Pursuit of Certainty

Wendy James is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

• Introduction: whatever happened to the Enlightenment? Part I Displacement and the search for redefinition 1 Managing tradition: ‘superstition’ and the making of national identity among Sudanese women refugees2 History and the discourse of underdevelopment among the Alur of Uganda Part II Emerging world forms 3 Race, culture and—what?: pluralist certainties in the United States 4 Certain knowledge: the encounter of global fundamentalism and local Christianity in urban south India 5 Inventing certainties: the dakwah persona in Malaysia 6 Powerful knowledge in a global Sufi cult: reflections on the poetics of travelling theories 7 Topophilia, Zionism and ‘certainty’: making a place out of the space that became Israel again Part III Vernacular contexts of public reason and critique 8 The politics of tolerance: Buddhists and Christians, truth and error in Sri Lanka 9 Changing certainties and the move to a ‘global’ religion: medical knowledge and Islamization among Anii (Baseda) in the Republic of Bénin 10 Bourdieu and the diviner: knowledge and symbolic power in Yoruba divination 11 Choking on the Quran: and other consuming parables from the western Indian Ocean front Part IV Epilogue: a professional dilemma? 12 Cultural certainties and private doubts