scholarly journals The Cult of the Underworld in Singapore: Mythology and Materiality

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 363
Author(s):  
Dean Koon Lee Wang

Myths provide hagiographic and iconographic accounts of the gods, which shape rituals that are performed in cults associated with these gods. In the realization of iconographies and ritualization of narratives in myths, material objects play an active role. This article examines the pattern of worship in the cult of the Ah Pehs, a group of Underworld gods whose efficacy lies in the promise of occult wealth, and focuses on the material aspects such as offerings and paraphernalia associated with these gods. Though ritual texts and scriptures are absent in the Ah Peh cult, symbols in the form of material objects play a crucial role. These objects are also considered as synecdoche for the gods in certain cases. The first part of this paper presents a case study of the autonomous ritual of “Burning Prosperity Money”, which reveals the cycle of occult exchange between gods and devotees. The second part involves an imagery analysis of the material objects central to the cult, and argues that in the system of reciprocity with the gods, material objects common to the everyday life are reinterpreted and enchanted with a capitalist turn, resulting in the development of occult economies within the local Chinese religious sphere.

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942110328
Author(s):  
Jason Sandhar

This article shows how the colonial nature essay both spoofs and affirms crises of the European self in British India’s post-Rebellion era (1857–1947). Authored by English civil servants who took to naturalism as a hobby, the nature essay’s exaggerated misadventures with quotidian animals such as ants, beetles, and mosquitos parody British accounts of the 1857 Rebellion, while dehumanizing caricatures of uncooperative servants reduce Indian society’s complex hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and race to buffoonery. Taking as a case study two of the genre’s exemplars, Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson, I read the colonized animals and people in these texts as agents who destabilize the material and psychic life of empire. Historians and postcolonialists agree that censorship, paranoia, and violence defined British rule over India between 1857 and 1947, yet they overlook the everyday life of empire. The nature essay’s peculiar synthesis of humour and science grants surprising insights into how colonial agents understood themselves as Raj hegemony shifted into its final stages. As the nature essay’s colonized people and animals thwart the daily work of empire, they also reveal the colonial class’ failure to confront its anxieties about the sahib’s political and epistemic stability as a rational, post-Enlightenment agent destined to master the colony.


Author(s):  
Priyanuj Choudhury

Fear is one of the foremost debilitating factors that hinder an individual’s growth, and one of the cornerstones of mainstream competitive schooling in India. The presence of fear in the process of schooling has great significance in the way it shapes an individual and affects learning. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ways in which education can be imparted without the operation of fear, by looking at the everyday practices, rituals and built form of a KFI school in Bengaluru. Through an ethnographic exploration, the author attempts to interpret the micro processes of everyday life in the school and pedagogic practices employed across junior, middle and senior school classrooms that work in collusion to create an environment free of fear. Through a case study of contradictions, the author also looks at the possible factors that may work against the creation of such a space.


1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Davidson

AbstractSchizophrenia has historically been considered a severe psychiatric disorder with a chronic and progressive course; an assumption that has shaped both clinical research and public policy. Recent studies have suggested, however, that many people recover from this disorder to varying degrees, prompting new research approaches that focus on factors influencing improvement as well as pathology. An empirical-phenomenological approach appears especially promising as an avenue to investigating the active role the person may play in improvement. The dimensions of everyday life that are discussed as providing a conceptual framework for investigations of the active role of the person are intentionality, temporality, and meaning. Within this framework a four-step process of recovering and reconstructing the self in schizophrenia is then delineated, with concrete illustrations of each step drawn from interviews with one young woman with schizophrenia. The findings are taken to represent the kinds of valuable insights that may be garnered from an empirical-phenomenological approach to research built upon a recognition of the importance of the dimensions of intentionality, temporality, and meaning in the everyday life of those afflicied with severe mental illness. There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again. T. S. Eliot


Author(s):  
Åsa Trulsson

Contemporary spiritualties are often portrayed as a turn to a subjective and individualized form of religion, consisting of individually held truth claims or private peak experiences that are generated sporadically at retreats and workshops. The portrayal is ultimately related to a perception of everyday life in contemporary Euro-America as mundane, rationalized, and secular, but also the exclusion of practices centered on the body, the home and the everyday from what is deemed properly religious. This article explores the sacred technologies of the everyday among women in England who identify as Goddess worshippers. The purpose is to further the understanding of religion and the everyday, as well as the conceptualization of contemporary Goddess-worship as lived religion. Through examining narratives on the intersection between religion and everyday activities, the technologies of imbuing everyday life with a sacred dimension become visible. The sacred technologies imply skills that enable both imagining and relating to the sacred. The women consciously and diligently work to cultivate skills that would allow them to sense and make sense of the sacred, in other words, to foster a sense of withness through the means of a host of practices. I argue that the women actively endeavor to establish an everyday world that is experienced as inherently different from the secular and religious fields in their surroundings; hence it is not from disenchantment or an endeavor with no social consequences. The women’s everyday is indeed infused with different strategies where the body, different practices, and material objects are central in cultivating a specific religious disposition that ultimately will change the way the women engage with and orient themselves in the world.


2019 ◽  
pp. 113-123
Author(s):  
Alina Ivanenko

Hitler occupation of Ukraine became the most difficult challenge for the Ukrainian people as the "new order" leaders’ aim was to eliminate the population of captured territories, to prepare a living space for the "Aryan people" whom Hitler and his ascendants considered the Germans to be. The policy of the Nazi regime on the occupied territories, which were regarded as an object of exploitation, oppression and robbery, led to significant changes in the practice of everyday life of the civilian population. History becomes more anthropological and it encourages the study of everyday life in order to understand holistic picture of historical events. This picture had its own peculiarities in different regions of Ukraine. In the Soviet period the issues of everyday life in occupied areas were considered fragmentarily, with the main focus on the other images - the nationwide struggle against the invaders, the moral and political unity of the Ukrainian people, the leading role of the party in fighting back the occupiers, etc. In fact, modern national scientists had to study the problem of anthropological measurements of occupation from scratch. However, in recent decades in Ukraine there has appeared a lot of historical research, the subject of which is the anthropological defining of occupation. These studies are being considered in the given article. A particular subject of research and this publication as well is certain categories of population: women, minors and intelligentsia. The existence of these categories of people in occupation has certain features that researchers disclose from different, often opposite, points of view. At the present stage various aspects of the Ukrainian peasantry life during the years of Nazi occupation are investigated by O. Potylchak, O. Perekhrest, V. Revehuk, T. Nagayko and others. The works of T. Vronska, K. Kurylyshyn, L. Kovpak, O. Isaikin, M. Herasimov, V. Kononenko, A. Yankovska and others were dedicated to the everyday life issues in the years of the Second World War and in the first post-war decade. The material, household and social spheres in the post-occupation period in different regions of Ukraine were studied by S. Galchenko, M. Dedkov, I. Spudka. However, in most of these works, the strategies of town people’s survival in the liberated territories in 1943-1945 are briefly outlined. Some researchers (T. Zabolotna, T. Nahayko, O. Savitska, V. Yakovenko) emphasize the everyday life of individual cities. I. Vetrov researched the economic robbery of the national economy and the population of Ukraine by invaders. Some aspects of the social policy of occupiers are highlighted in the study of O. Potylchak. M. Shevchenko, V. Hedz conducted a study of "female" narrative sources. Nowadays there are two directions of coverage of children lives during the occupation. The first direction is represented by D. Slobodynsky, who assumes that the state of children during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine was unbearable. H. Holysh and L. Holysh consider that children and teens played a very active role in the struggle against the Nazis. The state of the intelligentsia during the occupation was studied by L. Bidocha, V. Hinda, O. Salata, T. Zabolotna. The researchers point to the reasons of cooperation of this segment of the population with the occupants, which in fact did not differ from the motives of other groups of society. The author comes to the conclusion that the Nazi occupation had a negative impact on the various spheres of life of the society at that time, which led to significant changes in the everyday life of the local population of Central Ukraine. At that period the majority of people tried to fulfill their existential needs, for example to preserve their own lives and protect their loved ones in particular. The author comes to the conclusion that the aspects of people’s life during the Nazi occupation, disclosed by the authors in modern historiography, constitute a far-incomplete picture of Ukrainians’ life during this period. There are issues that require a detailed study and analysis of researchers in order to imagine life and daily realities on the occupied territory and what problems they had to deal with in order to survive in those conditions. There is a considerable spectrum of problems associated with the occupational routine, which requires a detailed study and analysis of researchers and it allows to make a coherent picture of living conditions on the occupied territories of Ukraine.


2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elina Hankela

The article calls for critical theological examination of the politics of ethnicity in the context of mainline churches in South Africa. The category of ethnicity is largely missing in the interrogation of diversity in the delineated context. Including this category of difference in the theological and religious studies diversity discourse would, if brought to bear on praxis, facilitate the building of inclusive worship spaces. On the contrary, neglecting the politics of ethnicity in the context of churches means neglecting a dynamic that impacts negatively on the everyday life of ordinary churchgoers. The argument is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in a Methodist church in Johannesburg primarily in 2009.


i-com ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cordula Endter

AbstractEthnographic research methods are getting more and more popular in disciplines that have mainly been dominated by quantitative or experimental methodological approaches. Especially in technology-driven research, ethnography seems to enrich common approaches by investigating the use of technology in the everyday life of prospective users. By participating in and observing the users and their mundane activities, routines and rituals ethnography provides insights that can be integrated in the design process to improve the usability of the artifact. This article discusses the intersection of ethnography and usability by introducing ethnographic methods, discussing their application in the context of design for elderly and presenting results of an ethnographic case study in the field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL).


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsombor Tóth

This paper as a case study is an attempt at revealing some of the previously ignored, but relevant contexts related to the phenomena of reading, listening to, or assimilating early modern sermons. Due to the survival of numerous ego-documents accounting for the everyday life of an early modern individual, Mihály Cserei (1667–1756), my interperation provides a microhistorical reconstruction of those moments when Cserei was either listening to or reading Catholic and Protestant sermons. As he put down his reflections recording the hermeneutical experience of listening to or reading early modern Hungarian or Latin sermons, there is a possibility to decipher the cultural, confessional, and mental intentions, biases or prejudices shaping the act of understanding. Thus, Cserei became a modelreader immortalized in the microhistorical contexts of his life, revealing some of the unknown historical anthropological features of reading and understanding in the confessionally divided culture of the early modern era.


Author(s):  
Minna Saariketo

This presentation examines how the softwarization of everyday life is experienced. The point of embarkation is the observation that despite the proliferation computation in the everyday, people pay little attention to the conditions of software and its role in shaping their mundane time-spaces. I will discuss results from a case study that used Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (1992/2004) to shed light on how the rhythms of code-based technology are experienced. The research design of the intervention was inspired by the idea of privacy mirrors (Ngueyn and Mynatt 2002). Research participants (n=13), who described their relation to their devices as intense, used tracking software (RescueTime, ManicTime, App Usage or RealizD) in their ICTs and kept media diaries. These were used as artefacts in the interviews to enable reflection on the role of ICTs in daily life. The results from the rhythmanalysis show how the complex intertwinement of digital devices and applications in the everyday evokes manifold feelings. Simultaneously, technology is perceived as an aid in organizing and managing the daily life, but it also induces feelings of losing control, chaos, and burden. The results suggest that although people might take for granted the infrastructural conditions of technology, such as data mining, they still actively negotiate their relation to devices and applications vis-à-vis temporality. Outcomes from the intervention encourage developing further research designs that use the means of softwarization itself (e.g. tracking and digital traces) to enable critical reflection.


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