Volume 2014, Issue 229 - Special Issue: Language and Religion in Asian Contexts and Texts

Singapore and Malaysia shared a similar history until 1965. They continue to share a similar spread of religions, ethnicities and languages. Even though Chinese are much the largest community in Singapore, and Malays the majority group in Malaysia, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism are widely practised in both, while Malay, English, Tamil and several forms of Chinese are widely spoken – and frequently mixed with each other. To identify the range of perceptions of culture and identity in each society, discussion was observed among an ethnically-diverse focus group of Singaporeans and compared with similar discussion among a group of Malaysians. Discursive analysis was used to examine the construction of religious and ethnic identity emerging from the spoken data. The research focus was not only on the content of the discussions itself but also on the speech strategies employed by the participants. Findings suggest the existence of competing perceptions of what a multicultural society is or should be, not only across different ethnic and religious groups but also between the two countries.

This article compares the discourses on Islam generated by the current and two previous Prime Ministers of Malaysia. As Prime Minister, each of them concurrently held the post of party president of UMNO (United Malays National Organisation) which is the main political party in the coalition government of the country. Political parties in multi-ethnic Malaysia are largely race based parties and members of UMNO are predominantly Muslim Malays. The data are the keynote addresses delivered by the party president at the UMNO General Assembly held annually. As the party president speaks, he expresses the attitudes and ideologies of his own group – Malays, Muslims, political entity, presupposing common values and knowledge of history. The article presents findings on how each speaker makes references to Islam in terms of rhetorical structures of texts, representation of “us” and “them”, and the socio-political changes which result in the production and/or reproduction of discourse and social actions therein. In sum, analysis reveals similarities and differences among the speakers in their references to Islam. As discourse is ideologically motivated and socially produced, structures and references change as the socio-political environment of the nation evolves.

This article is a comparative study of language choice and religious identities of three Singapore weekend madrasahs. The article reveals how language choice or the medium of instruction, be it Arabic, Malay or English, may directly influence or is intricately connected to religious identities as manifested in an array of classroom semiotics and pedagogical practices. The methodology used includes ethnographic research methods ranging from field notes, participant observations and audio and video tapes to interviews with pupils, teachers and parents.

The American-born Stone-Campbell Movement, particularly its ecclesiastical offshoot, the Church/es of Christ, is one of the religious projects which were exported to the Philippines along with the U.S.A.'s colonial mission in Asia. Operating on a “restorationist” theological framework, it seeks a return to a “New Testament Christianity” uncorrupted by denominationalism. This article proposes that the Church of Christ version of restorationism demonstrates the nature of discourse, in the Foucauldian sense – i.e., totalizing and regulative set of pronouncements and practices which provides for its own subversion and overthrow. It attempts to show how, in its interface with the culture of the Igorots of Northern Philippines, it assumes a form of cultural imperialism which marginalizes the indigenous while spelling its own alienation with its West-centric orientation and ecclesiocentric language. The study is framed not only by its appropriation of Foucault's notion of discourse and of several Filipino missiologists' concept of “indigenized/contextualized theology,” but also by the author's former subjection to the religious discourse under question. It joins the call for a continuous interrogation of Western religious discourses imposed upon or co-opted by Philippine and other Asian societies with the end view of fostering interethnic dialogue and understanding between and among Asian and non-Asian cultures.

This article aims to investigate the use of metaphors in selected Tamil hymns for Lord Shiva in one of his cosmic manifestations or murtis . The wisdom of life is communicated through the dance of the Lord and the use of metaphors in religious Saiva hymns invoke the reader/devotee to relate to the Lord's actions of creation, conservation, destruction, concealment and illumination. The article first discusses the multimodal visual metaphor of the dance form of the Lord and then gives a pragmatic analysis of the use of temporal and location metaphors in hymns or tevaram by the poet-saints or nayanmars . The article contends that there is a “slippage” between speaker (poet-saints') meaning and sentence meaning. The canonical literature becomes “meaningful” to the reader or devotee with the inclusion of emotional content that relates to the authority of the religious canon and its meaning. Findings reveal a particular narrative pattern in the tevaram and the use of metaphors explicates the devotion or bakhti of the poet-saints to the Lord.

This article discusses the meaning of death in Kenkō Yoshida's Tsurezuregusa [Essays in idleness], completed around 1330 at the end of the Kamakura Period (1185–1333). Kenkō, who was a Buddhist monk and hermit, naturally construed the concept of death in terms of the impermanence of the world. Taking Lakoffian conceptual metaphor theory, in which death is understood as an abstract category, as a jumping-off point, I contrast the Buddhist conception of death with different conceptualizations of metaphor and metonymy by contemporary scholars to locate the notion of “death” in the medieval linguistic context. I claim that while death in Essays in idleness is more frequently considered non-literal, it is not interpretable metaphorically. This hints at an alternative, namely, that Kenkō's concept of death is created metonymically. Impermanence as a literary aesthetic thus crystallizes in the form of death as a syntagmatic metonym.

The current article is an investigation into language in a narrative religious text, specifically how the semiotic resource of language is used to construct meanings in relation to language and religion. The religious text chosen for the study comes from two retold versions of the world's largest story, “the most cherished of all Indian classics, the Mahabharata” (Dharma 1998: 1). The article will attempt to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the elements of generic/schematic structure in the text? (2) How are the elements of generic/schematic structure related to language? (3) How is language used to bring out the various religious themes in the texts? The generic/schematic structure shows that the story chapters appear to have been organized the same way. The discourse phases are signaled by two incidents, two complications, two reactions and two resolutions in the story. Ideational meanings are embodied in both congruent and metaphoric ways. Catenative verbs are used to form a chain of events. Mood and comment adjuncts are used to provide interpersonal meanings of appraisal and judgment. Textual adjuncts are used to provide thematic prominence and contribute to the semantic continuity of the text whereas circumstantial adjuncts of time, place and manner serve to enhance the meanings expressed by choice of process types and participants. In the story certain actions acquire symbolic meanings. It is through these symbolic meanings that religious, cultural and spiritual ideologies come to be construed. Examples of symbolic meanings explicated from the texts are the depiction of Ganga's divinity, the curses and blessings of a sage and how religious merit is obtained. Detailed analysis of the role of language in expressing meanings related to sacrifice, renunciation and the fulfillment of vows in religious discourse may enhance cross-cultural understanding and may be of interest to language practitioners and spiritualists.