Drawing on first person accounts, Asia in the Making of Christianity studies conversion in the lives of Christians throughout Asia, past and present. Fifteen contributors treat perennial questions about conversion: continuity and discontinuity, conversion and communal conflict, and the politics of conversion. Some study individuals (An Chunggŭn of Korea, Liang Fa of China, Nehemiah Goreh of India), while others treat ethnolinguistic groups or large-scale movements. Converts sometimes appear as proto-nationalists, while others are suspected of cultural treason. Some transition...

Embedded Entrepreneurship examines the importance of cultural meaning in the creation and utilization of economic value. Based on case-studies from Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, the authors demonstrate that micro-scale entrepreneurship is intertwined with prevailing conceptions, moralities and habituations in the entrepreneurs' social milieu. More specifically, the volume argues that meaning-making is integral to economic opportunity; that economic actors' market agency is shaped by cultural experiences; that entrepreneurs' prototypical "individualism" is socially...

In Migration as Transnational Leisure: The Japanese Lifestyle Migrants in Australia Jun Nagatomo discusses a new type of migration in which "lifestyle" is at the core of middle class aspirations to migrate. Traditionally, international migration has been commonly seen as resulting from economic, political and religious causes. However, this book studies an intriguing new dynamic between the social transformation and the Japanese engagement with tourism and migration. Since the 1990s, when Japan was struggling with the recession, increasing numbers of young middle class Japanese began...

Using the potential of place as an approach and of places as ethnographic contexts, the authors in this volume investigate the multiple entanglements of 'religion' and 'modernity' in contemporary settings. The guiding questions of such an approach are: How are modernity and religion spatially articulated in and through places? How do these articulations help us to understand the ways in which religion becomes socially and culturally significant in modern contexts? And how do they reveal the ways in which modernity unfolds within religion? Thus, places are not only understood as neutral...

Based upon a survey of five faith-based volunteer groups, Promising Practices offers valuable insights and fresh perspectives into the ways women’s participation in religious civic organizations may work as a gateway toward participatory democracy. By approaching women’s faith-based volunteering as a social practice, the book engages with three of the most important dimensions of civil society: gender, religion, and democracy. Cavaliere teases out the complexity of interactions among these three dimensions of civic life through stories of individual women who volunteer for three different...