scholarly journals Sacred Secularities: Ritual and Social Engagement in a Global Buddhist China

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Reinke
Keyword(s):  
Social Engagement ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Asian Continent ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Social Engagements ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Temple

The Taiwanese order Fo Guang Shan is a major representative of renjian Buddhism. The order maintains a global network of over 200 temples and practice centers that spans over not only most of the Asian continent, but also includes Oceania, the Americas, Europe and Africa. This article examines how the order negotiates the modern secular/religious divide by considering the example of its flagship diaspora temple Hsi Lai Temple in L.A., California. Particular attention is given to two prevalent religious practices at the temple—ritual and social engagements—that are often associated with the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ respectively. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the article aims to assess the relationship between the two practices and discusses how they resonate with a new generation of highly educated, affluent Chinese migrants.

scholarly journals Living in precarity: Ethnography of everyday struggles of single mothers in Lithuania

Sociologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-83
Author(s):  
Laura Lapinske
Keyword(s):  
Single Mothers ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Life Strategies ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Everyday Living

This paper presents challenges and life strategies of highly educated single mothers in Lithuania. My ethnography traces the impact on strategies of remaining in a country where exit strategies - alcoholism, suicide, emigration - prevail and seem as an ?easier? option. It is a study concerned with the relationship between precarity, single motherhood, social reproduction and everyday living. I focus on precarious living conditions, social isolation and stigmatization, unappreciated and highly gendered care-work. Based on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork material, the paper presents the micro-level attempts to negotiate what it means to be a lone care-taker, to revalorize and challenge the hegemonic narratives of individual strength and success.

Social media engagements of music videos on YouTube’s official artist channels

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110549
Author(s):  
Yun Kyung Oh ◽  
Joon Yeon Choeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Social Engagements ◽  
Positive Engagement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

As social platforms become essential in promoting songs, many artists create an official channel on YouTube and encourage their fans’ engagements. However, little is known about the effectiveness of official videos in generating fans’ media engagements. We conduct two empirical studies to investigate the relationship between official video attributes, media engagements and channel subscribers. First, we propose a model to explain how music video attributes facilitate the relative social media engagements of a video. Second, we test whether three types of social engagements are associated with an increase in official channel subscribers. To do so, we collect social media engagement data for the 2896 music videos uploaded between May 2016 and April 2019 by 105 artists who own their YouTube official artist channels. The empirical evidence shows that the official videos incorporating visual, performance and storytelling components can generate more positive engagement from the viewers, while audio-only videos exhibit lower overall engagement intensity. Furthermore, we find that active media engagement, such as leaving ‘comments’, contributes to the increase in channel subscribers beyond the effect of the number of registered videos. Our results suggest that highly involved music fans may show the active types of social engagements, such as leaving a comment on live and follow-up videos. In practice, our findings imply that YouTube creators need to incorporate visual-focused platform characteristics to stimulate in-depth social engagement.

Document- and Keyword-based Author Co-citation Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binglu Wang ◽  
Yi Bu ◽  
Win-bin Huang
Keyword(s):  
Citation Analysis ◽  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Method Validation ◽  
New Method ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Network Visualization ◽  
Knowledge Domain ◽  
Knowledge Domains ◽  
Domain Mapping ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the field of scientometrics, the principal purpose for author co-citation analysis (ACA) is to map knowledge domains by quantifying the relationship between co-cited author pairs. However, traditional ACA has been criticized since its input is insufficiently informative by simply counting authors’ co-citation frequencies. To address this issue, this paper introduces a new method that reconstructs the raw co-citation matrices by regarding document unit counts and keywords of references, named as Document- and Keyword-Based Author Co-Citation Analysis (DKACA). Based on the traditional ACA, DKACA counted co-citation pairs by document units instead of authors from the global network perspective. Moreover, by incorporating the information of keywords from cited papers, DKACA captured their semantic similarity between co-cited papers. In the method validation part, we implemented network visualization and MDS measurement to evaluate the effectiveness of DKACA. Results suggest that the proposed DKACA method not only reveals more insights that are previously unknown but also improves the performance and accuracy of knowledge domain mapping, representing a new basis for further studies.

THE TEMPLE IN 2 MACCABEES – DYNAMICS AND EPISODES

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 352-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre J Jordaan
Keyword(s):  
Minor Importance ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
Negative View ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Temple

Scholars differ among each other about the importance of the Jerusalem temple in 2 Maccabees. Some see the temple as of minor importance while others are of the opinion that the temple takes centre stage in this book. This article concurs with the second view. However, it goes further by also exploring crucial temple dynamics. These temple dynamics are determined by certain pre-set criteria and centre mainly on the relationship between God and the nation. The result is that three different temple episodes can be distinguished. The positive/negative view of each temple episode is determined by this relationship between the nation and God. This opens a new way of exploring 2 Maccabees.

African and African American Religions in the Early Americas

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Young
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Religion ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter chronicles the relationship between African religious practices on the continent and African American religion in the plantation Americas in the era of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have demonstrated not only that African religious practices exhibit remarkable subtlety and complexity but also that these cultures have played significant roles in the subsequent development of religious practices throughout the world. Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion comprised a set of broad and varied religious practices that contributed to the development of creative, subtle, and complex belief systems that circulated around the African Diaspora. In addition, this chapter addresses some of the vexed epistemological challenges related to discussing and describing non-Western ritual and religious practices.

Automated graves: The precarity and prosthetics of caring for the dead in Japan

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-636
Author(s):  
Anne Allison
Keyword(s):  
Delivery System ◽  
Aging Population ◽  
Just In Time ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Temple

Once dependent on family to bury and memorialize the dead, caring for the deceased has become increasingly precarious in the wake of a decreasing and aging population, a trend towards single households, and downsizing of social relationality—including the temple parishioner system once key in mortuary rituals. In the new “ending” marketplace emerging today to help Japanese manage this precarity, automated graves offer customers a convenient burial spot in an urban ossuary where ashes, interred in a deposit box, are automatically transferred to a grave upon visitation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines the just-in-time delivery system at work in automated graves, arguing that the mechanism serves as a social prosthesis, propping up the allure of social caring for the dead, even for those whose ashes are never visited by human relations. With over 30 such institutions now operating in Japan, automated graves are a sign of changing sociality between the living and the dead.

scholarly journals Normative Data for a Tablet-Based Dual-Task Assessment in Healthy Older Adults

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Lussier ◽  
Kathia Saillant ◽  
Tudor Vrinceanu ◽  
Carol Hudon ◽  
Louis Bherer
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Dual Task ◽  
Normative Data ◽  
Healthy Older Adults ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Coefficient Of Variability ◽  
French And English ◽  
Task Assessment ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Objective The objective of this study is to provide normative data for a tablet-based dual-task assessment in older adults without cognitive deficits. Method In total, 264 participants aged between 60 and 90 years, French and English-speaking, were asked to perform two discrimination tasks, alone and concurrently. The participants had to answer as fast as possible to one or two images appearing in the center of the tablet by pressing to the corresponding buttons. Normative data are provided for reaction time (RT), coefficient of variation, and accuracy. Analyses of variance were performed by trial types (single-pure, single-mixed, dual-mixed), and linear regressions assessed the relationship between performance and sociodemographic characteristics. Results The participants were highly educated and a large proportion of them were women (73.9%). The accuracy on the task was very high across all blocks. RT data revealed both a task-set cost and a dual-task cost between the blocks. Age was associated with slower RT and with higher coefficient of variability. Men were significantly slower on dual-mixed trials, but their coefficient of variability was lower on single-pure trials. Education was not associated with performance. Conclusions This study provides normative data for a tablet-based dual-task assessment in older adults without cognitive impairment, which was lacking. All participants completed the task with good accuracy in less than 15 minutes and thus, the task is transferable to clinical and research settings.

The American Ghetto, Gangster, and Respect on the Streets of Copenhagen: Media(tion)s between Structure and Street Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 089124162110569
Author(s):  
Hakan Kalkan
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Street Culture ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship

“Street culture” is often considered a response to structural factors. However, the relationship between culture and structure has rarely been empirically analyzed. This article analyzes the role of three media representations of American street culture and gangsters—two films and the music of a rap artist—in the street culture of a disadvantaged part of Copenhagen. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates that these media representations are highly valuable to and influential among young men because of their perceived similarity between their intersectional structural positions and those represented in the media. Thus, the article illuminates the interaction between structural and cultural factors in street culture. It further offers a local explanation of the scarcely studied phenomenon of the influence of mass media on street culture, and a novel, media-based, local explanation of global similarities in different street cultures.

Sekolah Islam (Islamic Schools) as Symbols of Indonesia's Urban Muslim Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Yanwar Pribadi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Islamic Schools ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Islamic Identity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract This article discusses the relationship between Sekolah Islam (Salafism-influenced Islamic schools) and urban middle-class Muslims. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the City of Serang (Kota Serang), near Jakarta, this paper argues that these conservative and puritan Muslims demonstrate their Islamic identity politics through their engagement with Sekolah Islam. The analysis of in-depth interviews with and close observations of parents of students and school custodians (preachers or occasionally spiritual trainers) at several Sekolah Islam reveals that they have attempted to pursue ‘true’ Islamic identity and have claimed recognition of their identity as the most appropriate. The pursuit of a ‘true’ Islamic identity has infused Islamic identity politics, and there is an oppositional relationship between local Islamic traditions and Salafism, as seen in Sekolah Islam. The relationship between Islam and identity politics becomes intricate when it is transformed into public symbols, discourses, and practices at many Sekolah Islam. This paper shows that through their understanding and activities at Sekolah Islam, these Muslims are avid actors in the contemporary landscape of Islamic identity politics in Indonesia. By taking examples from Sekolah Islam in Indonesia, this article unveils social transformations that may also take place in the larger Muslim world.

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