Ethos最新文献

Bronislaw Malinowski suggested nearly a century ago that a key purpose of religious engagement is to provide a sense of stability in the face of uncertainty. This close relationship between religion and stability is often presumed by scholars today, but, we argue, it is not as universal as is often supposed. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research in Northern Thailand, we show how Thai Buddhists actively and strategically remind themselves of the inherent precarity of the future, rather than seek to minimize it. Analyzing rhetoric that draws on shared understandings of the uncertain in day-to-day religious practice, we show how Thai Buddhists strive for what we call “aimless agency”: a psychological acceptance of future unknowability. We use this ethnographic example to suggest further work on the social implications of impermanence and the importance of paying greater attention to cultural variability in religious approaches to an uncertain world.

Cultural consonance is both a theoretical and methodological approach that provides a means of locating an individual within a cultural space via their degree of adherence to a particular shared cultural norm or model. Yet, lacunae remain in the cultural consonance approach, namely, the mechanisms that motivate putting cultural knowledge into practice. Using the performance of gender roles in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, as a backdrop, this paper examines the roles of social network conformation (defined as the perceived adherence of one's social network with norms) and internalization of cultural norms (taken from Melford Spiro's theory of the same name) on cultural consonance. We show that the performance of cultural models is domain-specific, with Brazilian men motivated by their social network, whereas women are motivated by their own internalized understandings of gender.

Resumo  Consonância cultural é ambos, uma teoria e uma abordagem metodológica, que fornece uma maneira de localizar um indivíduo dentro do espaço cultural por meio de seu grau de adesão a uma determinada norma ou modelo cultural compartilhado. Ainda permanecem lacunas na abordagem de consonância cultural, a saber, os mecanismos que motivam colocar o conhecimento cultural em prática. Usando o desempenho de papéis de gênero em Ribeirão Preto, Brasil como pano de fundo, esse trabalho examina a conformação dos papéis das redes sociais (definido como a aderência percebida da rede social de alguém com as normas), e internalização de normas culturais (retirada da teoria de Melford Spiro com mesmo nome) em consonância cultural. Nós mostramos que o desempenho de modelos culturais é específico de um domínio, com homens brasileiros motivados por suas redes sociais, enquanto as mulheres são motivadas por suas próprias compreensões internalizadas de gênero.

Based on participant observations in life drawing classes at an art academy in Jerusalem, this article examines the diverse ways artists-in-the-making work out the boundaries between “art” and “non-art.” First, the classes serve as a rite of passage in which actors deploy discursive, spatial, and sensorial practices to relate to and represent the live model as a unique object of art. Second, using the model evokes moral deliberations through which students attempt to articulate how an “artistic” way of seeing the body differs from other uses of an exposed (mainly female) body prevalent in society. Third, students positioned as religious others negotiate their participation in this Western artistic tradition, using their alterity to destabilize the art/non-art boundary. These various negotiations demonstrate how the “art” category and art students’ sense of an artistic self, body, and belonging are formed through a pragmatic, relational, and multifaceted boundary work.

Cognitive culture theory and the associated methods of cultural domain analysis and cultural consensus analysis have revolutionized the study of cultural sharing and variation. However, the ways in which these methods can be employed are still not widely appreciated. Our aim in this paper is to propose a systematic framework for investigating cultural models. We provide examples of ideal types of sharing and variation in cultural models, including monocentric cultural models, multifocal cultural models, and multicentric cultural models. This review will contribute to mixed methods by providing a roadmap for researchers interested in employing cultural modeling in their own work, but who may not have a well-developed sense of the various ways in which it can be pursued.

This article develops a cultural theory of those dreams with rich imagery and developed plots that are likely to be dreamt in rapid-eye-movement sleep. Such dreams, it argues, are an instance of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “deep play.” For Geertz, deep play is play with “an image … a model, a metaphor” that makes visible fundamental cultural structures. Image metaphors for cultural models often appear in dreams. Deep play in dreams, I argue, subjects cultural models to destabilizing play in order to adapt them to the dreamer's experience and to confront threats to the dreamer's identity that models for being a person can pose. Dreamers destabilize models by ambiguating images that represent them in seven ways outlined in the article. Ambiguity stops the mind from settling on a single meaning. This inability triggers hyper-associations that challenge and subvert a model's given meanings. Two dreams from an undergraduate who participated in a study of dreaming at a major Northwestern university illustrate these ideas.

This article explores the role of images in intercultural training in youth mental health care. Drawing on ethnographic work conducted with practitioners taking part in transcultural seminars, this article discusses how the attention paid to images during these meetings can enable practitioners to adopt a different way of looking at the families they work with. To do so, I draw from the writings of theorists who have reflected on how images work and the power they can have over us. I first turn to the Barthian notion of punctum, and then to Kaja Silverman's argument on the role of the aesthetic object in “educating our look.” Through an ethnographic vignette, I describe how images flow during a meeting and impact the people present. I argue that working with images in intercultural training is more productive in transforming the colonial gaze than making theoretical statements that trainees may interpret as judgmental.