Stephen Headley's new book explores contemporary religious change in the Surakarta region of Central Java. In his analysis of the Durga ritual complex, the author sheds light on one of the most unusual court traditions to have survived in an era of deepening Islamisation.
This book gives the reader much food for thought, not only about Javanese mythology, the wayang, and cosmology, but also about what it is to be a Javanese person within a cosmos so construed.' -Moussons'Interesting reading... the author is well equipped to carry out this task, having an unusual and impressive command of the literature. His tour through the mythological background is intriguing and insightful... many suggestive leads and fascinating links between mythology, kinship, and ritual... From Cosmogony to Exorcism offers an analysis in the structuralist mode and it makes a brilliant contribution to this tradition.' -AnthroposStephen Headley translates and studies a Javanese ritual and myth, the birth of the man-eating demon, Kala. He shows that this genesis myth, with its movement from cosmogony to exorcism, constitutes the basis of networks of circulating values in contemporary Javanese society.
The fate of religion in the post-communist societies of eastern Europe remains one of the single most important issues in the comparative sociology of religion. No country is more important to that study than Russia. A gifted scholar of religion in both eastern Asia and Russia, Stephen Headley provides a sensitive portrait of Orthodoxy in Russia during the post-Soviet period. Headley tells the story of Russian Christianity from within - and with an eye for religious devotion as well as church reconstruction. The result is a beautiful, informative, and exquisitely rare book.
Stephen Headley's new book explores contemporary religious change in the Surakarta region of Central Java. In his analysis of the Durga ritual complex, the author sheds light on one of the most unusual court traditions to have survived in an era of deepening Islamisation.
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