Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community's traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which ...Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi'i traditions of lamentation. The group's practices are exemplary of many Islamic revival movements, which aim simultaneously to spread a religious message and to transform the affective conditions in which that message might be received.
Music, playing instruments and performing rituals are bodily activities and as such they can be studied stressing their corporeal features. Music and sounds are usually essential elements in rites, ...and bodies play an essential role in bringing together music and rituals. We explore these issues focusing on Punic terracotta figurines playing musical instruments recovered from the island of Ibiza (fifth to third centuries bc).
This Article argues that in order to understand the constitutional categories of a polity governed by Confucian norms, we must seize upon the idea of ritual as the key concept. By describing the ...Confucian view of "ritual" as the basis for political legitimacy, the Article shows how constitutional norms and discourse were articulated through interpretations of ritual. Then, through a discussion of a historical controversy over ritual that took place in seventeenth-century Korea, the Article reveals the workings of Confucian "ritualist" constitutionalism in action. It shows that much like modern constitutional debates, the ritual controversy was a clash between different views on the proper degree of finality in the interpretation of constitutional norms. It then proposes that the ritual controversy can be analyzed as a constitutional crisis in at least three ways: first, as a prolonged political strife caused by inconsistent precedents; second, as a breakdown of dialogue between different interpretive voices, and third, as a collapse of epistemic foundations underlying people's conception of the polity's constitution. Throughout the Article the author engages in a dialogue with modern constitutional scholarship, thereby shedding new light on the study of comparative constitutional law as well as pre-modern East Asian law.
The consolidation of the Nehruvian state's sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi's assassination and the mourning ...rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi's ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party's right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi's death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.
Arguably, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is human-induced climate change. This article proposes the cultural memory of the Anthropocene as the dominant reason for our inadequate climate ...mitigation, whilst simultaneously arguing for the process of hoping-mourning as a possible solution. As such, this article analyzes the Anthropocene as a cultural memory, arguing for a restructuring of its milieu de mémoire to include other-than-human entities. The article finds that the hyper-separational framework of the Anthropocene limits our conceptual space on several spatiotemporal dimensions, limiting, and simplifying, our perception of time and space, excluding other-than-human entities. Furthermore, it is found that by sustaining corporeal vulnerability, mourning, and mourning rituals broaden the cultural domain, permitting other-than-human entities into our milieu de mémoire, which, through its transformative capabilities, offer new and much needed ways of imagining different futures and thus, essentially, different strategies of mitigation and adaptation.
This article explores possible links between hair-pulling and trauma. It suggests that hair-pulling represents a dissociative language, or an intersubjectively formed and maintained "body dialect," ...by means of which certain people communicate self-experience pertaining to unmourned and traumatic deaths. With reference to anthropological findings, I offer support for the possibility that a connection exists between ancient mourning rituals involving hair-pulling and what has come to be known as "trichotillomania." Three brief therapeutic illustrations are presented.
New York City's 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire memorial march and 2001's spontaneously erected post-9/11 city-shrine occurred during vastly different eras of Western mourning theory and ...practice, yet were mourned with markedly simihr emotional outpourings of disbelief', grief, and outrage. The Triangle factory memorial march epitomizes collective mourning richly invested in Victorian mourning traditions, reflecting how mourners of this era were willing to feel grief, remain tied to the lives of those grieved, and be reminded of the physicality of loss. Beginning in 1913, Freud's work reinvents the theory and practice of bss and mourning, medicalizing and pathobgizing Victorian mourning rituals, branding them uncivilized and taboo. Soon thereafter post-Freudian notions of bss and mourning take firm root, stand strong today, and moreover gain strength as new mourning-based pathobgies are added to the American Psychiatric Association s diagnostic manual. A direct contrast, I argue post-9/11 Manhattan city-shrine mourning practices evidence a crack in Freudian theory's armor albwing for the resurgence of pre-Freudian, Victorian mourning rituah. As a result, nearly a century after the Triangle fire memorial march, the post-9/11 city-shrine reflects not the post-Freudian, sanitized, modem-day notion of mourning one might expect, but hearkens backward in time to the pre-Freudian mourning practices of Victorians. I reveal, document, and analyze modern-day mourners' calling-intoquestion of Freudian mourning theory, arguing this questionings significance in the present historical moment, examining the post-9/11 city-shrine's marked simihrities to Victorian-era mourning practices, and offering, I argue, a distinct sign of an unsentimental cultural re-humanizing of loss.
The ascetic ideals initially established by Confucius are moderate and rational. Yet, virtuoso asceticism became a social phenomenon when the state desired to institute a more powerful channel to ...disseminate Confucian values in the broader populace beyond the literati. The reason that the cult of the virtuoso particularly served this purpose was that the enshrinement of virtuoso generated social power within community. That social power, somewhat equivalent to charisma, derived from the enshrined spirit's connection with transcendence having official and public offerings from community. The social process in the formation of the ascetic virtuoso and its social function in the Confucian tradition follow a pattern similar to that laid out by Martin Riesebrodt: denial of the physical self restructuring of social relations, and spiritual transformation. Ascetic virtuosos stemming from the tradition of "inner-worldly" asceticism closed a gap between a rationalized system of behavior-regulating practices and interventionist practice with reference to transcendence.
In Job 1:20, Job performs four actions:
1) he rends his garment; 2) he shears his head; 3) he falls to the ground; and 4) he prostrates himself.
The third of these can be read either (with the first ...two) as an act of mourning or (with the last) as an act of worship. I suggest that this is a deliberate literary choice: the poetic technique of Janus parallelism. Since Janus parallelism has already been demonstrated to be both frequent in the book of Job and significant for its meaning, this unexpected Janus parallelism in the prose portion of the book confirms that those chapters are not an early survival but a creation of the author of the book as a whole.
PDF
