Description
Book SynopsisThis volume fundamentally improves our understanding of processes like the secularization of society, and the growth of mass ideological movements, by looking upon these transformations to modernity as a species of conversion akin to religious conversion. The geographical areas covered by the contributors—the Ottoman domain, India, China, and Japan—provide striking examples of the dynamic force of conversion as a reaction to the tremendous pressures exerted by colonialism and imperialism and by the types of transformations constitutive of modernity.
Table of ContentsPart 1: Converting States: Nationalism, Ritual, and Religious Identity The Crisis of “Conversion” and Search for National Doctrine in Early Meiji Japan - Trent Maxey Civic Faith and Hybrid Ritual in Nationalist China - Rebecca Nedostup The Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan - Alan Tansman Adamant And Treacherous: Serbian Historians On Religious Conversions - Bojan Aleksov Part 2: Converting Institutions: Education, Media, and Mass Movements Gender, Conversion, and Social Transformation: The American Discourse of Domesticity and the Origins of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement, 1857-1876 - Barbara Reeves-Ellington Secular Conversion as a Turkish Revolutionary Project in the 1930s - Ertan Aydin Some Consideration on the Building of an Ottoman Public Identity in the Nineteenth Century -Şerif Mardin Science Without Conscience: Unno Jūza and Tenkō of Convenience - Sari Kawana Charismatic Entrepreneurship and Conversion: Oomoto Proselytization, 1916-1935 - Nancy Stalker Part 3: Converting Selves: Translating Modern Identity Translation and Conversion Beyond Western Modernity: Tolstoian Religion in Meiji Japan - Sho Konishi Civilization and Its Discussants: Medeniyet and the Turkish Conversion to Modernism - Kevin Reinhart The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme to Turkish Secular Nationalism - Marc Baer The Body as the Locus of Religious Identity: Examples from Western India - James W. Laine The Poetics of Conversion and the Problem of Translation in Endō Shūsaku's Silence - Dennis Washburn Part 4: Converting Others: Hybridity and the Problem of Sincerity “Mass Movements” in South India, 1877-1936 - Eliza F. Kent From Morals to Melancholy: How a Japanese Critic Rejected Bakin and Learned to Love Shakespeare - Patrick Caddeau Hidden Believers, Hidden Apostates: The Phenomenon of Crypto-Jews and Crypto-Christians in the Middle East - Maurus Reinkowski True Believers? Agency and Sincerity in Representations of “Mass Movement" Converts in 1930s India - Laura Dudley Jenkins From Ideological Literature to a Literary Ideology: “Conversion” in Wartime Japan - James Dorsey
