The anthropological study of Theravada Buddhism

Richard F. Gombrich. Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. viii + 366 pp. Appendixes, glossary, bibliography, and index. £4.00 (U.K.).

E. Michael Mendelson. Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975. 389 pp. Appendixes, bibliography, and index. $19.50.

Melford E. Spiro. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. iv + 507 pp. Appendix, references, and index. $17.95.

S.J. Tambiah. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North‐East Thailand. Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, Number 2. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1975 (First paperback edition), xi + 388 pp. Illustrations, maps, diagrams, tables, bibliography, and index. $6.95 paper.     

Language identity,linguistic diversity and political cleavages: evidence from Ukraine

ABSTRACT. This article revisits the notion of linguistic diversity and its function as a political cleavage. It argues that people's linguistic and cultural attitudes are influenced not only by their communicative practice but also by their identification with particular language(s) – even though they may not always communicate in that language. In Ukraine, from which my empirical data is drawn, language identity is embodied in the concept of native language that was imposed by the Soviet institutionalisation of ethnicity and came to mean ethnic belonging as much as linguistic practice. My analysis of survey data demonstrates that native language is a powerful predictor of people's attitudes and policy preferences with regard to both language use and other socially divisive issues, such as foreign policy and historical memory. This finding should also be applicable to other societies with a large‐scale discrepancy between language practice and identity.     

Memory,ghosts and the good life: Sati in Theravada cultural contexts

Mindfulness in its English rendering brings together a mix of historical influences, from Zen to Romanticism to yoga. Still, the most central concept from which it draws is sati, a Theravada Buddhist Pali term first translated as mindfulness over 100 years ago. This article reports on the findings of an ethnographic investigation of sati in the Theravada-majority countries of Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where the concept is widely used for a range of religious, therapeutic and colloquial ends. Based on interviews and questionnaires involving over 600 monks, psychiatrists and lay Buddhist practitioners, the article explores aspects of sati that are not often recognized (or recognized as much) in Western, secular mindfulness contexts. These qualities include attention to memory in present-moment awareness, the potency of supernatural engagements and a social-ethical orientation towards living well. Highlighting these qualities allows for a greater appreciation of cultural diversity within contemporary global mindfulness practices and suggests possibilities for further developing the global therapeutic potential of mindfulness.     

Negotiating Muslim identity and diversity in Greek urban spaces

Based on a recent study of indigenous and migrant Muslims in Greece, this article provides an exploration of the spatial expressions of religious identity and practice among indigenous and migrant Muslims in Athens. Through a detailed analysis of ethnographic and visual material, we investigate the ways in which Muslim communities negotiate their religious identities and belonging in a city where there is no official mosque, considering that exclusionary perceptions of Islam constitute an important element of Greek national identity. The discussion concentrates on the management of visibility of Muslim identity through public displays of religious practices. Finally, we explore the ongoing debates surrounding the building of a Central Mosque in Athens as a symbolic claim to acceptance and recognition of Muslim presence and religious diversity in the Greek capital.     

Complexity and diversity: domestic material culture and French immigrant identity in early modern London

Abstract

The French immigrants of early modern London are recorded as having been a clearly recognizable community with similarities in language, religion, occupation and material culture. However, analysis of the excavated and documentary evidence of their domestic artefacts reveals few differences when compared with their English counterparts. Although isolated artefacts may reasonably be linked to an immigrant identity, the majority of refugees do not appear to have commonly expressed their group identity through their domestic material culture in historically identifiable ways. This may indicate that the nature of French immigrant identity was more complex and varied than contemporary accounts imply.     

The diversity of identity: youth participation at the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In recent years, the transitional justice field has become increasingly concerned with ensuring meaningful participation from a wide range of actors. In response, a burgeoning scholarship has emerged, which aims to understand the interests and needs of these stakeholders, most notably women and children. Noticeably absent from this research is an examination of youth interests as distinct from children’s. Instead, the conflict identities of youth are most often conceived as inextricably tied to those of children. As a result, the narrow victim/perpetrator binary remains the dominant identity construction employed for understanding their involvement in conflict and transitional justice processes. Drawing on the case of the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article reveals that youth are more than passive subjects in the reconciliation process. It demonstrates that the interactions of youth with truth and reconciliation commission processes allow youth to exercise agency, and thus challenge the dominance of the victim/perpetrator identity construct. The article thus proposes an alternative way of framing youth participation, whereby the identities of youth in transitional contexts are represented as diverse and malleable.     

Financial order and world politics: crisis, change and continuity

Many insist that the world economy today is in the grip of the most severe financial crisis since 1931. Although the origins of this crisis are in dispute, the extent and scale of the changes prompted by it are becoming clear. Among these changes are a recalibration of the relationship between public and private authority, a reconfiguration of the regulatory responsibilities and capacities of the state with respect to the financial system, and a rebalancing of relations of power among states. While the financial crisis has generated points of stress along all of these axes of change, we should be wary of expecting an entirely new global financial order to emerge from the carnage. The complex links between financial order and world politics suggest that this financial crisis will result in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary transformation in the world's financial order.     

Pakistan,militancy and identity: parallel struggles

This article focuses on the dominant and parallel struggles that have been carried out in Pakistan in terms of its Islamic identity since 9/11. It argues that the Pakistan government has legitimised and explained its partnership with the US government in countering terrorism through a discourse that makes use of Islamic symbols. The Islamists have engaged in a similar process, arguing for jihad against the enemies of Islam. Simultaneously, a tension has persisted between liberal/progressive and orthodox notions of being a Pakistani Muslim, which has been reflected in, for example, the debate on the blasphemy law in Pakistan. It is important that strategies to strengthen Pakistan also creatively empower groups subscribing to liberal/progressive ideas so as to succeed in the struggle against militancy in the long term. The argument is developed in three parts, starting with a discussion of opposing views on Pakistan's identity and the place of Islam as the context for the Pakistan government's participation in the War on Terror. The second part explores features of the opposing discourses adopted by Islamabad and jihadi groups. The third part discusses the parallel tensions between alternative understandings of Pakistan's Islamic identity at the societal level with reference to the blasphemy law. The concluding section suggests a carefully crafted approach to assisting Pakistan at this stage in its history that could also respond to the subordinate tensions.     

National identity: banal,personal and embedded

ABSTRACT. This article examines the theoretical problem of understanding the relationship between personal and social dimensions of national identity. It does this by relating ethnographic data collected during a study of a merger between a Scottish and an English bank to three conceptual frameworks. First, it considers Michael Billig's thesis of ‘banal nationalism’. Then it addresses Anthony P. Cohen's concept of ‘personal nationalism’. Finally, it adapts a conception of the relationship between personal and social identity found in the recent work of Derek Layder. Based on this it argues that national identities, like all identities, are rendered salient for persons when they seem to address personal issues of power over one's life, and that the various social organisational settings through which people realise control over their lives (in this case, the bank) are thus crucial contexts for understanding people's attachments to identities, national and otherwise.     

Rhetoric of unity and cultural diversity in the making of European cultural identity

The fundamental aim of the cultural policy of the European Union (EU) is to emphasize the obvious cultural diversity of Europe, while looking for some underlying common elements which unify the various cultures in Europe. Through these common elements, the EU policy produces ‘an imagined cultural community’ of Europe which is ‘united in diversity’, as one of the slogans of the Union states. This discourse characterizes various documents which are essential to the EU cultural policy, such as the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Agenda for Culture and the EU’s decision on the European Capital of Culture program. In addition, the discourse is applied to the production of cultural events in European Capitals of Culture in practice. On all levels of the EU’s cultural policy, the rhetoric of European cultural identity and its ‘unitedness in diversity’ is related with the ideas and practices of fostering common cultural heritage.     

Proust: identity,time and the postmodern condition

The self as the identification of the self with itself is a product of the dynamic transformation of European culture beginning in the Renaissance. The self, or absolute ego, was an outgrowth of the consciously rationalist spirit. However, modernity's Faustian drive was conscious paradoxically without being self conscious of itself or its cultural creations. Modernism deconstructed the values and assumptions of modernity. A casualty was the problematization of the self that had been banished and/or erased by formalism, structuralism and deconstruction.

The modernist self erases the absolute ego reconstructing it with a rich, complex, narrative idea of a self‐conscious relational self encompassing memory, repression, autobiography and history.

This paper explores the modernist conception of self in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust demolishes the absolute ego in favor of the paradoxical self which knows itself only in relation to otherness actualized in persons and culture in the sacred time of existence.