Keep It Halal! A Smartphone Ethnography of Muslim Dating

This article reveals how Muslim religious identity is impacted by Muslim dating apps. The development of Muslim dating apps within the last decade has led to Muslims seeking partners beyond their physical and social locality. The following research takes inner-Muslim discursive traditions into account in order to examine how Muslim males articulate and negotiate their Islamic identity in the process of partner selection. The research’s methodological approach draws from digital ethnography, with the smartphone as the primary field site. The smartphone ethnography on the app of Muzmatch will demonstrate that users are physically embedded in doctrinally heterogenous contexts. Yet, the religious framework of the app promotes a “doctrinal homogeneity” that finds expression via the discursive articulations of the app users. It will be shown that users are being shaped by the app as they incorporate the religious framework provided by it.

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

Diachronic genre analysis: patterns of rhetorical organization in academic book reviews

This study investigates vestiges of change and traces of permanence in academic book reviews produced between the 20th and 21st centuries. To this end, it aims to analyze the more frequent rhetorical moves in academic book reviews published between 1953 and 2015. The diachronic analysis covers a time continuum of 62 years which we divided in three generational phases: a) 1953-1970; b) 1971-2000; and c) 2001-2015. The division was based on the methodological parameters proposed by the Discursive Traditions paradigm. Each phase consists of 15 texts, adding up to a total of 45 samples that were collected from Brazilian scientific journals in the field of Languages and Linguistics. Epistemologically, we are based on the studies of John Swales (1990; 2004), as well as those of Motta-Roth (1995), Araújo (1996) and Bezerra (2001) to support the analysis of the rhetorical organization of reviews. In order to instrumentalize the diachronic analysis of genres, we found support in the works of Coseriu (1980), Zavam (2009), Castilho da Costa (2010) and other scholars in the already mentioned field of Discursive Traditions. The results have indicated four rhetorical moves present in the reviews: introducing to the book, summarizing the content, evaluating the book and issuing a final opinion. Those moves are divided in 16 rhetorical steps and their frequency and execution forms show traces of variation in each generational phase.

Rearticulating the Conventions of Hajj Storytelling: Second Generation Moroccan-Dutch Female Pilgrims’ Multi-Voiced Narratives about the Pilgrimage to Mecca

This article explores the interplay between content, narrator, and lifeworld in narrative constructions concerning the meanings of pilgrimage to Mecca by studying the hajj stories of second-generation Moroccan-Dutch women. By adopting a ‘dialogical approach’ to self-storytelling, it is asked how the pilgrimage experiences of these women and the meanings they attribute to them are shaped by different intersecting discursive traditions that inform their daily lives. It is demonstrated that by creative re-articulation and mixing of vocabularies from different discursive traditions to make sense of their hajj experiences, the women contribute to a modern reconfiguration of the genre of hajj accounts. Since gender is the site par excellence where the public debate about the (in)compatibility of being Muslim and being European/Dutch is played out, specific attention will be paid to how the women negotiate conceptions of female Muslim personhood in their stories.

‘A new & extraordinary service to be done to the state and Comonwealth of England’

This chapter considers the infamous Cokayne Project of 1614–17, whereby the Merchant Adventurers lost their privileges to a new company formed to convert the expert of semi-manufactured cloths with the fully finished product. It focuses on how the project was experienced by the Company and its members, as well as its long-term impact. The Cokayne Project is presented as an experiment in corporate commercial government which attempted to wed governed and free trade. As well as attracting outsiders, many Merchant Adventurers were drawn to its promise of breaking down corporate barriers between different markets. However, the project threatened the dissolution of the social structure of the Merchant Adventurers’ trade, leading to protests from the factors at Hamburg. Although these protests helped to keep alive the Company’s discursive traditions, the Cokayne Project presaged divisions within the Company’s ranks that would grow as the century went on.

Tradiciones discursivas en una polémica dieciochesca entre aristotélicos y novatores

The philosophical discourse in Spanish was born in the first decades of the 18th century, when the proponents of modern ideas abandoned Latin, in which were written the treatises on philosophy of the previous centuries. The debate between novatores and Aristotelians characterizes the cultural panorama of the first decades of the Enlightenment, and with the entrance in Spain of the ideas of the modern philosophers, new discursive traditions are created. This paper analyzes a corpus formed by texts of philosophical argument published in Spain during the first part of 18th century, with the purpose of investigating the passage from the discursive tradition of the syllogism to structures that bring with them a greater degree of objectivity and impersonality.

On the Latin Origins of Spanish mediante

This paper aims to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic and extra-linguistic circumstances that accompany the emergence and behavior of mediante in the first centuries of Spanish. To this end, the origin of the Latin participle medians, mediantis is examined and the evidence of its ablative form mediante in various contexts is also analysed and discussed. We conclude from our study that (1) the appearance of mediante in Latin takes place at a relatively late stage of Latin, it having entered the language as a grammatical calque from Greek; (2) in Latin, prepositional values of mediante, which do not necessarily originate from Latin absolute ablative clauses, are already detected; and finally, (3) discursive traditions and historical-cultural factors, in particular those developed in Patristic and Scholastic Literature, are fundamental for the understanding, not only of the evolution of mediante in Latin, but also of its introduccion into Spanish.

Coda

This coda argues that from the 1650s to the 1910s, the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange absorbed and at the same time transformed conceptions of Jewish usury that had emerged in the thirteenth century. Resilient as those conceptions proved to be across time, they also evolved and adapted in response to new realities and competing discursive traditions. In fact, the legend analyzed here served multiple, sometimes even conflicting, agendas. By mapping the routes of its transmission, this book has shown why this tale became a powerful tool for debating and policing the boundaries of European commercial society and why it planted deeper roots in France than in the rest of Old Regime Europe. The chapter then considers the legend's disappearance, which was to be expected since people no longer use bills of exchange.

Aesthetics of Muslim-ness: Art and the Formation of Muslim Identity Politics

The paper explores two opposing yet simultaneous forces of aesthetics as transformative and constitutive force of Muslim identity politics, religiosity and cultural style in Cape Town The ethnography focuses on Muslim artists in Cape Town, namely Thania Petersen and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, whose artworks embody a ‘social drama’ of a lived experience of Muslims’ ongoing individual and collective active engagement with and appropriation of the plurality of competing discourses that are religious and secular, local and global. The discussion unpacks the ways in which the artworks of Petersen and the Essop brothers serve as a transformative force and as a politic of authenticity to Muslim identity, religiosity, and cultural style. The paper offers an appreciative but critical reading of Talal Asad’s idea of an anthropology of Islam. Taking into consideration the incommensurable diversity and internal contradiction that could be conceived as Islamic discursive traditions, this paper argues that the aesthetics of Muslimness is what inspires coherence within and across diverse, contradictory Islamic traditions.