Professor Geoffrey Parrinder has been a founder of the modern discipline of Religious Studies, and one of its most distinguished exponents. His work in African Traditional Religion has been especially significant. He was the first person to create a regular course in African Traditional Religion at university level, and taught many of those who have developed his insights further.He has also made distinguished contributions in the field of Indian Religions. His controversial interpretation of Buddhism as a religion is still underestimated. He started his career as a Methodist missionary, then became a teacher in Nigeria and finally taught at King's College London, where he had a personal chair. A Christian theologian, he nevertheless has sought, and to a remarkable extent has succeeded, in interpreting the faith of others in an impartial and fair-minded way.He will be remembered as one of the twentieth century's most distinguished scholars of Religious Studies.
Martin Forward
Martin Forward has taught Islam at the universities of Leicester, Bristol and Cambridge. At present, he is Academic Dean at Wesley House, Cambridge. He teaches Jewish Christian Relations in Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity, of which he is a member. He is the author of Muhammad: A Short Biography (Oxford, Oneworld, 1997). He also edited Ultimate Visions (Oxford, Oneworld, 1995), a collection of essays by distinguished scholars of Religious Studies from many faiths, who explain why they believe what they do.
Editorial Reviews
 | “Beautifully written and creatively argued, The Goddess in the Mirror presents an original perspective on beauty work that takes us beyond predictable and reductionist framings of the subject. Tulasi Srinivas’s moving ethnography innovatively tracks how Hindu myths and stories that customers and workers narrate offer paths to becoming.”
—Purnima Mankekar, coauthor of The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City
|
| “The work of beauty lends itself to philosophical speculation and to a sociology of neoliberal self-making. But the odor, press, shimmer, and grit of the bodies, relations, myths, and techniques assembling the contemporary life beautiful has seldom been as palpable as in Tulasi Srinivas’ The Goddess in the Mirror. A stunning ethnographic achievement that leads its reader through the challenge and complexity of gendered recognition via situations comic, luminous, and horrifying.”
—Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, The Bad Family, and Other Modern Things
|
| “[T]his is a valuable and nuanced book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle. In terms of disciplinary impact, The Goddess in the Mirror may well become a touchstone for integrating aesthetic and affective dimensions into analyses of power.”
—Gunjan Shekhawat, LSE Review of Books
|
Books of related interest