scholarly journals Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Fisher ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Political Participation in Early Stuart Ireland

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-796 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Darcy
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Common ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractA consideration of political participation in early Stuart Ireland suggests modifications to the prospectus outlined by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus in “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” By investigating the structures that facilitated public debates about politics in Ireland, as well as the factors that complicated it, this article challenges the periodization of the public sphere offered by Lake and Pincus and suggests that there is a clear need to integrate a transnational perspective. Unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, the majority of Ireland's population was Catholic. The flow of post-Tridentine Catholic ideas from the Continent and Anglo-Britannic political culture meant that competing ideas of what constituted the common good circulated widely in Ireland and led to debates about the nature of authority in the early modern Irish state. These divisions in Irish society created a distinctive kind of politics that created particularly unstable publics. Thus, Ireland's experience of the early modern public sphere differed considerably from concurrent developments in the wider archipelago.

Colonial Material Collections and Representations of Devadasi Bodies in the Public Sphere in the Early 20th-Century South India

Anthropos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-546
Author(s):  
Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
South India ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ideal Woman ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Guardian

This article discusses how the politics of morality in the early 20th-century South India, in its gendered nation-building exercise, reified a distinction between sacred/profane by using devadasis’ bodies as material objects in the public sphere. Traditional performers of dance and music, devadasis were chosen to represent the profane in a series of historical developments in which both Europeans and Indian colonial elites participated in constructing and using the categories of the sacred and profane to classify sex and body as material, profane, and obscene. Specifically targeting devadasis, these developments resulted in ostracization and criminalization of devadasis and their communities. Using statues, poems, and literature as examples, this article shows how devadasis were collected as material objects and used to represent the notion that some bodies and sex were fundamentally materialistic whilst others were not, such as that of the “new woman” who was imagined to be an ideal woman, and the guardian of the sacred space in the colonial and postcolonial India.

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