A Few Grains of Salt

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-133
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
Religious Movement ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Source ◽  
Real Danger

This chapter assesses some common cultural associations people have with Buddhism and where these associations came from. In the case of Europe and America, early in the 1800s, two groups—the Romantics and the Transcendentalists—started to take an interest in ideas from Asia in general and from Buddhism in particular. Another early source of Western interest in Buddhism is a religious movement called Theosophy. It is through these channels that many in the West first came into contact with Buddhism. It arrived filtered through people with very particular agendas and interests. People who had little, if any, command of Buddhist texts or the languages they were written in. Though they popularized ideas and texts from Asia, they did so with a very specific spin, one that still can be felt today. Ultimately, it is important to keep in mind that there is more to Buddhism than one's own idealized version of it because there is a real danger in projecting what one wants onto Buddhism and ignoring the rest.

Markets in Africa

1963 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polly Hill
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Development Economics ◽  
Export Trade ◽  
The West ◽  
Narrow View ◽  
Complete Identification ◽  
Import And Export ◽  
Economic Relationship ◽  
Statistical Survey ◽  
Real Danger

Economists in Africa hold a narrow view of their scope. Traditionally they have been almost entirely concerned with the economic relationship between Africa and the West, with the import and export trade: the colonial situation was, in a sense, all that interested them. Nowadays their interests have extended to include statistical ‘survey work’ and, of course, problems of economic development. So successfully conducted are the surveys (at least in some countries) and so well backed are they by U.N. funds, that there is a real danger of a complete identification of African economics with statistics, and already the idea seems to be spreading that it is somewhat disreputable for economists to handle material which cannot be quantified. As for ‘development economics’, this—pace E.C.A.—is indeed an under-developed subject. Only recently have economists, such as W. B. Reddaway,1 begun to doubt the appropriateness to Africa and other under-developed areas of certain western concepts and assumptions. And scarcely any economists in Africa are yet showing any awareness of the need to study the structure of the indigenous economy—except statistically.

‘A Peculiarly English Institution’: Work, Rest, and Play in the Labour Church

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 357-367
Author(s):  
Krista Cowman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
The West

The Labour Church held its first service in Charlton Hall, Manchester, in October 1891. The well-attended event was led by Revd Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister from Hyde, and John Trevor, a former Unitarian and the driving force behind the idea. Counting the experiment a success, Trevor organized a follow-up meeting the next Sunday, at which the congregation overflowed from the hall into the surrounding streets. A new religious movement had begun. In the decade that followed, over fifty Labour Churches formed, mainly in Northern England, around the textile districts of the West Riding of Yorkshire and East Lancashire. Their impetus lay both in the development and spread of what has been called a socialist culture in Britain in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and in the increased awareness of class attendant on this. Much of the enthusiasm for socialism was indivisible from the lifestyle and culture which surrounded it. This was a movement dedicated as much to what Chris Waters has described as ‘the politics of everyday life …. [and] of popular culture’ as to rigid economistic doctrine. This tendency has been described as ‘ethical socialism’, although a more common expression at the time was ‘the religion of socialism’.

Gypsy Pentecostalism, Ethnopolitical Uses and Construction of Belonging in the South of Spain

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuela Cantón Delgado
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Religious Sect ◽  
Cultural Reinvention

The Gypsy Evangelical movement started in the west of France where, in the mid twentieth century, the first conversions took place. Back home, the converted started preaching among their people, spreading the religious movement all the way to western Andalusia. Half a century later, we can hardly call this a “new” movement, but we can certainly say that Gypsy Pentecostalism has become one of the most original organizational experiences developed by Spanish gypsies. The process of constructing this new sense of ethnic and religious belonging has been marked by the double suspicion that hangs over Evangelical Gypsies: first, as part of a stigmatized ethnic minority and, second, as members of a religious “sect”. However, this has also helped to strengthen the process of ethnogenesis and cultural reinvention that is redrawing the image of gypsies from the angle of Evangelism. It has also brought about the strategic and intentional mobilization of ethnicity—the search for recognition and political activity aimed at obtaining public resources to finance extensive social development.

scholarly journals The children of Ham

1997 ◽  
Vol 71 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
John W. Pulis
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
The West ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Press ◽  
Syracuse University ◽  
Modern Era

[First paragraph]Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom. RITA MARLEY, ADRIAN BOOT & CHRIS SALEWICZ (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, 1995. 288 pp. (Paper £ 14.99)Marley and Me: The Real Story. DON TAYLOR (as told to Mike Henry). Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1994. xxxv + 226 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari. VELMA POLLARD. Kingston: Canoe Press, 1994. x + 84 pp. (Paper J$ 150.00)Rastafari: Roots and ldeology. BARRY CHEVANNES. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994; Kingston: The Press - University of the West Indies, 1995. xiv + 298 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.95, Paper US$ 17.95; J$ 500.00)Seeking a myth to justify the enslavement of Africans, explorers, scholars, and others turned to the Bible, that most sacred and preeminent of Western texts, conjured-up an old biblical curse, and set it to work one more time. As Europe entered the Modern Era, Africans were reinvented as the children of Ham and were targeted for a life of servitude in the New World. Five hundred years later, black folk in Jamaica seized upon an event in Africa, re-interpreted a passage in the Revelation of John, and set in motion a project that transformed enslavement and exile into a religious movement of global proportions.1

scholarly journals Religion as an Authoritarian Securitization and Violence Legitimation Tool: The Erdoğanist Diyanet’s Framing of a Religious Movement as an Existential Threat

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 574
Author(s):  
Ihsan Yilmaz ◽  
Ismail Albayrak
Keyword(s):  
Religious Community ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Global Community ◽  
The West ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Gulen Movement

The paper shows how a state controlled religious institution used religion, fear, trauma, insecurity, grievances, and conspiracy theories to dehumanise a religious community, and presented it as an existential threat to the nation, the global community of believers and religion, by investigating the case of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs’ (the Diyanet) securitizing role under the authoritarian Islamist Erdoğanist rule. The article provides an empirically rich analysis of the Diyanet’s construction of the Gülen Movement (GM) as a source of sedition (fitne), corruption (fesat), mischief, a social disease, and finally, as a traitor and puppet of the West that constantly conspires against Turkey, Islam, and the Muslim World. By securitising the movement, the Diyanet legitimised the authoritarian and violent actions of the Erdoğanist regime against the alleged movement members.

scholarly journals Scientism and Post-Truth

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Angela Puca
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Experiential Approach ◽  
Related Aspect ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Philosophical Underpinning

The last decades have seen an increasing interest towards Shamanism in the Western world, both among scholars and those who practise shamanism. The academic interest has been mainly focussed on identifying the differences between forms of contemporary Shamanism in the West and traditional Shamanisms as experienced among indigenous peoples. A related aspect that needs further development in the field is the analysis of the philosophical underpinning that lies behind this relatively new religious tradition and its manifestations. Initial findings, derived from data collected as part of a research project on autochthonous and trans-cultural Shamanism in Italy, suggest that there are two paradigms shaping the neo-shamanic experiential approach. I will start by clarifying the notion of paradigm as the founding basis of every reasoning process, cultural production and hence religious movement. Then, I will argue that the Scientistic and Post-truth paradigms represent two founding bases of Neo-shamanism and its scholarly recognised traits and will conclude by addressing the issue of a potential contradiction between the two will be addressed.  

Collective Identity and the Postcharismatic Fate of Shambhala International

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn P. Eldershaw
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
The West ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Ethnographic Data

This study examines the postcharismatic fate of Vajradhatu/Shambhala International, one of the largest Buddhist communities in North America. Throughout its thirty-year history, the Shambhala movement has experienced a number of internal and external challenges. Following the untimely death of its founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1987, the movement experienced a crisis in succession that garnered international negative exposure and threatened its stability. This analysis draws on recent theorizing on collective identity to examine the manner in which this movement has survived the crisis and gone about reconstituting itself. It is proposed that recent transformations in Shambhala International are indicative of larger changes in the organization of religion within contemporary pluralist culture. This study provides much-needed ethnographic data on an empirically neglected new religious movement and adds to a growing body of literature tracing the growth of Buddhism in the West.

Enumeration and Identification of Asbestos Fibres in Water

1974 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 526-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Mudroch ◽  
J. R. Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Water Supply ◽  
Water Samples ◽  
Drainage Basin ◽  
Lake Superior ◽  
Research Work ◽  
List Type ◽  
The West ◽  
Asbestos Fibre ◽  
Amphibole Asbestos

Approximately 60,000 tons per day of waste from taconite mining, tailing, are added to the west arm of Lake Superior at Silver Bay. Tailings contain nearly the same amount of quartz and amphibole asbestos, cummingtonite and actinolite in fibrous form. Cummingtonite fibres from 0.01μm in length have been found in the water supply for Minnesota municipalities.The purpose of the research work was to develop a method for asbestos fibre counts and identification in water and apply it for the enumeration of fibres in water samples collected(a) at various stations in Lake Superior at two depth: lm and at the bottom.(b) from various rivers in Lake Superior Drainage Basin.

The fight to save Uganda’s White Rhino

1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 6-12
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
West Nile ◽  
White Rhino

In the West Nile District of Uganda lives a population of white rhino—those relies of a past age, cumbrous, gentle creatures despite their huge bulk—which estimates only 10 years ago, put at 500. But poachers live in the area, too, and official counts showed that white rhino were being reduced alarmingly. By 1959, they were believed to be diminished to 300.

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