scholarly journals Inculturation, Anthropology, and the Empirical Dimension of Evangelization

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivencio Ballano
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Theological Orientation ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Christian Message

Using anthropological and theological perspectives and secondary literature, this paper argues that the scientific study of culture by professional anthropologists and social scientists is an essential component in the Catholic Church’s mission of evangelization through inculturation. Inculturation, the process of inserting the Christian message in society, requires scientific discernment to know which cultural traits are compatible with or contrary to the Christian faith, requiring anthropological training and active collaboration between theologians and professional anthropologists. Evangelization has incarnational and empirical dimensions when inserting the Gospel in human cultures. A genuine evangelization of cultures must be firmly rooted in the empirical reality of local cultures. The philosophical and theological orientation of many inculturationists and missionaries may sufficiently address the metaphysical dimension of the Christian faith, but not its empirical aspect when preached and adapted to human behavior in society, which entails scientific ethnographic research and active dialogue among clerics, missionaries, and social scientists.

Review of Psychology: A scientific study of human behavior. 5th ed.

1979 ◽  
Vol 24 (11) ◽  
pp. 947-947
Author(s):  
RICHARD A. KASSCHAU
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Scientific Study

The National Uprisings in the Soviet Union

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
David D. Laitin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Soviet Rule ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Incorporation Model ◽  
Model Weight ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Different Sources

Recently published histories of national groups living under Soviet rule provide a rich secondary literature on the various paths taken by these groups to be incorporated into the Russian empire and the Soviet state. Social scientists who want a differentiated understanding of political mobilization among the various nationalities should not ignore these important contributions. This review essay attempts to synthesize these histories in order to provide a coherent model of nationality politics. Proposing an “elite incorporation model” of political mobilization, the essay accounts for different sources of national protest. The model weight not only the pressures for national autonomy and republican sovereignty but also the pressures that provide support for the Union.

Why Do People Become Perpetrators of Genocide?

2019 ◽  
pp. 312-334
Author(s):  
Ying Tang ◽  
Leonard S. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Psychological Explanation ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Individual Level

Explanations of the behavior of genocide perpetrators—and evildoers in general—are not always well received. Social scientists condemn evil, but they also seek to understand and explain it. However, explanations of wrongdoing in terms of general principles of human behavior can strike many people as a way of making excuses for it. Research is reviewed indicating that explaining wrongdoing in terms of situational or contextual factors (i.e., a social psychological explanation) is especially likely to be perceived as an attempt to exonerate the wrongdoer. Research also reveals cultural and individual-level moderators of this tendency. Interactionist accounts trigger less resistance. Psychological accounts of genocide are meant not to absolve perpetrators of responsibility but to inform the prevention of future genocides.

Descriptive, Explanatory, and Interpretive Approaches

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-85
Author(s):  
Louis M. Imbeau ◽  
Sule Tomkinson ◽  
Yasmina Malki
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Explanatory Pluralism ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Social

This chapter assesses descriptive, explanatory, and interpretive approaches. ‘Description’, ‘explanation’, and ‘interpretation’ are distinct stages of the research process. Description makes the link between what is to be described and a concept and its empirical referent. It defines a way to understand empirical reality, as variations, significations, or processes. Description refers to the ‘what’ question, as the first step towards explanation. When it comes to answering the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions, some social scientists differentiate between explanation and interpretation. For them, the aim of social sciences is to ‘understand’, that is, to uncover the meanings of individuals’ or groups’ actions through the interpretation of their beliefs and discourses, whereas the aim of natural sciences is to ‘explain’, that is, to establish causality and general laws. The chapter presents an approach which offers a broader perspective for the social sciences, advocating an explanatory pluralism that allows for a more ecumenical approach.

Hypothetical Situations and Particularistic Requests: A Test in Three Hospitals

1969 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Wager ◽  
George Miller
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Hypothetical Situation ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Laboratory Methods ◽  
Laboratory Experimentation ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Difficult Cases ◽  
Theoretical Import

Physical, biological, and social scientists are well aware that some events and processes in field research are more difficult to study directly than others. For this reason, problems of considerable theoretical import are sometimes neglected. The obstacles may arise from the relative infrequency and irregularity with which certain classes of events occur, the lower visibility of certain events to observations at the time and place they occur, or the costs of studying such classes of events. Yet the difficulties involved in no way reduce the theoretical or practical importance of these phenomena. It is precisely with respect to these difficult cases that social scientists find laboratory experimentation and the hypothetical situation in field research most useful. The relative advantages and disadvantages of laboratory methods for studying human behavior have been well documented. By comparison, the usefulness and limitations of the hypothetical situation technique as a viable alternative have been almost totally neglected.

scholarly journals Dialog Structure Through the Lens of Gender, Gender Environment, and Power

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran ◽  
Owen Rambow
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Automatic Methods ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Textual Content

Understanding how the social context of an interaction affects our dialog behavior is of great interest to social scientists who study human behavior, as well as to computer scientists who build automatic methods to infer those social contexts. In this paper, we study the interaction of power, gender, and dialog behavior in organizational interactions. In order to perform this study, we first construct the Gender Identified Enron Corpus of emails, in which we semi-automatically assign the gender of around 23,000 individuals who authored around 97,000 email messages in the Enron corpus. This corpus, which is made freely available, is orders of magnitude larger than previously existing gender identified corpora in the email domain. Next, we use this corpus to perform a largescale data-oriented study of the interplay of gender and manifestations of power. We argue that, in addition to one’s own gender, the “gender environment” of an interaction, i.e., the gender makeup of one’s interlocutors, also affects the way power is manifested in dialog. We focus especially on manifestations of power in the dialog structure — both, in a shallow sense that disregards the textual content of messages (e.g., how often do the participants contribute, how often do they get replies etc.), as well as the structure that is expressed within the textual content (e.g., who issues requests and how are they made, whose requests get responses etc.). We find that both gender and gender environment affect the ways power is manifested in dialog, resulting in patterns that reveal the underlying factors. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.

scholarly journals Ethnographic Trailblazers: Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Robert Prus ◽  
Matthew Burk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Participant Observer

While ethnographic research is often envisioned as a 19th or 20th century development in the social sciences (Wax 1971; Prus 1996), a closer examination of the classical Greek literature (circa 700-300BCE) reveals at least three authors from this era whose works have explicit and extended ethnographic qualities. Following a consideration of “what constitutes ethnographic research,” specific attention is given to the texts developed by Herodotus (c484-425BCE), Thucydides (c460-400BCE), and Xenophon (c430-340BCE). Classical Greek scholarship pertaining to the study of the human community deteriorated notably following the death of Alexander the Great (c384-323BCE) and has never been fully approximated over the intervening centuries. Thus, it is not until the 20th century that sociologists and anthropologists have more adequately rivaled the ethnographic materials developed by these early Greek scholars. Still, there is much to be learned from these earlier sources and few contemporary social scientists appear cognizant of (a) the groundbreaking nature of the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon and (b) the obstacles that these earlier ethnographers faced in developing their materials. Also, lacking awareness of (c) the specific materials that these scholars developed, there is little appreciation of the particular life-worlds depicted therein or (d) the considerable value of their texts as ethnographic resources for developing more extended substantive and conceptual comparative analysis.  Providing accounts of several different peoples’ life-worlds in the eastern Mediterranean arena amidst an extended account of the development of Persia as a military power and related Persian-Greek conflicts, Herodotus (The Histories) provides Western scholars with the earliest, sustained ethnographic materials of record. Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War) generates an extended (20 year) and remarkably detailed account of a series of wars between Athens and Sparta and others in the broader Hellenistic theater. Xenophon’s Anabasis is a participantobserver account of a Greek military expedition into Persia. These three authors do not exhaust the ethnographic dimensions of the classical Greek literature, but they provide some particularly compelling participant observer accounts that are supplemented by observations and open-ended inquiries. Because the three authors considered here also approach the study of human behavior in ways that attest to the problematic, multiperspectival, reflective, negotiated, relational, and processual nature of human interaction, contemporary social scientists are apt to find instructive the rich array of materials and insights that these early ethnographers introduce within their texts. Still, these are substantial texts and readers are cautioned that we can do little more in the present statement than provide an introduction to these three authors and their works.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Sayyid M. Syeed
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Islamic Studies

With this fourth issue of 1993, we have completed ten years of publishingthe American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (MISS). Westarted our journey in 1984 with two issues published during the yearunder the title of American Journal of Islamic Studies. The next year itwas transformed into the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences(AJISS). The first decade has been quite a pioneering experience, and bynow we have been able to identify a growing pool of thinkers, writers,and social scientists who are participating in our endeavor to promote ascholarly forum on Islam.In this issue, Rosalind W. Gwynne's paper is part of a continuing discussionon sunnah. She demonstrates that, in Islamic texts, sunnah doesnot refer only to the Sunnah of the Prophet, of the local community, orof the Companions and the early community; it can refer to the "SunnatAll&" (the practice of God). She reviews the occurrence of the wordsunnah in the Qur'an and, by analyzing some tafair and early documents,shows that it also refers to the universal and unchanghg rules thatAllah has established and set into motion. She quotes Wensinck's Concordanceof Hadith, in which sunnah has been used in the context of"Sunnat Alliih alongside with "Sunnat a1 Nabi" and sunnah in othersenses. Social scientists must concentrate on the "Sunnat AllW in orderto understand the universal laws of Allah that govern social phenomena.Louay Safi provides a methodological approach that recognizes revelationas a primary source of knowledge and seeks to use both text andaction analysis techniques as necessary theory-building tools. He arguesthat scientific activity presupposes metaphysical knowledge and that, furthermore,it is even impossible without transcendental ptesuppositions. Healso contends that revelation's truth is rooted in empirical reality and thatthe quality of evidence supporting revealed truth is of no less caliber thanthat justifying empirical truth.Ebtihaj Al-A'ali presented her paper on "Assumptions Concerning theSocial Sciences: A Comparative Perspective" at a recent Toronto, Canada,confemce dealing with cross-cultural knowledge. She summarizes briefly ...

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