scholarly journals I am hated, therefore I am: The Enemy in Yorùbá Imaginary

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Abimbola Adelakun

 This essay will study how the Yorùbá conceptualize “ọ̀tá” or the enemy, a trope that recurs in various cultural phenomena such as music, prayers, and other social rituals. The Yorùbá worldview of the enemy has profound implications on the way they frame issues that affect their mental, physical, social, and general well-being. Health studies, religious studies, and social ethics studies and analyses have mostly tried to investigate the enemy as a concept borne out of Yorùbá cosmology which serves as a conduit for superstition, fear, and other seemingly irrational behavior. In this essay, I frame the concept of “ọ̀tá” through the theatrical dialectic of antagonist/protagonist theory. The enemy, I argue, is the way the Yorùbá metaphorize all kinds of antagonism—material and immaterial ones—into an imaginative texture that gives it the tangibility they need to triumph against those situations. This essay will interrogate how this personification of antagonism is achieved by studying Ifá texts, Yorùbá popular music of a period, and contemporary Pentecostal prayers.

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Fuochi ◽  
Chiara A. Veneziani ◽  
Alberto Voci

Abstract. This paper aimed to assess whether differences in the way to conceive happiness, measured by the Orientations to Happiness measure, were associated with specific reactions to negative events. We hypothesized that among orientations to pleasure (portraying hedonism), to meaning (representing a eudaimonic approach to life), and to engagement (derived from the experience of flow), orientation to meaning would have displayed a stronger protective role against recent negative and potentially stressful events. After providing a validation of the Italian version of the Orientations to Happiness measure (Study 1), we performed regression analyses of the three orientations on positive and negative emotions linked to a self-relevant negative event (Study 2), and moderation analyses assessing the interactive effects of orientations to happiness and stressful events on well-being indicators (Study 3). Our findings supported the hypotheses. In Study 2, meaning was associated with positive emotions characterized by a lower activation (contentment and interest) compared to the positive emotions associated with pleasure (amusement, eagerness, and happiness). In Study 3, only meaning buffered the effect of recent potentially stressful events on satisfaction with life and positive affect. Results suggest that orientation to meaning might help individuals to better react to negative events.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-43
Author(s):  
Justin Tse

This essay reviews Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus's New Age Spiritualities: Rethinking Religion. It shows that their attempt to redefine religion through new age spiritualities is actually an attempt to impose an economically elite social geography onto religious studies as a social fact. My central argument is that this effort in turn reveals that religious studies serves as a sociological factory for liberal economic ideologies. It suggests that to mitigate this ideological work, a shift toward critical geography in religious studies is the way forward.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-18
Author(s):  
Nathan Rein

Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell's 2014 article, "On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion," offers a comprehensive rationale for the use of real, essentialist definitions of religion in the field of religious studies. In this article, I examine her arguments and the proposed definition she supplies. I argue that a close reading of Schaffalitzky's piece, concentrating especially on the way she uses examples, helps to demonstrate that she and her anti-essentialist opponents view the field of religious studies in incommensurable ways. While Schaffalitzky views definitions as serving the analytical study of religion as an object, her opponents view definitions primarily rhetorically and seek to focus attention on the process of defining.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 730-744
Author(s):  
V.I. Loktionov

Subject. The article reviews the way strategic threats to energy security influence the quality of people's life. Objectives. The study unfolds the theory of analyzing strategic threats to energy security by covering the matter of quality of people's life. Methods. To analyze the way strategic threats to energy security spread across cross-sectoral commodity and production chains and influences quality of people's living, I applied the factor analysis and general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis. Results. I suggest interpreting strategic threats to energy security as risks of people's quality of life due to a reduction in the volume of energy supply. I identified mechanisms reflecting how the fuel and energy complex and its development influence the quality of people's life. The article sets out the method to assess such quality-of-life risks arising from strategic threats to energy security. Conclusions and Relevance. In the current geopolitical situation, strategic threats to energy security cause long-standing adverse consequences for the quality of people's life. If strategic threats to energy security are further construed as risk of quality of people's life, this will facilitate the preparation and performance of a more effective governmental policy on energy, which will subsequently raise the economic well-being of people.


Author(s):  
Malene Friis Andersen ◽  
Karina Nielsen ◽  
Jeppe Zielinski Nguyen Ajslev

There is a growing interest in organizational interventions (OI) aiming to increase employees’ well-being. An OI involves changes in the way work is designed, organized, and managed. Studies have shown that an OI’s positive results are increased if there is a good fit between context and intervention and between participant and intervention. In this article, we propose that a third fit—the Relational Fit (R-Fit)—also plays an important role in determining an intervention’s outcome. The R-Fit consists of factors related to 1) the employees participating in the OI, 2) the intervention facilitator, and 3) the quality of the relation between participants and the intervention facilitator. The concept of the R-Fit is inspired by research in psychotherapy documenting that participant factors, therapist factors, and the quality of the relations explain 40% of the effect of an intervention. We call attention to the importance of systematically evaluating and improving the R-Fit in OIs. This is important to enhance the positive outcomes in OIs and thereby increase both the well-being and productivity of employees. We introduce concrete measures that can be used to study and evaluate the R-Fit. This article is the first to combine knowledge from research in psychotherapy with research on OIs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna P Durnová ◽  
Eva M Hejzlarová

In public policy scholarship on policy design, emotions are still treated as opposed to goals, and their presence is assumed to signal that things have gone wrong. We argue, however, that understanding how and for whom emotions matter is vital to the dynamics of policy designs because emotions are central to the capacity building of policy intermediaries and, with that, to the success of public policies. We examine the case of Czech single mothers in their role as intermediaries in ‘alimony policy’. Our interpretive survey provided single mothers an opportunity to express the way they experience the policy emotionally. The analysis reveals that the policy goal of the child’s well-being is produced at the cost of the mother’s emotional tensions and that policy designs defuse these emotional tensions, implicitly. These contradictory emotions expressed by mothers show us a gateway to problematising policy designs in a novel way, which reconsiders construing policy design as a technical, solution-oriented enterprise to one in which emotional tensions intervene in policy design and are essential for succeeding.


Author(s):  
Moh Rifai

<p>Parents are obliged to take care of their children’s future, especially by rendering sufficient education. Children are believed to bring about happiness every now and then, who generate family’s pride up to the almighty judication. Some people are save and some are not in that court, where children will give sigificant contribution in it. That’s why the children’s well being has become the parents obligation. To bring about children’s well being, parents should also render the good treatments during the life cycle of their children. The main duties of parents for their children are giving them the good names, sending them to the good schools where they can learn religion, and marry them to their good spouses. Psychologically, when children are sent to school for the first time, they will feel that they are put apart from parents’ care, so that may of them have to go difficult phase of adjustment. The adjustment includes that of education so as to run as naturally as possible. To get the naturality of the education delegation, teachers and educators are obliged to be able to nurture any value to students as naturally as possible. Parenting model of teaching serves the requirements of teaching children just the way the parrents do, so that it is assumptively effective in teaching elementary students by taking consideration on the psychologial aspect of children.</p><p> </p><p>Key words:   Parenting Model of teaching, children education optimalization</p>


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