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The sexual lives of religious youth and young adults have been an increasing topic of interest since the rise of abstinence-only education and attendant programs in many religious institutions. But while we know a lot about individual-level rates of sexual behavior, far less is known about how religious organizations shape and mediate sexuality. We draw on data from observations with youth and young adult ministries and interviews with religious young adults and adult leaders from Muslim, Hindu, and Protestant Christian groups in order to examine how religious adults in positions of organizational authority work to manage the gender and sexual developments in the transition to adulthood among their youth. We find three distinct organizational styles across the various religious traditions: avoidance through gender segregation, self-restraint supplemented with peer surveillance, and a classed disengagement. In each of these organizational responses, gender and sexuality represent something that must be explained and controlled in the process of cultivating the proper adult religious disposition. The paper examines how religious congregations and other religious organizations oriented toward youth, work to manage the gender and sexual developments in their youth’s transitions to adulthood. The paper draws from a larger project that is studying the lived processes of religious transmission between generations.

Data were extracted from (a) ethnographic observations of youth programming at religious organizations; (b) ethnographicobservations with families during their religious observances; (c) interviews with adult leaders of youth ministry programs. The sample includes Protestant Christian, Muslim, and Hindu organizations and families.

The paper presents three organizational approaches toward managing sex and instilling appropriate gender ideas: (a) prescribed avoidance, in which young men and women are segregated in many religious and educational settings and encouraged to moderate any cross-gender contact in public; (b) self-restraint supplemented with peer surveillance, in which young people are repeatedly encouraged not only to learn to control themselves through internal moral codes but also to enlist their peers to monitor each other’s conduct and call them to account for violations of those codes; and (c) “classed” disengagement, in which organizations comprised of highly educated, middle-class families do little to address sex directly, but treat it as but one aspect of developing individual ethical principles that will assist their educational and class mobility.

While the comparative sample in this paper is a strength, other religious traditions than the ones studied may have other practices. The ethnographic nature of the research provides in-depth understandings of the organizational practices, but cannot comment on how representative these practices are across regions, organizations, or faiths.

Most studies of religion and youth sex and sexuality either rely on individual-level data from surveys, or study the discourses and ideologies found in books, movies, and the like. They do not study the “mechanisms,” in either religious organizations or families, through which messages are communicated and enacted. Our examination of organizational and familial practices shows sex and gender communication in action. Further, most existing research has focused on Christians, wherein we have a comparative sample of Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.

Communal violence requires a prior existence of radicalism. The chapter shows that the degree of extremism of one group can increase or decrease in response to that of the other. Lootable wealth unambiguously raises radicalism. It is not the absolute level of income but the difference between peacetime income and that of conflict periods that determines the magnitude of radicalism.

In the context of social sustainability, characterization of sustainable development embroils a process of growth not only without social disruption but also without the involvement of any severe risk of environmental collapse of the ecosystem. Economic, social, and environmental aspects in an interactive setup determine the different dimensions of sustainability. In this backdrop, this chapter focuses on the dimensions of social sustainability of the development process – particularly with an eye on the determining factors of social tension resulting in social disruption which in turn become noticeable through violent forms of different types of crime – homicides (murder), property-related crimes (dacoity, robbery, burglary, and theft), and riots. Although the occurrences of such crimes in an indicator of weakness in the law and order of the state, one needs to evaluate the significant role played by various types of deprivation and discrimination. This study attempts to find out the role played by economic deprivation for the incidence of such crimes in the presence of infrastructural and socioeconomic developmental factors. This analysis is performed in the context of India using generalized method of moments (GMM) structure with panel data of 16 major Indian states from 2005 to 2016.

India's dynamic turn toward globalization brings new eating practices driven by desires for status and convenience. Traditional expectations of women as keepers of domestic culture persist as fears of a possible loss of Indianness are projected onto women. In the reflexive identity processes of urban middle-class Hindu women, new normative beauty ideals are often impossible to attain, resulting in Western-style food-related health problems. Awareness of these risks may be deflected by matrimonial, body image, and time pressures, as depicted in a preliminary model of food globalization and women's identities.

Resistances of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGO) to the construction of gendered religious nationalism are addressed. The implications of such resistances and redefinitions of gendered religious nationalism for the women’s movement in India and transnationally are also assessed.

Semi-structured interviews with leaders and/or key informants of purposively selected organizations in the state of Gujarat serve as the primary data for the chapter. Using a grounded theory approach, the study is a qualitative analysis of the interviews and a reading of major published documents, unpublished reports, and internal reports of the NGOs that were made available.

The analysis discerns three main frames deployed by NGOs in resisting attempts by the state to construct nationalism: Communal Harmony (Not Communal Violence), “Endangered” Woman and Gender Mainstreaming. The “communal harmony, not communal violence” frame views women as an ungendered part of their communities. Although women are made central to the religious violence and struggle, they are viewed as passive persons without rights. This passive frame is the “endangered woman” frame. But women’s groups and NGOs addressing the violence have actively sought to emphasize the gender aspect of all formal and informal political activities. This is the “gender mainstreaming” frame. However, the mere visibility of women in political discourse should not be confused with the feminist framing of women’s rights or mainstreaming women’s issues.

The analysis brings an organizational agency perspective to consider resistance to the gendered basis of the violence perpetrated and embedded in nationalism.

While internal wars have acquired a new lease of life in the post-Cold War era and the capacity of the states has become limited thanks to globalization, non-state actors are seen to play an increasingly important role in handling and mitigating them. The paper focuses on four such interventions in contemporary India ranging from (a) parties themselves striving hard for bringing the conflicts to an end and (b) “third party” acting as a mediator to (c) both armed and unarmed interventions of organized nature and (d) initiatives individuals take while trying to resolve them. Not all such interventions are necessarily civil society interventions for the latter aim not only at ending conflicts but ending them in a way that establishes the principles of rights, justice, and democracy.

The relationship between religious belief and spousal choice in Nepal is examined, looking at how the importance that individuals place on their own religious faith influences their decision either to allow their parents and other relatives to arrange a marriage for them or to initiate their own love marriage. How the importance attached to religious faith within the individual’s family and neighborhood affects this decision, and how education modifies the relationship between religion and spousal choice are also looked at.

Ordinary least squares regression models are used to examine the relationship between spousal choice and key independent variables. Interaction terms are used to examine how education may moderate the relationship between personal, family, and neighborhood religious salience and spousal choice.

It is found that the effect of one’s neighbors’ faith operates differently based on one’s own level of education. The “moral communities” thesis is used to theorize that in neighborhoods where religion is regarded as very important, individuals need to expend more effort to maintain respectability, adhering to tradition by having arranged marriages. In neighborhoods where religion is less important, the weaker demands made by the “moral community” render individuals more free to choose their own spouses. For highly educated individuals, the effect of their neighbors’ religious belief is considerably reduced.

As Nepalis become more educated, they not only move out of the sphere of family influence, as discussed in previous research, but also away from being influenced by their neighbors.

Recent years have produced significant demand for geographical contributions to the study of social movements in general and of environmental social movement organizations (ESMOs) in particular. Geographical approaches to the study of ESMOs emphasize “the mediation of social movement agency by place” (Miller, 2000; Routledge, 1993) and call attention to the role of place-based environmental knowledge (EK) in the broader “struggle(s) over meaning” that increasingly constitute environmental politics (Buechler, 1997; Escobar, 1992; Rangan, 2000; Watts, 1990). My chapter responds to this call by providing an examination of the reproduction of EK by antipollution organizations in India’s central Ganges River Basin (GRB). Through interviews with organization leaders and members, along with analysis of organizational websites and publications, I examine the EK of two key antipollution organizations in the GRB: The Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF) and Kanpur Eco-Friends (KEF). Analysis focuses on methods of knowledge reproduction employed by each organization, their respective framing practices, and the localized natures of the EK they reproduce. I argue that each organization works to reproduce a specific and place-based understanding of pollution in the GRB that informs their framing of the pollution problem, the tactical activities in which their members engage, and the power relations that exist between the two organizations and their leaders. Further, I argue that engaging with EK as both a method of understanding pollution and a tactic for consolidating political power is essential to making sense of the relative success of these movement organizations and the challenges they face in trying to build a broader coalition and mass-mobilization against pollution in the Ganges.

This chapter is focused on India's destination marketing strategies that promote religious tourism. It sheds light on the Government of India's initiatives to attract faithful tourists to sacred locations including holy temples and places of interest for spiritual pilgrims. The tourism business in India has gone through numerous phases of growth. This research reveals how the state government and central governments have stepped up their commitment to develop tourism, including religious tourism, on multiple fronts. It confirms that India can be rightly considered as the land of faith, as spirituality and religion are very prominent, as evidenced by its holy temples and landmarks, located in different regions of the subcontinent. In conclusion, it discusses about the challenges for the future, and elaborates on the opportunities related to promoting religious tourism to target faithful pilgrims and other visitors to “Incredible India.”

This chapter shifts contemporary debates on Eurocentrism from its focus on European social theory to an analysis of its moorings in non-Atlantic sociological traditions and especially those within ex-colonial countries. It discusses the sociological/anthropological visions of two first generation sociologists/anthropologists from India, G. S. Ghurye (1893–1983) and D. P. Mukerji (1894–1961), within Orientalist-Eurocentric positions and explores how these are reinvented in the work of contemporary sociologist T. N. Madan (1933–). It suggests that colonial processes and its institutions together with “derivative” nationalist ideas have played and continue to play important mediatory role in organizing these Orientalist-Eurocentric visions.

The chapter presents three sets of arguments. First it suggests that in order to understand postcolonialism it is imperative to lay out the organic links between Orientalism and Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism and its mirror Orientalism mediated to frame social science language in terms of the binaries of universal (the West) and particular (the East). The particular was represented in India through the discipline of anthropology. The latter studied “traditions” through the themes of religion, caste, and family and kinship. When sociology emerged as a discipline in India in the early twentieth century, it continued to use the language organized by anthropology to analyze the particular cultural traditions of the country. Second, I suggest that these binaries also framed nationalist thought and the latter mediated in framing the sociological ideas of G. S. Ghurye and D. P. Mukerji which were embedded in Eurocentric-Orientalist principles. Third, I analyze the ideas of the contemporary social theorist T. N. Madan to indicate how his perspective continues to derive its positions from Orientalist-Eurocentric positions and ignores an engagement with critics who have questioned Orientalist Eurocentrism. Disregarding these arguments implies the legitimation of the latter perspective derived from the disciplines of sociology/anthropology.

The chapter contends that a decolonized critique of colonial social science has existed in other regions of the world including India, and that this perspective needs to be retrieved by social theorists to reformulate the sociological discourse as a study of modern India. It also suggests that contemporary analysis of Eurocentrism needs to move out from within the circuits of knowledge defined by received colonial geopolitical enclaves in order to assess the way production, distribution, and consumption of Orientalist-Eurocentric perspectives have organized sociological traditions across the world including the Global South.