Avkobling og transformasjon: Meditasjonsretreater på Dharma Mountain mellom popularisering og religiøst fellesskap

While meditation has undeniably become a part of popular culture, the term encompasses a wide variety of practices and conceptualizations on the religious-secular spectrum. In this paper, I explore how this wide scope is dealt with at meditation retreats offered at the Norwegian center Dharma Mountain. The place is built around the Norwegian guru Vasant Swaha and serves as a meeting place for his disciples, the sangha. At the same time, the Dharma Mountain group takes part in the wider popular meditation field with retreats tailored toward the preferences of an often guru-critical mainstream audience. Based on ethnographical material, I compare two meditation techniques, vipassana and Dynamic Meditation, and how they are introduced, legitimized, and performed at a newcomer weekend in the first and a summer retreat with Vasant Swaha in the second case. I show that while instructors introduce vipassana as a generic and simple technique, they mark Dynamic Meditation as a specifically composed method and thus integrate it with Swaha’s background in the Osho movement and the therapeutic outlook of his retreats. My findings point to the flexibility of the concept of meditation and how this helps organizers to address different audiences. Under the umbrella of meditation, Dharma Mountain incorporates a range of conceptualizations, from self-help to spiritual awakening, and different social forms, from costumer relations to religious community, in one and the same place.

Putting the Pieces Together: Mental Construction of Semantically Congruent and Incongruent Scenes in Dementia

Scene construction refers to the process by which humans generate richly detailed and spatially cohesive scenes in the mind’s eye. The cognitive processes that underwrite this capacity remain unclear, particularly when the envisaged scene calls for the integration of various types of contextual information. Here, we explored social and non-social forms of scene construction in Alzheimer’s disease (AD; n = 11) and the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 15) relative to healthy older control participants (n = 16) using a novel adaptation of the scene construction task. Participants mentally constructed detailed scenes in response to scene–object cues that varied in terms of their sociality (social; non-social) and congruence (congruent; incongruent). A significant group × sociality × congruence interaction was found whereby performance on the incongruent social scene condition was significantly disrupted in both patient groups relative to controls. Moreover, bvFTD patients produced significantly less contextual detail in social relative to non-social incongruent scenes. Construction of social and non-social incongruent scenes in the patient groups combined was significantly associated with independent measures of semantic processing and visuospatial memory. Our findings demonstrate the influence of schema-incongruency on scene construction performance and reinforce the importance of episodic–semantic interactions during novel event construction.

Relationship between the motivational and demand sphere of students during the quarantine period and the field of perception of the concepts “Coronavirus”, “Quarantine” and “Self-Isolation” (based on research materials of PNRPU masters)

The article explores the peculiarities of the relationship of motivational and demand sphere with the field of perception of the concept of “coronavirus”, “quarantine”, “self-isolation” in modern society. Their interrelations influence both the formation of a holistic personality and the formation of public opinion. The study is based on the notion that life values are a set of different inherently social attitudes, which under the influence of external social forms of interaction and intrapersonal characteristics are subject to constant modification, which is reflected in the system of perception, as the world as a whole, and in particular at the conceptual, sense-making level. Thus, studying the peculiarities of the relationship of personal value orientations with the field of perception of a particular concept, we can build a dynamic scheme of mutually influential vectors of values, orientations, life priorities, taking into account the specific conceptual perception of the concept under study. The study revealed that the respondents are more characterized by the prevalence of focus on the material situation, spiritual satisfaction, as well as achievement and self-development. These values are manifested in the spheres of professional life, education and family relations. In the field of perception of the highlighted concepts there is a number of significant differences, so the concept of “coronavirus” has a negative value assessment while high subjective importance in the individual personal plan for the person. The concepts of “self-isolation” and “quarantine” are perceived positively in terms of value, while in the subjective, personal plan they carry a negative dynamic for the individual. Thus, the study confirmed that depending on the structure of basic needs, value priorities, which the person holds, we can assume what attitude he will have to the studied concepts, what meaning he will fill them.

Literature as Speculative Thought

This chapter spells out the conceptual stakes of the reformist literary mode by turning to British state theory’s ‘Hegelian moment’. Hegel’s state theory converges on an understanding of the state as an aspect of social life (Sittlichkeit), making it possible to think about the state’s institutional structures as a moment in the actualization of social life rather than as a Foucauldian assemblage of administrative means external to social life. Britain’s Hegelian moment makes visible a reformist idiom in which the state appears as an aspirational figure that makes it possible to imagine the transition from capitalist society (Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft) towards a more egalitarian socio-political order. This transformation is imagined through close engagement with existing social forms rather than through a complete revolutionary overhaul of existing social arrangements. The chapter ends by asking why Britain’s Hegelian moment ended around 1914 and what were its more immediate afterlives.

Training Birth Attendants in India

This chapter documents the local and global processes of construction, legitimization and delegitimization, and the political uses of the knowledge of traditional birth attendants—TBAs. Based on four years’ ethnographical investigation in Tamil Nadu, this chapter discusses the issue from various points of view. It looks at the debates of actors involved in the national and international public health agendas, Indian movements promoting ‘Natural Childbirth’, and movements in favour of the preservation of traditional systems of medicine. TBAs are variously perceived as wicked mothers whose archaic practices must be controlled, the archetypal ambassadors of traditional knowledge, or as relevant actors bringing together ideal elements of any development activity—locality, community, and low cost. This careful reading of the contemporary social representations of TBAs and of their role reconfigurations offers a lens to examine authoritative knowledge’s social forms, practices, and paradoxes.

Breaking with the Family Form: Historical Categories, Social Reproduction, and Everyday Life in Late 1950s Rural China

This article explores the way PRC historians use analytical categories by looking at the emergence of a divide between production and the social reproduction of labor (all the work that goes into producing and raising laborers) that transformed and structured rural everyday life during the Mao period. Everyday life is historical, produced in different ways under different material conditions, structured and shaped by social forms in motion. Thus, it is not an analytical frame through which historians can view the real content of the Mao period underneath the thin veneer of Maoist high politics and its categories. This article therefore argues that everyday life, far from a sphere resisting the impositions and dictates of the state, is fully implicated in the political-economic structuring of society. This is a call to not simply replace an earlier social science focus on the political economy of the PRC with a bottom-up or empirical view of everyday life, recognizing that everyday life is already a structured terrain. Rather than bringing in social science analytical categories from the outside or searching for an empirical real view from below, we need to investigate the emergence of categories and social forms from the real material limits and tendencies of a rapidly changing PRC society.

On the three constraints of the development of artificial intelligence: Value, liberation, and responsibility

The socialization of technology and the technicalization of society have accelerated the speed, scope and scale of human liberation from nature. In our past technological society, “liberation” mainly referred to people's physical strength. An intelligent society, characterized by the wide application of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), will further liberate not only people's physical strength, but also their mental power, greatly changing social forms and social operation modes, as well as people themselves. In the application of technologies and the design and manufacture of equipment on which the intelligent society depends, a new tension is formed between instrumental rationality and value rationality. While promoting the liberation of human beings, intelligent society will also cause humans to be dominated and enslaved by AI, which will lead to human alienation. Intelligent society is more in pursuit of how the invested capital and technology can multiply in the process of accumulation and circulation; meanwhile, it will ignore the moral responsibilities of relevant parties, such as researchers, manufacturers, and users. In the process of developing an intelligent society, instrumental rationality should be regulated by value rationality, thus promoting the liberation of human beings and eliminating their alienation. As capital appreciation occurs, the moral responsibilities of relevant parties should be clarified.

A common neural currency account for social and non-social decisions

To date, social and non-social decisions have been studied in isolation. Consequently, the extent to which social and non-social forms of decision uncertainty are integrated using shared neurocomputational resources remains elusive. Here, we address this question using simultaneous EEG-fMRI and a task in which decision evidence in social and non-social contexts varies along comparable scales. First, we identify comparable time-resolved build-up of activity in the EEG, akin to a process of evidence accumulation. We then use the endogenous trial-by-trial variability in the slopes of these accumulating signals to construct parametric fMRI predictors. We show that a region of the posterior-medial frontal cortex (pMFC) uniquely explains trial-wise variability in the process of evidence accumulation in both the social and non-social contexts. We further demonstrate a task-dependent coupling between the pMFC and regions of the human valuation system in dorso- and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC/vmPFC) across both contexts. Finally, we report domain-specific representations in regions known to encode the early decision evidence for each context. These results are suggestive of a domain-general decision-making architecture, whereupon domain-specific information is likely converted into a "common currency" in the dmPFC/vmPFC and accumulated for the decision in the pMFC.

Applying Social Forms: The Project Method in Teaching Foreign Languages

The article discusses applying the project method as one social forms of teaching foreign languages. The author of the article considers that in project work students learn to cooperate, and cooperative learning fosters in them such moral values as mutual assistance, desire and ability to empathize; it improves general culture of communication and social behavior in general, forms creative abilities and activity of students, i. e. there is an inseparable process of training and education, and leads students to practical possession of a foreign language.