bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Old and Middle English Spellings for OE hw-, with Special Reference to the ‘qu-’ Type: In Celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNE: In Memoriam Angus McIntosh
Authors: Laing Margaret , Lass Roger
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates how the four main electronic resources created in the same tradition as A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediæval English (LALME), i.e. LAEME, LALME itself (and its electronic version eLALME), A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS) and A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Proto-Old English to Early Middle English and accompanying Corpus of Changes (CoNE) can be used in tandem to support an investigation into the initial wh-cluster in words such as when, where, what, who, which. No fewer than 57 different spellings are found for this cluster, from the earliest attested Old English to ca 1500. The authors show how LAEME, eLALME, and LAOS provide the data that allow this spelling variation to be analysed as reflecting various scribal choices, whether determined by orthographic variation (including traditional contextual rules for the use of  or ), phonological variation, geographical variation, and/or diachronic variation. The final section showcases CoNE, and reconstructs a diachronic account on the basis of these spellings, revealing a coherent, if extremely complex, picture of lenitions, fortitions, and reversals.
An East Anglian Poem in a London Manuscript? The Date and Dialect of The Court of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19
Authors: Putter Ad
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates the text The Court of Love (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, folios 217r-234r). It was long time held to be a poem by Chaucer, a notion debunked by Skeat as a neo-medieval fabrication dating from the fourth decade of the sixteenth century at the earliest. This chapter presents a new appraisal of the date, which is tentatively pinpointed as the middle of the 15th century, and the localization of the poet, who is localized in East Anglia based on the evidence of rhymes and some spellings. Frequent failures of rhyme point to the linguistic differences between the poet and the scribe, as reconstructed from rhyme, metre and possible “relicts”. The hypothesis that the poet was from East Anglia and the scribe from London is confirmed by evidence from eLALME dot maps, and shows that instances in the poem that were identified by Skeat as “false grammar” are in fact examples of syntax that is true to the poet’s own dialect.
Introduction
Authors: Shaw Michael
Published: May 2021

The introduction to this book begins by illustrating that many writers and critics in the 1890s identified an artistic and literary revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland, one that hoped to defend Scottish cultural traditions and revive Scotland’s status as an international cultural centre. Despite these statements, the period has come to be associated with insularity, anti-nationalism and sentimentality, especially in Scottish literary criticism. The introduction establishes the book’s aim: to uncover the concerns with cultural revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, before going on to set up the key contexts and parameters for the book. Building on John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism, I define my terms and then introduce key political contexts, highlighting that cultural revival efforts ran alongside (and intersected with) a prominent late-Victorian political campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament. I then introduce the key artistic movements that helped support fin-de-siècle cultural revivalism – decadence and symbolism – and I discuss the ways in which they complemented the Celtic Revival.
The Pageant Revival: Popularising Renascence
Authors: Shaw Michael
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that several Scottish cultural revivalists, including Patrick Geddes, John Duncan and Jessie M. King, enthusiastically embraced Edwardian historical pageantry. What pageantry offered these writers and artists was an opportunity to further disseminate the Celtic myths and ‘lines of descent’ they had built in heir writings and artworks. By focussing on two key pageants: The Scottish National Pageant of Allegory History and Myth (1908) and Patrick Geddes’s The Masque of Learning (1912), I reveal the importance of Celtic mythology to Scottish pageantry, as well as the ways that these pageants interrogated stadialist notions of historical progress. A sub-chapter is dedicated to Arthurianism in Scotland, where I highlight the ways in which the Scottish claim to King Arthur helped advance Scottish cultural revivalism. The chapter also complicates wider critical understandings of Edwardian British pageantry, and reveals a distinct tradition in Scotland.
Envoy
Authors: Shaw Michael
Published: May 2021

This conclusion builds on the previous chapters of the book and highlights some key lines of continuity between the Scottish cultural revivalists of the fin de siècle and the writers of the Scottish Renaissance. By focussing on Hugh MacDiarmid, the conclusion reveals that – despite MacDiarmid’s dismissive portraits of late-Victorian Scotland – he acknowledged various debts to (and expressed admiration for) several figures discussed in this book, including William Sharp/Fiona Macleod and Patrick Geddes. The lines of continuity presented here are only indicative, but they reveal a more complex relationship between late-Victorian and Modernist cultural nationalism than some of MacDiarmid’s quotations suggest.
Plan Alfa
Authors: Lockhart James
Published: May 2021

This chapter assesses the Viaux movement's Plan Alfa, more commonly known by its White House name, Track II, which led to the murder of Gen. René Schneider in October 1970. It reviews the developments in Chilean politics that led to this while clarifying the United States and CIA's influence in it, particularly its limitations.
Jefe de la Plaza: The Rise of Augusto Pinochet
Authors: Lockhart James
Published: May 2021

This culminating chapter examines the rise of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, an anticommunist officer who became dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. It assesses the coup that overthrew the Allende administration in five parts: Allende's politics, the professional officer corps' politics, the relationship between the professional officer corps and their senior commanders, Pinochet's decision to commit to the coup, and the involvement of foreign military and intelligence services, including the CIA and KGB.
Conclusion
Authors: Lockhart James
Published: May 2021

This chapter restates the book's findings and their implications.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Matthew James , Lupton Julia Reinhard
Published: May 2021

The Introduction argues for the salience of the face to face for bridging the disciplinary divide between performance studies and ethical philosophy. The authors sketch three exemplary kinds of face-to-face engagement: the love duet, conflict, and recognition. Drama insists on faces in motion—turning towards and away; facing, defacing, and outfacing; saving face and losing face. Moreover, Shakespeare’s plays present the interactions between characters’ faces through the inter-face of theater, implicating the audience and its own judgments in the first-order movements of trust and betrayal.
Face to Face, Hand to Hand: Relations of Exchange in Hamlet
Authors: Shortslef Emily
Published: May 2021

In this essay, Emily Shortslef reads three linked encounters between Hamlet and Laertes in Act 5 of Hamlet—their fight at Ophelia’s grave, Hamlet’s recollection of this event in his subsequent expression of remorse, and their fatal duel before Claudius—in relationship to Levinas’s conceptualization of the face-to-face encounter as the ethical relation. She shows how Levinas’s notion of the self as constituted through the encounter with irreducible and unknowable alterity makes these scenes visible as moments in which the self is called into question by the other. At the same time, in contrast to Levinas’s famously asymmetrical concept of relationality and responsibility, the relationality that emerges in these scenes—one generated by the risk inherent in fighting on stage—necessitates mutual awareness of the other’s presence, careful attunement to movement, and reciprocal gestures of provocation and response. Each character discloses himself through the way that their facing bodies sense and respond to the other’s motion. In these antagonistic but collaborative encounters between Hamlet and Laertes, Shakespeare stages a relation of exchange that at the end of the play will also enable an exchange of forgiveness.
Bed Tricks and Fantasies of Facelessness: All’s Well that Ends Well and Macbeth in the Dark
Authors: Byker Devin
Published: May 2021

Shakespeare’s bed tricks hinge on humans without faces. In such dark environs, one is unable to perceive the face of another, and therefore unable to recognize, to acknowledge, or even to deny. But what are the consequences of imagining a faceless human? Out of what desires or temptations might a fantasy of facelessness emerge? Wittgenstein repeatedly drew on the face as a symbol of the interconnected nature of inner experience and outer expression, culminating in his assertion that “The face is the soul of the body.” By saying this, he challenges a particular fantasy of privacy that would seek to see the face as the external machinery of inner feelings. According to such a fantasy, doing away with faces might resolve the threat of duplicity through the erasure of human expression altogether. In this essay, Devin Byker explores how Measure, All’s Well, and Macbeth, through comic and tragic modes, investigate fantasies of facelessness—efforts to disavow the face and thus to alter the demands of human relations. Through such drama, Shakespeare explores both the epistemological and ethical force of the claims of the face and the consequences of a fantasy that wishes to ignore such claims.
The Face of Judgement in Measure for Measure
Authors: Curran Kevin
Published: May 2021

Like a number of other Renaissance comedies and romances, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure ends with a scene of judgment in which punishment and reward is distributed among a group of characters. Measure for Measure insistently links judgment to the spatial and revelatory dynamics of facing and unmasking. Adducing evidence from two early modern archives – legal writing on the theory and practice of judgment and treatises on physiology and faculty psychology – Kevin Curran addresses two related questions: (1) What can a historical understanding of the face in early modern culture tell us about the phenomenology of judgment in Measure for Measure? And (2) how does Shakespeare’s staging of judgment create a participatory experience in the playhouse grounded in sensation? The essay ultimately argues that the face in Measure for Measure functions as a hinge between the ethical relation of judgment and the ethical relation of theater, one that insists of the embodied and affective quality of both forms of interaction.
The Man of Sorrows: Edgar’s Disguise and Dürer’s Self-portraits
Authors: Scolnicov Hanna
Published: May 2021

In King Lear, Edgar transforms himself from a young aristocrat into the mad beggar, Tom o’Bedlam. Naked except for the blanket that covers his loins, he assumes the image of the Man of Sorrows. He tells Lear that, in his former life, he was a dandy dedicated to cultivating his own looks, spending his time in illicit and multiple sexual relations, in drink and dicing. This is a homiletic picture of himself as a typical courtier, guilty of the deadly sin of vanity. The icon of the Man of Sorrows is familiar from countless paintings, and Shakespeare uses the traditional visual image, lifting it out of its religious context and giving it a Humanist significance. Perhaps the most pertinent visual images are those in which Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) represented himself as the Man of Sorrows. In his earlier self-portraits, he appears as a handsome young man, well-dressed and carefully coiffed, reminding us of Poor Tom’s account of his past as a frivolous courtier. In her comparative study of Shakespeare and Dürer, Hanna Scolnicov argues that recognizing the surprising images shared by the two helps uncover the conceptual world of the play.
Afterword: Theatre and Speculation
Authors: West William N.
Published: May 2021

The face-to-face encounter is a figure for direct, immediate contact between two entities. It has a long history, from Paul’s assertion that what he sees now in a glass darkly he will some day meet face to face to Emmanuel Levinas’ attempt to refound philosophy as based on its confrontation with another. But in seeking to determine the conditions under which the face to face could take place—absolute transparency to the absolutely other—its writers have risked stripping it of the contingencies and particularities that actually mark face-to-face encounters in the world. They have accidentally rendered it as theory and as theophany. Theatrical performance shows another view of the face to face, restoring to it the confusions and quirks of the world, embracing the dark glass of Paul’s wordly speculation rather than the promise of a more perfect vision always still to come. By executing the clarities that are hoped for in the face-to-face encounter, theater shows its shortcomings and discovers in them unhoped for points of contact.
The subjunctive in adjectival relative clauses
Authors: Moessner Lilo
Published: May 2021

This chapter deals with the frequency development of the subjunctive and its competitors, namely indicatives and modal constructions, in adjectival relative clauses in the historical periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). Additionally, it discusses the linguistic and extralinguistic parameters influencing their distribution across these periods. The analysis of a corpus comprising nearly 3,000 relative clauses reveals that the subjunctive in adjectival relative clauses died out in the 16th century, that it was best preserved in text category STA containing legislative texts, and that it was favoured in combination with wh-relative markers and in constructions characterized by modal harmony, i.e. in combination with matrix clauses with verbal syntagms expressing root modality.
“Let’s Get a Swede!”: Peter Goldmann, The Beatles, and the Origins of the Music Video
Authors: MacKenzie Scott
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores how in 1966, Paul McCartney in London met Peter Goldmann, a director at SvT (Sveriges Television AB). McCartney, inspired by recent films by Bergman and Godard, wanted The Beatles’ new promotional films (necessary after the group decided to abandon touring earlier in the year) to be in the emergent art cinema vein. McCartney allegedly told his bandmates (perhaps apocryphally): ‘Let’s get a Swede!’. Goldmann directed in late 1966 and early 1967 the promo films for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” (he also went on to direct the promo for “A Day in the Life”). These two promo films are quite probably the two works by a Swedish director seen by more viewers globally than any other. This chapter thus examines the importance of these promo films as precursors to MTV, foregrounding Goldmann’s centrality in the creation and advancement of the music video aesthetic and his importance to its global history.
The Gothenburg International Exile Film Festival in Context
Authors: Ulfsdotter Boel , Björkin Mats
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores how in 1993 two Iranian immigrants to Sweden, Hossein Mahini and Hassan Mahini, launched a film festival in Sweden’s second largest city Gothenburg for films related to exile and refugee experiences, the Exile Film Festival. The programming of the festival represents the large range of exilic, diasporic, ethnic, immigrant, and refugee communities that are part of the contemporary public sphere. The festival also constitutes an overlooked elsewhere of cinematic programming outside of the main commercial, art house, or mainstream film festivals. It is also part of local, national, and international “ecology” of exhibition of non-Western films in general, and exile or diaspora film festivals in particular, including through the festival’s intervention into Gothenburg suburbs that rarely otherwise see this kind of cinematic programming. The chapter also discusses exilic cinephilia cultures in Sweden and the kinds of films that are screened at the festival. By so doing, it introduces a range of cinematic elsewhere.
“Here is My Home”: Voiceover and Foreign-language Versions in Postwar Danish informational film
Authors: Thomson C. Claire
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses a selection of foreign-language Danish informational films, giving an overview, firstly, of how the films travelled and in which languages. It then looks more closely at a key principle in such filmmaking in Denmark: the use of voiceover, as opposed to subtitling or dubbing. This was a practice predicated on the medium-specific properties of film, as well as the networks of distribution and exhibition in play at the time. Voiceover was a practical necessity, but one which positioned the filmic narratives, and by extension Denmark, in spatio-temporal relation to the contexts of viewing. Examining a selection of typical and atypical films made between 1947 and 1960, the present study argues that voiceover, accent, and ambient sound often engender a delicate balance between “here” and “elsewhere.”
Aki Kaurismäki’s Finno-French Connections and Other Transcultural Elsewheres
Authors: Ribeiro Ana Bento
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how Aki Kaurismäki’s cinema is based on transnational codes. The Finnish filmmaker is mostly known by his unique signature style, where time and spaces are an amalgamate of different decades, while still engendering references to multiple cultures. With an institutional and industrial model that makes it the European hub for arthouse film production, France has been a steady presence on Kaurismäki's films' credits. This chapter discusses how Kaurismäki's French co-productions exemplify the ways in which economic and technical transnationality operate in the successful making of arthouse films, especially through his five collaborations with French production company Pyramide Productions. Focusing on the case studies of La vie de bohème (1992) and Le Havre (2011), two co-productions fully set in France, this chapter foregrounds how the films’ transnational qualities speak both to funding and production technicalities particular to the European film industry, while analyzing narrative and aesthetic components as well.
Nordic Noir as a Calling Card: The International Careers of Danish Film and Television Talent in the 2010s
Authors: Redvall Eva N.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the transnational success of drama serials such as Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007-2012) and Borgen (2010-2013) and the popularity of a special kind of ’Nordic Noir’ crime drama, the Danish television production landscape enjoyed an unprecedented international interest in the early 2010s. While the series found widespread circulation and sparked new discourses on subtitled content that challenges dominant English-speaking fare, the interest in what was perceived as a highly professional public service production culture simultaneously created new possibilities for Danish talent to launch A-list careers on the global television stage. This study further analyses this new circulation of talent, focusing on how the Danish practitioners have experienced the move to the international production landscape, particularly on what they perceive as similarities and differences between Danish and US production cultures. The chapter also explores what can be regarded as the benefits of this kind of transnational flow of talent; for the international productions as well as for the national series when directors and actors move back and forth between the Nordic region and the rest of the world, creating different kinds of ’Nordic elsewheres’, on screen and behind the screen.
Paris Looks to the North: Swedish Silent Film and the Emergence of Cinephilia
Authors: Fee Annie
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores how the films of Swedish filmmakers Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström were central to the efforts of 1920s French film critics to elevate the status of film to the level of high or modernist art. French audiences passionate about their film taste resisted the changes to their cinema-going habits and were very vocal about their preference for popular cinema. These moments of protest reveal powerful alternative strains of popular film culture amidst which the French First Wave critic-­‐filmmakers were trying to win over audiences and educate the general public using the example of Sweden as a model for “true film art.” This chapter provides an account of the violent rejection of several Swedish films by contemporary French audiences as passionate in their resistance to “artistic” films as they were in their defense of the familiar faces of Hollywood imports and French popular cinema.
The Transnational Politics of Lars Von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Amerika”
Authors: Badley Linda
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores a previously overlooked area in von Trier, Dogma95, and Vinterberg scholarship by investigating the industrial and aesthetic practices, generic elements, and themes that make up their collective “Amerika” elsewhere. Where the two Danish directors’ American references have often been passed off as auteurist provocations, this chapter addresses the tensions and contradictions between the films’ European locations and American settings and the discursive play between Scandinavian and European “art” cinema and American genres (the musical, the western, gangster, horror, and science-fiction/disaster film) to expose a counter-hegemonic transnational politics. Films under discussion, including Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay Antichrist, Melancholia, It’s All about Love, Dear Wendy, are all set in an imagined USA, a country von Trier has never visited. Their settings are more often delocalized and blatantly mythical and inspired by a distantiated and critical, Kafkaesque and Brechtian, perspective – of “Amerika.”
I Am Curious (Yellow) as Sex Education in the USA
Authors: Ghanoui Saniya Lee
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores I Am Curious (Yellow) and the public’s response during its first box office run in the United States. It argues that the film functioned as a non-normative form of sex education, and that the U.S. government wanted to censor it swiftly not because it was pornographic, but precisely because it was deemed not to be. In other words, the film presented itself as a creative pseudo-documentary endeavor while the U.S. interpreted it as obscene and tasteless; the film pushed the definitions of what is and is not documentary and informational film. I place I Am Curious (Yellow) in the historical canon of internationally (in)famous Swedish sex education films, the most notable example being Language of Love (Ur kärlekens språk).
I Am Curious (Yellow) was the first of several films that further blurred the line between sex education and pornography on an international scale.
Transnational Cinefeminism of the 1970s and Mai Zetterling’s documentary elsewheres
Authors: Larsson Mariah
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates one phase of Mai Zetterling’s directorial career. Although she is often described as a Swedish woman director, Zetterling’s films were made in several different countries. She lived the majority of her life abroad, mainly in the UK and France, and had a career independent of national borders. Through brief case studies of three films – The Prosperity Race (1962), “The Strongest” (segment of Visions of Eight, 1973), and Scrubbers (1982) – this chapter explores both how Zetterling negotiated her own (trans)nationality in order to find opportunities for filmmaking and how these three films in different ways make use of space and place. As an expatriate Swedish woman, she explains Swedish welfare society to British citizens; elects to focus her segment of the Olympics documentary on weightlifters rather than “feminine” sports; and aligns herself with British film traditions to create an intense mix of savage realism and hallucinatory surrealism in Scrubbers.
Masked Interaction: The Case for an Enactive View of Commedia dell’Arte (and the Italian Renaissance)
Authors: Söffner Jan
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents a case study for the use of enactivist phenomenology as a paradigm for Cultural Analysis and Renaissance Studies. It begins by describing a mask used in commedia dell’arte, first as a simple object and then as embedded in an acting praxis. The focus then turns to Renaissance cultures of the performing arts, fiction, and the constitution of subjectivity. Finally, the chapter considers what the mask has to say about sixteenth-century Italy, comparing the outcomes of this analysis with those of more conventional approaches, which are mostly focused on Renaissance humanism. The line of argumentation follows a bottom-up methodology based on enactivist assumptions. By the end the chapter will render the adopted approach theoretically explicit and offer closing remarks about the use of enactivist phenomenology for cultural analysis, by comparing it with neighbouring theories and methods in Cultural Studies (especially Praxeology, Actor-Network-Theory, studies on Material Cultures, and Performance Studies).
Thinking with the Hand: The Practice of Drawing in Renaissance Italy
Authors: Houng Cynthia
Published: May 2021

Drawing occupies a central place in the European artistic tradition, especially exploratory drawing, of the sort that modern artists might call sketches or studies. This chapter argues that the rise of this mode of drawing in Renaissance Italy represented more than a shift in artistic or workshop practice. It also marked a metamorphosis in the relationship between cognition and the act of drawing itself. Drawing, for Italian Renaissance artists, was both a way of thinking with the hand, and a way of thinking between hands.
The Medieval (Music) Book: A Multimodal Cognitive Artefact
Authors: Maxwell Kate
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the medieval book as an example of embedded creative cognition. Through a detailed case-study analysis of a single opening from the interpolated Livre de Fauvel, the chapter shows how the modern-day reader takes an active part in the cognitive ecology that produced the book. The argument draws on theories of distributed cognition, multimodality, book history, and the writings of Augustine of Hippo to demonstrate the close connections between the mind, the body, and the book that are both still in action and under transformation today.
‘The adding of artificial organs to the natural’: Extended and Distributed Cognition in Robert Hooke’s Methodology
Authors: Present Pieter
Published: May 2021

This chapter compares Robert Hooke’s views on the use of writing as an external memory with contemporary notions of extended and distributed cognition. The aim is not to portray Hooke as a proponent of these views avant la lettre, but to highlight certain interesting structural similarities and differences. Hooke believed that cognition could be externalised through the use of an external ‘repository’. In this case, cognition takes place through the manipulation of written material. This externalisation of memory makes it possible for other people to access, supplement, and organise the same ‘repository’, which allows for a cognitive division of labour. It is further shown how the Royal Society, of which Hooke was a member, is presented by Thomas Sprat as an enterprise aimed precisely at this kind of cognitive division of labour. The chapter concludes with a concrete example of an ‘external repository’ designed by Hooke, analysing the way it puts into practice Hooke’s ideas on individually and socially extended cognition.
At the Margins of Europe: Byron’s East Revisited and The Giaour
Authors: Minta Stephen
Published: May 2021

Greece, in Byron’s work and life, seems so central, so symbolically tied to ideas of freedom and commitment, that it is easy to forget how marginal Greece was in the Europe of Byron’s time. Byron’s East is an anomalous composite, framed by four elements: the imperial force of the Ottoman Empire, the framing structure of classical Greece, a loosely defined Albanian presence operating both within the limits of the Ottoman Empire, but in some ways resistant to it, and what can be described as ‘modern Greece’. In reconstructing this network of Turkish/European oppositional attitudes, we can see with greater clarity how Byron approached his Giaour and to what extent Byron’s difficulties in escaping from the traditional representation of classical Greece are only partially resolved in Childe Harold.
Race, Place and Cultural Production in Carmel-by-the-Sea
Authors: Gano Geneva M.
Published: May 2021

Carmel-by-the-Sea, a newly developed artist’s village located on the central California coast, claimed for itself the title of the first year-round little art colony in the nation, one that boasted an elaborate infrastructure including an experimental community theatre, communist study groups, dada-inspired balls, ‘straight’ photography, music festivals, and literary work of all stripes. This chapter describes the strange blend of intellectuals, bohemians, socialists, and businessmen that made the Carmel colony exemplary and excavates the history of land development for the high-end tourism and real estate economy on the Monterey Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century. As local newspaper articles, real estate brochures, and guidebooks reveal, this small village used emergent real estate development and cutting-edge marketing techniques to position itself as what Richard Florida might call a ‘creative city.’ These helped to promote the area to a predominantly white middle and upper class with the time and money to spend on tourism and leisure activities. This chapter fleshes out this economic history—one that importantly includes the racially targeted displacements of Chinese fishermen to make way for the artists and tourists—and connects it to a remarkable scene of modernist primitivism in Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon.
Kazakhstan
Authors: Ganje Alina
Published: May 2021

Sunni Islam and Russian Orthodoxy had historically cultivated a tolerant co-existence in Kazakhstan. Protestantism first arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Lutherans, Baptists, Adventists, and Mennonites. Catholic presence, stemming from Franciscan monks in the thirteenth century, flourished with large numbers of Polish exiles, and Catholic German and Latvian immigrants. The Russian Revolution brought religious persecution and during decades of communist rule the country suffered a loss of identity. In 1991, Kazakhstan was declared an independent secular state; however, the loss of a state ideology led to renewed interest in religion and/or new moral and social communities. Since 1991, the Orthodox denomination has undergone a revival. While legislation targeted extremism, the law in practice had a negative impact on both Islamic and Christian communities, restricting religious freedom. This has led to a decline in religious organisations, dropping between 2011 and 2014 by around one-quarter. Still, Protestant churches outnumber Russian Orthodox churches by more than two to one. However, the ROC holds meetings with the government to discuss its spheres of activity in Kazakhstan. Given the state’s limitations on religious expression, literature and teaching in school, the future of religious freedom in Kazakhstan remains uncertain.
Uzbekistan
Authors: Krason Feruza
Published: May 2021

85% of the population of Uzbekistan are Uzbeks, while the rest are Russians, Tajiks, Kazakhs and other smaller ethnic groups. Uzbekistan declares freedom of conscience but government and society are intolerant of any Uzbek who chooses Christ over Islam and any person deemed too religious is monitored carefully. The fall of the Soviet Union brought confusion as many returned to Islam, ‘the religion of their fathers.’ Christianity has been considered a ‘Russian’ religion in Uzbekistan, due to the presence of ROC and Protestant churches via imperial Russia. There are five Roman Catholic churches throughout Uzbekistan. The current Evangelical movement was seeded by Mennonites, the forced exile of Molokans, the preaching of the English philanthropist Granville Augustus William Waldegrave and by the perseverance of the Russian Baptists. Missionaries came to teach and work as doctors, and to teach business while South Koreans came as missionaries to “local” Koreans in the country. Whereas the number of ethnic Uzbek Christians was only about 100 in 1994, some estimates suggest 10,000 ethnic Uzbek Christians today. Still, Uzbek Christians face difficulties and ostracism in daily life. Nevertheless, the Uzbek Church is quite active in evangelism and the growth of the Church has been exponential.
Pakistan
Authors: Arshad Mehak , John Youshib Matthew
Published: May 2021

Pakistan culminated from the concept that religion is the main denominator identifying and unifying Muslims in the subcontinent, and therefore Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations. Christians strongly supported the Muslim League in its pursuit of a separate homeland. Through the historical influence of Christian missions there were 3,912 ‘native’ Christians by 1881, and by 1941 this number had increased to 511,299 in Central Punjab. The largest church in the country is the Catholic Church (Latin rite). In 1970 the Church of Pakistan brought together Anglicans, Methodists and some Presbyterians, each with an extensive network providing education, healthcare and pastoral care. Other denominations in Pakistan include the Salvation Army, Pentecostals, Full Gospel Assemblies, Adventists, among others. However, Christians in Pakistan today are maligned, regarded as part of the lowly ‘sweeper community’, with a small number of seats reserved for them in politics. Christians are threatened by the Blasphemy Law, meant to safeguard Islam. At least 700 girls are kidnapped annually and forced to marry Muslims. Nevertheless, the Christian community has demonstrated vitality; with thousands studying in Christian schools and many receiving medical care from Christian hospitals, the Christian community remains committed to engage positively in inter-faith dialogue.
West India
Authors: Aghamkar Atul Y.
Published: May 2021

West India, inclusive of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa, is the most urbanised and socio-religiously progressive part of India and constitutes 14.32% of its total population (2011). Christians can be traced back to the sixth century. The arrival of Vasco de Gama ushered in a new epoch of Roman Catholic mission in India. Protestant missionary work among the low castes challenged upper-caste reformers to combat social evils. Pentecostal and Charismatic groups, such as the New Life Fellowship, began to permeate the urban landscape in the late twentieth century. Today, the church in West India remains largely stagnant, often struggling with leadership and property issues. Converts hailing from both upper and lower castes contributed to produce liturgy written in the local dialects. With the emergence of Dalit theology, some West Indian theologians faded into the background, and engagement from a subaltern perspective dominated the theological scene. Religious fundamentalism continues to pose a threat to Christian evangelism. Despite unfavourable conditions in West India, Christians have been more involved in politics than before. In reality, most urban churches are growing because of rural–urban migration and not necessarily because of conversions.
South India
Authors: Jeyaraj Daniel
Published: May 2021

South Indian Christians trace their history to the ministry of the Apostle Thomas in modern-day Kerala and in Mylapore. Orthodox Christianity in South India has most complex history. Members are native to Kerala; yet most carry on the legacies of ancestors who were loyal to either the Patriarchs in Persia and Constantinople or the Popes in Rome. Under these external ties lie the forces of caste identity and rivalries among influential families. Socio-religious customs of varna, avarna and jāti still affect society, despite opposition from religious groups. Since 2014, the fundamentalist ideology of one nation, one religion, one language, one people and one culture, forced dissidents and minorities to blend in. While Christianity in South India is an urban phenomenon, it has not spread among the Adivasis (‘original inhabitants’) of South India, who live in tune with the nature surrounding them. In fact, most South Indians call themselves Hindus; they may belong to either philosophical or popular Hinduism, each consisting of numerous subgroups. Theological education is still offered through several outlets; however, despite the history and presence of Christianity, many Christians have yet to engage fully with the intellectual and spiritual heritage of South India.
Northeast India
Authors: Zhimomi Kaholi
Published: May 2021

The north-east has a distinct regional identity, as the land of seven sisters, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim; and yet, has been absorbed into the social, cultural and political scheme of the secular nation since independence. The identity politics resulted in dissatisfaction on the part of the indigenous people, which generated long-term military violence in Northeast India. Today, disempowerment among indigenous groups is enormous. For early missionaries, conversion to Christianity also entailed adoption of the Western way of life. Most of the missionaries in Northeast India were American or Welsh among the Protestants and German, Spanish or Italian among the Catholics. Despite exploitation by colonialists that attempted to replace indigenous customs, revivals paved the way for renaissance for those customs. Today, Christianity is the major religion in the states of Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, with significant growth of indigenous leaders, both secular and religious. Furthermore, there is a rapid growth of educated young tribals who are qualified administrators, educators, academicians, politicians and theologians. With the effects of globalization and modernisation, Christianity must not be assumed to be an agent of acculturation but an agent that helped in the metamorphosis of indigenous norms into authentic tradition.
Evangelicals
Authors: Shah Rebecca Samuel , Samuel Vinay
Published: May 2021

In most South and Central Asian countries, while Christians account for 1–2% of the population, the region has the fastest-growing Evangelical population in the world. South Asian Evangelicalism can be traced back to the 1706 arrival in Tranquebar of two Pietist German missionaries. Fearing what they called the ‘proselytising zeal’ of Christians, the East India Company forbade missionaries into Company-ruled territories. Evangelicalism in South Asia succeeds in hostile environments because it embraces any space available for its mission. Healing and exorcism have been the key impetus bringing people to Christ in South Asia. While many Evangelical Protestant churches have adopted Pentecostal beliefs, Charismatic influences have been minimal in certain institutions. Still, the proportion of South Asia’s Evangelical Pentecostal or Charismatic population is steadily rising. Among villages are the ubiquitous ‘Independent churches’ separate from mainstream denominations. Evangelicalism in South Asia is rooted in a commitment to the care of the poor. From very early, eschatological urgency was at the heart of missions. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Evangelical churches became aware of moral destruction after decades of communism. Across Central Asia, Evangelical missionaries continue to spread the gospel but remain vigilant about when and how they evangelise.
Pentecostals and Charismatics
Authors: Satyavrata Ivan
Published: May 2021

The Pentecostal/Charismatic movement is not a monolithic church ‘tradition’ with a centralized organization. After a May 1860 revival in Tamil Nadu, revivals swept across India that included figures such as Pandita Ramabai and Minnie Abrams. Pentecostalism in Iran had an early start in the work of Andrew Urshan, who received the baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1908 in Chicago. There are several sociological factors unique to the region that have influenced the wide range of Pentecostal expressions. Some church movements have closely guarded their indigenous identity, while others have welcomed outside relationships. Independent local churches have become Charismatic as the result of a spiritual revival or of embracing Pentecostal teachings and constitute the largest segment of Pentecostals/Charismatics in the region. Pentecostal movements take on indigenous contexts fairly easily due to its autonomy, its spontaneity, and the arousal of cultural identity emerging from colonial experience. A personal experience of the Spirit and the emphasis on Charismatic gifts are central. Despite hostility in the region, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are growing exponentially, aided by the creative use of media. The varied populations of South and Central Asia represent the most formidable challenge to Christian missions in the twenty-first century.
Faith and Culture
Authors: Longkumer Atola
Published: May 2021

Of the two Asian regions, socio-economically, South Asia presents both prosperity and abject poverty, embedded in varying traditions. Central Asian states are well-endowed with natural resources and sustain a diverse cultural heritage against a backdrop of Islam. The indigenous shamanic cultures that have sustained myriad indigenous people (often described by terms such as tribals, Adivasis, minorities) for generations across South Asia need to be recognised along with its globalisation. Healing, use of traditional medicines, the position and role of women, caste hierarchy and the relationship with the other are incorporated into South Asian Christianity. ‘Anonymous Christians’ have also contributed to concepts such as ‘insider movements’ to discuss embedded followers of Jesus. In Central Asia, Charismatic Christianity is finding particular resonance. The relative freedom of religious expression has given opportunities for Christians to witness to the gospel. The potential ecumenical relationship with the existing Orthodox Church presents an opportunity for global Christianity. Christianity has received fresh interest in Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of the nation-states of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Theological creativity along with prophetic proclamation will be needed to balance these challenges of culture and faith in the region.
Social and Political Context
Authors: Prakash SJ Cedric
Published: May 2021

Christianity in the region is under siege by fundamentalists from other religions who consider it a threat to their (often unjust and exploitative) way of life; by governments that are in nexus with these forces and by theocratic states in which the ‘other’ religion is seen as ‘alien’. While Christians have played prominent roles in India, anti-conversion laws in the country have been used by those who harbour ill-will towards the religious minorities, particularly Christians, to constantly discriminate against them and attack both their intentions and their actions. Attacks on Christians have been on the increase since 2014. In Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and countries of Central Asia, Christians experience systematic persecution (and even martyrdom) and, with rare exceptions, it is not easy for Christians to freely profess, practise and propagate their faith. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have a Muslim majority, but unlike in several other Muslim countries, freedom of religion is guaranteed in their constitutions, though the actual implementation leaves much to be desired. Christians in South and Central Asia are involved in inter-religious dialogue and doing their best to engage with majority communities in countries where Christianity does not have much of a bearing.
Gender
Authors: Jeyaraj Sheela , Anderson-Rajkumar Evangeline
Published: May 2021

Gender issues in South and Central Asia involve discriminations in the socio-cultural, political and economic realms. Despite policy initiatives, gender equality is still not available for most women. The condition of Central Asian women is less favourable than that of their counterparts in South Asia. Still, in South Asian countries where certain Hindu or Buddhist fundamentalist norms prevail, the position of women continues to be deplorable. Discrimination of women is justified in Sanskrit scriptures, which do not contain a coherent narrative of the creation of women. Likewise, the scriptures of Jainism and Buddhism present women as inferior to men. The status of Christian women in certain South Asian countries is better than that of their Central Asian republics. The patriarchal societies of South and Central Asia do not educate a sufficient number of women in theology. Today, almost all female Christian theologians in South Asia engage with the pathos of the exploited. Reversal of gender roles among diaspora communities have caused conflicts in the home and in public. Despite their struggles, Christian women in South and Central Asia continue their witness to God’s grace in Christ sustaining them.
Religious Freedom
Authors: Nazir-Ali Michael
Published: May 2021

Despite international law regarding religious freedom, there has been widespread refusal to respect treaties by nations. Islamic and Marxist states have largely ignored these restrictions. The safeguarding of religious freedom is also at risk in the West, from groups that seek equality but refuse to recognise the conscience of religious believers. In Central Asia, Marxism-Leninism continue to be used by authoritarian regimes for their own ends. Both Central Asia and South Asia have to contend with resurgent Islam, and restrictions imposed by Hindu or Buddhist nations. In Afghanistan, courts defer to Sharia law on conversion from Islam to another religion. Bangladesh is experiencing the rise of vocal Islamism, which has targeted Shi’a Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and secularists. In Indian politics, the position of non-Hindu religions has deteriorated following the election of a Hindu nationalist party. In Central Asia, countries experience some level of tolerance but with rising regulations against religion, while targeting Islamic radicalism. Pakistan has seen a relentless drift towards Islamisation in law. The primary nature of the rights needs to be upheld in relation to ideological concerns and even claims to other rights that might be seen as trumping religious freedom.
Caste and Christianity in India
Authors: Jeremiah Anderson
Published: May 2021

The Indian practice of the caste system creates a repressive stratification in the subcontinent. Hinduism refers to a variety of theologies, mythologies, cultic practices and philosophies spread across India. The exclusion of outcastes is ordained, pursued and perpetuated by dominant religio-political and socio-cultural forces, often with violent consequences. While the constitution prohibits any discrimination on grounds of caste, the social practice of caste identity continues to be relevant across the country. Because the caste system is the product of a religious worldview, it is through religious rituals that caste discrimination and prejudices are manifested. Mission organisations agreed to work within specific caste communities in order to avoid conflict. The caste-based segregation masquerading as denominationalism runs so deep within the churches in India that there are congregations who do not share the Eucharist. Only 12 out of 241 bishops are from a Dalit background, whereas Dalits make up more than 65% of the membership of Catholic congregations. Dalit groups have had to mobilise to counter the unfair advantages enjoyed by higher-caste groups. The caste system has become a potent political tool within Indian society and its relevance in shaping socio-cultural moorings have not diminished.