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The article presents a list of books on socio-political issues. These books include: "Money and modernity: State and local currencies in Melanesia," by David Akin and Joel Robbins, "Evolving brains," by John Morgan Allman, "Beyond boundaries: Selected papers on refugees and immigrants," vol. 5, edited by Diane Baxter and Ruth Krulfeld, "Symbols in Northern Ireland," edited by Anthony D. Buckley, and "Religion and magic: Approaches and theories," by Graham Cunningham.

A frequent pattern found among crypto-religious communities is that the rituals or beliefs held in secret are transmitted primarily by women, from mothers to daughters. This paper examines a small community of women in south India, the secret Christians of Sivakasi, in order to investigate why these women chose to maintain a delicate, and at times dangerous, balance between their outward observance of Hindu rituals and their inner, private adherence to Christianity. By contextualizing these Nadar women's lives in the vexed history of caste conflict in late nineteenth-century south India, I show that women in this upwardly mobile Hindu community found in clandestine Christian circles a means of securing a limited autonomy in an intensely patriarchal milieu, especially as their lives became increasingly circumscribed by Brahmanical customs. Georg Simmel and Paul Christopher Johnson's analyses of the affective dynamics of secrecy illuminate the complex motivations for women's involvement in these groups, in spite of the risks, and help explain why the conjugal bond becomes the focus of so much attention in the narratives of Secret Christians. By identifying features that distinguish crypto-religiosity, a relatively rare but distinctive outcome of religious encounter, in dialogue with Maurus Reinkowski and Joel Robbins's work, I hope to make this category more useful, and push our understanding of the complexities of religious change beyond the well-known dyad of conversion and syncretism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on referencing ideologies of communication for understanding the variation in ritual performances. According to the author, the research paper of Robbins fits well into the reorientation, especially noticeable in contemporary linguistic anthropology, of language studies towards forms of ritualization, patterning, and regulated performance. Moreover, he thinks that Robbins sets thinking about ritual versus language.

The article presents a literary criticism of a book "Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life" by Joel Robbins. It analyze anthropological theory of millenarianism and his theologically engaged anthropological framework to better understand the social impact of dispensational premillennial and dominion postmillennial theology. It discusses the politically motivated lives of former U.S. President Donald Trump's evangelical advisors.

In a ground-breaking article Joel Robbins analysed what he characterises as the 'awkward' relationship between anthropology and theology and invited greater anthropological engagement with its disciplinary cousin. This Special Issue responds to this provocation by using Robbins' argument as a bouncing board for wide-ranging forays into a common set of concerns. In investigating anthropological theologies the collection critically attends to the kinds of engagements and encounters that already take place and also lays out future agendas for further interactions. We call for an anthropology that is open to provisional, dialogic and potentially transformative interactions across diverse theologies and suggest that such a move will help shed light on the possibilities of re-modelling the practice of anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst classical anthropological perspectives have tended to ground social disjuncture in the personalisations and inventions of Human Nature, more recent approaches have peered into cultural process for sources of discontinuity and renewal. In his studies of the rise of charismatic Protestant churches, Joel Robbins has argued persuasively that Pentecostal conversion heralds the effective adoption of a new cultural logic and the ontological and moral reformation of the world after conversion. Robbins 'discontinuity thinking' has been critiqued by Mosko and others for failing to take account of formal continuities in the structure of personhood across the arc of conversion that just as convincingly explain the appeal of charismatic Protestant Christianity. Extrapolating its terms to a Western Polynesian case (Fiji), this paper re-visits this debate arguing that, whilst Pentecostal conversion in Fiji discontinues 'tradition' in the way that Robbins proposes, it does so at a locus ofexogenisation that has long served as a portal through which tradition has been renounced and forms of immortality have been quested abroad. The nature of this tradition of disjuncture in pre- modern polities in Fiji is briefly contrasted with other recent discussions of alterity and indigeneity in Amazonian and other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the idea of Joel Robbins on the relationship between ritual and linguistic ideology. The author thinks that although Robbins often seems to endorse American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's perspective on the capacity of ritual to nullify the threats of language, Robbins also seems to demur, as, when he points out that Rappaport's account of ritual fits particularly neatly with the views of some cultures but not all of them.

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This article is meant as a contribution to a larger project about the relations between religion and ethics. It sketches out some approaches to the following questions: assuming that what we call "religion" and "ethics" are in principle distinct from each other, what is the conceptual relationship between them? What are the historical pathways along which the two often seem to converge? What are the social implications of that convergence where it occurs? And when they converge, what remainder escapes the conflation of these two? As a way of opening up these questions, this article compares two recent studies from the anthropology of religion, Joel Robbins' ethnography of new evangelical Christians in Melanesia, and Charles Hirschkind's study of a Muslim piety movement in Cairo. The comparison centers on how monotheistic religious traditions tend to objectify ethics in ways that render them cognitively explicit and thus expose them to pressures toward rationalization, generalization, and abstraction. But these traditions also expect ethics to guide everyday life, in all its concrete particularity, with potentially paradoxical consequences. These paradoxes seem to be one source of the restless urgency of those revival movements that identify ethics with piety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 2004 monograph, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Joel Robbins argues that the Urapmin, a small group of newly converted Chistrians in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, are trapped between two conflicting systems of values, namely the relationality of indigenous culture and the individuality of Christian culture. Yet, Robbins suggests that the Urapmin are troubled not only by conflicting values, but also by the fact that they have embraced a new ideological system without changing the material base of their lives, that is, subsistence agriculture on land owned by kin groups. Drawing on Robbins's work on the Urapmin and my own research on two different Christian denominations in the Western Solomon Islands, I bring a political-economic dimension to discussions of subjectivity, cultural change and ideologies of modernity that have arisen within the anthropology of Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Christianisation of the Urapmin people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), based on a critique of the concept of culture in the book "Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society," by Joel Robbins. Information on the traditional religion of the Urapmin, the Charismatic revival movement that sparked their widespread conversion to Baptist Christianity from the late 1970s, and on their religious practices is provided.

Ng, Kum Lin (2002) Chinese in Fiji. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 286 pp. Reviewer: Eugene Kumekawa Tertiary Education Commission, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: Robbins, Joel and Holly Wardlow (eds.) (2005) The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia: Humiliation, Transformation and the Nature of Cultural Change. Hampshire: Ashgate, xiv, 246 pp., £47.50, hbk. Reviewer: Ralph Pettman University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Email: Pholsena, Vatthana (2006) Post-war Laos: The Politics of Culture, History and Identity. Singapore: ISEAS, 254 pp., $US22.95, pbk, ISBN: 981-230-355-3. Reviewer: Richard B. Verrone Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA. Email: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of the interaction between indigenous and exogenous sociocultural orders, especially at the frontiers of globalisation. Here I review three recent attempts to do so: (1) a model of structural transformation as developed by Marshall Sahlins; (2) a model of articulation as developed by James Clifford; (3) a model of 'adoption' proposed by Joel Robbins. As a test case for these models, I consider them in relation to some recent developments in local segmentary politics and verbal art in the Ku Waru region of Highland New Guinea. I show that all three models are in certain respects inadequate for understanding those developments, and offer some proposals as to what kinds of theory might be more adequate to the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual. As a linguistic anthropologist himself, the author believes that rituals can also be seen as actional texts or comparable to a form of communication. Thus, in his view, Robbins' account correctly invokes linguistic or, more broadly, semiotic ideology as something to be considered in understanding ritual, but, not to draw out the implications for a theory of culture.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on the theory of American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport on ritual performance and communication. According to the author, Robbins is certainly right when he claims that Rappaport's theory of ritual and religion lends itself to an interesting interpretation in terms of Austin's performative approach to language. However, he thinks that ritual cannot be both a performative in the original Austinian sense and indexically self-authenticating in Rappaport's sense, as explicated by Robbins.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on the major work of American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport on ritual. For him, Robbins provides a lucid summary of some of the critical points Rappaport's idea on ritual. According to the author, Robbins's concept of linguistic ideology partly fails him in his attempt to provide a supplement to Rappaport's theory. He specifically argues the collective term used by Robbins on the way Rappaport sets up language as the source of problems that only ritual can resolve, calling it language ideology.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual. In his belief, Rappaport's theory on ritual contributes to what, in contemporary cultural anthropology, is a languishing enterprise, heroic theory building. However, he supports the emphasis given by Robbins on language ideology as one of the references in understanding the variation in ritual performances.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on referencing ideologies of communication for understanding the variation in ritual performances. In the author's perspectives the idea of Robbins poses some interesting questions because the ideologies of communication are particularly interpersonal dimensions of power and epistemology, understanding their relationships to the forms of ritual performances opens the way to more complex understandings of the ritual experience.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual performance and communication. He cited the idea of Edmund Leach, which states that the speech itself is a form of ritual, as a good example of the reason behind the reference given by Robbins of communication with understanding the variation of ritual performance. However, he also pointed out that communication is not the only basis in understanding ritual performance, since there are many culture-specific forms of ritual communication and different levels within them.