Gendered Paths to Enlightenment: The Intersection of Gender and Religion in Buddhist Temples in Mainland China and the United States

2020 ◽  
pp. 232949652096818
Author(s):  
Di Di

This study explores how religious adherents construct their ideas regarding gender in Buddhist faith communities. Two temples, one in China and the other in the United States, both affiliated with the same international Buddhist headquarters, are situated in national contexts that endorse different macro-level gender norms. While leaders of both temples teach similar religious gender norms—specifically, that gender is unimportant for spiritual advancement—adherents do articulate gender differences in other respects. Buddhists at the temple in China believe that men and women differ but should be treated equally, with neither holding dominance over the other; meanwhile, U.S. practitioners also believe that everyone should be treated equally irrespective of gender, but they view men and women as essentially the same. A close analysis reveals that Buddhists at both temples recognize the distinctions between their religious and societal macro-level gender norms and navigate between these norms when constructing their own understandings of gender. This study highlights the influence of national context on the relationship between gender and religion, thereby contributing to and deepening our understanding of the subject.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110251
Author(s):  
Di Di ◽  
Robert A. Thomson ◽  
Elaine Howard Ecklund

In the first cross-national, mixed-methods study on gender, family, and science, the authors examined the relationship between research productivity and family life for male and female physicists and biologists in four countries: India, Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on surveys of 5,756 respondents and follow-up interviews with 369 participants, the authors found that the relationship between family responsibilities and publishing operates differently for men and women. Additionally, this relationship is conditioned by the national context in which the scientists work. The interviews indicate that family responsibilities constrain women’s publication productivity according to context. Cross-contextual differences are partially explained by the macro-level gender norms transmitted to academic scientists and how women navigate their scientific research productivity and family responsibilities. The findings have implications for the broader literature on the dialectical relationship between macro-level gender norms and responses by scientists in India, Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.


1957 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara Richards ◽  
Henry Dobyns

This paper deals with a problem long debated by anthropologists—the relationship between environment and culture. We analyze effects of topography on cultural change in situations of contact between two social systems, one more powerful than the other and inclined to enforce its behaviors on the weaker. We do this by examining cultural changes in one work-unit within a large insurance company in the United States.


1995 ◽  
pp. 27-39
Author(s):  
Margalit Berlin ◽  

The article analyzes the relationship between the corporate culture of a multinational company headquartered in the United States, which enjoys great prestige worldwide, and the business environment and practices in Venezuela, where it has an operation. The prevailing culture in the corporation is North American and the top managers come from their country of origin. In Venezuela, on the other hand, most of the companies are family-owned, and personal contacts and influences prevail. The research is oriented to the elaboration of a qualitative diagnosis, through rigorous observation and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that there is resistance on the part of Venezuelan managers to follow the culture of a strict company governed by rules set in a very different economic and political context. The ambiguity between acceptance and low identification with the values of the parent company leads to think of corporate culture as fragmented.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen

This chapter examines three important debates in International Political Economy (IPE). The first debate concerns power and the relationship between politics and economics, and more specifically whether politics is in charge of economics or whether it is the other way around. The second debate deals with development and underdevelopment in developing countries. The third debate is about the nature and extent of economic globalization, and currently takes places in a context of increasing inequality between and inside countries. This debate is also informed by the serious financial crisis of 2008 and has raised questions regarding the viability of the current model of capitalism in the United States and Western Europe.


Antiquity ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 23 (89) ◽  
pp. 40-43
Author(s):  
E. G. R. Taylor

The late Mr Thomas Burke was well known for his popular writings on London life, and the phrases employed by literary reviewers of his earlier works are precisely applicable to his English Townsman: ‘it swarms with rare and amusing pictures,’ ‘it is a mine of out-of-the-way facts.’ A man of strong prejudices, Mr Burke was accustomed to see what he expected to see, factory workers, for example, to this day commencing toil at 6 a.m. while their employers ‘roll-up in their cars at about eleven.’ Nevertheless he is concerned to emphasize the wholly laudable thesis that it is just as ‘natural’ for men to live in towns as in villages. Yet his supporting arguments are not always very happy, as when he cites the Victorian sociologist, Henry Mayhew, who had worked out (and mapped) the geographical incidence of crime. It seems that while total criminality did not vary, the townsman was addicted merely to burglary, larceny, forgery, pocket-picking and shop-lifting, while the countryman specialized in crimes ‘of the kind named unmentionable’ (which incidentally included illegitimacy). And after all, says Mr Burke ‘burglary and thieving are fairly wholesome and quite natural activities.’ Many of our towns, so he thought, were at least as old as our villages, for ‘when [man] rose from savagery it was instinctive in him to gather with his fellows for mutual protection, for the exchange of knowledge and for the sharing of experience’. Such an opinion may pass muster in a book which, in point of fact, makes very entertaining light reading. But unfortunately it is the kind of opinion that is very widespread, and in particular our Planners, like Mr Burke, have never read their Gordon Childe. Build some houses, add a so-called ‘trading-estate’ (actually a congeries of small factories), ‘decant’ the ‘over-spill’ of some growing city into the houses and ‘steer’ some industrialists (or bribe them) into the factories : there is your recipe for a New Town. The habit of studying present-day cities in their functional aspects, and of examining the relationship between function and geographical situation has not yet spread from the geographers to the borough engineers, borough surveyors and county architects who form the corps d’élite of physical Planners; still less of course do these experts probe with the archaeologist and the historian into the problem of the roots and origins of urban life. In the United States there is evidence of a wider vision, and if the young men and women reading philosophy, history and economics at Oxford together with their contemporaries reading mathematics and physics at Cambridge were even to flit through just the Syllabus and Maps of the Chicago course in Anthropology described by the Editor in the September number of ANTIQUITY, our future governing classes might be in a better position to resolve the antithesis between Plato and Karl Marx.


Author(s):  
Sheriff G.I. ◽  
Chubado B.T. ◽  
Ahmet A.

This paper discusses the concept of the one-China policy and how the United States support of Taiwan poses a challenge to stability in the region. The paper adopted the library descriptive instrument from historical research to come up with the available data in the paper. Findings show that, since 1949, the struggle between the Nationalist Republic of China and the Communist party escalated into a civil war which resulted in the defeat of Kuomintang and the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which took control of all mainland China. Only the island of Taiwan remained under the control of the ROC. Since then, both the ROC and the PRC have been claiming to represent all of "China", and both officially claim each other's territory. The paper concludes that China cannot forfeit the strait of Taiwan despite American support to the island. The deteriorating relationship between the U.S and China relationship has seen trade wars to accusations on the origins of the coronavirus to political buffering, to the sovereign of Taiwan and Hongkong, it just seems to be a manifestation of the Sino-American Cold War. The way things appear, the relationship between the U.S and China will further deteriorate largely because democracy and liberal order are being challenged by the political posture of China. The paper recommends that there is the need to maintain the non-interference principle by the two parties, the United States should know that Taiwan is China and therefore not meddle in the affairs of China and vice-versa.


Author(s):  
Christopher Cannon Jones

ABSTRACT This article examines the first Mormon mission to Jamaica in January 1853. The missionaries, facing opposition from both black and white Jamaicans, returned to the United States after only a month on the island, having made only four converts. Latter-day Saints did not return to Jamaica for another 125 years. Drawing on the missionaries’ personal papers, church archives, local newspaper reports, and governmental records, I argue that the 1853 mission played a crucial role in shaping nineteenth-century Mormonism's racial theology, including the “temple and priesthood ban” that restricted priesthood ordination and temple worship for black men and women. While historians have rightly noted the role twentieth-century missions to regions of the African Diaspora played in ending the ban, studies of the racial restriction's early scope have been discussed in almost exclusively American contexts. The mission to Jamaica, precisely because of its failure, helped shape the ban's implementation and theological justifications. Failing to make any inroads, the elders concluded that both Jamaica and its inhabitants were cursed and not worthy of the missionaries’ time, which anticipated later decisions to prioritize preaching to whites and to scale back and ultimately abandon efforts to proselytize people of African descent.


Author(s):  
Matthew Lehnert ◽  
Isabelle Nilsson ◽  
Neil Reid

The impressive growth in the number of craft breweries in the United States has created both opportunities and challenges for municipalities. On the one hand, it is evident that craft breweries can add to the diversity of the urban fabric and contribute in a meaningful way to neighborhood vitality and, in the case of distressed areas, to neighborhood revitalization. On the other hand, zoning regulations in many municipalities have not been particularly accommodating. Craft breweries pose a challenge to municipalities, as their businesses represent a hybrid of restaurant, manufacturer, and entertainment. To capitalize on the growing popularity of craft breweries, municipalities have been changing their zoning ordinances. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between craft breweries and zoning in three American cities. We seek to highlight the differences and similarities that craft breweries face in seeking optimal locations, in the face of zoning challenges.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Pettersson

•This article presents a study of how images of the United States have changed in German media discourse since the end of the Cold War. Two leading German news papers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung, have been analysed during four time periods — from 1984 to 2009 — covering four American presidencies. The results show that the image of the USA was far more critical in 2004, during the Bush era than during the other presidencies, where positive and trustful images had a more prominent place in the discourse. Even anti-American images were found. However, the critical images were, in general, more focused on what the USA does, not what it is — even during the Bush era. Furthermore, the relationship between the USA and Germany was portrayed as being close and friendly — like a father—son relationship — with the exception of 2004, when relations were presented as somewhat strained. •


1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 885-895
Author(s):  
Kenneth C. Cole

Erie v. Tompkins evidences decentralizing trends in our federal system in two different ways—one fairly obvious and relatively orthodox; the other neither obvious nor orthodox, but probably the more significant. The first aspect may be touched upon very briefly and the ramifications of the second explored more fully.The obvious side of Erie v. Tompkins lies in its rejection of a common law of the United States available for application by the federal courts in diversity cases. This conception was given expression by Story in Swift v. Tyson, and has been followed in many, if not most, of the succeeding cases building upon and expanding Story's doctrine.


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