scholarly journals Television is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Moll
Keyword(s):  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Islamic Revival ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Religious Media ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Secular Power ◽  
Television Producers

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious and the secular differently. This God-talk matters greatly to Islamic revivalists, who spend more time debunking each other than they do secularists. Attention to these internal critiques foregrounds the competing moral conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Indeed, focusing on the piety movement’s internal fractures as God-talk allows for an ethnographic engagement with how Muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power. This focus, in turn, complicates the stakes of anthropological judgment.

The Secular and the Religious in Tajikistan

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Thibault
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Local Perceptions ◽  
Islamic Revival ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Do So

The increasing practice of Islam in Tajikistan in the last few years has contributed to rising social and political tensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Northern Tajikistan between May and October 2010, this article intends to highlight underlying religious tensions in Tajikistan, which, I argue, are the result of the emergence of conflicting voices contesting current political spaces. My intention is to revisit two concepts abundantly used in the religious literature. First, I intend to deconstruct the dichotomous relation between the state and society and try to uncover the power relations that lie behind the making, dissemination and understanding of narratives addressing the place of Islam in society. Second, I reconsider the categories of the secular and the religious by illustrating the porous character of these concepts in the Tajik context. I do so by providing accounts of local perceptions of religious politics expressed by politicians and bureaucrats, ordinary believers and representatives of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan. Finally, I argue that the coexistence of different sets of religious and secular norms reveals that the struggle for political power in Tajikistan is now increasingly articulated around religious issues.

scholarly journals LAICITY AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS. EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE IN CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-211
Author(s):  
Philippe Portier
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Republic

It is common practice to defend the idea that by separating, in 1880s-1905, the State from the Churches, in particular from the Roman Catholic Church, the French Republic has opened the way to the feminine emancipation. The return to the history tilts us to propose a more diffentiating interpretation. The influence of the laicity is, in France, by no means unambiguous: according to periods, the Republic adopted varied public policies towards women. This article presents a diachronic modelling, envisaged from the dialectic of the equality and the difference, of these policies. It spots a first period, 1880 till 1960, during which remains a hierarchical formula maintaining women in a status of inferiority ; between 1960 and 1990, the equality spouses with the religious difference; from 1990, under the influence of the controversy around the “ Muslim question “, France enter a more universalist model, in which the assertion of women’s rights comes along with a relative denial of the religious difference.

scholarly journals The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being

2021 ◽  
pp. 175407392110638
Author(s):  
Mark Miller ◽  
Erik Rietveld ◽  
Julian Kiverstein
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Prediction Errors ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Momentary Happiness ◽  
Error Dynamics

We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time . Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing.

Rethinking resistance through and as affect

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Laszczkowski
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
High Speed Railway ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Ongoing Formation

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists’ experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent ‘subjective turn’ in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to ‘de-pathologize’ and ‘de-exoticize’ resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler’s feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists’ longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers’ own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects.

Ethnography From Physical to Digital Contexts

2022 ◽  
pp. 196-216
Author(s):  
Angela Delli Paoli
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The People ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
The Difference

The term ethnography comes from the Greek ethnos (folk, the people, cultures) and gráphein (to write, to describe), and therefore, its literal meaning refers to the description of cultures. The current perspectives of ethnographic research are widening to digital contexts for several interrelated motivations: decolonization, globalization, information and communication technologies (ICTs). The classical loci of digital ethnography is represented by online communities, delimited digital spaces of social aggregation around a given domain of interest. However, in the last years, these privileged sites are complemented or sometimes substituted by social media sites and metadata in digital ethnographic research. As a result, new sites for ethnographic fieldwork are emerging fostering new types of ethnographic practice. The difference in digital ethnographic fields imply an internally diverse array of approaches. The chapter starts from the origins of ethnographic research to investigate its digital developments, methodological challenges, and variety of approach.

The Origin of the Moon

1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 149-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. L. Ruskol
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Composition ◽  
Solar System ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Origin Of The Moon

The difference between average densities of the Moon and Earth was interpreted in the preceding report by Professor H. Urey as indicating a difference in their chemical composition. Therefore, Urey assumes the Moon's formation to have taken place far away from the Earth, under conditions differing substantially from the conditions of Earth's formation. In such a case, the Earth should have captured the Moon. As is admitted by Professor Urey himself, such a capture is a very improbable event. In addition, an assumption that the “lunar” dimensions were representative of protoplanetary bodies in the entire solar system encounters great difficulties.

Influence of Cell Wall Composition on the Fossilisation of Bacteria and the Implications for the Search for Early Life Forms

1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 491-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Westall
Keyword(s):  
Cell Wall ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Cation Binding ◽  
Positive Bacterium ◽  
Gram Positive ◽  
Gram Positive Bacteria ◽  
Transmission Electron ◽  
Hydrothermal Sediments ◽  
Identification Of Bacteria ◽  
The Difference

AbstractThe oldest cell-like structures on Earth are preserved in silicified lagoonal, shallow sea or hydrothermal sediments, such as some Archean formations in Western Australia and South Africa. Previous studies concentrated on the search for organic fossils in Archean rocks. Observations of silicified bacteria (as silica minerals) are scarce for both the Precambrian and the Phanerozoic, but reports of mineral bacteria finds, in general, are increasing. The problems associated with the identification of authentic fossil bacteria and, if possible, closer identification of bacteria type can, in part, be overcome by experimental fossilisation studies. These have shown that not all bacteria fossilise in the same way and, indeed, some seem to be very resistent to fossilisation. This paper deals with a transmission electron microscope investigation of the silicification of four species of bacteria commonly found in the environment. The Gram positiveBacillus laterosporusand its spore produced a robust, durable crust upon silicification, whereas the Gram negativePseudomonas fluorescens, Ps. vesicularis, andPs. acidovoranspresented delicately preserved walls. The greater amount of peptidoglycan, containing abundant metal cation binding sites, in the cell wall of the Gram positive bacterium, probably accounts for the difference in the mode of fossilisation. The Gram positive bacteria are, therefore, probably most likely to be preserved in the terrestrial and extraterrestrial rock record.

Structuring, Motions and Shapes of Corona Emission Line Profiles

1994 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 421-426
Author(s):  
N. F. Tyagun
Keyword(s):  
Emission Line ◽  
Filling Factor ◽  
Direct Relationship ◽  
Coronal Plasma ◽  
Line Of Sight ◽  
Line Profiles ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Yellow Line ◽  
Red Line

AbstractThe interrelationship of half-widths and intensities for the red, green and yellow lines is considered. This is a direct relationship for the green and yellow line and an inverse one for the red line. The difference in the relationships of half-widths and intensities for different lines appears to be due to substantially dissimilar structuring and to a set of line-of-sight motions in ”hot“ and ”cold“ corona regions.When diagnosing the coronal plasma, one cannot neglect the filling factor - each line has such a factor of its own.

Difference Fourier Analysis of Glucose Embedded and Frozen Hydrated Purple Membrane

1982 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 74-75
Author(s):  
Jules S. Jaffe ◽  
Robert M. Glaeser
Keyword(s):  
Purple Membrane ◽  
Data Set ◽  
High Resolution Data ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Fourier Techniques ◽  
Versus Protein ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Difference Fourier ◽  
Ideal Method

Although difference Fourier techniques are standard in X-ray crystallography it has only been very recently that electron crystallographers have been able to take advantage of this method. We have combined a high resolution data set for frozen glucose embedded Purple Membrane (PM) with a data set collected from PM prepared in the frozen hydrated state in order to visualize any differences in structure due to the different methods of preparation. The increased contrast between protein-ice versus protein-glucose may prove to be an advantage of the frozen hydrated technique for visualizing those parts of bacteriorhodopsin that are embedded in glucose. In addition, surface groups of the protein may be disordered in glucose and ordered in the frozen state. The sensitivity of the difference Fourier technique to small changes in structure provides an ideal method for testing this hypothesis.

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