Browsing by Subject "Spiritualism"
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Item Becoming occult: Alienation and orthodoxy formation in American spiritualism(2013-08) Evans, Richard K.; Stoll, Mark; Adams, Gretchen A.; Wong, Aliza S.“Becoming Occult” explores the evolving relationship between Spiritualism and the normative, dominant Protestant culture of the nineteenth century. The thesis uses the Fourth National Convention of Spiritualists, held in 1867, as a case study for broader events in Modern Spiritualism. I argue that a faction of Spiritualists, which I call the Spiritualist orthodoxy, finalized their takeover of the movement at this convention. Once firmly in control, this group began the process of alienating groups of people that formed antebellum Spiritualism. These groups include Christian Spiritualists, politically moderate Spiritualists, and anti- ecclesiastical Spiritualists. The thesis consists of three chapters, each devoted to the alienation of the aforementioned groups. More importantly, “Becoming Occult” is one of the first applications of a new theoretical approach to emergent religious traditions. Introduced by religious scholars J. Gordon Melton and David Bromley, this interpretive framework rethinks the church-sect-denomination-cult framework that has dominated scholarship on the historical study of religion. I believe this new methodological approach will fundamentally shape the ways in which historians approach religions. I also extend the Melton-Bromley thesis further by arguing that the evolving relationship between an emergent religious tradition (Spiritualism, in my case) and dominant social institutions is key to understanding how a movement becomes considered “occult” by normative culture.Item Caodai spiritism : hybrid individuals, global communities(2010-05) Huynh, Duc Hong; Stalker, Nancy K., 1962-; Metzler, MarkThe Caodai religion of Vietnam has often been labeled as a peasant-driven, politico-religious sect due to its anti-colonial activities during the first half of the 1940s. This paper conducts an historical analysis of Caodaism’s formative years (1926-1941) to show that the religion was in fact primarily managed by Cochinchinese (South Vietnamese) elites who appropriated many of the governance and economic models introduced by the French colonial government. Combining their knowledge of Western bureaucratic systems with Asian religious traditions into a form of hybridity that exhibited both cultures, these elites founded the religion of Caodaism. The paper uses the concept of hybridity to look at how other aspects embody the negotiation and reappropriation of ideas by Caodaists. These include the concept of salvation, the religion’s spirit pantheon, Caodaism’s most famous Western convert (Gabriel Gobron), and the Caodai community in Tay Ninh province. I argue that these hybrid forms allowed Caodaists to overcome a sense of cultural inferiority by establishing cultural parity with the West. Furthermore, I look at the recent developments within Caodaist communities that have formed in the wake of the 1975 Vietnamese Diaspora. I first examine the influence of restrictive state policies on Caodaists in the homeland and compare it with the experiences of diasporic Vietnamese in rebuilding their religion outside of Vietnam. I find that these diasporic communities are caught between two poles in their attempts to revive the religion. Some overseas Caodaists feel that it is necessary to preserve the tradition by supporting mainland Caodaism from the outside. Others find it more suitable to begin reinventing the religion to cater to diasporic needs and challenges. This tension, I argue, also constitutes a type of hybridity in which individuals must delegate between these two approaches to decide the future of their religion.Item La subjetividad femenina y la modernidad en Puerto Rico y Brasil (siglos XIX y XX)(2013-05) López, Juan Carlos, active 2013; Arroyo-Martínez, JossiannaMy dissertation, Feminine Subjectivity and Discourses of Modernity in Puerto Rico and Brazil (19th and 20th century), explores the construction of modern feminine subjectivities during the social, cultural and industrial modernization of Puerto Rico and Brazil throughout the 19th century. With this investigation I analyze, from the perspective of gender studies and recent analyses of modernity, the construction of the idea of "woman" that derived from marginal discourses focused on notions of progress. For this purpose, I will analyze the works of the following writers from Puerto Rico: Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-1882) and Ana Roqué de Duprey (1853-1933), and from Brazil: Joaquim M. Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and Julia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934). Studying these writers and their literary production, I will be able to contribute to current debates on how modernization generates new forms of feminine subjectivity. Moreover, these new forms rearrange and transform the process of modernization from a feminine perspective. This approach is essential to the understanding of the cultural production of the modern woman within one of the more complex periods of Latin America's history. In the first part of the dissertation, I explore the novels of Tapia y Rivera and Machado de Assis. These writers present different aspects of spiritualism regarding women. With the work of these two male intellectuals, I will focus on how spiritualism influences femininity while simultaneously participating in new economic forms. In the second part, with the novels of Roqué de Duprey and Lopes de Almeida, I study the dynamics between rural and urban zones and how this impacts the configuration of gender. As a result of these processes of modernization, a modern feminine subjectivity emerged, yet it was one that did not necessarily share the new social and cultural ideals of progress. On the contrary, this subjectivity combined traditional cultural patterns with new ones. This contradiction generates different visions of modernity than that proposed by intellectuals and politicians. This shows how, in Puerto Rico and Brazil, the role of women in modernity allows for new interpretations in this period of crisis and national changes.Item Spirited media : revision, race, and revelation in nineteenth-century America(2014-08) Gray, Nicole Haworth; Carton, Evan; Winship, Michael, 1950-"Spirited Media" analyzes distributed structures of authorship in the reform literature of the nineteenth-century United States. The literature that emerged out of reform movements like abolitionism often was a product of complex negotiations between speech and print, involving multiple people working across media in relationships that were sometimes collaborative, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes antagonistic. The cultural authority of print and individual authorship, often unquestioned in studies that focus on major or canonical figures of the nineteenth century, has tended to obscure some of this complexity. Moving from phonography, to Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to spiritualism, to Sojourner Truth and Walt Whitman, I consider four cases in which reporters, amanuenses, spirit mediums, and poets revived and remediated the voices of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and figures from American history. By separating publication into events—speech, inscription, revision, and print—I show that "authorship" consisted of a series of interactions over time and across media, but that in the case of reform, the stakes for proving that authorship was a clear and indisputable characteristic of print were high. For abolitionist, African American, and spiritualist speakers and writers, authority depended on authorship, which in turn depended on the transparency of the print or the medium, or the perception of a direct relationship between speaker and reader. Like authorship, this transparency was constructed by a variety of social actors for whom the author was a key site of empowerment. It was authorized by appeals to revelation and race, two constructs often sidelined in media histories, yet central to discussions of society and politics in nineteenth-century America. Thinking of authorship as a distributed phenomenon disrupts models of the unitary subject and original genius, calling attention instead to uncanny acts of reading and writing in nineteenth-century literature. This dissertation argues that we should think about the transformative power of U.S. literature as located in revelation, not just creation, and in congregating people, not just representing them.