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Universalism Without Uniformity
In their volume Universalism without Uniformity, anthropologists Julia Cassaniti and Usha Menon bring together a set of distinguished papers to address the interconnections between culture and mind. As the title suggests, they seek to understand how one can conceive of a shared humanity while also doing justice to cross-cultural psychological diversity. The chapters investigate topics such as emotion, identity, mental health, and conflict, among others. Through the construction of a new approach that focuses squarely on the interrelationship of culture and mind, this volume questions old, entrenched disciplinary assumptions. Geared toward students of anthropology, psychology, and ethnic studies, Universalism without Uniformity seeks to uncover the intricate connections and mechanisms of psyche and culture.
The Spirit Is Moving: New Pathways in Pneumatology
The work of the Spirit of God is a vibrant and much discussed topic in many contemporary Christian communities worldwide. Apparently, the Spirit is moving. Theological reflection on this phenomenon has even given rise to what is often called a ‘pneumatological renaissance’. This volume not only takes stock of these remarkable developments, but also probes some of their hidden aspects and highlights avenues for future exploration. It contains a wide-ranging but coherent assortment of essays, covering the five relations of the Holy Ghost distinguished already in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: how does the Spirit of God relate to the Bible, to the Christ, to the human person, to the c...
Assigning Responsibility for Children’s Health When Parents and Authorities Disagree: Whose Child?
This book provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the potential conflict between a government’s duty to protect children and a parent(s)’ right to raise children in a manner they see fit. Using philosophical, bioethical, and legal analysis, the author engages with key scholars in pediatric decision-making and individual and religious rights theory. Going beyond the parent-child dyad, the author is deeply concerned both with the inteests of the broader society and with the appropriate limits of government interference in the private sphere. The text offers a balance of individual and population interests, maximizing liberty but safeguarding against harm. Bioethics and law professors will...
Living Buddhism
In Living Buddhism, Julia Cassaniti explores Buddhist ideas of impermanence, nonattachment, and intention as they are translated into everyday practice in contemporary Thailand. Although most lay people find these philosophical concepts difficult to grasp, Cassaniti shows that people do in fact make an effort to comprehend them and integrate them as guides for their everyday lives. In doing so, she makes a convincing case that complex philosophical concepts are not the sole property of religious specialists and that ordinary lay Buddhists find in them a means for dealing with life's difficulties. More broadly, the book speaks to the ways that culturally informed ideas are part of the psychol...
The Avatar Faculty
The Avatar Faculty creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic second selves—avatars—can play in our lives. The use of avatars can allow for what anthropologists call ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning "standing outside oneself." The archaic techniques of promoting spiritual ecstasy, which remain central to religious healing traditions around the world, now also have contemporary analogues in virtual worlds found on the internet. In this innovative book, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass argues that avatars allow for the ecstatic projection of consciousness into alternate realities, potentially providing both the spiritually possessed and gamers access to superior secondary identities with elevated social standing. Even if only temporary, self-transformations of these kinds can help reduce psychosocial stress and positively improve health and well-being.
Religion and Spirituality Across Cultures
This book presents an integrated review and critical analysis of the recent research in the positive psychology of religion, with focus on the positive psychology of religion across different cultures and religions. The book provides a review of the literature on different contributions of religion and spirituality to positive functioning and well-being and reviews religions across the world, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, Native American religions, and Hinduism. It fills a unique place in the market’s increasing interest and demand in the psychology of religion, as well as positive psychology. While the target audience is researchers, scholars, and students in psychology, cross-cultural studies, religious studies, and social sciences, it will be useful for anyone interested in better understanding the contributions of religion and culture in subjective well-being.
Ontologies of Rock Art
Ontologies of Rock Art is the first publication to explore a wide range of ontological approaches to rock art interpretation, constituting the basis for groundbreaking studies on Indigenous knowledges, relational metaphysics, and rock imageries. The book contributes to the growing body of research on the ontology of images by focusing on five main topics: ontology as a theoretical framework; the development of new concepts and methods for an ontological approach to rock art; the examination of the relationships between ontology, images, and Indigenous knowledges; the development of relational models for the analysis of rock images; and the impact of ontological approaches on different rock a...
Fire Dancers in Thailand's Tourism Industry
Fire Dancers in Thailand's Tourism Industry explores the evolution of fire dancing from informal community jam sessions into the iconic, tourist-oriented performances at beach parties and bars, through a close consideration of the role of affect in the lives of fire dancers in the ever-changing scene. Rather than pursuing the common notion that tourism industries are exploitative enterprises that oppress workers, Tiffany Rae Pollock centers the perspectives of fire artists themselves, who view the industry as simultaneously generative and destructive. Dancers reveal how they employ affect to navigate their lives, art, and labor in this context, showcasing how affect is not only a force that acts on people but also is used and shaped by social actors toward their own ends. Fire Dancers in Thailand's Tourism Industry highlights men as affective laborers, investigating how they manage the eroticization of their identities and the intersections of art and labor in tourist economies. Exploring moments of performance and everyday life, Pollock examines how fire artists reimagine their labor, lives, and communities in Thailand's tourism industry.
Engaging Evil
Anthropologists have expressed wariness about the concept of evil even in discussions of morality and ethics, in part because the concept carries its own cultural baggage and theological implications in Euro-American societies. Addressing the problem of evil as a distinctly human phenomenon and a category of ethnographic analysis, this volume shows the usefulness of engaging evil as a descriptor of empirical reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.
Traumatic Pasts in Asia
In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.
