The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

scholarly journals Burden of Sensitive Skin Questionnaire and Current Perception Threshold: Use as Diagnostic Tools for Sensitive Skin Syndrome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Polena ◽  
Marlène Chavagnac-Bonneville ◽  
Laurent Misery ◽  
Michèle Sayag
Keyword(s):  
Smoking Status ◽  
The Self ◽  
Diagnostic Tools ◽  
Threshold Values ◽  
Sensitive Skin ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Perception Threshold ◽  
Current Perception Threshold ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

The assessment of sensitive skin syndrome, characterized by subjective unpleasant sensations, remains a challenge, since there is no international consensus on the best diagnostic tools. This study evaluated the combination of the Burden of Sensitive Skin (BoSS) questionnaire and the current perception threshold as diagnostic tools for sensitive skin syndrome, and the relationship between BoSS and the subjects’ smoking status, phototype and skin type. A total of 100 women completed the BoSS questionnaire, and current perception threshold was measured on the face. The BoSS score was significantly higher in the self-reported sensitive skin group compared with the non-sensitive skin group (25.61 vs 14.05; p < 0.001), and in non-smokers vs smokers (23.00 vs 18.37; p < 0.05). In addition, the current perception threshold values were similar between the sensitive and non-sensitive groups. These results suggest that BoSS is a better diagnostic tool for sensitive skin syndrome than the current perception threshold, and that smokers less frequently have sensitive skin than do non-smokers.

scholarly journals The formation of young workers: The cultivation of the self as a subject of value to the contemporary labour force

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Farrugia
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The Self ◽  
Young Workers ◽  
Critical Insight ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This article explores the practices through which young people cultivate themselves as subjects of value to the post-Fordist labour force. In this, the article goes beyond an existing emphasis on young people’s ‘transitions’ through employment, to a focus on the practices through which young people are formed as labouring subjects, and therefore on the relationship between youth subjectivities and post-Fordist labour force formation. Theoretically, the article builds upon increasingly influential suggestions in studies of post-Fordism that the formation of post-Fordist workers now takes place through the conversion of the whole of a subject’s life into the capacity for labour, including affective styles, modes of relationality, and characteristics usually not considered as productive dimensions of the self. In this context, the article shows that whilst young people form themselves as workers through practices that are not specific to institutionalised definitions of education and labour, these practices – and the modes of selfhood they aim to cultivate – vary in ways that contribute to classed divisions within post-Fordist societies. In this, the study of the formation of young workers offers a critical insight into the way that the formation of subjectivities intertwines with the disciplinary requirements of post-Fordist labour in their classed manifestations.

Levinas on God and the Trace of the Other

2018 ◽  
pp. 320-342
Author(s):  
Michael L. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Interpersonal Experience ◽  
Divine Transcendence ◽  
The Face ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Levinas takes the face-to-face relationship between each subject and every other particular person to be a relationship of the self with transcendence. He believes this dimension of our interpersonal experience is represented in traditional religious and theological texts by the relationship with the divine or God. This paper explores how Levinas’s appropriation of the Cartesian expression “the idea of infinity” introduces this divine character of the face-to-face and how Levinas goes on to develop and enrich this association of the face-to-face, its ethical character, and divine transcendence. Levinas takes the divinity of the face-to-face to refer to the universality, objectivity, normative force, and motivational attraction of the sense of responsibility he believes is foundational for human experience. In short, for Levinas, the divinity associated with morality in traditional religious texts refers to the normative weight and psychological appeal of ethics itself.

Contemporary Spirituality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Bruce
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Unusual Structure ◽  
The Dead

The histories of the Findhorn Foundation (which is Europe’s oldest New Age centre) and of Glastonbury (England’s main New Age town) and detailed biographies of producers and consumers of holistic spirituality instruction, rituals, and therapies are used to describe such basic themes of the contemporary cultic milieu as individual autonomy, the importance of intuition, the persistence of the self through reincarnation, a melding of the realms of the living and the dead, the occult, a romantic preference for the natural and the ancient over the modern and the industrial, tolerance of diversity, and syncretism and holism. The unusual structure of the cultic milieu is described, and attention is drawn to the importance of ‘subsistence spirituality’: while some New Age activity is commercial, much is based on people providing services for themselves and their associates.

Liberation in the Face of Uncertainty

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert J. M. Hermans
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
The Self ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Dialogical Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Dialogical Self Theory ◽  
The Relationship

In this volume, Dialogical Self Theory is innovatively presented as a guide to help elucidate some of the most pressing problems of our time as they emerge at the interface of self and society. As a bridging framework at the interface of the social sciences and philosophy, Dialogical Self Theory provides a broad view of problem areas that place us in a field of tension between liberation and social imprisonment. With climate change and the coronavirus pandemic serving as wake-up calls, the book focuses on the experience of uncertainty, the disenchantment of the world, the pursuit of happiness, and the cultural limitations of the Western self-ideal. Now more than ever we need to rethink the relationship between self, other, and the natural environment, and this book uses Dialogical Self Theory to explore actual and potential responses of the self to these urgent challenges.

scholarly journals Communicative Identity in the Eighteenth Century; Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim's Epistolary Network and the Cult of Friendship

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. VC100-VC122
Author(s):  
Tobias Heinrich
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
The Relationship

In recent years the field of ‘life writing’ has been shaped by critical approaches that have abandoned traditional notions of the singular, self-governing individual in favor of a multiple and processual concept of the subject which understands the self as socially determined. A key role is played by an engagement with the technological and medial requirements – the material basis – of the subject’s construction. In contributing to this debate, this article looks at a configuration that, while it has numerous structural analogies to the present, is historically situated in the eighteenth century. Using the example of the epistolary network around the German Enlightenment figure Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803), I will argue that at one of the decisive turning points in the formation of the modern concept of the subject there was a form of medial communication which stood at odds to the idea of a unified and autonomous self. Through the relationship created between author and addressee, the letter constructed changing versions of the self that made the success of communication dependent on the play between textual ambiguities and the imagination. At the same time the article examines the role of the visual image as a substitute for the other in epistolary communication. Under the guiding concept of ‘friendship’ a network of text and identity production occurring in parallel is formed. Such a network is not solely based on the principle of individual autonomy but also on collective recognition. This article was submitted on July 1st 2014 and published on December 5th 2014.

‘travels of memory, imagination and fact’: Kate O'Brien's Archival Notes

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jamison
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Late Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Teresa Of Avila ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Autobiographical Impulse

This essay explores Kate O'Brien's attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O'Brien's archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose, significant insights into O'Brien's thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O'Brien's Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O'Brien's autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O'Brien's quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.

scholarly journals Sharing Small Stories of Life and Death Online: Death-writing of the Moment

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. DM118-DM142
Author(s):  
Korina Giaxoglou
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Public Displays ◽  
Shared Stories ◽  
Small Stories ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Digital Time

This article discusses public (and semi-public) reactions to death events attracting media and social media attention, described here as spectacular death sharing online. Based on the empirical study of sample cases—predominantly involving the death of white, often young, adults—I show how different kinds of spectacular death events are shared as small stories. I explore the key types of death selected for sharing online, the linguistic and narrative styling of these selections and the networked uptake of the shared stories of life and death. Addressing sharing practices of life and death at these different levels arguably allows an insight into the way the tellability of death is extended in digital time-spaces and its implications for the visibility of death, dying, and mourning. Sharing life and death as small stories of the moment is found to involve practices of death-writing of the moment, which are intimately connected to salient forms of broadcasting the self-online as life-writing of the moment (Georgakopoulou 2017). This mode of sharing offers a window to broader tensions arising from public displays of emotion and the changing—and often antagonistic—forms of testimony in contemporary networked societies.

Narrating Travel, Narrating the Self: Considering Women‘s Travel Writing as Life Writing

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Kinsley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Travel Accounts

This article considers the ways in which eighteenth-century womens travel narratives function as autobiographical texts, examining the process by which a travellers dislocation from home can enable exploration of the self through the observation and description of place. It also, however, highlights the complexity of the relationship between two forms of writing which a contemporary readership viewed as in many ways distinctly different. The travel accounts considered, composed (at least initially) in manuscript form, in many ways contest the assumption that manuscript travelogues will somehow be more self-revelatory than printed accounts. Focusing upon the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Katherine Plymley, Caroline Lybbe Powys and Dorothy Richardson, the article argues for a more historically nuanced approach to the reading of womens travel writing and demonstrates that the narration of travel does not always equate to a desired or successful narration of the self.

scholarly journals Hope, Meaning and Responsibility across Stages of Recovery for Individuals Living With an Enduring Mental Illness

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vedrana Copic ◽  
Frank P. Deane ◽  
Trevor P. Crowe ◽  
Lindsay G. Oades
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Health Management ◽  
Personal Health ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Face ◽  
Component Processes ◽  
Recovery Assessment ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis study reports on the relationship between stage of recovery and hope, meaning and responsibility for individuals diagnosed with severe mental illness.Methods:Seventy-seven people with a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder of at least 6 months' duration participated in the study. Participants completed the Self-Identified Stage of Recovery (SISR) scale, measures of component processes of recovery (Hope Scale; Positive Interpretation of Disease, SpREUK; Active Involvement, Personal Health Management Questionnaire (PHMQ) and the Recovery Assessment Scale-short (RAS).Results:Hope, meaning,Personal Confidence and HopeandNot Being Dominated by Symptomsvaried significantly across stages of recovery; however, neither in a parallel nor linear fashion. Hopefulness and sense of meaning in relation to the experience of mental illness increase before personal confidence and resilience in the face of setbacks.Conclusions and implications:Symptoms appear to take less prominence in individuals' lives in later stages of recovery. Greater insight into the relationship between stage of recovery and component processes may allow for more targeted recovery-oriented support for individuals at different stages of recovery.

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