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peacemaking tionalists than he wanted to let on in his letter to Edward Burton, whose misperception was not entirely fanciful. It suited Baxter’s purpose in that letter to emphasise, in the words of Bruce Lincoln, ‘distance, separation, otherness, and alienation’ from the congregationalists. In other contexts, however, he needed to convey ‘likeness, common belonging, mutual attachment, and solidarity’. For Lincoln, the formation of group identity involves a balancing of ‘similarities and dissimilarities’, ‘affinity and estrangement’. This process creates sentiment or
the Underworld , acknowledging relational non-dualism as an underlying principle while researching tang-ki in trance possession states allows the emic voice to be literally heard, and to be incorporated constructively into the ethnography. Moreover, this approach readdresses alterity in a way that removes the need to distance oneself philosophically from the religious and ritual phenomena studied. Within Sinology, and in regard to deities and tang-ki spirit possession in particular, the academic antecedent has been a denial of emic ontologies, from tang
the Underworld Generals of the Five Directions were firmly hammered into place marking the boundaries of the ritual space, that of the central camp placed strategically on a mound at some distance to take overall command of the combined Underworld forces. Several metres from the pyre, red candles separated by incense sticks were pressed into the ground in the shape of a ‘U’ thus surrounding the pyre on three sides. Di Ya Pek ran his flag over these before they were lit, transforming them through the transference of his efficacy into a ‘qi’ barrier impenetrable to
variant kind – for example the Dissenting Brethren were more willing to accept those who believed in believer’s baptism than their New England fellows – but this does not mean, as a number of historians have argued, that the Dissenting Brethren were beginning to distance themselves from Cotton.10 In 1959 A. G. Matthews set the tone for much subsequent historiography when he dismissed the continuity between New England’s view of the magistrate and the English congregationalist statements in the ‘Savoy 224 ‘Promote, protect, prosecute’ declaration’ on the basis of New
creation of all-inclusive temple environments catering to the whims and tastes of the wider community, ‘tang-ki’ and laymen alike. In contrast, while Singapore’s Ah Pek parties are informal events, they remain largely exclusive, the deities sharing food and alcohol primarily among themselves, thus creating an air of exclusivity which distances them hierarchically from the devotees present. From the balustraded balcony, I surveyed and instinctively analysed the temple’s wider community drawn together by the worship of Underworld deities who, it
episcopate was hardly popular, there was little appetite for a menu of iconoclasm and congregationalism. Along with Eaton, the only other clergyman known to have been involved with the Cheshire anti-episcopal petitioning 40 Peers, pastors and the particular church campaigns of early 1641 was a cousin of Sir William Brereton, probably a Lancastrian curate named John Brereton, who had preached against Aston’s petition at Neston.26 Similarly, whilst some forty-eight of Cheshire’s gentry had distanced themselves from Aston in an ‘Attestation’ submitted to the Commons on 22
1640s, the latters’ appropriation of texts produced by New England congregationalists to defend their desired national church settlement in England demonstrated the fundamental distance between them. The Dissenting Brethren wanted a national settlement that comprised voluntary participation of gathered congregations in national synods. The Scots could not comprehend how a 89 Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic nation could uphold the duties, rights and responsibilities of a covenanted people if the majority were excluded from access to the preaching
invariably informed their view of Hutchinson. Sharpe suggests that Hutchinson’s witchcraft scepticism was the result of two things: his desire to distance himself from a belief system increasingly considered by the elite as part of vulgar, popular culture; and his disinclination to view the universe as a place where immaterial forces regularly impinged on the day-to-day workings of the temporal world. Bostridge, on the other hand, 4 Salient examples of this can be found in Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and
leads me to challenge the legitimisation of theoretically abstract modes of knowing Finding the words 37 by developing a claim for ‘responsive ethnography’.2 By this I mean a practice of reflexive knowledge production, in which the researcher learns about themselves and others, through exploring closeness and distance in their relationships within and beyond the field. As I trace how I underwent this process, I identify a turning point in relation to the workings of my own surname in my fieldwork; I show how this exposed my deep implication with my research
the Prussian rule in the Rhine province from 1815 onwards, the cultural distance of many civil servants from the many customs of the Rhine area help explain the reason for numerous bans and prejudices. Lack of cultural comprehension could culminate in accusations of superstition by the new rulers. 41 They were not at all used to such Rhineland and Westphalian customs as the Gänsereiten or Gänsehauen , which concerned the
