Performing Gender and Political Recognition: Israeli Reform Jewish Life-cycle Rituals

2020 ◽  
pp. 089124162096826
Author(s):  
Elazar Ben-Lulu
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Reform Jewish ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
Jewish Religion

Anthropologists see life-cycle rituals as a significant way to understand gender roles and identities in religious communities. While in the past, these compulsory rituals involved a significant change in a person’s social status, today many of their traditional features have been transformed. This ethnographic inquiry examines Bat Mitzvah ceremonies (coming of age rituals for girls) in Israeli Reform Jewish congregations. By including new blessings, appropriating masculine religious symbols, and creating new bodily gestures, the feminine life-cycle ritual challenges the traditional Jewish laws and contemporary socio-cultural constructions of the Israeli Jewish community. The exclusion of the Israeli Reform community from mainstream Jewish religion turns this ritual into a subversive act that battles local Jewish Orthodoxy authority. The ceremony is a political performance, which positions the Reform congregations as an activist religious agent for gender equality in the Israeli public space.

Money, Mobile Money and Rituals in Western Kenya: The Contingency Fund and the Thirteenth Cow

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibel Kusimba
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Western Kenya ◽  
Mobile Money ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Moral Dimensions

Abstract:This article, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term.

Occupy Movement, Religion and Social Formations

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Matt Sheedy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures

The Occupy movement was an unprecedented social formation that spread to approximate 82 countries around the globe in the fall of 2011 via social media through the use of myths, symbols and rituals that were performed in public space and quickly drew widespread mainstream attention. In this paper I argue that the movement offers a unique instance of how discourse functions in the construction of society and I show how the shared discourses of Occupy were taken-up and shaped in relation to the political opportunity structures and interests of those involved based on my own fieldwork at Occupy Winnipeg. I also argue that the Occupy movement provides an example of how we might substantively attempt to classify “religion” by looking at how it embodied certain metaphysical claims while contrasting it with the beliefs and practices of more conventionally defined “religious” communities.

scholarly journals Environmental assessment of the Tung cultivation through life cycle analysis

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Bern�l ◽  
Rosana Schneider ◽  
�nio Machado
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Life Cycle Management ◽  
Assessment Method ◽  
Agroforestry Systems ◽  
Family Farms ◽  
Conventional Agriculture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ecosystem Changes ◽  
Poor Soil

Over the past few decades, conventional agriculture has been facing serious crises caused by numerous factors, including poor soil management and the excessive application of pesticides. Thus, alternative production systems have been developed, including agroforestry systems, especially those that produce both energy and food. The objective of this study was to environmentally evaluate the culture of Aleurites fordii Hemls. (Tung) using the Life Cycle Assessment method with the SimaPro 7.3.2 software. The results revealed that in family farms that use less mechanization to harvest crops, the primary category of environmental impact was land use, which included the removal of animal and vegetable species and ecosystem changes. The full impact of this category was 1741.21 m2yr PDF (potentially disappeared fraction). Subsequently, prognostics were established for the reduction of such impacts, and we conclude that Tung has a high potential for agricultural installation with high responsibility to the environment. Keywords: Environmental factors, Aleurites fordii Hemls, Life Cycle Management, Tung.

scholarly journals Life Cycle Assessment and Material Flow Analysis: Two Under-Utilized Tools for Informing E-Waste Management

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7939
Author(s):  
Sohani Vihanga Withanage ◽  
Komal Habib
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle Assessment ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Material Flow ◽  
Keyword Search ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Flow Analysis ◽  
Material Flow Analysis ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Depth Analysis

The unprecedented technological development and economic growth over the past two decades has resulted in streams of rapidly growing electronic waste (e-waste) around the world. As the potential source of secondary raw materials including precious and critical materials, e-waste has recently gained significant attention across the board, ranging from governments and industry, to academia and civil society organizations. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the last decade of e-waste literature followed by an in-depth analysis of the application of material flow analysis (MFA) and life cycle assessment (LCA), i.e., two less commonly used strategic tools to guide the relevant stakeholders in efficient management of e-waste. Through a keyword search on two main online search databases, Scopus and Web of Science, 1835 peer-reviewed publications were selected and subjected to a bibliographic network analysis to identify and visualize major research themes across the selected literature. The selected 1835 studies were classified into ten different categories based on research area, such as environmental and human health impacts, recycling and recovery technologies, associated social aspects, etc. With this selected literature in mind, the review process revealed the two least explored research areas over the past decade: MFA and LCA with 33 and 31 studies, respectively. A further in-depth analysis was conducted for these two areas regarding their application to various systems with numerous scopes and different stages of e-waste life cycle. The study provides a detailed discussion regarding their applicability, and highlights challenges and opportunities for further research.

Mocking Parades and the Place of Pagan Statuary in Late Antique Alexandria

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Visual Contact ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.

Human acanthocephaliasis: A thorn in the side of parasite diagnostics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blaine A. Mathison ◽  
Ninad Mehta ◽  
Marc Roger Couturier
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
English Language ◽  
Clinical Presentation ◽  
Zoonotic Infections ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Treatment And Diagnosis

Acanthacephala is a phylum of parasitic pseudocoelamates that infect a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate hosts and can cause zoonotic infections in humans. The zoologic literature is quite rich and diverse, however the human-centric literature is sparse and sporadically reported over the past 70 years. Causal agents of acanthacephaliasis in humans are reviewed as well as their biology and life cycle. This review provides the first consolidated and summarized report of human cases of acanthacephaliasis based on English language publications, including epidemiology, clinical presentation, treatment, and diagnosis and identification.

scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING LAW AND RELIGION AS CULTURE: MAKING ROOM FOR MEANING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between law and religion in contemporary civil society has been a topic of increasing social interest and importance in Canada in the past many years. We have seen the practices and commitments of religious groups and individuals become highly salient on many issues of public policy, including the nature of the institution of marriage, the content of public education, and the uses of public space, to name just a few. As the vehicle for this discussion, I want to ask a straightforward question: When we listen to our public discourse, what is the story that we hear about the relationship between law and religion? How does this topic tend to be spoken about in law and politics – what is our idiom around this issue – and does this story serve us well? Though straightforward, this question has gone all but unanswered in our political and academic discussions. We take for granted our approach to speaking about – and, therefore, our way of thinking about – the relationship between law and religion. In my view, this is most unfortunate because this taken-for-grantedness is the source of our failure to properly understand the critically important relationship between law and religion.

Regions, groups, and identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.L. Thurston
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Archaeologists once viewed super-individual identity as primordial and tied to territorial boundaries, useful for describing an orderly past and creating national or ethnic genealogies. Current research ties identities not to regions, but to groups: complex cultural constructions, expressed in varied yet simultaneous manifestations of bonds with family, lineage, clan, or polity, each with multiple shifting markers. These can involve kinship, status, gender, age, occupation, shared experience, and social memory, in turn impacted by wider sociopolitical, religious, and economic concerns. Between Iron Age groups, cooperation, détente, and conflict were equally likely; trade, travel, and familiarity resulted in material and ideological co-mingling, while still preserving difference, and involved symbolic and practical novelty, as well as continuity with the past. Once, such complexities caused archaeologists to label identity research impossible or unnecessary, but its exclusion often leads to misinterpretation. Fortunately, thoughtful considerations of method, materiality, and scale have resulted in productive new approaches.

Coming of age: English in Nigeria

English Today ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor O. Awonusi
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
The Past

A report on the past and present of the major variety in West Africa

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