiality, or direct antagonism. Nilakantha and his immediate family and dialogical partners form the core of what I refer to as the "Smarta religious system" of the seventeenth century, culturally a direct antecedent of what we know today as south Indian Smarta-Saivism. My analysis takes the form of three parallel case studies, each of which illuminates a dynamic of intersection between intellectual discourse and religious culture that proved foundational to the religious landscape of south India up to the present day. Taken as a whole, these case studies illustrate the micro-dynamics of public theology, articulating key moments of the consolidation of south Indian Smarta identity and religiosity.

This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that anti-Muslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat.

This project seeks a new perspective on issues of literacy, literary language, and cultural contact in the literature of premodern Japan by examining the primers used to study Chinese-style literature in the Heian and early medieval periods (c. 900-1250CE). Much of Heian literary production was centered on kanbun: "Chinese-style" writing that resembled classical Chinese and mobilized allusive connections to classical Chinese texts, but was usually read based on classical Japanese vocabulary and syntax. The knowledge gleaned from introductory kanbun education forms an important and little-researched common thread linking readers and writers from a wide range of backgrounds - from male and female courtiers to specialized university scholars to medieval monks and warriors eager to appropriate court culture. While tracing the roles of commonly-studied kanbun primers and commentaries in shaping Heian literary culture and its medieval reception, I consider key aspects of premodern Japan literacy - from the art of kundoku ("gloss-reading") to the systems of knowledge involved in textual commentary and the adaptation of kanbun material. Examining the educational foundations of premodern Japanese literary culture demonstrates that kanbun and other literary styles functioned as closely entangled modes of literacy rather than as native and foreign languages, and that certain elements of classical Chinese knowledge formed a valued set of raw material for literary creativity. Chapter 1 outlines the diversity of premodern Japanese literacy and the key primers and encyclopedic reference works involved in kanbun education. Chapter 2 focuses on a primer for learning written characters, the Thousand Character Classic (Qian zi wen), discussing its varied reception in the contexts of calligraphy practice, oral recitation, and commentarial authority and offering translations from the tongue-in-cheek literary showpiece Thousand Character Classic Continued (Zoku Senjimon, 1132). In Chapter 3, I examine the role of kanbun knowledge in Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (Makura no soshi, early 11th century), which foregrounds the social and creative roles of introductory kanbun material as a vocabulary of conversational quotation among both men and women. Chapter 4 turns to Condensed Meaning of the New Ballads (Shin gafu ryakui, 1172), a ground-breaking anecdotal commentary on Bai Juyi's poetry, to discuss the way that kanbun texts were interpreted and reinvented through commentary. Chapter 5 discusses an innovative poetic adaptation of a kanbun primer, Waka Poems on the Child's Treasury (Mogyu waka, 1204), which makes use of poetic topics and historical anecdotes as effective ways of organizing kanbun knowledge and also suggest the potential for introductory education to spark literary creativity across genre boundaries. I conclude with a brief look at the relevance of premodern Japanese kanbun education for broader questions about literary language and for comparisons involving other transregional classical languages like Latin. By illustrating the processes by which elements of Chinese literary culture were adopted and adapted throughout East Asia, this project provides fertile ground for exploring issues of literacy and cultural interaction that underlie all forms of literature.

Among the countries which have experienced a political transition away from authoritarianism in the 1980s, South Korea is usually considered as a model of both democracy and judicial review. Relying on an interpretive reading of jurisprudence, the present research however uncovers the double-edged way in which the Constitutional Court of Korea has discharged its role as guardian of the constitution. A critical analysis of constitutional jurisprudence indeed reveals how the court's commitment to define and defend the post-transition constitutional order has translated into both liberal and illiberal outcomes. This ambivalent dimension of the court's role has unfolded as the institution came to intervene in the major dispute opposing the state and parts of civil society after the 1987 change of regime: reshaping the contours of enmity in the post-transitional period. Through the contentious issue of enmity, what has been put at stake in the constitutional arena is the very challenge of delineating the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in South Korean democracy. In light of this task, constitutional justice has imposed itself as a paradoxical site, where the post-transitional disagreement about what counts as ``national'' and ``anti-national'' has been both staged and interrupted. Parmi les sociétés ayant fait l'expérience d'une transition politique au cours des années 1980, la Corée du Sud est d'ordinaire tenue pour un modèle de ``réussite'' démocratique et constitutionnelle. L'analyse interprétative du corpus jurisprudentiel sur laquelle le présent travail de recherche repose révèle cependant l'ambivalence qui a caractérisé la manière dont la cour a endossé son rôle de défenseur de l'ordre constitutionnel dans la période post-transitionnelle. Cette ambivalence se traduit par la dualité d'effets, libéraux et illibéraux, produits par les décisions de la cour à mesure qu'elle est intervenue dans le conflit majeur ayant opposé l'Etat sud-coréen et une partie de la société civile depuis le changement de régime : redéfinir les contours de qui, et ce qui, constitue l'ennemi après la transition. A travers la question polémique de l'ennemi, ce sont les dynamiques d'inclusion et d'exclusion au sein de la démocratie sud-coréenne qui ont été mises en jeu sur la scène constitutionnelle. La Cour constitutionnelle de Corée a joué un rôle paradoxal au regard de cette dispute, ou ``mésentente'', que son intervention a contribué à mettre à la fois en scène et en sommeil.

This dissertation explores the challenges, especially those relating to education and to social marginalization, that are being faced every day by underprivileged migrant families residing in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. It also reveals the coping mechanisms they must devise in order to stay afloat financially in a nation that is rapidly urbanizing and thereby changing at a dizzying speed. Drawing primarily upon my interviews with and observations of migrant families and associated community members, and secondarily upon scholarly and governmental research, this study shows how these families' survival strategies reveal those patterns of resource mobilization that are intimately linked to their social relations to, and ties with, others in the destination area. In the wake of the economy's marketization that began in the mid-1980s, Vietnam has undergone massive social changes, including a vast upsurge in free migration, an increased bargaining power of cash, and rising levels of social segregation. On the one hand, the advent of the market-oriented economy and nominal relaxation of the state controls over population mobility have opened up new paths down which migrants can pursue economic opportunities in their urban destinations, and have given people on the move some room for negotiation with the state. On the other hand, their status as non-permanent residents of Hanoi has continued to hinder them from gaining access to public services and government-sponsored care, equal to that enjoyed by their permanent-resident counterparts. Perhaps the chief consequence of the latter adverse trend is that migrant children not meeting the financial and/or regulatory conditions that all students are expected to meet if they wish to enter mainstream, formal education are inclined to seek learning opportunities in the other sphere of alternative, informal education. Thus migrant families have essentially been trapped, socioeconomically, in the informal sector; they have little prospect of upward social mobility, and they are compelled to adopt a stance of self-reliance with respect to resource mobilization. Then too, the everyday and governmental discourses that too often portray migrants as being disorderly at best and criminal at worst, and thus as constituting a deleterious social presence, have served not only to vindicate the state's ongoing adherence to the preexisting household-registration system but to disguise its ineffectiveness at managing rural-urban migration and its failure to redress Vietnam's ever-widening social inequalities and increasingly inequitable resource distribution. The permeation of such discourse among the city residents, and its internalization by the migrants themselves, have only served to exacerbate the stigmatization and peripheralizing of migrants. Serving to at least somewhat counteract the latter negative trend is the migrants' resourcefulness in settling into the city and forming social safety-nets, mutual-aid arrangements often based on sharing the same village of origin. Unfortunately, the social solidarity of village-based relations often goes hand in hand with exclusivity and thus with discrimination against all those who fall outside the inner circles, thereby further distancing the migrants from the mainstream of city life. Ultimately the study points to the need for some structural transformations in the Vietnamese government, changes reflective of the fact that migrants are not mere "social evils" but to the contrary, part and parcel of the state's growth. Only when such steps have been taken will the discourse about migrants shift from vilification to praise or even concern, and will Vietnamese society no longer be "transitional" because it has become inclusive and cohesive.

This dissertation challenges the existing narrative in the history of Daoism that asserts that it was precisely during the Yuan period when all the different lineages "converged" to form the "two great Daoist schools" of Quanzhen and Zhengyi and furthermore suggests that there was a progression to this convergence, that the Quanzhen school in the north was "replaced" in imperial favor by the Celestial Masters of the Zhengyi school in the south after the Mongols conquered the Song dynasty in 1276. By critically examining contemporaneous sources, especially inscriptions, this study reveals that the patriarchs of the Zhang family of Mount Longhu ("the Celestial Masters of the Zhengyi school") were not the most influential or authoritative Daoists during the Yuan. In fact, it was the patriarchs of the lineage of the Mysterious Teachings that were the most eminent and influential Daoists from the south. In comparing the roles played by the Mysterious Teachings in contradistinction to the Celestial Masters, this study dismantles the prevailing narrative that the patriarchs of the Zhang family of Mount Longhu were the sole spiritual and political authorities over Daoism throughout Chinese history and shows that they did not in fact fully established themselves as the perennial sacred leaders of Daoism until the Ming dynasty.

This dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Pushkar, India, a Hindu pilgrimage site that doubles as an international tourist destination with an influx of two million visitors each year. Here, I explore the massive enterprise on the part of Pushkar locals to build “heaven on earth,” paying particular attention to how the articulation of sacred space works alongside economic changes brought on by globalization and tourism. Central to my work is an investigation of how tourism and global thinking affect everyday life in this pilgrimage site, and how Hindu ideas—about religion, identity, and belonging—shape the contours of tourism; the goal, then, is to show how religion and tourism are in fact mutually constitutive. In examining the entanglements of making Pushkar paradise, I look to a number of different topics: beliefs about Hindu universalism and how its principles incorporate people from outside of the Hindu fold; ritual repertoires that brahmans perform on behalf of their clients in order to propitiate the gods; mythic tales that boast of Pushkar’s greatness, printed in 5-rupee pamphlets or narrated by priests at the lake; environmental action taken up by locals worried about lake pollution; and guided tours designed to promote the kind of atmosphere where people from around the world can feel as if they belong.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--York University, 1998. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-121). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ39232.

The portrayal of the middle eastern woman in Le voyage en Orient of Nerval and Les notes de voyage en Orient of Flaubert is the written representation of a personal experience. The transposition of observations to literary images is subject to cultural and personal constraints that the present thesis aims at deciphering and analysing. / We have entitled Informational intent the first section of our research, in which we have discovered that intelligible descriptions tend to the fragmentation and the categorization of the middle eastern woman. This approach has led us to find that the authors' perceptions are often limited to appearances. Moreover, our literary analysis have confirmed that the representations follow the laws and patterns established by centuries of oriental studies. / The second section, entitled The narrative organization shows that the episodes where women are involved have been organized into quasi-autonomous narrative entities reflecting the rhythm of the travel. On the other hand, the autobiographical expression serves as a unifying element. / In the last section, The woman as part of a global interpretation of the Middle East, we have realized that her representations are influenced by the attitudes and cultural context of the time as well as the specific poetic world of the authors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xv, 256 p. : ill. Advisor: John P. Wanous, Department of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-199).