The Missing Religious Factor in Imagined Communities

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 1395-1414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward A. Tiryakian
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Weak States ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
New Social Order

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has redrawn understanding of the loci and agents of modern nationalism. Whereas standard interpretations had privileged the movements of modernity of Western nation-states, Anderson’s analysis gave priority to the role of peripheral elites in “imagining the nation” beyond the boundaries of the everyday world. What Anderson leaves out altogether in his seminal study is the bearing of the religious factor in various peripheral settings in such regions as sub-Sahara Africa and East Asia. This article, extending Max Weber’s notion of charismatic leadership, proposes that in concrete cases of “colonial situations” in Africa and in two East Asian countries of weak states, religio-political figures arose seeking a new social order that had mass appeal. Their successes and failures should be seen as integral comparative aspects of nationalism and modernity

Scriptural Battlefields: The Old Testament, Legal Culture, and the Polemics of the Spanish New World Empire, 1492–1821

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra ◽  
Adrian Masters
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Order ◽  
New World ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Group Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Social Order

Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.

scholarly journals The Theology of Struggle

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-92
Author(s):  
Lisa Asedillo
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
New Creation ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Collective Commitment ◽  
Sacramental Vision ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Popular Writing ◽  
New Social Order

This article explores writing and scholarship on the theology of struggle developed by Protestants and Catholics in the Philippines during the 1970s-90s. Its focus is on popular writing—including pamphlets, liturgical resources, newsletters, magazines, newspaper articles, conference briefings, songs, popular education and workshop modules, and recorded talks—as well as scholarly arguments that articulate the biblical, theological, and ethical components of the theology of struggle as understood by Christians who were immersed in Philippine people’s movements for sovereignty and democracy. These materials were produced by Christians who were directly involved in the everyday struggles of the poor. At the same time, the theology of struggle also projects a “sacramental” vision and collective commitment towards a new social order where the suffering of the masses is met with eschatological, proleptic justice—the new heaven and the new earth, where old things have passed away and the new creation has come. It is within the struggle against those who deal unjustly that spirituality becomes a “sacrament”—a point and a place in time where God is encountered and where God’s redeeming love and grace for the world is experienced.

Re-enchanting the World: The Role of Imagination in Perception

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Lennon
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Everyday World

AbstractThis paper defends what the philosopher Merleau Ponty coins‘the imaginary texture of the real’.It is suggested that the imagination is at work in the everyday world which we perceive, the world as it is for us. In defending this view a concept of the imagination is invoked which has both similarities with and differences from, our everyday notion. The everyday notion contrasts the imaginary and the real. The imaginary is tied to the fictional or the illusory. Here it will be suggested, following both Kant and Strawson, that there is a more fundamental working of the imagination, present in both perception and the constructions of fictions. What Kant and Strawson failed to make clear, however, was that the workings of the imagination within the perceived world, gives that world, anaffective logic. The domain of affect is that of emotions, feelings and desire, and to claim such an affective logic in the world we experience, is to point out that it has salience and significance for us. Such salience suggests and demands the desiring and sometimes fearful responses we make to it; the shape of the perceived world echoed in the shapes our bodies take within it.

scholarly journals Brazilian funk as the herald of a new social order: a semiotic analysis of the internet music video “Beijinho no ombro” and its reception in social media

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-20
Author(s):  
Ricardo Nogueira de Castro Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Natural Extension ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Analytical Treatment ◽  
New Social Order ◽  
Generative Approach

The present article aims to analyze the music video “Beijinho no ombro” – a major Brazilian social media phenomenon that reached more than 9 million Youtube views in 3 months in 2014 –, discussing both the processes by which homologies between categories of expression and content are established – the so called Hjelmslev’s “commutations” – and suspended – the Danish linguist’s concept of “syncretism” (Hjelmslev, 2003) – in the audiovisual text, and the effects of meaning created thereby. The analytical treatment assimilates also some of Éric Landowski’s contributions to the discussions about the intersubjective interactions regimes (Landowski, 1997, 2006) and their impact on the study of the socalled states of soul deeply developed by Greimas and Fontanille in their Sémiotique des passions (Greimas & Fontanille, 1993). The object analysis intends moreover to illustrate a methodological approach proposed by the author and that may be applied to various corpora regarding the audiovisual repertory. Such an approach, a natural extension of Greimas’ treatment of the plane of content and Floch’s developments into the plane of expression (Floch, 1984, 1993), offers as a contribution the proposition of a methodology that, departing from the figures of expression and their homologations and semi-symbolic relations with categories of content, will then detect their projections in each one of the three levels of the generative path. Thus, not only the role of the means of manifestation in the process of generation of effects of meaning can be better evaluated, but also the possibilities of a generative approach that includes the textual structures – rather than the explicit exclusion that appears in the Dictionary of semiotics (Greimas & Courtés, 1991:208) – can be further discussed.

scholarly journals Justice in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Mobility Capital and New Social Order

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Evgeniy Karchagin
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Threat ◽  
New Social Order ◽  
Opening Up

The COVID-19 pandemic forces us to reconsider the conceptual boundaries of the world and everyday social order, affecting such pairs of concepts as: natural / artificial; habitual / extraordinary. The author considers one of the aspects of the changes having occured: the transformation of spatial mobility, which is connected with deep social changes. In the first part, the experience of isolation is interpreted on the basis of the theoretical resources of the social theory of mobilities, primarily the concepts of mobility capital and mobility justice. Not all social groups were equally mobile, because they had different mobility capital. The issue of mobility equity has taken in a new context: a natural global threat that has exacerbated the existing inequalities caused by the emergency. The second part of the article deals with the concept of "state of emergency" by G. Agamben and analyzes the issue of transgression of the system of the world social order, including its everyday dimension. The answer to this question is given on the basis of an analysis of the interpretations and forecasts of the leading contemporary European intellectuals (Agamben, Žižek, Latour, Sloterdijk, Fuller). The problems of social distancing, the transformation of higher education, the increase in the powers of the state, associated with medical justifications are considered. Important parameters of the new social order are the environmental factor and the need for sociocritical optics to understand the consequences of the pandemic. Analysis captures the increasing role of digital intermediaries of social interactions, which forms a new context for the problem of justice, opening up perspectives for issues of distance with digital technologies and issues of digital ecology.

Sport and National Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dilwyn Porter
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Imagined Communities ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the role of sport in the construction of national identity. It focuses initially on sport as a cultural practice possessing the demonstrable capacity to generate events and experiences through which imagined communities are made real. The governments of nation-states or other political agencies might intervene directly in this process, using sport as a form of propaganda to achieve this effect. More often, however, the relationship between sport and national identity is reproduced in everyday life, flagged daily by the mass media as an expression of banal nationalism. Particular attention is given to the role of sports that are indigenous to particular nations and also to sports engaged in competitively between nations. These have contributed in different ways to the making of national identities.

LIBERDADE E ECONOMIA NA FILOSOFIA DO DIREITO DE HEGEL

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (107) ◽  
pp. 413
Author(s):  
Arnaldo Fortes Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Current Model ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Thematic Relation ◽  
New Social Order

Este artigo trata da concepção hegeliana de liberdade na sociedade civil. Destaca a parte relativa à liberdade de mercado na qual ficam caracterizados os limites intransponíveis para o exercício da eticidade e, conseqüentemente, de uma combinação real entre ética e economia numa sociedade organizada sob o primado do mercado. Na relação temática entre liberdade e sociedade civil, Hegel formulou de maneira precursora uma Teoria Social de caráter alternativo à experiência de traço liberal. O papel dessa teoria é formular, de maneira integrada, os temas econômico, político e do direito de uma nova ordem social verdadeiramente humanista. Por isso, o paradigma hegeliano de liberdade institui um contraponto radical à concepção de liberdade de mercado com a qual o liberalismo econômico construiu a teoria capitalista de organização de sociedade, incluindo o atual modelo da teoria econômica neoliberal globalizada.Abstract: This article deals with the hegelian conception of freedom in the civil society. It emphasizes the part relative to the freedom of market in which are characterized the insuperable limits for the exercise of the ethicity and, consequently, a real combination between ethics and economy in a society organized under the primate of the market. About the thematic relation between freedom and civil society, Hegel formulated in precursory way a Social Theory of alternative character to the experience of liberal imprint. The role of this theory is to formulate, in comprehensive way, the economic, political and juridical themes of a new social order truly humane. Therefore, the hegelian paradigm of freedom establishes a radical counterpoint to the conception of freedom of market with which economic liberalism has constructed the capitalist theory of society organization, including the current model of the global new-liberal economic theory.

Huju

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan P. J. Stock
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Emotional Expressivity ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Chinese Music ◽  
Communist Revolution ◽  
New Social Order

China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, the author's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai have allowed him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. The text then focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a ‘musical’ reading of gendered performance.

Public Religion and State Transformation: Zero-Sum Game or Fruitful Partnership?

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander-Kenneth Nagel
Keyword(s):  
Mass Communication ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
State Transformation ◽  
Environmental Pressures ◽  
Public Religion ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
Religion And State ◽  
Zero Sum

AbstractModern nation states appear to be under siege: economic transactions and environmental pressures come along in global dimensions and along with transnational mass communication and religious communities call into question the paradigm of secular nationalism. While political scientists have supplied useful heuristics to examine the transformation of modern states under these conditions, they have widely disparaged the religious factor as a premodern atavism. Scholars of religious studies, on the other hand, have celebrated the 'new' publicity of religion, but established an overtly antagonistic concept of religion and the state. In this article I try to connect the two debates by arguing that the role of public religion for state transformation can be understood in institutionalist terms of public-private partnerships rather than as a zero-sum game.

‘It Ain't Necessarily so’: Eliciting Hidden Knowledge and the Role of Schemata in Data Collection1

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
David Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Survey Research ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
Hidden Knowledge ◽  
Hidden Data ◽  
Do So

A problem for evaluators and researchers is that what people ‘say’ in an interview context is often different from what they do in the everyday world, in vivo. Elicitation techniques appear to be effective at revealing ‘hidden’ data but the theories about why they do so are inadequate. This paper examines literature from cognitive science, schema and survey research to identify ideas that may help explain why elicitation techniques work and how we can improve their use. The schema concept provides a testable mechanism for how elicitation may function and the conditions under which elicitation might work. It also raises questions for evaluators about the variability of people's responses in different contexts and the influence of the interview context on the results obtained.

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