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Spiritual Power (spiritual + power)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

Deep into the Shinnyo Spiritual World

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JAPANESE SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2001
Akira Kawabata
"Shinnyo-en" (Garden of the Truth) is one of the most famous religious groups in Japan today. But outside Shinnyo-en it is difficult to understand Shinnyo teaching. By focusing on the words from interviews, this article depicts its spiritual world and analyzes the function of its spiritual power on interviewees. The believers' narrative is interpreted from a sociological perspective using computer-aided qualitative data analysis and a life history approach. The computer-aided coding method is found to be an effectual means to discover significant factors in Shinnyo teachings. This method has four steps: (1) interview transcripts are input in ASCII format in several groups according to the time we interviewed; (2) KT2 system, a set of programs for computerized content analysis, disaggregates the transcripts into words to which I assign codes; (3) the codes are integrated into several meaningful categories for a cross-tabular examination of two variables, times and categories; (4) a contour map made from the cross-table helps to grasp the significance of the categories and their relations in a life history. This procedure enables us to understand the significance of the "self", and the transformation of the "self" according to the time flows. The contour map of the belief commands a panoramic view of Shinnyo teaching. From this point of view we can scrutinize the interview data and describe the Shinnyo spiritual world as it is understood. [source]

Female saints and the practice of Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2008
ALYSON CALLAN
ABSTRACT Unlike the saintly power of her male counterpart, which is conceived as an attribute of the individual, the spiritual power of the female saint in Sylhet, Bangladesh, is attributed to a supernatural entity that is temporarily affiliated with her. This difference cannot simply be regarded as an example of gendered domains of religious practice, in which men study the Qu'ran and women traffic with spirits, as in Sylhet, male healers practice with the aid of spirits. I describe how one woman's saintly status allowed her to resist the virilocal rule of residence, a patriarchal structure that is said to underpin women's subordinate position in Bangladesh. Her story demonstrates that Islam cannot be conflated with patriarchy and that it may support women's emancipation from structures of male authority. The meaning of Islam is context dependent and revised through practice. [Islam, gender, agency, sainthood, Bangladesh, spirit possession, healing] [source]

CONSULTING KU JLOPLE: SOME HISTORIES OF ORACLES IN WEST AFRICA

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 3 2004
Elizabeth Tonkin
Historical comparison of oracles in west Africa, mainly during the nineteenth century, shows how divination practices may alter. In the cases explored here, reputation, range of users, economic growth, and political influence interacted as these oracles developed; some at sites with internal and overseas trade access became complex, large-scale operations. But by about 1900, colonialists felt threatened by their secular and their spiritual power and smashed them physically, though not spiritually. Contextualized comparison shows that the many people who were involved as oracle organizers and supplicants must have had different motivations and interests. Some methodological implications of the findings are considered. As in many powerful secular organizations, access to insider knowledge was blocked, but oracular reputation was important, and the oracles had competitors. Success derived partly from collecting intelligence, with simultaneous advertisement that emphasized the mysterious power of their operations. [source]

Front and Back Covers, Volume 25, Number 4.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 4 2009
August 200
Front and Back cover caption, volume 25 issue 4 ETHNOGRHAPHIC DOCUMENTARIES AND PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY Ethnographic documentaries are a shop window for anthropology. These cover photos represent three well received films shown at the most recent RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film held at Leeds Metropolitan University in July. The festival is a biennial event at which visual anthropologists, filmmakers and documentarists mingle. The front cover image is from the film Black mountain. A once unremarkable site of multi-faith pilgrimage to a Sufi saint has been transformed and its local history rewritten. The film documents the journey of Charlotte Whitby-Coles, a PhD student who, whilst researching religious pilgrimages, stumbled on the politicization of a pilgrimage site in western India. Her research suggests that Kalo Dungar (Black Mountain), situated in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, provides a micro-example of current political issues in India today that threaten the ideal of ,unity in diversity' for the country. The top image on the back cover is taken from Between the lines, a film by Thomas Wartman on India's ,third gender' that follows photographer Anita Khemka as she explores the hidden hijra subculture of Bombay. Khemka is fascinated by the spiritual powers of the outcast hijras , biological men who dress as women but reject identification with either gender. Accompanying three hijras, Khemka discusses intimate details , their matriarchal surrogate families, castration ceremonies, sexuality, begging and prostitution. Khemka's ability to initiate personal dialogue about persistent cultural stereotypes of gender provides insight into a social group currently at the forefront of the fight for gender equality in India. The lower image is from the film Enet Yapai by Daniela Vavrova. Enet Yapai was six years old when Vavrova first met her in 2005 in Ambonwari village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Between November 2007 and April 2008 she followed Enet and her mother Alexia on their way to process sago, catch fish or collect grass for baskets and mats. This experimental film captures the subtleties of the interaction between Enet Yapai, the camera and the filmmaker. For details of the prizes awarded at the festival, see p. 29 of this issue or http://www.raifilmfest.org.uk. [source]