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16485 results in Anthem Press

Page 353 of 825

  • Chapter Five - Ghostly Encounters in the Field: Anthropology of the Paranormal or Paranormal Anthropology?

  • Homayun Sidky
  • Book:
    Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    16 December 2019
    Print publication:
    30 November 2019, pp 111-120

  • Summary

    Anthropology has taught us that the world is differently defined in different places. […] the worlds of different people have different shapes. […] space does not conform to Euclidean geometry, time does not form a continuous unidirectional flow, causation does not conform to Aristotelian logic, man is not differentiated from nonman or life from death, as in our world.

    — Walter Goldschmidt, foreword to Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan (1968)

    When [anecdotes] are the only source of data they cannot be used to reach extraordinary (or even ordinary) conclusions. The plural of anecdote is not “data.”

    — Victor Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith (2012)

    In contrast to anthropologists who subscribe to the hands-off approach to religious truths and paranormal beliefs, there are those who embrace the spiritual and paranormal suppositions of the people they study. This kind of anthropology developed around the personal anomalistic or weird experiences of several researchers while they were engaged in field research in cultures away from home. These types of events are nothing new or unique. What is new is how some researchers have interpreted such occurrences.

    During my fieldwork in Nepal, the paranormal was always around. Nepalese shamans with whom I worked are practitioners who claim to have access to recondite, otherworldly knowledge and to possess the capacity to interact with and embody spirits, foretell the future, and divine the sources and causes of misfortune and illness. Paranormalists, psychics, clairvoyants, evangelical faith-healers, and other such practitioners in the West more or less say the same thing. Nepalese shamans can also purportedly communicate with ghosts, raise the souls of the dead in cremation grounds during late-night ceremonies, exorcise evil spirits, and summon demons at crossroads to harm enemies. There is also a remarkable parallel between the “alien abduction” narratives commonly reported in the United States and the supernatural kidnapping stories associated with the shamanic calling in Nepal (see Sidky 2008: 147– 62).

    In the Tibetan community in Northern India, I encountered individuals who claim to be the reincarnations of known deceased personages and say they can recall their past lives. Some Tibetan monks avow that they can levitate during meditative states and invited me to observe their remarkable abilities.

  • Chapter Four - Capacity and Fragility: The Sociological Framework for the Capacity Project and Developing “Fragile” States

  • Avideh K. Mayville
  • Book:
    The Transformation of Capacity in International Development
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    30 November 2019, pp 73-108

  • Summary

    The previous chapter examined how capacity as a concept gained salience within donor spaces, moving from agendas to institutional frameworks to finally be implemented within projects. A concept gains salience by becoming a common theme or underlying thread within varying discourses, primary areas of stakeholder collaboration, and when it becomes subsumed within overarching narratives that drive forth the reality of the spaces within which actors operate. As a concept of practice, capacity lives everywhere and across all issue areas. It is in many ways an all-consuming concept that only gains substance when within the context of other concepts. As we work toward a conceptual framework of understanding for capacity, this teasing out major discursive relationships is tedious, but necessary. This chapter is about the relationship of “capacity” to another pervasive, descriptive concept that has implications for development strategy, global security concerns, and the prevention of mass human rights violations: “fragility.”

    As this term is generally used as a descriptor for the status of states, and much of capacity building has to do with the building of the state, this chapter approaches the relationship between these two concepts first through an examination of sociological frameworks for understanding projects of capacity and later through the lens of USAID's involvement in counterinsurgency operations, which is particularly relevant as we consider fragility. The scholarly frameworks I examine explain capacity building as a community-building project and identify major themes of capacity building as state power, community, and social capital, using examples from the Global North to conceive of the construction of capacity through the lens of frames and habitus. These frameworks are both illuminating and limiting for an analysis of donor-driven capacity-building efforts in states deemed “fragile,” such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. I juxtapose these examples against the context of the case this book examines, examining these limitations and exploring the ramifications of them when considering the question of capacity as it relates to fragility within the context of statebuilding. This leads into a discussion on the role of security within development agendas and fragility as a designation for states deemed lacking in capacity, as well as how rights-based approaches to development fit into this framework for statebuilding.

  • 2 - Science and Global Environmental Governance

  • Pia M. Kohler
  • Book:
    Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    30 November 2019, pp 9-36

  • Summary

    June 2014. Paris, France. The archives of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are at the far end of the UNESCO library; I leave the glorious sunshine behind as I enter the dark, cave-like reading room. I'm tracking down documentation related to a short-lived precursor to the science advice committees that are the focus of this book: the Advisory Committee on Natural Resources Research. Established in 1965, this 15-member committee was responsible “for advising the Director-General on the preparation of UNESCO's programmes for the promotion of research and training in the geological, hydrological, soil and ecological sciences, as well as for the study and conservation of natural resources.” As I review the report of the deliberations that led to the committee's establishment, I encounter familiar themes. The tension between the political and scientific nature of the committee's work comes across in the minutes of the executive board's discussion on the matter, and the deputy director-general's call for the selection of expert members to be of a “nongovernmental character” is echoed among calls heard today for insulating science committees from political concerns. The committee's expert members are to be selected “for their high degree of competence and in such a way to ensure an equitable representation for the various regions and of the scientific disciplines concerned.” This concern with striking a balance between disciplinary diversity and geographic representation is one still at play in the “modern” committees I have been studying. How have approaches to striking that elusive balance changed in the intervening five decades?

    Harnessing science for international diplomacy is not a recent phenomenon. To highlight just one example, the “International Polar Year” initiative, convened four times since 1883, fostered novel opportunities for cooperation that not only yielded scientific breakthroughs but also strengthened diplomatic ties (Nilsson 2009). Following World War II, initiatives such as UNESCO's Advisory Committee on the Arid Zone Research Programme (which preceded the Advisory Committee on Natural Resources Research discussed above) proved instrumental in bringing about the “view from above” and making a “global environment” an object of governance (Jasanoff 2001; Selcer 2018).

The Transformation of Capacity in International Development
  • Afghanistan and Pakistan (1977–2017)
  • Avideh K. Mayville
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    30 November 2019
  • “The Transformation of Capacity in International Development” exposes the transformation of capacity within the development discourse through a discursive analysis of USAID projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 1977 and 2017. Capacity development has emerged as a pervasive component and objective of aid, in spite of being ill-defined by donors. USAID is a significant actor with an unrivaled role in the production of projects, providing a unique institutional vantage point from which to realize relationships and networks of aid production. As development agendas increasingly call for human rights approaches to development and the foreign policies of donor states sound alarms over global security threats, capacity development has emerged as the solution to the complex problem of development. Through this examination of USAID’s attempts to build capacity in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the book exposes how Western notions of progress, constructed by institutions, government officials, scholars and private sector actors, are obscured by the transformation of capacity. As agendas are translated into projects, they perpetuate historical relationships of global inequality that have corrupted and compete with indigenous models of governance. “The Transformation of Capacity in International Development” has implications for those considering the future of human rights-based approaches to development, the international management of global security threats and the sustainability of donor investments.

  • Chapter Six - Why We Think the World Is Haunted

  • Homayun Sidky
  • Book:
    Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    16 December 2019
    Print publication:
    30 November 2019, pp 121-146

  • Summary

    All proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvelous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature.

    — David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding (1748)

    It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent in realities to be originally revealed.

    — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

    We impose order [on the world] even when there is no motive to do so. We do not “want” to see a man on the moon. We do not profit from the illusion. We just see it. […] The predisposition to impose order can be so automatic and so unchecked that we often end up believing in the existence of phenomena that just aren't there.

    — Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't so (1991)

    The human information-processing system is such that we should expect ostensibly paranormal experiences to be frequently reported even if paranormal forces do not exist.

    — Christopher French, Paranormal Perception (2001)

    The ease with which we see faces, in particular, has led to the idea that we are inclined to see supernatural characters at the drop of a hat. Each year some bagel, muffin, burnt toast, potato chip, or even ultrasound of a fetus showing the face of some deity is paraded as evidence for divine miracles.

    — Bruce Hood Supersense (2009)

    In this chapter, I begin my examination of the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious and paranormal beliefs. The main question addressed is, How and why do people think of such things? My anthropological investigations of religious specialists over many years that brought me into contact with a variety of paranormal and supernatural practitioners have led me to the conclusion that humans seem to have particular cognitive biases that naturally result in paranormal ideation. It is as if the misunderstood and mysterious workings of their own minds have mystified humans across space and time.

  • Chapter Two - The Unreal Real: The Supernatural, Religion, and the Paranormal

  • Homayun Sidky
  • Book:
    Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    16 December 2019
    Print publication:
    30 November 2019, pp 39-56

  • Summary

    Terms such as supernatural, metaphysical, and nonempirical reality are, in fact, oxymorons. It would make as much sense to talk about the “unreal real.”

    — James Lett, Science, Religion, and Anthropology (1997)

    The unexplained is not supernatural.

    — Michael Scriven, Science, Primary Philosophy (1966)

    Words such as religion, supernatural, and paranormal refer to transcendental realities, beings, and forces. These terms are very imprecise, and the boundaries of the purported phenomena which they denote are fuzzy. The first question to ask is, What makes something religious rather than supernatural or paranormal? Consider the following: Why is a late-night visitation by an androgynous being with wings, that is, an angel, deemed to belong to the realm of religion, while a similar nocturnal appearance by another androgynous but wingless creature, the occupant of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, considered to belong to the domain of the paranormal? Are beliefs in the existence of ghosts or souls part of religion or the supernatural? Alternatively, are they paranormal? Some conceptual clarification is necessary before we can proceed further.

    What Is the Supernatural?

    The term “supernatural” comes from the Latin supernaturalis that was in use during the Middle Ages to describe the miracles of God mentioned in the Bible and the prodigies associated with the Christian cult of saints (Bartlett 2008: 9– 17, 2013: 3– 26). This concept was brought into theological discourse by the great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century. It was juxtaposed with the ideas of natura and naturalis, “nature” or “natural,” and was an aspect of the theological discussions of the time about the world of people and the spirit world. As the theistic philosopher William Shea (1984: 308) has pointed out, understandings of supernatural are framed in relation to “nature” and “natural,” so that the meaning of one term is “dialectically coupled” with the comprehension of the other term. However, medieval thinkers concerned with the supernatural and natural struggled with the distinctions between these concepts. As the historian Robert Bartlett (2008: 26) has put it, “the categories and definitions used for discussing the natural and the supernatural were fluid, potentially contradictory, and often indeed unexamined.”

  • 4 - The Aesthetic and the Political

  • Jibu Mathew George
  • Book:
    Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    29 November 2019, pp 93-110

  • Summary

    The Scandal Called the Aesthetic

    It appears too late in the day to ask the question ‘What is “good” literature?’ It might seem even too late to argue for or against an essentialist definition of literature or literary value. Contemporary literary criticism is weighed in favour of the idea that it is contexts, institutions and discourses which decide the literariness of any piece of speech or writing. We have successfully extended the use of the term ‘literature’ on the basis of media, genre and sociological criteria to include oral literature, pulp fiction and the writings/ cultural practices of many formerly marginalized groups, respectively. It is a critical commonplace that an unconscious system of values lies behind our evaluations of literature, and that this varies from culture to culture and from person to person. For a Marxist critic, this system of values is related to class structure and the intellectual hegemony of the dominant class. For a postcolonial critic, the texts which were considered prestigious and were prescribed for academic study were so, because they were ideological tools of, and in turn received impetus from, the politico-cultural project of imperialism. Similarly, feminists challenge a male-centred canon. Indeed such endeavours have helped to set right the lopsidedness of literary history as well as contemporary priorities.

    Apropos the subjective side, indeed the apprehension of literary value is partly a matter of the subject-object symmetry. If this is the case, value – I refuse to categorize it as exclusively ‘aesthetic’ because there are more aspects to value than pure aesthetic – is located neither exclusively in the reader nor in the text but at the precise point of encounter between them. But the subject is not an autonomous Cartesian one but is constituted in the collective, historically specific discourses. As such, the system of values consists of culturally acquired elements and maybe entangled in the networks of power and ideology. Further, literary values are pluralistic; there are many kinds of excellence.

    Is there something called aesthetic quality? Can it be decided at all? If the answer is in the affirmative, how does one decide the quality of a literary work? Can the political be demarcated from the aesthetic?

Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies
  • Why Do Things with Texts, and What To Do with Them?
  • Jibu Mathew George
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    29 November 2019
  • Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies' takes up key meta-questions in the humanities, with focus on contemporary literary studies, philosophically examines the nature of knowledge therein as well as the implications of certain popular critical approaches, and addresses the effervescent question of ‘relevance’. In contrast to usual works on literary theory, or on philosophy of literature for that matter, this book presents an integrated meta-reasoning on the foundational questions of literary studies from an interdisciplinary perspective – in a manner of intertextual informality. It endeavours to articulate a rationale for the humanities in general and literary studies in particular. It philosophically examines the implications of, and assumptions behind, three popular tendencies in contemporary literary criticism – textual deconstruction, ideological criticism and constructivism. It also introduces the reader to possibilities of non-reductive reasoning with regard to the relation between the aesthetic and the political. With his multidisciplinary background, doctoral degree on an encyclopedic author (James Joyce) and past engagements with vital issues in the humanities/literature, Jibu George is in a position to deal with foundational questions therein.

  • 3 - Beyond for and Against: Tendencies of Contemporary Criticism

  • Jibu Mathew George
  • Book:
    Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    29 November 2019, pp 53-92

  • Summary

    What to Do with Texts?

    As part of the ongoing ‘transvaluation’ of established literary values, we have successfully argued and accepted that texts, authors, genres and social groups other than the canonical ones ought to be studied as part of the syllabi. In other words, we are past the phase of ‘restricted entry’, and objects of study have democratically multiplied. But there has been no corresponding rethinking, at least to the same degree, on what more can be done with the old and the new entrants. Somehow, originality in research has come to mean writing theses and books on less-canonical works. When we decide merely to study less-known works (it is an open secret that first-generation critics have certain advantages), we are mainly questioning the canon, not necessarily devising ways of dealing with texts which have hitherto been excluded, though new texts may demand new approaches.

    During my initial years as a research scholar, I was asked to read up the secondary materials on a certain author – ‘a love that dare not speak its name’ – other than James Joyce, on whose works I did my doctoral research, so as to have an overview of the then current trends in practical criticism. After a year-long reading I found that three-fourths of the critical materials said one or more of the following:

  • Meaning is undecidable.

  • Literary texts are entangled in discourses of race, class and gender.

  • Some concept or the other is a cultural construct.

    • As we know, the first is a theoretical insight of deconstruction. The second comes to us from schools of ideological criticism, such as postcolonialism, Marxism and feminism. Harold Bloom terms these collectively ‘the School of Resentment’ (1995, 23). The third demonstrates constructivism, the ‘in-thing’ in academia today. Gender is a construct. So is sexuality, nation, subject, disability and what not. Heck! Literature itself is a construct. Later I learnt that these tendencies were representative of contemporary literary criticism in general. I also learnt that statements that did not say any of these three things were likely to be dismissed as ‘humanistic’.

  • 1 - The Why and Wherefore of Academic Disciplines: The Humanities and the Human World Process

  • Jibu Mathew George
  • Book:
    Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    29 November 2019, pp 5-28

  • Summary

    The Humanities – An Ugly Duckling among Alma Mater's Pets

    One principle dominates contemporary deliberations on curriculum planning and development in higher education: ‘social relevance’. The one reason given for poor research funding in the humanities is that its results are not immediate. What is not immediate is purportedly irrelevant! At least in Hans Christian Anderson's tale, the ugly duckling eventually reveals itself to be a swan. We are not claiming that the true identity of the humanities will be revealed only in future though this chapter contains a sort of blue print for their expansion. Nor are we saying that we should divert all the funding from stem cell studies and cancer drug research to knowledge generation in the humanities. Ours is not a plea for pre-eminence of the humanities or a plea against any other discipline or set of disciplines, say STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). This is not a plea at all. No discipline needs a defence against any other discipline. As demonstrated with the later discussion of ideological criticism in Chapter 3, polemical or contestational reasoning is a necessary but insufficient phase of reasoning in the humanities. But every discipline needs to articulate a rationale for its existence. The title of this section, therefore, is not a summary but a point of departure.

    Though in a very different context, some acknowledgements of limitations, or calls for such an acknowledgement, have come from within the humanities. Several years ago, philosopher (or ‘post-philosopher’) Richard Rorty proposed a modest conversational theory of knowledge. According to him, philosophy was a form of cultured conversation, not an attempted revelation of the truth of the world. Apparently, there is very less at stake here. Rorty was of the view that philosophers should give up the ambition or pretension to describe the world. As the title of his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature suggests, ideas do not provide a mirror of the way the world is but have consequences. The philosopher is not a ‘cultural overseer who knows everyone's common ground’ and who offers an explanatory master discourse but an ‘informed dilettante’ who sees ‘relations between various discourses as those strands in a possible conversation’ (1990, 316– 17). Rorty's was a response to what he called the ‘self-obsessed, “in-grown”, and “over-philosophized” ‘ character which the humanities had attained in the 1980s.

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