Johan Rasanayagam
Biographic Data
| ID | 84859 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Johan Rasanayagam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Johan |
| FAMILY NAME | Rasanayagam |
| SIGNATURE | RASANAYAGAM J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Aberdeen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6539-3461 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Post-secular Anthropology as Recognition and the Limits of Understanding
This article contributes to discussions around a post-secular anthropology that seek to engage seriously with religious traditions and theology. Conversations in Morocco with Muslims who experienced possession by jinn spirits point to the importance of recognition. To understand those experiences risks translating them into my concepts. Recognizing them accepts that what the other says has significance. They call me to visit the broader Islamic t…
The Anthropology of Moralities
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other’s morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit an…
Dialogues
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Fragile conviction
Fragile Conviction is an ambitious book. Pelkmans seeks to develop a ‘conceptual framework that is capable of illuminating how collective ideas gain and lose force’ (171). He examines his theme of
Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition
As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of 'totality', where the knowing s…
Sommaire Général pour l’année 2015 des n°s 1, 2, 3, 4 (mars, juin, septembre, décembre) (volume 46)
n'est autorise que dans les limites des conditions gnrales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement. Toute autre reproduction ou reprsentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manire que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord pralable et crit de l'diteur, en dehors des cas prvus par la lgislation en vigueur en France. Il est prcis que son stockage dans une base d…
Author-critic forum
Review: M. Nazif ShahraniIf one wants to write an anthropology of Islam, one should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur'an and the Hadith. (Asad 1986 Asad, Talal. 1986. The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Occasional Papers. [Google Scholar], 14)The meta-question addressed here is: What does it…
The politics of culture and the space for Islam
This article examines how possibilities for Muslim expression were and are shaped by the political imaginaries in Soviet-era and independent Uzbekistan. It develops the concept of social ‘imaginary’ in Charles Taylor's critique of Western secular modernity. Political imaginaries are the assumptions about the nature of being, the essential categories through which the world is understood and acted upon, that are produced within dominant state disc…
Informal economy, informal state
Purpose In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a “shadow” economy. In the post‐socialist context, the unregulated, often extra‐legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of post‐socialist “Mafias”, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept …
Ordinary Ethics
Peer reviewed
Healing with spirits and the formation of Muslim selfhood in post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Since Uzbekistan gained its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has re-entered the public sphere and people there have joined the rest of the Muslim world in contemplating reflexively what it means to be Muslim. This article explores this process in the context of healing practices involving spirit agency. It argues that this form of healing, as an imaginal encounter with spirit agents, constitutes a particular mode of …
Spheres of communal participation
Peer reviewed
Healing with spirits and the formation of Muslim selfhood in post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Since Uzbekistan gained its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has re-entered the public sphere and people there have joined the rest of the Muslim world in contemplating reflexively what it means to be Muslim. This article explores this process in the context of healing practices involving spirit agency. It argues that this form of healing, as an imaginal encounter with spirit agents, constitutes a particular mode of …
Informal economy, informal state
Purpose In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a “shadow” economy. In the post‐socialist context, the unregulated, often extra‐legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of post‐socialist “Mafias”, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept …
Spheres of communal participation
Peer reviewed
Dialogues
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition
As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of 'totality', where the knowing s…
The politics of culture and the space for Islam
This article examines how possibilities for Muslim expression were and are shaped by the political imaginaries in Soviet-era and independent Uzbekistan. It develops the concept of social ‘imaginary’ in Charles Taylor's critique of Western secular modernity. Political imaginaries are the assumptions about the nature of being, the essential categories through which the world is understood and acted upon, that are produced within dominant state disc…
Fragile conviction
Fragile Conviction is an ambitious book. Pelkmans seeks to develop a ‘conceptual framework that is capable of illuminating how collective ideas gain and lose force’ (171). He examines his theme of
Spheres of communal participation
Peer reviewed
Healing with spirits and the formation of Muslim selfhood in post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Since Uzbekistan gained its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has re-entered the public sphere and people there have joined the rest of the Muslim world in contemplating reflexively what it means to be Muslim. This article explores this process in the context of healing practices involving spirit agency. It argues that this form of healing, as an imaginal encounter with spirit agents, constitutes a particular mode of …
Informal economy, informal state
Purpose In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a “shadow” economy. In the post‐socialist context, the unregulated, often extra‐legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of post‐socialist “Mafias”, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept …
Ordinary Ethics
Peer reviewed
The politics of culture and the space for Islam
This article examines how possibilities for Muslim expression were and are shaped by the political imaginaries in Soviet-era and independent Uzbekistan. It develops the concept of social ‘imaginary’ in Charles Taylor's critique of Western secular modernity. Political imaginaries are the assumptions about the nature of being, the essential categories through which the world is understood and acted upon, that are produced within dominant state disc…
Sommaire Général pour l’année 2015 des n°s 1, 2, 3, 4 (mars, juin, septembre, décembre) (volume 46)
n'est autorise que dans les limites des conditions gnrales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas chant, des conditions gnrales de la licence souscrite par votre tablissement. Toute autre reproduction ou reprsentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manire que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord pralable et crit de l'diteur, en dehors des cas prvus par la lgislation en vigueur en France. Il est prcis que son stockage dans une base d…
Author-critic forum
Review: M. Nazif ShahraniIf one wants to write an anthropology of Islam, one should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur'an and the Hadith. (Asad 1986 Asad, Talal. 1986. The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Occasional Papers. [Google Scholar], 14)The meta-question addressed here is: What does it…
Fragile conviction
Fragile Conviction is an ambitious book. Pelkmans seeks to develop a ‘conceptual framework that is capable of illuminating how collective ideas gain and lose force’ (171). He examines his theme of
Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition
As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of 'totality', where the knowing s…
The Anthropology of Moralities
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other’s morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit an…
Dialogues
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Post-secular Anthropology as Recognition and the Limits of Understanding
This article contributes to discussions around a post-secular anthropology that seek to engage seriously with religious traditions and theology. Conversations in Morocco with Muslims who experienced possession by jinn spirits point to the importance of recognition. To understand those experiences risks translating them into my concepts. Recognizing them accepts that what the other says has significance. They call me to visit the broader Islamic t…
Sociology (9 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Soviet and Russian History (4 works)