Acts That Work: A Cognitive Approach to Ritual Agency

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 281-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesper Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
The Real ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Ritual Behavior ◽  
Action Representations ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractQuestions of agency are central for understanding ritual behavior in general and representations of ritual efficacy in particular. Religious traditions often stipulate who are entitled to perform particular rituals. Further, representations of unobservable superhuman agents are often explicitly described as the 'real' ritual agents. Recent investigations into the processes underlying action representations and social cognition can help explain how these representations arise. It is argued that paying close attention to details in the cognitive processing of ordinary actions can shed light on how ritual actions activate part of these systems while simultaneously leaving other aspects unaccounted for. This has particular effects that make culturally transmitted representations of superhuman agents highly relevant.

Analyse des réseaux de personnages dans les textes de Leslie Kaplan : du postmodernisme à l’inconscient

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110024
Author(s):  
Murielle El Hajj
Keyword(s):  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Shed Light

The texts of Leslie Kaplan question the irreducible opposition between the real and the non-real. Her characters and their intentional absence confuse the repository and fictional worlds, not only to point out the thin margin between reality and fiction, but to underline the impossible delimitation between the real and the fictional, or even between the text and the world. This article studies the characters of Kaplan and aims to demonstrate their identity crisis through the study of their literary onomastic and the use of the neutral pronoun ‘it’ and allegoric expressions. In addition, the objective of this article is to shed light on the Kaplanian characters as Kunderian models, while stressing the particularity of their physionomy, which consists to present ‘fuzzy’ characters that are present and absent at the same time, engaging the reader in the fictional process as a try to complete the missing details. This article concludes that the Kaplanian characters are not only the prototypes of the postmodern being, but they are also introverted, psychopaths and a demonstration of different facets of the unconscious.

How Does Innovation Affect Economic Growth? Evidence from G20 Countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946622110635
Author(s):  
Ajoy K Sarangi ◽  
Rudra P. Pradhan ◽  
Tamal Nath ◽  
Rana P. Maradana ◽  
Hiranmoy Roy
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Causal Relationships ◽  
Jel Codes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Effects ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Shed Light

We study the interactions between innovation and economic growth in G20 countries over 1961–2019. We establish whether there is a temporal causality between these two variables. Employing the autoregressive distributive lag framework, our results expose a grid of short-run and long-run causal relationships between innovation and growth, including long-run unidirectional causality from innovation to economic growth. Overall, our findings shed light on the real effects of innovation on economic growth. JEL Codes: O38, O31, O32

Vasile Aaron – Reporta din vis, o noutate literară din vreme

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-59
Author(s):  
Carmen Oprișor
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
The Real ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Shed Light

Vasile Aaron (1780-1821) had an important contribution to the modernization of the Romanian literature. He was also the representative of the Transylvanian Enlightenment School. One of his works which is worth mentioning is Reporta din vis (Reporta in his dream), a meditation upon the ephemeral human life. Here, the author brought in elements of novelty such as the “dream-in-a-dream” images, the pre-Romantic motif of the ruins or the first fantastic descriptions in the Romanian poetical works. All Aaron´s literary and social activity reflected the specific features of his age. The complete studies written by Liliana Popa and Nicolae Popa shed light upon Aaron’s life and work and they showed the real dimensions of his personality.

Religion and Dictatorship in Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-193
Author(s):  
Richard Steigmann-Gall
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Institutional Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
First World ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the intersection of religion and dictatorship after the First World War. It examines the question of institutional relations between church and state, and seeks to explore how these relations shed light on the ideological relationship between religious traditions and fascism in particular. It does this by considering comparative perspectives across Europe, especially with regard to church–state relations but also in terms of politics, ideology, and culture. It goes on to explore the cases of Italian fascism and German Nazism, demonstrating how these regimes have typically been understood, as well as how they perpetuated a distinctive religious politics.

Ayer on Personal Identity

Philosophy ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 51 (195) ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Madell
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Real ◽  
Bodily Continuity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
In Virtue Of

In ‘The Concept of a Person’ Ayer presents a theory of personal identity which has never, to my knowledge, attracted the close attention which it deserves. The theory puts forward bodily continuity as the central criterion of personal identity. In this, of course, Ayer does not differ from many other philosophers who have written on this subject. The real interest of Ayer's view is that it is quite explicit that the body is taken as the principle of unity underlying one's experiences, as that in virtue of which a series of experiences are the experiences of one person. Without the body, ‘not only is it not clear how the individual experiences are to be identified, but there appears to be no principle according to which they can be grouped together; there is no answer to the question what makes two experiences which are separate in time the experiences of the same self’ (pp. 113–114). Some link between experiences there must be. Memory cannot serve as this link, since remembering an experience already implies thinking of it as one's own. The only acceptable candidate is the body.

A cognitive approach to characterization: Katherina in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culpeper
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Impression Formation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Schema Theory ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Cognitive Theories

In this article, I argue that literary characterization can be fruitfully approached by drawing upon theories developed within social cognition to explain the perception of real-life people. I demonstrate how this approach can explain the construction of Katherina, the protagonist in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Specifically, I introduce notions from cognitive theories of knowledge (especially schema theory), and impression formation. Using these, I describe (1) the role of prior knowledge in forming an impression of a character, and (2) how various types of impression are formed. Prior to my analysis of Katherina, I outline the kind of shrew schema the Elizabethans might have had knowledge of. Then, in my analysis I argue that the textual evidence in the first part of the play is largely consistent with this schema, and thus Katherina at this stage is largely a schema-based character. However, I show that as the play progresses a number of changes create the conditions for a more complex and personalized character. As a consequence of this analysis, I claim that Katherina is not, as some critics have argued, simply a shrew, or an inconsistent character, or a typical character of a farce.

Juan Downey's Ethnographic Present

ARTMargins ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-49
Author(s):  
Benjamin Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Video Feedback ◽  
Closed Circuit ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Video Technology ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Real

Recorded between 1976 and 77, Juan Downey's video experiments with the Yanomami people have been widely celebrated as offering a critique of traditional anthropology through their use of feedback technology. This article argues, however, that close attention to the different feedback situations the artist constructs with the group reveal a more complex relationship between Downey and that discipline. In the enthusiasm he manifests for synchronous, closed-circuit video feedback in many of his statements about his Yanomami project, Downey in fact tacitly affirms some of the most problematic principles of traditional anthropology. In his emphasis on the real-time quality of this particular form of feedback, the artist puts forth a view of Yanomami society as itself synchronous, as a type of homeostatic, changeless system outside of historical time. As such he participates in a synchronic bias that anthropologists of his own time had begun to seriously critique. By focusing on one individual video from the Yanomami project, The Laughing Alligator of 1979, this essay argues that Downey's critical contribution to anthropological debates of his time does not come in the form of synchronous feedback, but rather through a different procedure unique to video technology based on temporal lag, delay, and spacing.

The Philosophy of World Religions

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hick
Keyword(s):  
Human Race ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The Real ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Transcendent Reality ◽  
Realistic View ◽  
Basic Distinction ◽  
The One

I Am grateful to Mr Peter Byrne (‘John Hick's Philosophy of World Religions’, S.J.T., Vol. 35, 289–301) for highlighting some of the central issues for a philosophy of religious pluralism. He starts from the now widespread realisation that it is not a morally or religiously acceptable view that salvation depends upon being a member of the Christian minority within the human race. A more realistic view must be pluralistic, seeing the great religious traditions as different ways of conceiving and experiencing the one ultimate divine Reality, and correspondingly different ways of responding to that Reality. These ways owe their differences to the modes of thinking, perceiving and feeling which have developed within the different patterns of human existence embodied in the various cultures of the earth. Thus, on the one hand the religions are responses to a single ultimate transcendent Reality, whilst on the other hand their several communal consciousnesses of that Reality, formed from different human perspectives, are widely different. To understand this mixture of commonality and difference I have suggested that we should make use of a basic distinction which occurs in some form within each of the great traditions. In Christian terms it is the distinction between God in himself, in his eternal self-existent being, independently of creation, and God-for-us or God as revealed to us. In more universal language it is the distinction between the Real (Sat, al-Haq) an sich and the Real as humanly experienced and thought.

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