scholarly journals Buddhism between Asia and Europe: The Concept of Mindfulness through a Historical Lens

Asian Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara DITRICH
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Therapeutic Tool ◽  
Critical Awareness ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Mindfulness Practices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Since the beginning of the twentieth century mindfulness has been positioned at the core of modern Buddhism and viewed by many modern interpreters as an essential component of Buddhist doctrine and practices. More recently, the practice of mindfulness has become rapidly popularised, radically secularised and removed from its Buddhist context, employed mainly as a therapeutic tool or applied for the enhancement of well-being. This paper examines the concept of mindfulness using an historical lens, aiming to identify some of the main parameters and consequent implications involved in the changes and developments of this Buddhist contemplative method—from its early beginnings over 2,500 years ago to the present day. Special attention is given to the historical developments in the colonial period, when various Buddhist traditions encountered the main European discourses of the time, resulting in the birth of modern Buddhism. In this period, particularly in Burma, meditation was positioned at the centre of Buddhist teachings and thus provided the grounds and conditions for the subsequent popularisation and secularisation of mindfulness in the late twentieth century. Through an examination of the concept of mindfulness through history, the paper explores whether a critical awareness of historical facts provides a better understanding of the current ubiquity of mindfulness practices worldwide. In addition, mindfulness has recently become an object of scientific research and, hence, it is important to investigate it in different contexts and discourses throughout history, and understand the implications of various definitions, interpretations and applications of mindfulness for the development of modern research approaches and methodologies.

Law and Economics Against Feminism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha T. McCluskey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Law And Economics ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Economic Ideology ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Goal

This article analyzes feminism in legal theory in relation to the rise of “law and economics” during the late twentieth century as a methodology that generated academic credibility for anti-egalitarian ideology and policy. Law and economics fundamentally undermines feminism in law by constructing the economy as a sphere best governed by efficiency insulated from contested morality and politics. This division naturalizes a gendered baseline that generally makes feminist reforms appear costly and unfair. Finally, the article explores how this core division of law and economics constructs an idea of liberty that makes feminist efforts to remedy gender-based harms appear illegitimate and oppressive. Law and economics cuts against legal feminism not because gender justice is a non-economic goal, but because law and economics promotes a misleading economic ideology steeped in gender and tilted toward those most willing and able to disregard and discount others’ well-being.

The Patriotic Society: Discussions and Omissions About Indians in the Peruvian War of Independence

1998 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-298
Author(s):  
Charles F. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Population Continuity ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Few topics if any have perplexed Peruvian thinkers in the twentieth century as much as why the indigenous population has not been more fully incorporated into the nation. While the question has been posed in a number of ways from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, changing greatly over the decades, all agree that the indigenous population has not, as of the late twentieth century, been granted the rights and dignity implied by the term citizenship. Although the question has been addressed in literature, the social sciences and other academic disciplines, the answer is ultimately historical. Most analysts cast an eye on the colonial period and pay particular attention to the War of Independence. For the indigenous population, continuity more than change marked the Andean republics' rupture with Spain. Well into the republican era, “Indians” continued to pay tribute, euphemistically renamed the Contribution, and thus continued to constitute a unique fiscal and political category.

scholarly journals Sez who? Critical Legal History Without A Privileged Position

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Henry Schlegel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Critical Legal Studies ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Critical Awareness ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Historians affiliated with Critical Legal Studies (CLS) treated their critiques of law as complete when finished, as the last thing that could be said on the subject. Why this is so is quite unclear, especially given that they regularly cited late twentieth-century scholarship that offered reasons why all groundings for thought were debatable. By not critiquing their own set of assumptions as best as they could, CLS historians created the appearance that they believed they occupied a position outside of history and interest, this at the same time that they were objecting to the implicit adoption of such a position by others. CLS scholars thus lost the possibility of strengthening their own scholarship by failing to put their own grounding assumptions under pressure. A modest examination of CLS historical work on labour law suggests how a self-critical awareness might have strengthened even the strongest of such scholarship.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

Chakras and Endocrine Glands

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Andrea Jain
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Endocrine Glands ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
Unique System ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This paper is an exploration of preksha dhyana as a case study of modern yoga. Preksha is a system of yoga and meditation introduced by Acarya Mahaprajna of the Jain Svetambara Terapanth in the late twentieth century. I argue that preksha is an attempt to join the newly emerging transnational yoga market whereby yoga has become a practice oriented around the attainment of physical health and psychological well-being. I will evaluate the ways in which Mahaprajna appropriates scientific discourse and in so doing constructs a new and unique system of Jain modern yoga. In particular, I evaluate the appropriation of physical and meditative techniques from ancient yoga systems in addition to the explanation of yoga metaphysics by means of biomedical discourse. I will demonstrate how, in Mahaprajna’s preksha system, the metaphysical subtle body becomes somaticized. In other words, Mahaprajna uses the bio-medical understanding of physiology to locate and identify the functions of metaphysical subtle body parts and processes in the physiological body.

Archaeology, Historicity, and Homosexuality in the New Cultus of Antinous

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ethan White
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian deified his male lover, Antinous, after the latter drowned in the Nile. Antinous’ worship was revived in the late twentieth century, primarily by gay men and other queer-identified individuals, with Antinous himself being recast as “the Gay God.”

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