Methodological Innovations for the Study of Spirituality

One of the most important decisions in any study of spirituality is the method used to collect information about spiritual life. This methodological choice frames later conceptual analysis—making possible some types of conclusions but preventing others. Accordingly, methodological innovation in the study of spiritualty holds the promise of conceptual innovation. This chapter puts forth three methodological innovations available to spirituality researchers. They are (1) using smartphones to collect experience-sampling method data about day-to-day spiritual experiences, (2) conducting field experiments in which spiritual experiences are randomly assigned, and (3) analyzing big data to observe societal-wide trends and patterns in spiritual expressions. Each of these methods promises to produce rich and novel data that hold the potential for conceptual breakthroughs in our understanding of spiritual processes.

Dreams of a Final Theory T

The grander metaphysical schemes popular in Hertz’s era often suppressed conceptual innovation in manifestly unhelpful ways. In counterreaction, Hertz and his colleagues stressed the raw pragmatic advantages of “good theory” considered as a functional whole and rejected the armchair meditations upon individual words characteristic of the metaphysical imperatives they spurned. Rudolf Carnap’s later rejection of all forms of “metaphysics” attempts to broaden these methodological tenets to a wider canvas. In doing so, the notion of an integrated, axiomatizable “theory” became the shaping tenet within our most conception of how the enterprise of “rigorous conceptual analysis” should be prosecuted. Although Carnap hoped to suppress all forms of metaphysics, large and small, through these means, in more recent times, closely allied veins of “theory T thinking” have instead encouraged a revival of grand metaphysical speculation that embodies many of the suppressive doctrines that Hertz’s generation rightly resisted (I have in mind the school of “analytic metaphysics” founded by David Lewis). The proper corrective to these inflated ambitions lies in directly examining the proper sources of descriptive effectiveness in the liberal manner of a multiscalar architecture.

What Can Comparative Authoritarianism Tell Us About China Under Xi Jinping (and Vice Versa)?

This paper evaluates the progress and impact of the literature on comparative authoritarianism, showing not only how its development over the previous two decades can help us understand China’s authoritarian politics better, but also how the latter can move the former forward. We focus on two important topic areas in the literature: authoritarian power-sharing and autocratic politics of information (e.g., partial media freedom and government censorship). For the first topic, we shall review the literature on the authoritarian power-sharing between dictators and their allies and explicate how this conceptual innovation helps us understand the institutional foundation of China’s regime stability and phenomenal economic performance before Xi Jinping. The analysis then provides us a baseline for assessing China’s economic and political future under Xi Jinping given his clear departure from the pre-existing power-sharing framework. Finally, this paper also assesses the relevance of the literature on authoritarian politics of information to the Chinese context. In sum, we not only emphasize the conceptual contributions of the literature of comparative authoritarianism to the field of Chinese politics, but also identify lacunae in the current literature and avenues for future research that post-Xi political developments have made visible to us.

Exoplanet biosignatures

Biosignature science has come a long way in half a century, but its future depends on more interdisciplinary feeback and conceptual innovation.

Shared projects and symbiotic collaborations: Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation

This paper presents ‘shared projects’ and the ‘symbiotic’ relations they engender to capture accounts of state and society actors collaborating to turn individual constraints into collective opportunities for pursuing urban experiments which are institutionally-shaped but also institution-shaping. The concepts are developed through a sequential and recursive comparison – that is, a ‘comparative conversation’– between a case of urban village upgrading in Shenzhen and Community Land Trust Development in London. The paper uses a pragmatist approach to capitalist transformation as a starting point for comparison between these supposedly ‘incomparable’ cases. I build both heterogeneous and generalisable accounts of the pathways and progressive potential of collaborations on shared projects by recursively composing analytical proximities across the cases and their contexts of state entrepreneurialism and austerity localism. Theoretically, this paper contributes to scholarship which focuses on the contingency and complexity inherent in urban transformation. State and society actors are seen as potential collaborators working pragmatically to solve systemic problems without necessarily targeting wholesale systemic change. Methodologically, it contributes to ongoing attempts to demonstrate the positive relationship between experimental comparisons and conceptual innovation through staging a ‘comparative conversation’.

Governing Political Islam

This paper analyzes what I define as an anti-Islamist discourse (or an “Islamistphobia”) both as a social reality and as conceptual innovation in contemporary Egypt. The paper focuses on four interrelated actors—the current Egyptian regime and its discourse on political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood and its historical entanglements with the Egyptian state, the Salafi al-Nūr and Rāya Parties, and al-Azhar’s relation with both the regime and the Islamists. I advance an idea that anti-Islamist sentiments channel primarily through official (state) and media discourses in Egypt, rooted in both a colonialist locale and in a contemporary religious framework and its anticolonial rhetoric. It is, however, directed primarily against the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than against all Islamist groups across the board. Keywords: Anti-Islamist discourse, Islamistphobia, Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt, political Islam

Introduction

The first chapter explains the contributions of the book to the literature on nationalism. The first is to highlight the importance of the interplay between nationalist movements and the state for understanding a nationalist movement. The second is to emphasize temporality in the accommodation of nationalist movements as the key dimension for explaining why nationalism sometimes becomes strongly secessionist while other times it does not. The third contribution is to highlight the divided nature of nationalist movements. The book’s fourth contribution is a conceptual innovation about autonomy. It distinguishes between static autonomy, which corresponds to permanent autonomy arrangements, and dynamic autonomy, which features autonomy arrangements that are, or can be, laterally adjusted or enhanced in time. This conceptual distinction represents the building blocks for sketching a theory about secessionism in liberal democracies. Such a theory is the fifth contribution of this book. This theory is that static autonomy stimulates secessionism while dynamic autonomy staves it off.

Translators of the Soul: Bingham Dai, Pow-Meng Yap, and the Making of Transcultural Psychoanalysis in the Asia Pacific

This essay argues that Asian psychoanalysts developed a new style of science, what I call transcultural reasoning, in the twentieth century. This conceptual innovation drew on the power of cultural narratives to elucidate the unconscious mind across different historical and geographical contexts. Focusing on the life and work of two experts in particular, Bingham Dai (1899–1996) and Pow-Meng Yap (1921–71), this article reconsiders the role of biography in the history of psychoanalysis and elucidates the importance of the Asia Pacific region to the transformation of mental health science in the twentieth century.

From an Economic Term to a Political Concept

The term “economic self-management” (in Estonian, isemajandamine) stood at the center of economic and political debates in Soviet Estonia in 19871988. This article traces its transformation from an economic term to a political concept, reconstructing the intellectual resources that the reformers were drawing on in this process. Navigating the constraints of Soviet discourse, reform-minded academics in Soviet Estonia radically expanded the original meaning of isemajandamine, which ultimately provided an argumentative platform for declaring the republics “sovereignty” within the Soviet Union. The article brings out the linguistic, political, and transnational dimensions of this conceptual innovation, which started in 1987 and was completed when the law on the “economic independence” of the Baltic republics was adopted by the Soviet Union in 1989.

From an Economic Term to a Political Concept

The term “economic self-management” (in Estonian, isemajandamine ) stood at the center of economic and political debates in Soviet Estonia in 1987–1988. This article traces its transformation from an economic term to a political concept, reconstructing the intellectual resources that the reformers were drawing on in this process. Navigating the constraints of Soviet discourse, reform-minded academics in Soviet Estonia radically expanded the original meaning of isemajandamine, which ultimately provided an argumentative platform for declaring the republic’s “sovereignty” within the Soviet Union. The article brings out the linguistic, political, and transnational dimensions of this conceptual innovation, which started in 1987 and was completed when the law on the “economic independence” of the Baltic republics was adopted by the Soviet Union in 1989.