Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands by Swamy, Priya;

Affect and Absence

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place;

GET 20% OFF
The discount is only available for 'Alert of Favourite Topics' newsletter recipients.

Publisher's listprice GBP 85.00
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

40 608 Ft (38 675 Ft + 5% VAT)
Discount 20% (cc. 8 122 Ft off)
Discounted price 32 487 Ft (30 940 Ft + 5% VAT)

40 608 Ft

Availability

printed on demand

Product details:

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic
Date of Publication 17 October 2024
Number of Volumes Hardback

ISBN 9781350079069
Binding Hardback
No. of pages208 pages
Size 238x162x16 mm
Weight 420 g
Language English

Long description:

This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these 'traumas of absence' - the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces - can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues.

This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home.

By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.