This innovative collection examines the transnational movements, effects, and transformations of religion in the contemporary world, offering a fresh perspective on the interrelation between globalization and religion. Transnational Transcendence challenges some widely accepted ideas about this relationship—in particular, that globalization can be understood solely as an economic phenomenon and that its religious manifestations are secondary. The book points out that religion's role remains understudied and undertheorized as an element in debates about globalization, and it raises questions about how and why certain forms of religious practice and intersubjectivity succeed as they cross national and cultural boundaries. Framed by Thomas J. Csordas's introduction, this timely volume both urges further development of a theory of religion and globalization and constitutes an important step toward that theory.
Thomas J. Csordas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Language, Charisma, and Creativity; The Sacred Self; and Body/Meaning/Healing, as well as editor of Embodiment and Experience.
"Outstanding and original. Transnational Transcendence unsettles some widely accepted understandings in the field and brings together a range of expert scholars; the standard is superior."—Fenella Cannell, author of Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines
"Scholars of modernization have not adequately addressed the global 'return of religion' in our time. In this excellent collection, a number of distinguished authors (including the editor himself) help the interested reader to understand the phenomenon in illuminating ways."—Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center
“This broad ranging and theoretically powerful collection is the first serious attempt to come to grips with the relation between religious experience in terms of globalization, not in terms of the mere diffusion of texts and objects but of the social and personal conditions of religious experience in relation to the global displacement of such texts and object. Its searching essays open up a new field of study of the relation between global process and social experience that is sorely needed to get beyond the current object oriented approaches to globalization.”—Jonathan Friedman, University of California, San Diego
352 pp.6 x 9Illus: 4 b/w photographs
9780520257429$34.95|£30.00Paper
Mar 2009