Buddhism in the West (North America and Europe)

Buddhism ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Mitchell ◽  
Thomas Calobrisi

The study of Buddhism in the West is built on the pioneering work of a handful of scholars in the mid-1970s. These individuals were bold enough to take the subject seriously within a reluctant academic discipline. Charles Prebish’s American Buddhism (1979) set the standard and many terms of debate for the decades to come. The field has grown considerably, despite a perceived lack of methodological sophistication (see Numrich 2008, cited under General Overviews). Scholars in this area generally approach the subject from one of three directions: area studies (Buddhism in the United States, Buddhism in France, etc.), something of a reverse area studies (e.g., Japanese Buddhism in the United States, Theravada in Britain), or topical studies (e.g., ritual studies, immigration and ethnicity, Buddhism and psychology). The most wide-reaching debates in the field generally revolve around questions of identification or classification and can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. For example, some question what “the West” is meant to signify, placing their research squarely in the context of postcolonial studies, transnational studies, or the construction of Buddhist modernism (McMahan 2002, cited under Ch’an, Zen, Sŏn). Others, such as Tweed 2002 (cited under Matters of Identity), recognize the difficulty of defining what constitutes a Western Buddhist when Buddhist culture has so thoroughly permeated the broader cultural milieu. Serving as a backdrop to these issues has been the wide-ranging and perennial debate regarding the “two Buddhisms” typology that, over the years since Prebish coined the phrase in 1979, has been considered, reconsidered, rearticulated, expanded to three Buddhisms, and renamed in a variety of ways. This article reflects these methodological approaches and topical debates, and it includes relevant sources from postcolonial studies, ritual studies, and engaged Buddhism. As mentioned, “the West” as an area of study is itself somewhat contested. Is the West limited to areas dominated by European culture? Do we extend this category to Australia and Oceania? For the sake of brevity, this article focuses on North America and Europe.

Comic book studies has developed as a solid academic discipline, becoming an increasingly vibrant and field in the United States and globally. A growing number of dissertations, monographs, and edited books publish every year on the subject, while world comics represent the fastest-growing sector of publishing. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies examines the history and evolution of the visual narrative genre from a global perspective, bringing together readable, jargon-free essays written by established and emerging scholars from diverse geographic, institutional, gender, and national backgrounds. In particular, the Handbook explores how the term “global comics” has been defined, as well the major movements and trends that drive the field. Each essay will help readers understand comic books as a storytelling form grown within specific communities, and will also show how these forms exist within what can be considered a world system of comics.


1993 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 1064-1080 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Bollinger ◽  
M. C. Chapman ◽  
M. S. Sibol

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between earthquake magnitude and the size of damage areas in the eastern and western United States. To quantify damage area as a function of moment magnitude (M), 149 MMI VI and VII areas for 109 earthquakes (88 in the western United States, 21 in the eastern United States and Canada) were measured. Regression of isoseismal areas versus M indicated that areas in the East were larger than those in the West, at both intensity levels, by an average 5 × in the M 4.5 to 7.5 range. In terms of radii for circles of equivalent area, these results indicate that damaging ground motion from shocks of the same magnitude extend 2 × the epicentral distance in eastern North America compared to the West. To determine source and site parameters consistent with the above results, response spectral levels for eastern North America were stochastically simulated and compared with response spectral ordinates derived from recorded strong ground motion data in the western United States. Stress-drop values of 200 bars, combined with a surficial 2-km-thick low velocity “sedimentary” layer over rock basement, produced results that are compatible with the intensity observations, i.e., similar response spectral levels in the east at approximately twice their epicentral distance in the western U.S. distance. These results suggest that ground motion modeling in eastern North America may need to incorporate source and site parameters different from those presently in general use. The results are also of importance to eastern U.S. hazard assessments as they require allowance for the larger damage areas in preparedness and mitigation programs.


Author(s):  
Warren Buckland

Since the 1960s, film theory has undergone rapid development as an academic discipline—to such an extent that students new to the subject are quickly overwhelmed by the extensive and complex research published under its rubric. “Film Theory in the United States and Europe” presents a broad overview of guides to and anthologies of film theory, followed by a longer section that presents an historical account of film theory’s development—from classical film theory of the 1930s–1950s (focused around film as an art), the modern (or contemporary) film theory of the 1960s–1970s (premised on semiotics, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis), to current developments, including the New Lacanians and cognitive film theory. The second section ends with a very brief overview of film and/as philosophy. The article covers the key figures and fundamental concepts that have contributed to film theory as an autonomous discipline within the university. These concepts include ontology of film, realism/the reality effect, formalism, adaptation, signification, voyeurism, patriarchy, ideology, mainstream cinema, the avant-garde, suture, the cinematic apparatus, auteur-structuralism, the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, film and emotion, and embodied cognition.


2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Lynn

AbstractThe subject of wolf recovery in North America sparks heated controversy, both for and against. This paper explores how this subject is informed by cosmopolitan worldviews. These worldviews pull nature and culture into a common orbit of ethical meaning, with implications for the normative relationships that ought to pertain in landscapes shared by people and wolves. This theoretical outlook is illustrated using the controversy over wolves in the northeastern region of the United States. I conclude with a set of reflections on theorizing the cosmopolis, the interpretation of cosmopolitan landscapes, and living with cosmopolitan wolves.


Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins

Globalisation is now a fashionable topic of historical research. Books and articles routinely use the term, though often in a loose manner that has yet to realise the full potential of the subject. The question arises as to whether globalisation, as currently applied by historians, is sufficiently robust to resist inevitable changes in historiographical fashion. The fact that globalisation is a process and not a single theory opens the way, not only to over-general applications of the term, but also to rich research possibilities derived in particular from other social sciences. One such prospect, which ought to be at the centre of all historians’ interests, is how to categorise the evolution of the process. This question, which has yet to stimulate the lively debate it needs, is explored here by identifying three successive phases or sequences between the eighteenth century and the present, and joining them to the history of the empires that were their principal agents. These phases, termed proto-globalisation, modern globalisation, and postcolonial globalisation provide the context for reviewing the history of the West, including the United States, and in principle of the wider world too.


1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 97-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Mouser

Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.


1953 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Tolstoy

Asiatic origins have, at one time or another, been suggested or at least considered for a number of traits connected with the manufacture and decoration of the earlier New World pottery. The well-known paper by McKern (1937) is among the most explicit statements on the subject. Griffin (1946; Sears and Griffin 1950a) has held similar views for some time. Like McKern, he has primarily in mind traits of the Woodland pattern of eastern North America, although he also mentions some non-Woodland traits among those which have counterparts in the Old World (1946, p. 45).Since McKern's paper, the distribution in time of the traits involved has become a lot better established. With the help of the still suspiciously regarded radiocarbon dates, our perspective on ceramic history in the United States has been extended over a span which appears to be that of some four millennia. Among the more significant additions to the Asiatic half of the distributional picture first place must be given to recent Soviet work in eastern Siberia.


1975 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 651-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. F. Howell ◽  
T. R. Schultz

abstract Thirteen simple formulas describing the attenuation of Modified Mercalli (MM) intensity are compared to determine which best predicts observed values in North America. The equation (19) ln I = ln I o + a 2 − b 2 ln Δ − c 2 Δ based on the assumption that intensity is related to energy by the equation (12) I = k E P appears to be the most useful, although it is not the most precise. P was found to be approximately 1/6, indicating that MM intensity is proportional to the sixth root of energy or the cube root of amplitude. The United States and southern Canada are divided into three attenuation provinces: a San Andreas province with an energy absorption coefficient of 0.015/km, an Eastern province with an absorption coefficient of 0.0031/km and a Cordilleran province with an absorption coefficient of 0.0063/km. The different rates of absorption can be explained as the result of slightly greater average focal depths in the East than in the West, although the data are too scattered to prove that this is the cause. Greater depth of focus, especially if low-angle faulting is involved, would explain the lack of surface displacement with eastern earthquakes.


1994 ◽  
Vol 137 ◽  
pp. 180-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-Yun Ma

In recent years the concept of civil society has gained scholarly attention world-wide. It has found numerous advocates in the West, such as John Keane who suggested democratizing European socialism by defending the distinction between civil society and the state; Michael Walzer who proposed synthesizing socialist, capitalist and nationalist ideals under the rubric of civil society; and Daniel Bell, who called for a revival of civil society in the United States as a protection against the expanding state bureaucracies. In 1992 alone, at least three books on the subject appeared. In Eastern Europe, proponents of the civil society concept – like Vaclav Havel, George Konrad and Adam Michnik – have been credited with developing an extremely useful theoretical tool for overthrowing Stalinist authoritarianism. A volume consisting of case studies of seven former or present socialist countries found that the notion of civil society is generally applicable to the study of Communist systems, as long as the influence of different cultures and traditions of individual countries are fully acknowledged. The civil society paradigm, despite its basic European orientation, has also been recognized as applicable to the study of developing countries.


Author(s):  
Frederick Luciani

The Cuban poet José María Heredia (1803–1839) spent twenty months exiled to the United States because of his involvement in pro-independence conspiracies. In that time, Heredia wrote a prodigious number of poems and letters, which are the subject of an ongoing scholarly project undertaken by Frederick Luciani of Colgate University. Luciani’s work involves more than translating these poems and letters into English—it examines Heredia’s stay in North America against the background of political and historical events, and traces the matrices of his connections with key figures, literary and otherwise, in Cuba and the United States. Questions that have surfaced through the translation process and scrutiny of this period of Heredia’s life include the relationship between Heredia’s poetry and his letters; the value of his letters as a form of travel literature; the contradictions inherent in his exilic condition; the ambiguity of his political sentiments; the nature of the networks that joined 19th-century Anglo-American and Hispanic writers, translators, and scholars; and the challenges and opportunities that Heredia’s life and work pose for readers, translators, and scholars today.


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