Mackintosh, C.* and Dempsey, C.**(2016) The British Asian Muslim male sport participation puzzle: an exploration of implications for sport development policy and practice.

approximately one quarter of the population is Christian, many of whom claim a religious heritage nearly two thousand years old. This article focuses on a tradition, prevalent in the highly Christianized Kottayam district in Kerala, in which local lore and festivals associate H in d u patron deities and Christian patron saints as siblings. The relationships of these interreligious sacred sibling pairs, described alternately as contrary and cooperative, provide an apt metaphor for the complex com m unal relations between their Christian and H in d u devotee communities. This rela tional ambivalence is challenged, however, by unambiguous religious rhetoric that argues for an irreparable disparity between Christianity and H induism , or else for the negation of the boundaries that distinguish them. As this genre of sacred sibling associ ations presently appears to be on the wane, I also explore the tensions inherent in ethno graphic enthusiasm for, versus native dismissal of, such traditions.

This book is a portrayal of a flourishing Hindu temple in the town of Rush, New York, dedicated to the great south Indian goddess Rājarājeśwarī. Guided by an exuberant Sri Lankan guru known as Aiya, temple practitioners embrace yet definitively break with tradition. Known for its ritual precision and extravagance, the temple and its guru defy convention by training and encouraging non-brahmans and women to publicly perform priestly roles, and by teaching the secrets of Śrīvidyā, a highly exclusive Tantric tradition. Weaving together traditional South Asian tales, temple miracle accounts, and devotional testimonials, the book is organized into three parts reflecting various intersecting worldviews, traditions, and landscapes with which temple practices and participants contend. The book’s first part explores the temple’s emphasis on ritual performance and potency, and the resulting collisions between miraculous and mundane worldviews as experienced and understood by Aiya, temple participants, and the ethnographer-author. Part two explores how Aiya and his students deftly balance convention with non-convention, breaking rules of orthodoxy that make room for leadership and learning, and providing possibilities otherwise unavailable in traditional temple settings. Part three explores the diaspora condition as experienced within the Rush temple context. It chronicles the joys and challenges of negotiating domestic and foreign traditions, and the effects this has on human and divine participants, temple rituals, and the temple terrain itself. In sum, the book argues that in a setting where science illuminates the sacred, where traditional religious practices allow for breaking with the same, and where foreign terrain becomes home turf, the Goddess not only lives, she thrives.

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