The New Animism and Its Challenges to the Study of Religion

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-147
Author(s):  
Isabel Laack

Abstract In the last decades, the worldview(s) of so-called Indigenous religions have regained academic interest. Scholars of religion, anthropologists, and Indigenous writers engage in a new research field called new animism characterized by a diversity of insider and outsider positions. The field contains immense potential for inspiring general debates in the study of religion because it touches on fundamental questions about hermeneutics, epistemology, epistemic goals, disciplinary identities, and the influence of Western ontology on scientific and academic research. This article aims to draw the attention of scholars of religion to the new animism by contextualizing the field within disciplinary and cultural history, presenting its core theories, analyzing its methodological and epistemological positions, and identifying the central players ands its politically highly charged social contexts with asymmetrical power relations. Finally, it discusses how the new animism challenges general debates within the study of religion and may provocatively stimulate them.

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
Elias Kolovos ◽  
Athanasios Vionis

Some areas of the territory of present-day Greece were under Ottoman rule for more than 500 years. To date, the study of this period has largely been neglected, with academic research generally focused on Prehistoric and ancient Greece. However, over the course of the last 20 years, there have been noteworthy developments in the study of the Ottoman history and archaeology of Greece. This paper has two aims: (1) to summarize research conducted in the fields of Ottoman archaeology and material culture in Greece, focusing on demographics, settlement layouts and ceramics, particularly table wares; and (2) to present recent efforts to record and protect the Ottoman monuments of Greece.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff

This state of the field essay examines recent trends in American Cultural History, focusing on music, race and ethnicity, material culture, and the body. Expanding on key themes in articles featured in the special issue of Cultural History, the essay draws linkages to other important literatures. The essay argues for more a more serious consideration of the products within popular culture, less as a reflection of social or economic trends, rather for their own historical significance. While the essay examines some classic texts, more emphasis is on work published within the last decade. Here, interdisciplinary methods are stressed, as are new research perspectives developing by non-western historians.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (XXIII) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Wojan

This article outlines the original research concept developed and applied by the Voronezh researchers, which brought both quantitative and qualitative results to the field of linguistic comparative research. Their monograph is devoted to the macrotypological unity of the lexical semantics of the languages in Europe. In addition, semantic stratification of Russian and Polish lexis has been analyzed. Their research concept is now known as the “lexical-semantic macrotypological school of Voronezh.” Representatives of this school have created a new research field in theoretical linguistics – a lexical-semantic language macrotypology as a branch of linguistic typology. The monograph has been widely discussed and reviewed in Russia.


Author(s):  
Almaz F. Abdulvaliev

This article presents the conceptual foundations for the formation of a new research field “Judicial Geography”, including the prerequisites for its creation, academic, and theoretical development, both in Russia and abroad. The purpose of the study is to study the possibility of applying geographical methods and means in criminal law, criminal procedure, and in judicial activity in general via the academic direction “Judicial Geography”. The author describes in detail the main elements of judicial geography and its role and significance for such legal sciences, as criminal law, criminal procedure, criminalistics, and criminology among others. The employed research methods allow showing the main vectors of the development of judicial geography, taking into account the previous achievements of Russian and worldwide academics. The author indicates the role and place of judicial geography in the system of legal sciences. This study suggests a concept of using scientific geographical methods in the study of various legal phenomena of a criminal and criminal-procedural nature when considering the idea of building judicial bodies and judicial instances, taking into account geographical and climatic factors. In this regard, the author advises to introduce the special course “Judicial Geography”, which would allow law students to study the specifics of the activities of the judiciary and preliminary investigation authorities from a geographical point of view, as well as to use various geographical methods, including the mapping method, in educational and practical activities. The author concludes that forensic geography may become a new milestone for subsequent scientific research in geography and jurisprudence.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Dante Choque-Caseres

In Latin America, based on the recognition of Indigenous Peoples, the identification of gaps or disparities between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population has emerged as a new research interest. To this end, capturing Indigenous identity is key to conducting certain analyses. However, the social contexts where the identity of Indigenous persons are (re)produced has been significantly altered. These changes are generated by the assimilation or integration of Indigenous communities into dominant national cultures. Within this context, limitations emerge in the use of this category, since Indigenous identity has a political and legal component related to the needs of the government. Therefore, critical thought on the use of Indigenous identity is necessary in an epistemological and methodological approach to research. This article argues that research about Indigenous Peoples should evaluate how Indigenous identity is included, for it is socially co-produced through the interaction of the State and its institutions. Thus, it would not necessarily constitute an explicative variable. By analyzing the discourse about Aymara Indigenous communities that has emerged in the northern border of Chile, this paper seeks to expose the logic used to define identity. Therefore, I conclude that the process of self-identification arises in supposed Indigenous people, built and/or reinforced by institutions, which should be reviewed from a decolonizing perspective and included in comparative research.


Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Zerilli

AbstractIn the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War.


2011 ◽  
Vol 267 ◽  
pp. 247-252
Author(s):  
Rui Xin Ma ◽  
Gui Shi Deng ◽  
Xiao Wang

SNS provides us with a brand new platform to communicate, interact and share. To better suit the need of scholars to get more authoritative and more satisfactory information about academic research, we construct a SNS scientific paper management platform. In this platform, scholars are divided into different virtual communities accord to their research field and their collaborative relationship with others. Ideas in CF are applied in the procedure of community division which helps us to find the accurate relation structures. At the end of this paper, we use compare the running results of normal platform and SNS to illustrate how useful it is.


Author(s):  
Clary Krekula ◽  
Sarah Vickerstaff

The policy debate on older people's extended participation in working life is not based on a social movement, such as the one putting forward demands on job opportunities for women, and has, by means of categorical stereotypes, mostly characterised older people as the problem. This narrative of individual choices and decisions presents older workers as de-gendered, de-classed individuals, shorn of their individual biographies and social contexts. It also treats the issue of extending working life as a phenomenon disconnected from surrounding society and trends. This line of reasoning points to the need for more sophisticated theoretical foundations. This chapter therefore provides a more encompassing framework for the discussion of extending working lives and outlines a new research agenda, including a power perspective with potential to shed light on age-based inequality, an intersectional perspective and a masculinity perspective which challenges the homogenous descriptions of older workers, a feminist understanding of work and a life course perspective which provides a framework which links the previous three.


2016 ◽  
Vol 838-839 ◽  
pp. 34-40
Author(s):  
Hidehiro Yoshida ◽  
Koji Morita ◽  
Byung Nam Kim ◽  
Koji Matsui ◽  
Yuichi Ikuhara ◽  
...  

Superplasticity in fine-grained oxide ceramics has been generally elucidated on the basis of their experimental strain rate-flow stress relationship and phenomenological analysis of cavity nucleation and growth. It has been widely accepted that the high temperature superplastic flow and failure in ceramics is significantly influenced by the atomic structure and chemistry of grain boundaries. Such phenomenon cannot be explained based on the classical phenomenological analysis. Our research group has therefore proposed to establish a new research field, grain boundary plasticity, to describe the superplastic deformation related to the grain boundary atomic structure. This paper aims to point out the importance of the atomistic analysis of grain boundary to develop new superplastic ceramics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-352
Author(s):  
Nicole Baron ◽  
Zegeye Cherenet

Purpose Resilience has recently attracted widespread interest in the field of urban planning and theory. However, the research that has been conducted on urban resilience in Africa has major theoretical and methodological gaps. This can lead to problems when designing and implementing resilience strategies there. Understanding African perspectives can be a way of tackling these. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Using the example of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper analyses expert interviews based on a grounded theory approach. The goal is to explore locally specific perceptions of and pathways to urban resilience. By comparing these findings to those reported in the existing literature, differences and overlaps are identified. Findings This study provides evidence for the existence of locally specific perceptions of and pathways to urban resilience. Furthermore, it identifies urban development pathways such as complete urban makeover (tabula rasa) and complete negation of change (resistance). Research limitations/implications Because this study uses Addis Ababa as a singular case and expert interviews as method, it rather represents an initial attempt at exploring a new research field than claiming generalisability. Its quality and significance lie in its discursive approach and theory formation. Practical implications This exemplary study from Ethiopia demonstrates that a regionally specific understanding of urban resilience is valuable for the design and implementation of urban resilience strategies. Originality/value This study offers unique insights into urban resilience from an African perspective and into the manifestation of urban resilience in Addis Ababa.


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