Astounding Creativity

Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez

This chapter explores black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ use, classification, and production of wonders in the seventeenth century. The chapter argues that wondrous events established the foundation upon which black Caribbean experiential epistemologies about nature became cemented. The Caribbean’s baffling realities were anything but stable. The chapter shows how Caribbean ritual practitioners drew from their own traditions while creating new meanings with their awe-inspiring acts; they did not simply duplicate representations of preordained, episteme-bounded signifiers of Old World origin. Witnesses to black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ reality-creating rituals could not help but feel viscerally amazed when these men and women flayed open the skin of the world to reveal its mysteries. Their ability to astonishingly master nature imbued each ritual practitioner with the social capital necessary to validate his or her diagnoses, healing procedures, and preparations. The wondrous nature of Caribbean lands allowed black ritual practitioners to claim authority over material truths in a world where facts remained difficult to articulate formally within multicultural and transitional societies.

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Nelmaya Nelmaya

<p><em>Indonesia is one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, with a total of 182,083,594 Muslims out of a total population of 224 million. As the largest population, Muslims have an essential role in building a civilized Indonesian identity. The problem now is, the civilized nation's identity has not been realized as expected, this can be seen from a variety of indicators, including indicators of Indonesian poverty still believing at least 37.17 million people are poor, crime is again ballooning, harmonization has not materialized because everywhere happens conflicts, including religious conflicts, Indonesia's achievements, and well-being are still far compared to other countries and so on. However, from the various indicators put forward, one thing which is superficial to form as a builder of civilization in Indonesia is social capital. The social capital of this nation is still ripped apart because it is not built with clear mass communication and has a paradigm that can dialogue textuality and contextuality. In this connection, Islam has a tradition of da'wah and is still developing today. This da'wah tradition is a potential asset that can build social capital to improve the nation's identity, which is still within the framework of this massive and anomie civilization. For da'wah to be used as a basis in this direction, da'wah must also develop normative methods and strategies that are appropriate to the present context. This paper offers transformative da'wah as a builder of social capital to realize a civilized nation's identity.</em></p>


Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez

This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms of being in the world.” There exist, after all, multiple manners of sensing and shaping an apparently stubborn reality. The chapter shows how black Mohanes fundamentally fashioned novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, the chapter shows, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a new sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. These paths and ways of sensing were fundamental for the modeling of the experiential revolution of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham

Ushering the reader into both the world of early modern radical religion and the considerable body of scholarly literature devoted to its study, the introduction offers a précis of what is to come and a backward glance to explain how the proposed journey contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations. After orienting readers to the basic methodological boundaries within which the book will operate and briefly situating the book within the wider historiography, the introduction adumbrates the shape of the work as a whole and encapsulates its central argument. The introduction contends that the mid-seventeenth-century men and women often described as “Particular Baptists” would not have readily understood themselves as such. This tension between the self-identity of the early modern actors and the identity imposed upon them by future scholars has significant implications for how we understand both radical religion during the English Revolution and the period more broadly.


Author(s):  
JORGE FLORES

AbstractThis article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individual mutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughal mutasaddi of Gujarat.


Author(s):  
Christian Welzel ◽  
Ronald Inglehart

This chapter examines the role that the concept of political culture plays in comparative politics. In particular, it considers how the political culture field increases our understanding of the social roots of democracy and how these roots are transforming through cultural change. In analysing the inspirational forces of democracy, key propositions of the political culture approach are compared with those of the political economy approach. The chapter first provides and overview of cultural differences around the world before tracing the historical roots of the political culture concept. It then tackles the question of citizens' democratic maturity and describes the allegiance model of the democratic citizen. It also explores party–voter dealignment, the assertive model of the democratic citizen, and political culture in non-democracies. It concludes with an assessment of how trust, confidence, and social capital increase a society's capacity for collective action.


Author(s):  
Xinru Liu

South Asia around the mid-1st millennium bce was a politically and socially turbulent time. Siddhartha, a young man of the Shakya ganasanga, witnessed the cruelty of warfare and the rising social and economic disparity of his time. He realized that the world is full of suffering. This observation evolved into the foremost truth of his doctrine of the Four Noble Truths. This essay will attempt to vividly portray the world of Buddha. It was a world where Brahmans and rajas, merchants and bankers, scribes and artisans, servants and slaves, courtesans-cum-musicians and dancers, farmers and fishermen, and people from mountains and forests, all strived to further (or at least maintain) their place on the newly formed social hierarchy. Some of those from low castes and outside the social core managed to penetrate the mainstream, but some never made it. Others born from elite families were cast out. Meanwhile, the presence of Achaemenid Persian Empire in the northwest of the subcontinent during the Buddha’s time, followed by the establishment of Hellenistic states after Alexander’s invasion in the late 4th century bce, brought new waves of immigration—thus exchanges of goods and ideas—with west and central Asia. Buddhist sangha and other communities of dissidents were refuges for some of the more unfortunate men and women looking for sanctuary. Based on stories in early Buddhist texts, namely the Pali canon and contemporary Brahmana texts (along with inclusion of Buddhist artwork of his time and after, this article will attempt reconstruct the historical Buddha and the time in which he lived.


2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (No. 2) ◽  
pp. 57-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lošťák

In relation to sustainable rural development, the paper starts with the question of its conditions. One of them is social acceptance of various projects or programmes. This issue is joined with the co-ordination of human activities. The mechanism facilitating the co-ordination in contemporary societies is related to social capital. Its concept is outlined through the references to the basic literature about the topic. Using content analysis, based on the quantification of the categories created through the analysis of the literature about the topic, the social capital in selected municipalities is investigated. The main aim of the paper, however, is to show the role of this method in social capital fast identification. Although the approach necessitates further elaboration, it can be considered as the first important step in the practice of development activities. The background of the paper reflects the challenges of the World Bank concerning the elaboration and development of the new methods of measuring social capital.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-248
Author(s):  
Rehana yasmin Anjum ◽  
Fakhra Amjad ◽  
Saira Yousaf ◽  
Faiza Manzoor

Sociolinguistics deals with linguistic variations such as dialect, idiolect, genderlect, register etc. It deals with ways of using particular languages and the social roles of speakers of these languages.  It is the speaker-oriented approach. Genders have different characteristics in the use of language, which lead to the gender differences in language. The present study was conducted to analyze the gender-based linguistic variations (variations at discourse and communication level) in Urdu language. Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect theory is the theoretical Background of the study. She has presented six sets of language contrasts that are used as instrument to analyze male and female conversations. It is commonly believed that women language is more sophisticated, apologetic as compared to men. These differences are called gender preferential differences in a patriarchal society with their own fancies and whims. The hypothesis is that men and women have different ways of communicating, based on male and female perception of the world as they are made of different things and contrasting style. The qualitative paradigm used in this study. Direct observation, interview and tape recording are used as tools for the data collection. Recorded conversation has been transcribed and analyzed to provide data from which these issues have been discussed. The researcher has analyzed Urdu language conversation among Urdu speech community living specially in Sialkot, according to Tannen’s speech contrasts. The data was analyzed manually. The findings show that variations occur due to the use of various linguistic devices, style, topic of discussion, power etc. This study is limited to the Urdu speech community. The limitation of my research is that I observed the language of middle class Urdu speech community not the other classes. In this research, I only highlighted variations at communication level, and delimited all other variations such as morphological, syntactic, phonological variations. Future researchers can study these aspects. The study will benefit the whole society in creation of awareness about non-sexist language to give a psychological identity of females in Pakistan.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-447
Author(s):  
Kevan Harris

Within a year of becoming president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad had already confused much of the world. Explanations of his political ascent in a semi-peripheral country rely largely on the concept of charismatic authority. This is a non-explanation, however, as the charismatic historical figure who seemingly holds creative command over the social world also has to be created. Instead, I argue that Ahmadinezhad’s trajectory from an Islamist engineering student to the presidency of a post-revolutionary state highlights three mechanisms of social-political innovation that are bounded by space and time: the situated overlap of social capital, the paradox of vertical clientage, and the breakaway of the machine boss. These mechanisms are usually misread as timeless signifiers of national backwardness or as charismatic dei ex machina. By showing these mechanisms at work through biography, we can challenge scholarly and popular explanations of social change that implicitly rehash modernization theory.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Neville

Between 1525 and 1640, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in the world of print: England saw the production of more than two dozen editions identified by their imprints or by contemporaries as 'herbals'. Sarah Neville explains how this genre grew from a series of tiny anonymous octavos to authoritative folio tomes with thousands of woodcuts, and how these curious works quickly became valuable commodities within a competitive print marketplace. Designed to serve readers across the social spectrum, these rich material artifacts represented both a profitable investment for publishers and an opportunity for authors to establish their credibility as botanists. Highlighting the shifting contingencies and regulations surrounding herbals and English printing during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the book argues that the construction of scientific authority in Renaissance England was inextricably tied up with the circumstances governing print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781009031615.


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