Children of Buddha, or Caretakers of Women?

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 184-211
Author(s):  
Monika Schrimpf

This paper deals with the self-understandings of ordained Buddhist women (nisō 尼僧, ama 尼) in contemporary Japan. Their situation is characterized by discrimination and limited access to clerical positions on the one hand and, with the exception of monastic nuns, by their lack of a clearly defined role on the other. Although the training required to attain the status of a fully ordained cleric is firmly regulated by each Buddhist school, ordained women’s subsequent way of life is not. They may be married and have their own families. They may be the head priestess of a temple, the wife of a temple priest, or work in a temple. They may live according to Buddhist precepts in private, or have secular jobs. Under these conditions, ordained women have found ways of empowering themselves by interpreting their role in accordance with their social contexts and by re-evaluating conservative conceptions of gender.

Author(s):  
О. В. Ходус

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of organizing the private life, which is formed and changed in the complex interaction of the Self with the Other. It is claimed that in the present mode of production of subjectivity there has been a significant performance related to the extension of the “private self”. It is emphasized that the problem of our time is not in itself privacy or even the ease with which digital technologies facilitate access to the intimate, hidden aspects of our lives, but the loss of the individual’s ability to live in private as such, loss of privacy, autonomy, fear of remaining Alone with you, reducing the need to hide something. The consequence of this is the desire for a life «alone with everybody», which is a clear result of particular conflicts of individual and collective subjectivity. It is determined that the «scattering» of private semantics throughout the «social body» was a natural result of a specific ontology of the present time, which is denoted by the (re)configuration of the intersubjective connection of the Self - the Other, namely, the redefinition of the status of the Other (Great Other and various «real» others - authorities from the environment of the subject) against the background of «over-sufficiency» of the Self. The post-social, simulation, hyper-real order of constructing the I-Other relationship is emphasized. Such its properties condition a situation of potential (in)attention to the Other, (in)certainty of the Other, radical «liquidation of the Other». It is stated that in the situation of «missing Other», «statistical Other», «artificial / mediated Other», the limits and limits of one’s Self are questioned, that is, the sense of «secret life» disappears. It is said that private life is organized today in the format of a «publicly organized event» (in terminology by L. Theveno). It is determined that as the subject becomes involved in the most public mode of interaction, his attitude towards himself will find manifestation in the mode of expressive desire for self-expression, which can often acquire quite bold and frank forms of self-objectification. It is justified that in any case such a construction of privacy is marked by obvious redundancy. On the one hand, it turns out to be a kind of spectacle made up of various visually designed elements – personal stories, cases from private everyday life, personal emotional and physical representations aimed at creating an «impression». On the other hand, excess privacy, being the epiphenomenon of modern techno-capitalism of the neoliberal sense, emerges as an effective resource for utilitarian (self)exploitation and potential commercialization of self.


Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.


2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Sherman A. Jackson

Native born African-American Muslims and the Immigrant Muslimcommunity foxms two important groups within the American Muslimcommunity. Whereas the sociopolitical reality is objectively the samefor both groups, their subjective responses are quite different. Both arevulnerable to a “double Consciousness,” i.e., an independently subjectiveconsciousness, as well as seeing oneself through the eyes of theother, thus reducing one’s self-image to an object of other’s contempt.Between the confines of culture, politics, and law on the one hand andthe “Islam as a way of life” on the other, Muslims must express theircultural genius and consciously discover linkages within the diverseMuslim community to avoid the threat of double consciousness.


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.


Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf

This chapter examines the eight female characters inCompany, what they do in the musical, and how they function in the show’s dramaturgy, and argues that they elicit the quintessential challenge of analyzing musical theater from a feminist perspective. On the one hand, the women tend to be stereotypically, even msogynistically portrayed. On the other hand, each character offers the actor a tremendous performance opportunity in portraying a complicated psychology, primarily communicated through richly expressive music and sophisticated lyrics. In this groundbreaking 1970 ensemble musical about a bachelor’s encounters with five married couples and three girlfriends, Sondheim’s female characters occupy a striking range of types within one show. From the bitter, acerbic, thrice-married Joanne to the reluctant bride-to-be Amy, and from the self-described “dumb” “stewardess” April to the free-spirited Marta,Company’s eight women are distillations of femininity, precisely sketched in the short, singular scenes in which they appear.


1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette

A strange contrast exists in the status of the Christian Church in the past seventy years. On the one hand the Church has clearly lost some of the ground which once appeared to be safely within its possession. On the other hand it has become more widely spread geographically and, when all mankind is taken into consideration, more influential in shaping human affairs than ever before in its history. In a paper as brief as this must of necessity be, space can be had only for the sketching of the broad outlines of this paradox and for suggesting a reason for it. If details were to be given, a large volume would be required. Perhaps, however, we can hope to do enough to point out one of the most provocative and important set of movements in recent history.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kader Konuk

AbstractThe place of Jews was highly ambiguous in the newly founded Turkish Republic: In 1928 an assimilationist campaign was launched against Turkish Jews, while only a few years later, in 1933, German scholars—many of them Jewish—were taken in so as to help Europeanize the nation. Turkish authorities regarded the emigrants as representatives of European civilization and appointed scholars like Erich Auerbach to prestigious academic positions that were vital for redefining the humanities in Turkey. This article explores the country's twofold assimilationist policies. On the one hand, Turkey required of its citizens—regardless of ethnic or religious origins—that they conform to a unified Turkish culture; on the other hand, an equally assimilationist modernization project was designed to achieve cultural recognition from the heart of Europe. By linking historical and contemporary discourses, this article shows how tropes of Jewishness have played—and continue to play—a critical role in the conception of Turkish nationhood. The status of Erich Auerbach, Chair of the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at İstanbul University from 1936 to 1947, is central to this investigation into the place of Turkish and German Jews in modern Turkey.


Proglas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Getsov ◽  
◽  
◽  

The paper is part of a series of publications that set out to examine various aspects in the analysis of appositive constructions. The purpose of this particular study is to reveal the multidimensional, diverse, and complex interaction between three types of syntactic relations – attributive, predicative, and appositive. The study offers a critical review of various theories on the status of the grammatical relation between the components of non-detached (close) appositive constructions. The main argument of this paper is that determining this status, on the one hand, is a function of the morphological and semantic characteristics of the components of the construction, while, on the other hand, it determines their syntactic status.


Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.


Author(s):  
Anne Knudsen

Anne Knudsen: The Century of Zoophilia Taking as her point of departure the protests against a dying child having his last wish fulfilled because his wish was to kill a bear, the author argues that animals have achieved a higher moral status than that of humans during the 20th century. The status of animals (and of “nature”) is seen as a consequence of their muteness which on the one hånd makes it impossible for animals to lie, and which on the other hånd allows humans to imagine what animals would say, if they spoke. The development toward zoophilia is explained as a a logical consequence of the cultural naturalisation of humans, and the author draws the conclusion that we may end up entirely without animals as a category. This hypothetical situation will lead to juridical as well as philosophical complications.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document