Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonatan N Gez ◽  
Yvan Droz ◽  
Jeanne Rey ◽  
Edio Soares
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Foraging Activity ◽  
French Word ◽  
Pollinating Insects ◽  
Shed Light

Based on comparative ethnographic research in four countries and three continents, Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility explores the notion of "religious butinage" as a conceptual framework intended to shed light on the dynamics of everyday religious practice. Derived from the French word butiner, which refers to the foraging activity of bees and other pollinating insects, this term is employed by the authors metaphorically to refer to the "to-ing and fro-ing" of believers between religious institutions.

Narrated Photography

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Sarah Dunlop ◽  
Peter Ward
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Shed Light

This article describes how a recently refined visual ethnographic research method, “narrated photography,” contributes to the study of religion. We argue that this qualitative research method is particularly useful for studies of lived religion and demonstrate this through examples drawn from a study the sacred among young Polish migrants to England. Narrated photography, which entails asking people to photograph what is personally significant to them and then to narrate the image, generates visual and textual material that mediates the subjective. Through using this method we discovered that family was considered to be sacred, both in terms of links to religious practice and a desire for a secure home which family relationships provide. Additionally, narrated photography has the potential to expand our conceptions of lived religion through the inclusion of visual material culture and the visual context of the research participants. In this case the data revealed that the Polish young people view structures within their landscape through a particularly Polish Catholic lens. These findings shed light on the religious tensions that migrants encounter in everyday life.

Modern Homesteading in America: Negotiating Religion, Nature, and Modernity

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kneale Gould
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Rural Living ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Face ◽  
Back To The Land

AbstractThis article explores the spiritual dimensions of modern back-to-the-land (or homesteading) practices in contemporary American culture. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, it examines the ways in which nature is sacralised and everyday life is ritualised by those who have chosen to lead lives of partial self-sufficiency in rural locales. Through an examination of oral and literary source material, and several case studies, this study demonstrates the ways in which nature is constructed as a source of meaning and authority for those who are disaffected from traditional religious institutions. This article also seeks to unfold the complexities involved in living `close to nature', such as the dangers in seeing 'natural living' as the only standard for the moral life and the tendency for 'back to the land' practices to be advocated by those whose class location is a privileged one. The analysis offered here is intended as a point of access into broader tensions in American culture: between traditional and alternative forms of religious practice, between the idealisation of rural life and the realities of rural living, and between the desire for freedom and the desire for self-imposed constraint in the face of modernity.

A Politics of Intensity: Some Aspects of Acceleration in Simondon and Deleuze

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-517
Author(s):  
Yuk Hui ◽  
Louis Morelle
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
The Other ◽  
Generic Concept ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Ontological Ground ◽  
Shed Light

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.

Young Islam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avi Max Spiegel
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Secular World ◽  
New Recruits ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Islamist Movements

Today, two-thirds of all Arab Muslims are under the age of thirty. This book takes readers inside the evolving competition for their support—a competition not simply between Islamism and the secular world, but between different and often conflicting visions of Islam itself. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among rank-and-file activists in Morocco, the book shows how Islamist movements are encountering opposition from an unexpected source—each other. In vivid detail, the book describes the conflicts that arise as Islamist groups vie with one another for new recruits, and the unprecedented fragmentation that occurs as members wrangle over a shared urbanized base. Looking carefully at how political Islam is lived, expressed, and understood by young people, the book moves beyond the top-down focus of current research. Instead, it makes the compelling case that Islamist actors are shaped more by their relationships to each other than by their relationships to the state or even to religious ideology. By focusing not only on the texts of aging elites but also on the voices of diverse and sophisticated Muslim youths, the book exposes the shifting and contested nature of Islamist movements today—movements that are being reimagined from the bottom up by young Islam. This book, the first to shed light on this new and uncharted era of Islamist pluralism in the Middle East and North Africa, uncovers the rivalries that are redefining the next generation of political Islam.

scholarly journals A Sense of Presence: Mediating an American Apocalypse

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.

After the Exodus: The New Catholics in Boston's Old Ethnic Neighborhoods

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regine O. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Racial Climate ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Haitian Immigrants ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Catholic Churches ◽  
Residential Settlement

AbstractThis article contributes to the growing body of work on the impact of religious institutions on the identities and experiences of new immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. Drawing from ethnographic research on Haitian immigrants in Boston, I find a relationship between initial residential settlement patterns and the location of Catholic churches. Following Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus: Why Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed, I argue that Haitian immigrants who arrived in Boston in the 1960s were attracted to certain neighborhoods despite the racial climate because they were Catholic. In addition to the influence of rules governing membership and religious authority, I show that Haitians turned to a Catholic narrative of their experience in Boston because being Catholic was the most acceptable way of being Haitian in that social context.

scholarly journals EDUCATING WOMEN FOR DEVELOPMENT: THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2005 AND THE PROBLEM WITH WOMEN'S CHOICES

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 122a-122a
Author(s):  
Fida J. Adely
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Women's Development ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Human Development Report ◽  
Women And Education ◽  
Shed Light

The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.

scholarly journals JUSTIFIED BELIEF IN A DIGITAL AGE: ON THE EPISTEMIC IMPLICATIONS OF SECRET INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES

Episteme ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boaz Miller ◽  
Isaac Record
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Epistemic Responsibility ◽  
Modes Of Operation ◽  
Internet Technologies ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Justificatory Status

AbstractPeople increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered internet sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users' reliance on internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns within standard theories of knowledge and justification. To shed light on the problem, we introduce a novel conceptual framework that clarifies the relations between justified belief, epistemic responsibility, action and the technological resources available to a subject. We argue that justified belief is subject to certain epistemic responsibilities that accompany the subject's particular decision-taking circumstances, and that one typical responsibility is to ascertain, so far as one can, whether the information upon which the judgment will rest is biased or incomplete. What this responsibility comprises is partly determined by the inquiry-enabling technologies available to the subject. We argue that a subject's beliefs that are formed based on internet-filtered information are less justified than they would be if she either knew how filtering worked or relied on additional sources, and that the subject may have the epistemic responsibility to take measures to enhance the justificatory status of such beliefs.

scholarly journals Frontiers of cosmopolitanism: Educational enclaves and the extractive roots of international schools

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308275X2110596
Author(s):  
Matthieu Bolay ◽  
Jeanne Rey
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
International Schools ◽  
International School ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
International Teachers ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
School Sector ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Do So

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in the international school sector, we show how cosmopolitan claims of openness mirror a relative closure and ‘offshore-like’ enclavement. To do so, we build upon the notions of modularity and extractivism, which we use as heuristics to analyse social and spatial practices of defining boundaries. Gazing beyond the main foundational myth of international schools, we first outline their concomitant extractive roots. Second, we shed light on the conditions of international teachers’ circulation worldwide. Third, we examine the territorial entanglements and disentanglements that characterise international schools. Finally, we investigate the tensions induced by a cosmopolitan educational ethos whose discourse of inclusion is inevitably paired with practices of exclusion.

scholarly journals Methodology in the Mirror: a Living, Systematic Review of Works in Quantitative Ethnography

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Szilvia Zörgő ◽  
Gjalt - Jorn Ygram Peters ◽  
Clare Porter ◽  
Marcia Moraes ◽  
Savannah Donegan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Segmentation Analysis ◽  
Shed Light

Quantitative Ethnography is a nascent field now formulating the specifics of its conceptual framework and terminology for a unified, quantitative – qualitative methodology. Our living, systematic review aims to shed light on decisions in research design that the community has made thus far in the domain of data collection, coding & segmentation, analysis, and how Quantitative Ethnography as a methodology is conceptualized. Our analysis intends to spur discussions on these issues within the community and help establish a lingua franca.

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