Search Results (17)

This paper examines personal names derived from traditional religious beliefs and practices among the Erei people in Biase Local Government Area of Cross River State in South-South, Nigeria while utilising insights from the multidisciplinary inferences of socio-onomastic theory to account for the cultural, social and situational contexts that create the religious content of the names. Data were obtained by means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews during six months of fieldwork involving 40 participants who were the name-givers, name-bearers and name-users. Our findings highlight the socio-onomastic tradition of Erei people in which personal names are bestowed through a conscious application of symbolic linguistic resources to express and perform ideologies and identities that are rooted in the traditional religion’s foundations and sociocultural practices that represent Erei people’s indigenous beliefs system and spiritual worldview. Focused on the ideals of African traditional religion, religious identities are constructed through the use of personal names related to idol worship, the mysteries of death, reincarnation and commemoration, cultural festivals and performances, symbolic objects, familial rankings and other aspects derived from their environment that also bear traditional religious significance. And because this set of personal names is now predominant among the ageing population and is losing contemporaneity due to an increasing subpopulation with a new (Christian) beliefs system, this study serves to preserve a transiting and endangered Erei socio-onomastic practice that represents the people’s traditional cosmology. Full article

Ain’t I a Woman? This question was raised by activist and self-emancipated former slavewoman Sojourner Truth, who validly questioned the body politic of identity when contextualized to perceptions of female personhood. Essentially, what Truth challenged were presumptions about the standards set to revere female bodies through markers of genteel Whiteness, while the worth of embodied Blackness, precisely the beauty of Black women, is reviled. In this article, I seek to raise awareness about factors of patriarchy and societal ramifications. Patriarchy is a systematized phenomenology of norms privileging the male gaze. The White male gaze, particularly in strongholds of power, influences the body politic of communal identity. Black women tend to lean on their faith to embody strength, yet patriarchy also encumbers the gendered body politic in religious spheres. As a womanist scholar, my analysis considers the intricate roles that patriarchy holds in the cultural production of a genteel, pretty woman image, wherein the aura of Whiteness grounds a body politic that deems Blackness as other. Despite the influences of prevailing macrosystems, I propose a theoethic of self-love to push against negatively biased identity boundaries by affirming ways to embrace Black beauty with a subversive imperative to love oneself regardless. Full article

Amidst increasing globalization and religious diversity, acknowledging and embracing openness towards religious and/or cultural others has become crucial for societal cohesion and international relations. Theological scholars, holding significant potential in mitigating inter-religious and intercultural prejudices, can play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge. However, it is acknowledged that theologians themselves may harbor such biases. This study, conducted within the framework of the Religious Openness Hypothesis, employed an online questionnaire among theology students, seen as future multipliers of religiosity, in Germany and Turkey (N = 513) using convenience sampling. The results reveal the consistent relation of religiosity to all forms of prejudice among German Christians, with a linked defense against secularism potentially leading to self-isolation and the protection of their own worldview against religious or cultural outgroups. In contrast, the (generally high) prejudice among Turkish Muslims appears to be rooted not primarily in religiosity or defense against secularism but in fundamentalism and, most likely, in other socio-cultural factors such as politics and education. For both subsamples, religiosity was positively linked with xenosophia, particularly when accounting for fundamentalism. The article concludes by proposing curriculum implications for universities and schools in both cultural contexts. Full article

Highlighting the restricted access to andrology medical devices in Arab Muslim countries, where unjust associations with sexual instruments lead to prohibitions, this commentary underscores the challenges in providing appropriate medical care for andrological conditions. Despite the crucial role of devices like penile extenders, vacuum devices, and vibrators in treating conditions such as Peyronie’s disease and erectile dysfunction, cultural and religious biases condemn them in certain regions. This lack of understanding deprives many patients of andrological treatments, limiting therapeutic options and equitable healthcare access. The commentary advocates for urology societies to raise awareness, engage policymakers, and use media to distinguish these devices from sex toys, emphasizing their medical nature for the benefit of patients. Full article

In this article, we offer a specific example from our programmatic research and teaching praxis during the COVID-19 anti-Asian hate pandemic period. We demonstrate how Asian American Studies community-centered knowledge coproduction and narrative generational wealth investment can address critical experiences of young learners from underrepresented, religiously-diverse populations through content that supports culturally sustaining child development and challenges disparately impactful realities of racism, misrepresentation, and systemic Western biases which undermine their health and wellbeing. Focusing on religious themes in relation to child development was not an explicit intention of our collaboratively developed storybook project titled, Hira Makes a Sound. Nevertheless, centering a women-led, intergenerational Nepali immigrant story in both our process and final product necessarily led to foregrounding religious, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of diasporic family and community life that are essential to coping and development for the fictional lead character, Hira, and her loved ones. Robust story data themes—paradoxically grounded in the ether of a shared Gurung worldview—provide generative lessons for researchers, educators, artists, and community advocates who work with or need to account for the lived experiences of young learners within religiously diverse, multi-generational immigrant family households and community ecologies. Full article

Religious hate propaganda, which is sustained communication by an authority that attempts to guide an audience towards persecuting others based on religion, is a speech crime. Yet, it is one of the least understood and most difficult speech crimes to prosecute. This is due to misunderstandings and epistemic gaps regarding how persecutory language, which would otherwise have little significance for prosocial religious adherents, becomes meaningful for a religious community. Drawing from the cognitive science of religion (CSR), this article develops and explores the hypothesis that for some religious communities, discursive attacks on others become meaningful when they center on dangerous accusations. Dangerous accusations portray the other as capable of mystical harm and, when made by cultural authorities, become socially accepted truths if repeated during rituals of veridiction. This article shows that dangerous accusations are at the heart of religious hate propaganda and exploit cognitive biases for threat perception, coalitional psychology, and costly signaling. Moreover, dangerous accusations can reinforce the social order and maintain social cohesion. Together, an analysis of speech crimes and dangerous accusations shed light on how religious hate propaganda works, how it can offer meaning to religious communities, and how it can justify persecution in certain environments. Full article

This article reflects on the biases in sexual and gender diversity policies in relation to the axis of cultural and religious diversity in Catalonia (Spain), where these policies have experienced an enormous boost since 2014. The paper aims to analyse the articulation between the experiences of queer migrants from Muslim backgrounds living in Catalonia and the LGBT and intercultural policies. Based on interviews both with queer migrants and people involved in developing public policies, we analyse how these two axes intersect. The approach of policies is mainly monofocal and assimilationist, failing to acknowledge the hybridity of queer migrant experiences. However, we also find examples of policy programmes that adopt an intersectional perspective and embrace hybridity by advancing more inclusive LGBT equality policies. The conclusions highlight two axes of tensions that have emerged in the analysis of the policies: the construction of the figure of the queer person from a Muslim background and the role of the state regarding sexual and gender diversity. Full article

This study examines the multiplicity of styles and heterogeneity of the arts created on the southern coasts of India during the period of colonial rule. Diverging from the trajectory of numerous studies that underline biased and distorted conceptions of India promoted in European and Indian literary sources, I examine ways in which Indian cultural traditions and religious beliefs found substantial expression in visual arts that were ostensibly geared to reinforce Christian worship and colonial ideology. This investigation is divided into two parts. Following a brief overview, my initial focus will be on Indo-Portuguese polychrome woodcarvings executed by local artisans for churches in the areas of Goa and Kerala on the Malabar coast. I will then relate to Portuguese religious strategies reflected in south Indian churches, involving the destruction of Hindu temples and images and their replacement with Catholic equivalents, inadvertently contributing to the survival of indigenous beliefs and recuperation of the Hindu monuments they replaced. Full article

African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious viral infection of domestic and wild pigs with high mortality. First reported in East Africa in the early 1900s, ASF was largely controlled in domestic pigs in many countries. However, in recent years ASF outbreaks have been reported in several countries in Europe and Asia. The occurrence of ASF in China, the largest pork producer in the world, in 2018 and in India, the country that surrounds and shares open borders with Nepal, has increased the risk of ASF transmission to Nepal. Lately, the pork industry has been growing in Nepal, overcoming traditional religious and cultural biases against it. However, the emergence of viral infections such as ASF could severely affect the industry’s growth and sustainability. Because there are no effective vaccines available to prevent ASF, the government should focus on preventing entry of the virus through strict quarantine measures at the borders, controls on illegal trade, and effective management practices, including biosecurity measures. Full article

Planning a city is a systematic process that includes time, space, and groups of people who must communicate. However, due to security problems in such war-ravaged countries as Afghanistan, the traditional forms of public participation in the planning process are untenable. In particular, due to gathering space difficulties and culture issues in Afghanistan, women and religious minorities are restricted from joining male-dominated powerholders’ face-to-face meetings which are nearly always held in fixed places called masjids (religious buildings). Furthermore, conducting such discussions with human facilitation biases the generation of citizen decisions that stimulates an atmosphere of confrontation, causing another decision problem for urban policy-making institutions. Therefore, it is critical to find approaches that not only securely revolutionize participative processes but also provide meaningful and equal public consultation to support interactions among stakeholders to solve their shared problems together. Toward this end, we propose a joint research program, namely, crowd-based communicative and deliberative e-planning (CCDP), a blended approach, which is a mixture of using an artificial-intelligence-led technology, decision-support system called D-Agree and experimental participatory planning in Kabul, Afghanistan. For the sake of real-world implementation, Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan) and Kabul Municipality (Afghanistan) have formed a novel developed and developing world partnership by using our proposed methodology as an emerging-deliberation mechanism to reframe public participation in urban planning processes. In the proposed program, Kabul municipality agreed to use our methodology when Kabul city needs to make a plan with people. This digital field study presents the first practical example of using online decision support systems in the context of the neighborhood functions of Gozars, which are Kabul’s social and spatial urban units. The main objective was to harness the wisdom of the crowd to innovative suggestions for helping policymakers making strategic development plans for Gozars using open call ideas, and for responding to equal participation and consultation needs, specifically for women and minorities. This article presents valuable insights into the benefits of this combined approach as blended experience for societies and cities that are suffering long-term distress. This initiative has influenced other local Afghan governments, including the cities of Kandahar and Herat as well as the country’s central government’s ministry of urban planning and land, which has officially expressed its intention to collaborate with us. Full article

Commonly represented in contemporary texts and modern historiographical accounts as a dangerous and alien region, characterised by piracy and barbarism, the history of the early modern Maghreb and the cultural impact it had on British society is one highly limited by indirect sources, cultural, political, and religious biases, and the distorting influence of Orientalist and colonial historiography. Historians have drawn on a wide range of popular media and government-held archival material, each with its own limitations, but one important corpus has been neglected. Drawn from up-to-date and trusted sources and distributed to vast audiences from a wide range of social groups, periodical news publications provide a vast and fruitful body of sources for evaluating popular and elite English viewpoints on Maghrebi piracy. This paper draws upon a corpus of 3385 news items comprising over 360,000 words relating to the Maghreb and its people, drawn from Stuart and Republican English news publications, with a view towards examining the discourse and reality around Maghrebi maritime combat, diplomact and trade in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. To what extent did maritime combat dominate coverage of the Maghreb, over other social, political and military events? Why did news writers use the word ‘pirate’ so infrequently to describe Maghrebi ships? Was Maghrebi piracy chaotic and unfettered, or did peace treaties and consular presence lead to stable trade relations? Were Maghrebi economies seen to be fundamentally built on naval predation, or was real benefit available from peaceful engagement with the Maghrebi states? Examining these and other questions from English news coverage, this paper argues that the material in English periodical news is generally consistent with what we know of the military, diplomatic and economic conditions of the time, surprisingly neutral in tone with a possible emphasis on positive stories when dealing with British–Maghrebi relations, and increasingly after the Restoration played a significant role in influencing British popular discourse. Full article

There is a basic tension within the idea of Comparative Hagiology, because the two terms that constitute its name are incongruous. To formulate a comparative hagiological project, we must choose at the outset which term will take priority. Prioritizing the comparative in comparative hagiology orients us to focus more on the basic disciplinary approaches to gather compare-able data, leaving hagiology as a placeholder whose content will be defined by the results of the comparison. Prioritizing hagiology requires first defining hagio- and reckoning with the European and Christian baggage that it brings to cross-cultural and inter-religious comparison. Holding that definition in mind, we then locate examples to compare by whatever approach seems fruitful in that case. Different choices of priorities lead to potentially different results. I argue that a path that prioritizes comparative is more likely to inspire experimental and innovative groupings, unconventional definitions of hagiology, and new perspectives in the cross-cultural study of religion. An approach that prioritizes hagiology runs a greater risk of repeating the same provincial and conceptual biases that doomed much of 20th-century comparative religion scholarship. Full article

Popular, ethnic, and folk religions endure in all regions of the planet, but specially in underdeveloped or developing non-Western countries. The main objective of this paper was to propose a framework for understanding this popular religious trend. Although religion in general has previously been linked to multiple modernities, the revitalization of popular religions has not. While Eisenstadt’s original theory of multiple modernities has been criticized on several aspects, his interpretative approach is valid provided that the contradictory dynamics of modernizing processes are recognized. The epistemological shift suggested by this article involves recognizing the biases that Western sociology has brought to its analysis of religions. Once we treat modernities as multiple, the specificity of each modernity opens up the spectrum of religious alternatives that flourish in every geo-cultural area. The growing diversity of popular religious expressions in the Global South stems from the fact that they are supported by thousands of believers. Their lived religions spills beyond religious institutions. These popular religiosities are the main sources of religious diversities and religious resistance in the context of multiple modernities. Lived religion and symbolic action allow us a better understanding of the magical-religious expressions of peoples of the world. Full article

This paper explores the complex evolution of the role anthropologists have played as cultural experts in the regulation of the entheogenic use of the peyote cactus throughout the 20th century. As experts of the “peyote cult”, anthropologists provided testimonies and cultural expertise in the regulatory debates in American legislative and judiciary arenas in order to counterbalance the demonization and prohibition of the medicinal and sacramental use of peyote by Native Americans through state and federal legislations. In the meantime, anthropologists have encouraged Peyotists to form a pan-tribal religious institution as a way to secure legal protection of their practice; in 1918, the Native American Church (NAC) was incorporated in Oklahoma, with its articles explicitly referring to the sacramental use of peyote. Operating as cultural experts, anthropologists have therefore assisted jurists in their understanding of the cultural and religious significance of peyote, and have at the same time counseled Native Americans in their interaction with the legal system and in the formatting of their claims in appropriate legal terms. This complex legal controversy therefore provides ample material for a general exploration of the use, evolution, and impact of cultural expertise in the American legal system, and of the various forms this expertise can take, thereby contributing to the contemporary efforts at surveying and theorizing cultural expertise. Through an historical and descriptive approach, the analysis notably demonstrates that the role of anthropologists as cultural experts has been marked by a practical and substantive evolution throughout the 20th century, and should therefore not be restrictively understood in relation to expert witnessing before courts. Rather, this paper underlines the transformative and multifaceted nature of cultural expertise, and highlights the problematic duality of the position that the two “generations” of anthropologists involved in this controversy have experienced, navigating between a supposedly impartial position as experts, and an arguably biased engagement as advocates for Native American religious rights. Full article

Muslim societies are facing the new challenges of cultural and religious diversity. They are experiencing migratory phenomena, or because they are countries of immigration (such as in the Persian Gulf monarchies and emirates) or countries that are becoming a new destination of migrants (such as Morocco and other North African nations). These challenges are increasingly urgent due to the effects of other globalization vectors such as new communication technologies that cross all boundaries and foster unprecedented conversions. The purpose of this contribution is limited to the religious aspect of the new forms of diversification faced by Muslim countries. The goal is to analyze to what extent this process biases traditional ways of managing religious diversity. Full article