Peter van der Veer

Patterns of middle class consumption in India and China

This is a book about the emerging patterns of consumption among the middle classes of India and China. The book compares cultural shifts as a result of liberalization and globalization in these two emerging Asian powers. This volume does not compare India and China to the West, as books on similar subjects have done in the past. Instead they are compared with each other. This book is well-timed, considering that both these countries have so much in common in terms of scale, civilization, history, and as emerging economies. The chapters in this book have been written by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists rather than by economists, so the emphasis is on cultural shifts rather than economic statistics. Transnational developments, like tourism, karaoke, soap operas, and the art market, have all been extensively covered in this book

'God must be Liberated!' A Hindu Liberation Movement in Ayodhya

There seem to be at least two elusive concepts in the sociology of India: caste and communalism. On caste Eric Wolf makes the point eloquently: ‘The literature on the topic is labyrinthine, and the reader is not always sure there is light at the end of the tunnel’ (1982: 397). The sociological perspective on caste seems to be obscured by a great deal of confusion about the place of religious values and sentiments in Hindu society. According to Louis Dumont (1970: 6, 7), the primary object of the sociology of India should be a system of ideas and the approach that of a sociology of values. Since the religious ideology, on which the caste system is based in his view, seems to have been fixed already in the classical period of Indian civilization, caste becomes a static, a-historical phenomenon in Dumonts writing and in much of the debate originating from it (cf. Van der Veer 1985). The same may easily happen with that other most elusive concept of the sociology of India, communalism. Again Dumont can be our misleading guide here. He argues that ‘communalism is the affirmation of the religious community as a political group’ (1970: 90). In terms of their religious values and norms there is a lasting social heterogeneity of the Hindu and Muslim communities (95–8). This argument amounts to a ‘two-nation’ theory, based upon an a-historical sociology of values.

Market and money: a critique of rational choice theory

The author argues that market theories of religion based on the notion of ‘rational choice’ do not contribute to our understanding of the transcendental value of money and markets in our social life. Such theories depend on too narrow an interpretation of ‘rationality’ and neglect the importance of enchantment in financial transactions, consumption patterns, and religious life. The author uses studies of religion in China and South Asia to illustrate his theoretical position.The author argues that market theories of religion based on the notion of ‘rational choice’ do not contribute to our understanding of the transcendental value of money and markets in our social lif...

Global breathing Religious utopias in India and China

In most places in the world one can follow courses in Yoga and Qigong. These forms of Indian and Chinese spirituality have gone global, but are still connected to national identities. This article ...

The value of comparison

In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropologys comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropologys engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.

Embodiment, Materiality, and Power. A Review Essay

Theories of agency are central to any form of explanation or interpretation of human action in the social and behavioral sciences, including the study of history. In studies of religion, they appear to require even more reflection than usual, because of secular skepticism of religious understandings of agency, involving divine intervention or supra-human powers. The major problem with theories of agency is their immense range and complexity. They involve fundamental notions of emotions and intentions, of habits and social practice, of desire and passion, of passions and interests, of resistance and power, of freedom and un-freedom, of the distinction between subject and object, of interiority and exteriority. As such, they have complicated genealogies in different religious and philosophical traditions. Western philosophical traditions are among the many traditions that have wide-ranging theories about the self and agency and express them in a universalistic language. 1 These universalistic claims are perhaps common, but the history of European expansion has implied a universalization of Western thought, so that despite its provincial origin Western thought informs both the understanding and the self-understanding of other societies. From the start, one of the tasks of anthropology and history has therefore been to critique universalistic assumptions about, for instance, agency, by examining other ways of life and traditions. Not only is universalism as such being questioned; the universalization of ideas is being critically analyzed.

Introduction: Doing Asian cities

This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities – Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore – exceed current urban theorization. Modest, but nonetheless more-than-local re-theorization, can proceed from such empirical excess, which itself can only be derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity. Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing – where, rather than merely importing and applying methodological tools from elsewhere, new ways of ‘doing’ cities emerge from reflexive engagement with emergent urban forms and ways of life. Considering diverse urban contexts in Asia, we foreground the aspirational dynamics of cities and ethnographic approaches to studying them. This has produced findings that have pushed the theoretical understanding of aspirations beyond Arjun Appadurai’s initial formulations in three ways. First, breaking from the dichotomy of pastness and cultural futures, the authors have found pastness making up important ingredients for aspirations. Second, the urban middle classes could very well express subaltern aspirations for and with subaltern groups, and it would be a mistake for us to ignore the sense and sensibility of the middle classes on account of their purported lack of subalternity. Third, the capacity to aspire is primarily achieved in the embodied production of space and limited by the same.

Introduction: The sacred and the urban in Asia

The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the secularizing spaces free up religious practitioners from the constraints of their traditions to innovate new practices to sacralize the urban spaces, in which the new conceptions of the urban play a crucial role. The direction and content of the innovations are driven by the aspirations of the religious practitioners with regard to the city and this provokes sacred politics challenging the state and capitalist market and aspirational contests to claim and control urban spaces vis-a-vis religious competitors, in which practitioners make use of state-market processes to do so.

The Future of Utopia

ABSTRACT The widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions.ABSTRACTThe widespread notion that the city is secular and that therefore society’s future is secular is in need of serious reconsideration. This paper argues that religion does not melt away but rather morphs into modern forms of aspiration, speculation, and contention. Religion is therefore crucial to social inquiry into the nature of the urban. The paper argues that in Asia the Christian modern is close to the secular modern with fragments of rational planning and calculation in constant interplay with fragments of the magic of speculative modernity. Both communism and market capitalism are ideological cousins of Christian millenarianism. In a comparison of India, China, and Singapore it argues that the Christian form of modernity has been much better able to penetrate and coalesce with Sinic civilizational traditions than with Indic civilizational traditions.

Urban aspirations in Mumbai and Singapore

This chapter focuses on financial markets and service economies to aspirations, desires and fantasies of another kind, primarily religious and civil. To compare the location of religion and the construction of belonging in two world cities, Mumbai and Singapore. In cultural studies, that peculiar hybrid of the humanities and social sciences, religion does not signify fun, is old-fashioned, and thus cannot be deemed worthy of discussion. The study of religion in cities has already become important because of the urbanization of the globe, a world-historical process that forces the majority of the worlds population to live in cities.Both Mumbai and Singapore are often imagined as secular cities, but it is striking how in both cases political designs on the city are inspired by notions of religion and civilization that have originated in the imperial encounter. Keywords:civilization; Mumbai; Religion; Singapore; urban aspirations