Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult

Werbner, Pnina

Oxford University Press

"... will be of interest not only to those concerned with Pakistan and the new Muslim presence in Europe, but also to those interested in an anthropological study of religion." —Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis
Pnina Werbner traces the development of a Sufi Naqshbandi order founded by a living saint, Zindapir, whose cult originated in Pakistan and has extended globally to Britain, Europe, the Middle East, and southern Africa. Drawing on 12 years of fieldwork in Pakistan and Great Britain, she elucidates the complex organization of Sufi orders as regional and transnational cults, and examines how such cults are manifested through ritual action and embodied in sacred mythology and global diasporas. A focus of the study is the key event in the order’s annual ritual cycle, a celebration in which tens of thousands of people gather at the saint’s lodge in Pakistan and in the streets of Britain. Werbner challenges accepted anthropological and sociological truths about Islam and modernity, and reflects on her own role as ethnographic observer. Pilgrims of Love is a major contribution to our understanding of disaporic Islamic practices, highlighting the vitality of Sufi orders in the postcolonial world.

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Indiana University Press

"... will be of interest not only to those concerned with Pakistan and the new Muslim presence in Europe, but also to those interested in an anthropological study of religion." —Barbara Metcalf, University of California, DavisPnina Werbner traces the development of a Sufi Naqshbandi order founded by a living saint, Zindapir, whose cult originated in Pakistan and has extended globally to Britain, Europe, the Middle East, and southern Africa. Drawing on 12 years of fieldwork in Pakistan and Great Britain, she elucidates the complex organization of Sufi orders as regional and transnational cults, and examines how such cults are manifested through ritual action and embodied in sacred mythology and global diasporas. A focus of the study is the key event in the order’s annual ritual cycle, a celebration in which tens of thousands of people gather at the saint’s lodge in Pakistan and in the streets of Britain. Werbner challenges accepted anthropological and sociological truths about Islam and modernity, and reflects on her own role as ethnographic observer. Pilgrims of Love is a major contribution to our understanding of disaporic Islamic practices, highlighting the vitality of Sufi orders in the postcolonial world.

Aimed at academics and students of anthropology, race and ethnic studies, sociology and cultural studies, this volume examines the different forms of leadership in Britain's black and ethnic communities, whose members originally came from the Caribbean and South Asia.

Black and Ethnic Leaderships in Britain: The Cultural Dimensions of Political Action

Social Sciences

Routledge

It is now 50 years since E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class.The Making of an African Working Class follows Thompson in exploring the formation of working class identity among low-paid African workers. In arguing for a radical public anthropology of worker identity, the book seeks to analyse the cultural, legal, ideological and experiential dimensions of labour activism often neglected in other labour studies. Pnina Werbner shows that by fusing cosmopolitan and local popular cultural forms of protest, unionists have created a distinctive, vernacular way of being a worker in Botswana: one that does not deny workers’ roots at home or in the countryside, while being cognisant of a wider world of cosmopolitan labour rights. The assertion of working class dignity, honour and respect, Pnina argues, is a powerful motivating force for manual workers. Against legal-sceptical approaches, The Making of an African Working Class argues that in challenging the government - their employer - in court, manual workers’ protests and mobilisation are deeply embedded in ethics, social justice and the law.

The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers' Union of Botswana (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

Pluto Press

The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics (World Anthropology)

The public sphere of the Manchester Muslim diaspora is a place of intense local micro-politics of honour and shame, debated in the globalized language of world affairs, and dramatically enacted through public performance. Pnina Werbner reveals a multi-centred world among Manchester Pakistanis, a locally created diasporic public space which appropriates and combines travelling ideas and images from a variety of sources into meaningful moral allegories. British South Asian Muslims became visible in the protests mobilized against The Satanic Verses, during which Pakistani immigrants abandoned the role of a silent, well-behaved minority in the public defence of their religious imagination and group honour. In opening up a new realm of activist citizenship politics, the Rushdie affair also provided the opportunity for the Pakistani diaspora to liberate themselves from the intimidation of their own religious extremists. There has since been an efflorescence of cultural and religious societies, festivals and public celebrations of fun and consumption, often with women taking more visible and vocal roles and challenging the hegemony of male elders. Along with a revived loyalty to the Islamic community and its global outposts there is a new struggle for local British citizenship rights, emphasizing multi-culturalism and the recognition and respect of difference. Series editors: Wendy James & N.J. Allen

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

James Currey

WERBNER, P,: THE MIGRATION PROCESS, CAPITAL, GIFTS AND OFFERINGS AMONG BRITISH PAKISTANIS, OXFORD, 1990, xii 391 p, tablas,Encuadernacion original, Nuevo,

The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts, and Offerings Among British Pakistanis (Explorations in Anthropology)

Berg Pub Ltd.

African Customary Justice (Cultural Diversity and Law)

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. 
Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. 
The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

History

Werbner, Richard

Africa

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Books by Werbner, Pnina

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Werbner, Pnina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult

Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult

Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult

Black and Ethnic Leaderships in Britain: The Cultural Dimensions of Political Action

The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers' Union of Botswana (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics (World Anthropology)

Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics (World Anthropology)

The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts, and Offerings Among British Pakistanis (Explorations in Anthropology)

African Customary Justice (Cultural Diversity and Law)