In this article, I examine how Singaporean Chinese families and funeral professionals work together to ritually manage the meaning and consequences of a death by suicide. While the now dated literature on Chinese mortuary practice emphasizes the formality and rigidity of death rituals, during fieldwork I noted many moments of confusion within ritual, moments of innovation, when relatives broke ...

This article adds to existing discussions on slave religions by offering the analysis of four post-mortem testaments left behind formerly enslaved African women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia elucidate different roles that faith and religiosity played within their lives, communities, understandings self. After contextualizing these primary sources relevant historiography descendant Atl...

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) as a form of gender-related violence continues to thrive within communities and across borders, with (under)reported prevalence among in the diaspora. Reports FGM/C diaspora speak socio-cultural religious factors which promote its prevalence. Successful interventions offer alternatives such rites passage socio-cultural-religious prospects offered by pra...

Thanks to such works as Keith Thomas's Religion and the decline ofmagic (1973), Lawrence Stone's The family, sex and marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977), Ronald Hutton's The rise andfall ofmerry England: the ritual year, 1400-1700 (1994), and Anthony Fletcher's Gender, sex and subordination in England 1500-1800 (1995), the cultural and social history of the early modem period is blessed with ...

The ancient Vedic texts Provides us with valuable information and guide lines on various multi-faced aspects of human life. The present discussion is limited to the medical treatment and medicinal charms mentioned in the Atharvanic literature with specific consideration to Kausikasutra for better understanding of the rites and actions mentioned in Atharvanaveda.

Cynodon dactylon commonly known as Durva is considered as a sacred herb by the Hindus and is used in religious rites. It is widely used by the people of India as a traditional medicine for diarrhea, dysentery, catarrhal opthalmia, dropsy, etc. This paper discusses the pharmacognostical and preliminary phytochemical studies of the herb.

Let 0 < a < b < ∞, and for each edge e of Zd let ωe = a or ωe = b, each with probability 1/2, independently. This induces a random metric distω on the vertices of Z d, called first passage percolation. We prove that for d > 1 the distance distω(0, v) from the origin to a vertex v, |v| > 2, has variance bounded by C |v|/ log |v|, where C = C(a, b, d) is a constant which may only depend on a, b a...