scholarly journals Avkobling og transformasjon: Meditasjonsretreater på Dharma Mountain mellom popularisering og religiøst fellesskap

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
Henriette Hanky
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Simple Technique ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Spiritual Awakening ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Self Help

While meditation has undeniably become a part of popular culture, the term encompasses a wide variety of practices and conceptualizations on the religious-secular spectrum. In this paper, I explore how this wide scope is dealt with at meditation retreats offered at the Norwegian center Dharma Mountain. The place is built around the Norwegian guru Vasant Swaha and serves as a meeting place for his disciples, the sangha. At the same time, the Dharma Mountain group takes part in the wider popular meditation field with retreats tailored toward the preferences of an often guru-critical mainstream audience. Based on ethnographical material, I compare two meditation techniques, vipassana and Dynamic Meditation, and how they are introduced, legitimized, and performed at a newcomer weekend in the first and a summer retreat with Vasant Swaha in the second case. I show that while instructors introduce vipassana as a generic and simple technique, they mark Dynamic Meditation as a specifically composed method and thus integrate it with Swaha’s background in the Osho movement and the therapeutic outlook of his retreats. My findings point to the flexibility of the concept of meditation and how this helps organizers to address different audiences. Under the umbrella of meditation, Dharma Mountain incorporates a range of conceptualizations, from self-help to spiritual awakening, and different social forms, from costumer relations to religious community, in one and the same place.

David Georges Emmerich Professor of Morphology

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Chassagnoux
Keyword(s):  
Extensive Study ◽  
Combinatorial Analysis ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Tensegrity Structures ◽  
Architectural Space ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Architectural Structures

David Georges Emmerich taught morphology at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and later at the Paris-La Villette School of Architecture from 1965 to 1990. An architect and engineer by training, convinced of the modern movement's inability to provide mankind with the architectural space needed, his research led to constructive systems using cheap, industrialised components, with wide scope for self-help housing as well as a broad range of architectural structures. His extensive study of regular partitioning in space, natural shapes, the resistance of shapes and combinatorial analysis led him to developing stereometric systems; and, more specifically, to the invention of self-tensioning, or tensegrity, structures.

scholarly journals Political Potential: The Women of Instagram Poetry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimia Rashidisisan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
Media Platform

Introduction The historical canon of poetry is predominantly male. The historical domain of policy making and politics is predominantly male. In the digital age, however, where the means to share or publish one’s thoughts and views is available to almost anyone, the strict gatekeeping of literature and political discourse is no longer upheld. The phenomenon of instapoetry, poetry published to Instagram, is an example of a social media platform being used by women to bring poetry into popular culture, and, by that means, address political issues surrounding womanhood. By addressing issues of female oppression, sexual assault, and race through poetry, female instapoets wield political power by raising awareness about these issues and influencing and mobilizing their young and female demographic to instigate social change. Rupi Kaur, a famous Canadian-Indian instapoet with 4 million Instagram followers, is an exemplar of the intersection of poetry, social media, and politics. Kaur’s female-centred content reaches millions of people and speaks to healing by way of self-help. Through her words and illustrations, readers are encouraged to think about the politics of being a woman today.

scholarly journals Witchcraft for Sale! Commodity vs. Community in the Neopagan Movement

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Waldron
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Ritual Music ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Relationship

The growth of the Pagan and Witchcraft revivalist movements (Neopaganism) is well documented in the Anglophone world. However, Witchcraft movements are also closely linked to a vibrant set of subcultures and a multitude of representations in popular culture. In this context investigating the relationship between Witchcraft as a religious community and its representation in consumer culture and mass media is extremely significant. This article examines the ambiguous relationship between witch and Wiccan communities and the vast array of merchandising, popular culture and media representations that surround them. In creating the WIKID WITCH KIT I hope to take you on a magickal and exciting journey! Through ritual, music, song and spoken word I will help you unleash your inner magick and discover the wonderful and positively empowering world of Witchcraft. As part of this journey you will discover your WIKID magickal name, giving you access to our exclusive website and online coven. There you can meet up with other WIKID Witches to swap spells, stories, and ideas. And every full moon I will personally join you for an online gathering——which will be truly WIKID. WIKID Witch Kit features WIKID Magick Fizz/WIKID Magick Potions/WIKID Magick Fire/WIKID Magick Star/WIKID Magick Cord/WIKID Magick Audio CD.1

Making Neoliberal Selves: Popular Psychology in Contemporary Mexico

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-70
Author(s):  
Daniel Nehring
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Hybrid Character ◽  
Popular Psychology ◽  
Christian Nationalism

Since the 1970s, academic debates have considered how psychological discourses may legitimize or challenge capitalist forms of social organization. However, these debates have largely focused on the USA and Western Europe. The roles which psychological discourses play in contemporary popular cultures in Latin America remain poorly understood. Here, I use an analysis of the Mexican self-help publishing industry to examine the roles which psychological narratives may play in constructing, bolstering or subverting neoliberal subjectivities. Self-help books, my subject matter, are widely read in Mexico and at the international level. They therefore constitute a nexus through which the narratives of self and social relationships of academic psychology percolate into popular culture. In Mexico, self-help publishing involves, first, the translation and sale of texts written elsewhere, often in the USA, Europe and other Latin American nations, and, second, the sale of books by Mexican authors. This gives the Mexican self-help industry a distinctively hybrid character, as a variety of interpretations of self-improvement compete with each other for a readership. Here, I contrast self-help texts that blend psychological concepts with Christian nationalism with secular accounts that rely on pseudo-scientific and philosophical arguments to formulate a moral vision of a successful life. In spite of their narrative diversity, I argue that neoliberal understandings of self, choice, and personal responsibility are pervasive in self-help texts. The organization of the self-help publishing industry according to neoliberal economic principles and the refashioning of authors as competitive self-help entrepreneurs may explain this narrative convergence to some extent.

Migration Policies and Uncertainty

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 28-45
Author(s):  
Jeanne Rey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Migration Policies ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract This article addresses the role of migrant congregations as civil society players through the practice of prayer. By combining the notion of political activism and the theory of subjectivation, it offers a new perspective on Pentecostal practice and migrant congregations in Europe as a way of addressing uncertainty linked to migration policies and mobility regimes. In Switzerland, where conditions for migrants have become increasingly restrictive, political and social forms of exclusion are challenged by African Pentecostal migrants who engage in prayer that contests restrictions on mobility, assignation to subaltern positions, as well as other forms of discrimination. Yet, this ritual resistance rarely takes the form of a political action; neither does it formulate concrete claims towards immigration procedures and policies. Rather, it is expressed through prayer in the protective space of a religious community, allowing the migrants to reassess subjectivations and to imagine new subjectivities.

Mormons and Materialism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen McDannell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Business World ◽  
For Profit ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Church

By consistently conflating spirit and matter, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has steadfastly resisted secularization theory’s prediction of the inevitable decline and marginalization of religion. This chapter argues that successful use of material and popular culture by Mormons in the USA and Great Britain has enabled its expansion. I maintain that Mormonism is a ‘material Christianity’, demonstrated by the Book of Mormon’s embodied Jesus and the 1847 establishment of a religious community in Utah. Latter-day Saints now run church museums and historic sites, put on musical pageants, and produce film sagas—all intended to inspire the faithful and proselytize to the rest. Successful church public relations campaigns dovetail with secular depictions of Mormons in film, on television, and in Broadway and West End theatre. The church’s foray into popular culture is funded partially through for-profit companies that creatively combine the business world with the world of faith.

scholarly journals Biohacking, Bodies and Do-It-Yourself

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirjam Grewe-Salfeld
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Home Health ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Biological Particles ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Ambiguous Position

From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles - biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.

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