From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage
Author: Véronique Altglas File Type: pdf Religious exoticism implies a deeply ambivalent relationship to otherness and to religion itself traditional religious teachings are uprooted and fragmented in order to be appropriated as practical methods for personal growth. Western contemporary societies have seen the massive popularization of such exotic religious resources as yoga and meditation, Shamanism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah. Veronique Altglas shows that these trends inform us about how religious resources are disseminated globally, as well as how the self is constructed in society. She uses two case studies the Hindu-based movements in France and Britain that started in the 1970s, and the Kabbalah Centre in France, Britain, Brazil, and Israel. She draws upon major qualitative and cross-cultural empirical investigations to conceptualize religious exoticism and offer a nuanced and original understanding of its contemporary significance. From Yoga to Kabbalah broadens scholarly understanding of the globalization of religion, how religions are modified through cultural encounters, and of religious life in neoliberal societies. **
Author: David Ciarlo
File Type: pdf
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Germany made the move towards colonialism, with the first German protectorates in Africa. At the same time, Germany was undergoing the transformation to a mass consumer society. As Ciarlo shows, these developments grew along with one another, as the earliest practices of advertising drew legitimacy from the colonial project, and around the turn of the century, commercial imagery spread colonial visions to a mass audience. Arguing that visual commercial culture was both reflective and constitutive of changing colonial relations and of racial hierarchies, Advertising Empire constructs what one might call a genealogy of black bodies in German advertising. At the core of the manuscript is the identification of visual tropes associated with black bodies in German commercial culture, ranging from colonial and ethnographic exhibits, to poster art, to advertising. Stereotypical images of black bodies in advertising coalesced, the manuscript argues, in the aftermath of uprisings against German colonial power in Southwest and East Africa in the early 20th century. As Advertising Empire shows for Germany, commercial imagery of racialized power relations simplified the complexities of colonial power relations. It enshrined the inferiority of blacks as compared to whites as one key image associated with the birth of mass consumer society.
Author: Despo Kritsotaki
File Type: pdf
This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under aCC BY 4.0license at link.springer.com **From the Back Cover This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under aCC BY 4.0license at link.springer.com About the Author Despo Kritsotaki is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Crete, Greece. Vicky Long is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British History at Newcastle University, UK. Matthew Smith is Professor of Health History at the University of Strathclyde, UK.
Author: C. Vann Woodward
File Type: pdf
Between the era of Americas landmark antebellum compromises and that of the Compromise of 1877, a war had intervened, destroying the integrity of the Southern system but failing to determine the New Souths relation to the Union. While it did not restore the old order in the South, or restore the South to parity with the Union, it did lay down the political foundations for reunion, bring Reconstruction to an end, and shape the future of four million freedmen.Originally published in 1951, this classic work by one of Americas foremost experts on Southern history presents an important new interpretation of the Compromise, forcing historians to revise previous attitudes towards the Reconstruction period, the history of the Republican party, and the realignment of forces that fought the Civil War. Because much of the negotiating occurred in secrecy, historians have known less about this Compromise than others before it. Now reissued with a new introduction by Woodward, Reunion and Reaction gives us the other half of the story.ReviewOnce or twice in every generation a historian has the patience and enterprise to return to some supposedly established conception of our past, carve away a long-standing mistinterpretation, and expose a part of the true surface....Woodward has done exactly that, and I believe he has provided us with one of the major historical insights of our time.--Richard Hofstadter, Columbia UniversityIn this eminently readable volume Woodward has made a major contribution to our understanding of Southern interests and issues. His penetrating and provocative analysis of this most far-reaching compromise of our national history indicates clearly the inadequacy and superficiality of long accepted myths. And it provides us with important insights into the realities of contemporary Southern and national politics. This is history as it should be written--and read.--R.D. Heffner, The NationAn important book, and a work of live scholarship.--The New YorkerWoodward must be given credit for bringing together the story in a superb bit of historical craftmanship....A convincing account, with a detectives skill and keen sense of the meaning of small leads and an understanding of the larger aspects of history.--E.M. Coulter, Saturday Review of LiteratureA magnificent book....This circumstantial account of the inner workings of the Compromise that ended Reconstruction reads like a detective story.--Rupert B. Vance, University of North CarolinaA fresh, vital thing, full-bodied, incisive, revealing. At long last we know all the unsavory details.--Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political SciencesAn illuminating and thorough study....[Woodward] writes political history with an appreciation of its drama, excitement, and larger meaning.--Library JournalAbout the AuthorC. Vann Woodward is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel, The Battle for Leyte Gulf, Origins of the New South, The Burden of Southern History, and The Future of the Past.
Author: Slavoj Žižek
File Type: epub
What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isnt a platitude that weve heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliche and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions. When Lacan described Hegel as the most sublime hysteric, he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Others desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come.This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.
Author: Ken Wilber
File Type: epub
Here is a collection of writings that bridges the gap between science and religion. Quantum Questions collects the mystical writings of each of the major physicists involved in the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck. The selections are written in nontechnical language and will be of interest to scientists and nonscientists alike.
Author: Elizabeth MacFarlane
File Type: pdf
Just as J. M. Coetzees post-2003 books present essays and narrative alongside one another, this book engages with its ideas through both critical and creative writing. Reading Coetzee interleaves critical essays on Coetzees works with an autobiographical narrative detailing MacFarlanes more personal response to her reading and writing. The presentation of elements of the creative with the critical, and the critical within the creative, aims to challenge the traditional boundary between the two. This kind of methodology derives from the idea (and practice) of embodiment that an idea or philosophy does not float free, but is tied to the idiosyncrasies, divergences, and subjective travel of its speaker or writer. Coetzees Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year explicitly address themes which abide more surreptitiously throughout his oeuvre the divisions and paradoxes which occur the moment pen gains page, the value of literature, and the ethics of embodiment. In revealing the dialogue between writer-self and reader-self, and between author and character, these recent novels invite a rereading of Coetzees previous literature. Reading Coetzee explores Coetzees preoccupation with the act of writing using his recent books as a lens through which to view his eight previous novels as well as his memoirs and essays. **
Author: Alexander Medcalf
File Type: pdf
This book explores the phenomenal resources dedicated to understanding and encouraging passengers to consume travel from 1900 to 1939, analysing how place and travel were presented for sale. Using the Great Western Railway as a chief case study, as well as a range of its competitors both on and off the rails, Alexander Medcalf unravels the complex and ever-changing processes behind corporate sales communications. This volume analyses exactly how the company pictured passengers in the countryside, at the seaside, in the urban landscape and in the companys vehicles. This thematic approach brings transport and business history thoroughly in line with tourism and leisure history as well as studies in visual culture. **About the Author Alexander Medcalf is Research Fellow for the Department of History at the University of York, UK.
Author: David H. Wenkel
File Type: pdf
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus promised his disciples kingship and thrones of judgment at the Last Supper. Many commentators have long seen this as a totally futuristic promise that is unrelated to the book of Acts. David H. Wenkel argues that the Twelve inaugurated their co-regency with Christ in the events surrounding Pentecost. This study begins by situating the material of Luke-Acts within the framework of Jewish inaugurated eschatology. It then argues that the kingship promised to the disciples has begun to be fulfilled in the book of Acts. This explains why it was so critically important to replace Judas with Matthias and re-establish the Twelve. It is a step toward re-framing the whole relationship between Luke and Acts within inaugurated eschatology.