scholarly journals Encountering the Goddess in the Indian Himalaya: On the Contribution of Ethnographic Film to the Study of Religion

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1021
Author(s):  
Arik Moran
Keyword(s):  
Spirit Possession ◽  
Himachal Pradesh ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Indian Himalaya ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
The Way

This paper examines the benefits of ethnographic film for the study of religion. It argues that the exploration of gaps between colloquial descriptions of divinities and their practical manifestation in ritual is instructive of the way religious categories are conceptualized. The argument is developed through an analysis of selected scenes from the documentary AVATARA, a meditation on goddess worship (Śaktism) among the Khas ethnic majority of the Hindu Himalaya (Himachal Pradesh, India). Centering on embodiments of the goddess in spirit possession séances, it points to a fundamental difference between the popular depiction of the deity as a virgin-child (kanyā) who visits followers in their dreams and her actual manifestation as a menacing mother (mātā) during ritual activities. These ostensibly incongruent images are ultimately bridged by the anthropologically informed edition of the material caught on camera, illustrating the added advantage of documentary filmmaking for approximating religious experiences.

Against Historicist Fundamentalism

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1414-1422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hayot
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

The rest of this essay devotes itself to an elaboration of that claim. Along the way I review the claim's implications for the study of literature in the world. I argue that assertions of fundamental difference, whether genetic or historical, reproduce the worst habits of Eurocentric thought.

A Sacred Communion

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-108
Author(s):  
Erin Michael Salius
Keyword(s):  
Spirit Possession ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Way

Chapter 2 focuses on another trope that upsets the realist and rationalist discourse of slavery: spirit possession. Whereas existing scholarship stresses the postmodernist resonances of this trope, the chapter argues that Catholicism serves to frame—and even to facilitate—the antirealist effect that spirit possession has on two contemporary narratives of slavery. First is Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a novel rarely associated with either spirit possession or Catholicism. By highlighting where Jane’s narrative voice is possessed by other speakers, this chapter documents how the Catholic characters in the novel enable it to engage radically antirealist views about history without ultimately endorsing them. The second part of the chapter focuses on Leon Forrest’s critically acclaimed but insufficiently studied novel Two Wings to Veil My Face, which also figures storytelling as a kind of spirit possession. Despite its obvious skepticism towards organized religion, the novel depicts these spiritual intercessions as Catholic sacraments: rituals of eating and drinking that recall the Eucharist. Thus, Catholicism is implicated in the way the narrator remembers slavery and in the parts of his history that are “beyond understanding.”

scholarly journals With Age Comes Wisdom

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 1375-1380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darrell A. Worthy ◽  
Marissa A. Gorlick ◽  
Jennifer L. Pacheco ◽  
David M. Schnyer ◽  
W. Todd Maddox
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Behavioral Changes ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Independent Task ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Way

In two experiments, younger and older adults performed decision-making tasks in which reward values available were either independent of or dependent on the previous sequence of choices made. The choice-independent task involved learning and exploiting the options that gave the highest rewards on each trial. In this task, the stability of the expected reward for each option was not influenced by the previous choices participants made. The choice-dependent task involved learning how each choice influenced future rewards for two options and making the best decisions based on that knowledge. Younger adults performed better when rewards were independent of choice, whereas older adults performed better when rewards were dependent on choice. These findings suggest a fundamental difference in the way in which younger adults and older adults approach decision-making situations. We discuss the results in the context of prominent decision-making theories and offer possible explanations based on neurobiological and behavioral changes associated with aging.

Post-Book Paratext

2014 ◽  
pp. 334-349
Author(s):  
Corey Pressman
Keyword(s):  
Social Isolation ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Essential Difference ◽  
Electronic Reading ◽  
Culture Centered ◽  
The Web ◽  
Cave Art ◽  
The Way

The earliest artifacts of expression, represented by cave art and carved statuettes, had a paratext of their own that surrounded and supported their significance. However, there is a fundamental difference between the way these artifacts operated in society and the way writing and print operate. Writing and print are associated with a “print culture” centered on fixity, social isolation, and authority. This opposes a preceding emphasis on orality, fluidity, and social communication. However, the hegemony of print culture has been challenged by the binary revolution. The widespread success of e-readers, apps, the Web, and electronic reading in general indicates a nascent post-book era. The essential difference between a paper book and its electronic analog is the stripping of the former's paratextual elements. This chapter suggests that we should be deliberate about designing the paratext of our digital post-book experiences. We have the opportunity to reintroduce elements of pre-print orality, continuing what scholars have noted as the development of a “secondary orality” instigated by radio and television. An entire profession already exists whose mission is to design and implement platform-specific elements that attend to the delivery of content: interaction designers. These professionals can help us design the future of reading.

PN: Horace is caught up in this web of imagined plots, whereas Helen and Gwen function with ‘no plan, no plot’ (C, 160), they pursue no ideal or truth, they are a ‘new breed’ (C, 147). Again it seems relevant that Horace tries to understand Helen in terms of ‘some family tragedy’ (C, 97), and that the graffiti in her room reads ‘OEDIPUS WRECKS’. Has the ‘new breed’ achieved some sort of freedom from the Oedipal guilt-trip? LT: This is from Horace’s point of view… PN: He’s trying to embed them in an Oedipal plot that the reader can see they somehow evade. Especially in Helen’s case because she does disappear. LT: She disappears and we don’t know what her history is. We do know in the sense that everyone has a father or mother, we know there’s an Oedipal drama. Can we avoid that? No. The question is how do you work with that in a story. How conscious of that are you in your own story-telling and in your life? PN: Horace says, ‘I also believed that in our souls we were in deep and profound unity…she was, I assumed, like me’ (C, 148). But the reader knows they really have nothing in common, and Horace’s fantasy about Helen’s ‘special androgynous quality’ (C, 148) is actually more Platonic than it is postmodern… LT: One of the problems in Horace’s life is that he would believe that he should not experience any kind of lack. He would think that there was a wholeness there for him to have. Whereas, in my mind, a Helen or a Gwen would understand that that’s always an illusion. Let’s say, no cure. PN: Are you suggesting some sort of fundamental difference between this fantasy of androgyny—as original, prior to sexual difference— and the sort of thing Warhol and the Factory explored? Gwen, for example, ‘admires Warhol precisely because of the falsity of his work, which actually makes it true, to her way of seeing and thinking, which is not mine’ (C, 155). LT: I subscribe more to a notion of bisexuality than to one of androgyny. I was also trying to think about homosexuality not as a fixed sexual position, so that a man who was a homosexual could also have desire for a woman at some moment, just the way a heterosexual man might have a desire for homosexual experience. Desire is pretty wild, and can move around, and be very unsettling. Horace wants to think she’s androgynous rather than thinking that he might be more bisexual—unfixed—than he thinks. In other words, rather than seeing it—instability—in himself he’s seeing it in her.

2005 ◽  
pp. 61-61
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Sexual Position ◽  
The Way

New species of the genus Polyplectropus Ulmer 1905 (Insecta: Trichoptera: Polycentropodidae) from Indian Himalaya

Zootaxa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4504 (3) ◽  
pp. 431
Author(s):  
MANPREET SINGH PANDHER ◽  
SAJAD HUSSAIN PAREY
Keyword(s):  
New Species ◽  
Himachal Pradesh ◽  
Indian Himalaya ◽  
Three New Species

This paper is another contribution to the Indian caddisfly fauna of genus Polyplectropus Ulmer. Here, we describe and illustrate three new species of the genus from the Indian Himalaya: Polyplectropus sainii sp. nov. and Pol. himachalica sp. nov. (both from Himachal Pradesh) and Pol. kailashchandrai sp. nov. (from Uttarakhand). With these new additions, the genus is now represented by 7 species from India. 

The Difference Between Instability and Uncertainty: Comment on Young and Holsteen (2017)

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Slez
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Model Uncertainty ◽  
Model Averaging ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Statistical Uncertainty ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Numerical Variation ◽  
The Way

Young and Holsteen (YH) introduce a number of tools for evaluating model uncertainty. In so doing, they are careful to differentiate their method from existing forms of model averaging. The fundamental difference lies in the way in which the underlying estimates are weighted. Whereas standard approaches to model averaging assign higher weight to better fitting models, the YH method weights all models equally. As I show, this is a nontrivial distinction, in that the two sets of procedures tend to produce radically different results. Drawing on both simulation and real-world examples, I demonstrate that in failing to distinguish between numerical variation and statistical uncertainty, the procedure proposed by YH will tend to overstate the amount of uncertainty resulting from variation across models. In standard circumstances, the quality of estimates produced using this method will tend to be objectively worse than that of conventional alternatives.

On a Sociological Challenge to the Veridicality of Religious Experience

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEROME GELLMAN
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Spirit Possession ◽  
Burden Of Proof ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
Sociological Explanation

This paper replies to Evan Fales' sociological explanation of mystical experience in two articles in Religious Studies vol. 32 (143–63 and 297–313). In these papers Fales applies the ideas of I. M. Lewis on spirit possession to show how mystical experiences can be accounted for as vehicles for the acquisition of political power and social control. The rebuttal of Fales contains three main elements: (a) the presentation of specific examples of theistic mystical experience from Christianity and Judaism which provide counter-examples to Fales' theory; (b) the presentation of some general objections to its plausibility; and (c) an argument for the conclusion that the burden of proof lies with naturalistic, reductionist explanations of religious experiences rather than with theistic interpretations of those experiences.

scholarly journals Gender Stereotypes in Advertising

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2 (12)) ◽  
pp. 82-87
Author(s):  
Anna Kniazian
Keyword(s):  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Physical Attractiveness ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Gender Group ◽  
The Way

The portrayal of men and women in advertising has received conside rable atten - tion over the last several decades, both by practitioners and academics. Research has primarily focused on the visual portrayal of men and women in advertising, within the realm of which, there appears to be a fundamental difference in the way men and women are portrayed. Men are generally stereotyped as competent, assertive, independent, and achievement oriented, whereas women are generally stereotyped as warm, sociable, interdependent, and relationship-oriented. Women are more often portrayed as young and concerned with physical attractiveness than their male counterparts. Masculine and feminine stereotypes are complementary in the sense that each gender group is seen as possessing a set of strengths that balance out their own weaknesses and that supplement the assumed strengths of the other group.

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