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Introduction : disconnected people and the lonely society -- Subjectivity and empathy -- Too lonely to die alone : internet group suicide -- Connecting the disconnected : suicide websites -- Meaning in life : exploring the need to be needed among young Japanese -- Surviving 3.11 -- The anatomy of resilience -- What loneliness can teach us.
Naikan is a Japanese psychotherapeutic method which combines meditation-like body engagement with the recovery of memory and the reconstruction of one's autobiography in order to bring about healing and a changed notion of the self. Based on original anthropological fieldwork, this fascinating book provides a detailed ethnography of Naikan in practice. In addition, it discusses key issues such as the role of memory, autobiography and narrative in health care, and the interesting borderland between religion and therapy, where Naikan occupies an ambiguous position. Multidisciplinary in its approach, it will attract a wide readership, including students of social and cultural anthropology, medical sociology, religious studies, Japanese studies and psychotherapy.
Through arresting narratives we meet a woman aiding refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, facing the chaos of a meaningless society and a doctor trying to stay alive during Mao's cultural revolution - individuals challenged by their societies and caught up in existential moral experiences that define what it means to be human.
Spacious Minds argues that resilience is not a mere absence of suffering. Sara E. Lewis's research reveals how those who cope most gracefully may indeed experience deep pain and loss. Looking at the Tibetan diaspora, she challenges perspectives that liken resilience to the hardiness of physical materials, suggesting people should "bounce back" from adversity. More broadly, this ethnography calls into question the tendency to use trauma as an organizing principle for all studies of conflict where suffering is understood as an individual problem rooted in psychiatric illness. Beyond simply articulating the ways that Tibetan categories of distress are different from biomedical ones, Spacious Mi...
Most young students of American culture believe many of the cultural assumptions they grow up with are universal. As insiders, speaking a common language, following the accepted patterns of behavior embedded in a particular way of life, most of us take our own social actions for granted, and it is a challenge to realize the strangeness and wonder of our own behaviors. The distinct aim of each edition of this popular classroom supplement has been to enable students to better understand themselves by casting American culture into sharper relief—offering other mirrors, other reflections. The latest edition’s twenty-one personalized narratives, of which seven are new, unveil fresh portrayals of American culture. Each contribution offers unique ethnographic perspectives of various aspects of American culture that enable us to better understand ourselves.
Practical theology has outgrown its traditional pastoral paradigm. The articles in this handbook recognize that faith, spirituality, and lived religion, within and beyond institutional communities, refer to realms of cultures, ritual practices, and symbolic orders, whose boundaries are not clearly defined and whose contents are shifting. The International Handbook of Practical Theology offers insightful transcultural conceptions of religion and religious matters gathered from various cultures and traditions of faith. The first section presents ‘concepts of religion’. Chapters have to do with considerations of the conceptualizing of religion in the fields of ‘anthropology’, ‘communi...
This book explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective. It sheds new light on a problem central in modern Western thought. Yuasa shows that Eastern philosophy has generally formulated its view of mind-body unity as an achievement a state to be acquired—rather than as essential or innate. Depending on the individual's own developmental state, the mind-body connection can vary from near dissociation to almost perfect integration. Whereas Western mind-body theories have typically asked what the mind-body is, Yuasa asks how the mind-body relation varies on a spectrum from the psychotic to the yogi, from the debilitated to the athletic, from the awkward novice to the master musician....
Frequently in partnership, but sometimes at odds, religious institutions and public health institutions work to improve the well-being of their communities. There is increasing awareness among public health professionals and the general public that the social conditions of poverty, lack of education, income inequality, poor working conditions, and experiences of discrimination play a dominant role in determining health status. But this broad view of the social determinants of health has largely ignored the role of religious practices and institutions in shaping the life conditions of billions around the globe. In Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health, leading scholars in the soci...
These essays bring together disciplinary understandings of what it is to be the bodies we are. In its own way, each essay calls into question certain culturally-embedded ways of valuing the body which deride or ignore its role in making us human. These ways have remained virtually unchanged since Descartes in the seventeenth century first sharply divided mind—a thinking substance, from the body—an extended substance. The legacy of this Cartesian metaphysics has been to reduce the body by turns to a static assemblage of parts and to a dumb show of movement. It has both divided the fundamental integrity of creaturely life and depreciated the role of the living body in knowing and making se...
Exploring how depression has become a national disease in Japan, this work shows how psychiatry has responded to the nation's ailing social order & how, in a remarkable transformation, the discipline has begun to overcome longstanding resistance to its intrusion in Japanese life.