Mark Elmore

Page 1. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Article Index 'Call if you have trouble': mobile phones and safety among college students 863 Jack Nasar, Peter Hecht and Richard Wener 'Institutional thickness': local governance and economic development in Birmingham, England 591 Andrew Coulson and Caterina Ferrario Analysing the capitalist state in post-socialism: towards the Porterian workfare postnational regime 401 Jan ...

Abstract This essay explores how people in eastern Himachal Pradesh, India, negotiate the space between everyday visuality and the power of invisibility. It argues that, for most of these people, the visual is always already pervaded by innumerable invisible forces—superhuman, historical, governmental, or mythic—and that processes of veiling and unveiling are central to the logics of their ritual practice. The essay uses ethnographic research to explore this relationship and its implications for the character of evidence in ...

AbstractThis article explores the circulation of contemporary discourses on religion and secularity in the western Himalayas. It traces a media circuit from Himachal Pradesh's remote villages to its urban centers and back again, using the circuit as a hermeneutic to illuminate how religion and the city become mutually constituted problems in need of definition, defense or reform. The conjoined circulation of ‘religion’ and ‘the city’— both as discursive products and as lived realities — has restructured how Himachalis understand, perform and problematize relations to local deities and the rites they enjoin as well as performances in and reflections on urban spaces and their rural exteriors. In this new circulatory system, the individual becomes the foundation of authority, the state trumps competing organizational forms, deities become metaphysical abstractions, particular beliefs are repurposed as religion, and villages emerge as ‘heritage’ to be promoted and observed. I use this argument to show why, despite the self-evidence of religion's meaning for those mobilizing its powers, a stable definition must remain forever a chimera.This article explores the circulation of contemporary discourses on religion and secularity in the western Himalayas. It traces a media circuit from Himachal Pradesh's remote villages to its urban centers and back again, using the circuit as a hermeneutic to illuminate how religion and the city become mutually constituted problems in need of definition, defense or reform. The conjoined circulation of ‘religion’ and ‘the city’— both as discursive products and as lived realities — has restructured how Himachalis understand, perform and problematize relations to local deities and the rites they enjoin as well as performances in and reflections on urban spaces and their rural exteriors. In this new circulatory system, the individual becomes the foundation of authority, the state trumps competing organizational forms, deities become metaphysical abstractions, particular beliefs are repurposed as religion, and villages emerge as ‘heritage’ to be promoted and observed. I use this argument to show why, despite the self-evidence of religion's meaning for those mobilizing its powers, a stable definition must remain forever a chimera.RésuméCet article examine la circulation des discours contemporains sur la religion et la sécularité dans l’Ouest de l’Himalaya. Il retrace un circuit de médias qui va et revient entre les villages reculés et les centres urbains de l’Himachal Pradesh, en utilisant ce circuit comme herméneutique pour expliquer comment la religion et la ville deviennent des enjeux qui se constituent mutuellement et qui appellent à une définition, une défense ou une réforme. La circulation conjointe de “la religion” et de “la ville”— toutes deux étant des produits discursifs et des réalités vécues — a restructuré la manière dont les Himachalis comprennent, pratiquent et considèrent les relations à l’égard des divinités locales et des rites prescrits ainsi que les célébrations et les matérialisations dans les espaces urbains et leurs extérieurs ruraux. Dans ce nouveau réseau de circulation, l’individu devient le fondement de l’autorité, l’État prévaut sur les formes organisationnelles concurrentes, les divinités deviennent des abstractions métaphysiques, des convictions particulières refinalisées en religion, et les villages apparaissent comme un “patrimoine”à promouvoir et respecter. À partir de cet argumentaire, il est montré pourquoi, malgré l’évidence intrinsèque de la signification de la religion pour ceux qui mobilisent ses pouvoirs, une définition stable doit rester une chimère à jamais.Cet article examine la circulation des discours contemporains sur la religion et la sécularité dans l’Ouest de l’Himalaya. Il retrace un circuit de médias qui va et revient entre les villages reculés et les centres urbains de l’Himachal Pradesh, en utilisant ce circuit comme herméneutique pour expliquer comment la religion et la ville deviennent des enjeux qui se constituent mutuellement et qui appellent à une définition, une défense ou une réforme. La circulation conjointe de “la religion” et de “la ville”— toutes deux étant des produits discursifs et des réalités vécues — a restructuré la manière dont les Himachalis comprennent, pratiquent et considèrent les relations à l’égard des divinités locales et des rites prescrits ainsi que les célébrations et les matérialisations dans les espaces urbains et leurs extérieurs ruraux. Dans ce nouveau réseau de circulation, l’individu devient le fondement de l’autorité, l’État prévaut sur les formes organisationnelles concurrentes, les divinités deviennent des abstractions métaphysiques, des convictions particulières refinalisées en religion, et les villages apparaissent comme un “patrimoine”à promouvoir et respecter. À partir de cet argumentaire, il est montré pourquoi, malgré l’évidence intrinsèque de la signification de la religion pour ceux qui mobilisent ses pouvoirs, une définition stable doit rester une chimère à jamais.

This book conceives of" religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions.

Until recently the concerns of Sanskritists, esotericists, and philosophers have dominated the academic study of Hindu tantra. Now scholars increasingly focus on ritual practice, living traditions, and vernacular texts. These new concerns have radically recast how Hindu tantra and its impact on South Asian history are visualized. Where before scholars represented Hindu tantra as an elite discourse with little social impact, now many understand it as the warp on which South Asian history was woven.