Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in ...which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton's fieldwork offers an assessment of the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recognized as a spiritual authority or guide—despite official denial of such status—and an examination of the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual mediation carried out by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she maps shifting ideas about women's involvement in public ritual events in a variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate outside the public sphere of major shrines.
Bullying is a universal phenomenon observed in all schools worldwide, with as many as 35% of students being involved in bullying. Group context is crucial for understanding and preventing bullying, ...as peers are often present in bullying situations and have key roles in maintaining, preventing, or stopping it. The aims of this study were to investigate school bullying as a social phenomenon in Poland and to understand how Polish adolescents perceive, discuss, and make sense of bullying in their communities.
I carried out fieldwork at three public secondary schools in a city in southern Poland, and conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 26 students aged 16/17 (16 girls, 10 boys). I used the grounded theory approach to analyze the data, as it offered an opportunity for deeper understanding of adolescents' social context and culture, with intragroup interactions playing a central role.
The results suggest that a parallel culture of bullying at the micro level is created at these schools, which includes norms; a multi-stage process of victim creation; and rituals confirming the victim's status, group coherence, and other students' attitudes and roles in the bullying. In terms of policy implications, the findings suggest that it could prove beneficial to plan anti-bullying programs with adolescents themselves, as they could clarify the contexts, situations, or triggers that might lead to bullying.
The study examines how traditional meanings attributed to housing and the rituals relating to death and burials on private properties are being challenged due to modernisation, familial politics, and ...contending sets of interests (i.e., valuing property for its economic capital vs. social/cultural capital). The methodology approach is based on in‐depth interviews with 12 respondents from a diverse range of socio‐economic backgrounds. Findings reveal how negotiations and renegotiations of interests affect the physical state and marketability of houses in the Yoruba communities. The findings also sign‐post a fascinating entry point for exploring the way Yoruba are negotiating and navigating the relationship between modernity and tradition. An important implication for marketing and consumption praxes concerns the dynamism in the narratives of ritual behaviour, especially in the non‐Western tradition. The paper contributes to the navigation of relationships between the living and the dead within a Nigerian subculture from a marketing perspective.
In Mark 14:3–9 and its parallels, a woman anoints Jesus with μύρον, which Jesus interprets as an anticipation of his death. This article considers the ritual and cultic connotations of the use of ...μύρον (“ointment”) and νάρδος (“spikenard”) from Mark 14:3–9 in connection with the importance Jesus attaches to this woman's act in Mark 14:9: “Truly I say to you: Wherever the Gospel ἐυαγγέλιον may be proclaimed in all the world, indeed what this woman has done shall be spoken as a memorial of her.” This declaration is significant for understanding the genre of Mark. Rudolph Bultmann’s observations about the Gospels’ cultic associations, directed less toward the question of their genre than to the question of their historiography, have largely gone unexplored in subsequent scholarship. In this article, I compare the use of μύρον and νάρδος in the LXX, MT, early midrashim on Song of Songs, and early Christian baptismal rituals. The findings suggest that the scriptural and ritual imagery in Mark 14:3–9 indicates that the Gospel uses ritual narration as a means of discourse with readers familiar with these rites.
Background
Many parents bereaved of a stillborn baby spend time with the child. In this time frame, different acts with the child in focus may occur. Some parents invite others to see the child too. ...Parents who suffer the loss of a newborn are vulnerable, and understanding acts and practices surrounding the dead newborn is important knowledge for caretakers.
Aims
This article aims to enlighten the amount of time Danish parents spend with their stillborn in hospital settings that encourage this practice. Furthermore, it aims to transcend the mere quantitative numbers through a theoretical approach that frames the analysis and discussion of possible layers of meaning imbedded in time spent with a dead newborn.
Study design
Data from a Danish cohort of bereaved parents were collected using web‐based questionnaires. These numbers were successively interpreted through an anthropological lens within the perspective of transition and ritualisation. Knowledge from existing empirical literature was also fused.
Results from the cohort
Danish parents spend hours or days with their stillborn child. They feel supported in this by healthcare professionals. Mainly close relatives join the parents while admitted to the hospital to see the stillborn child, followed by other family members and friends.
Conclusion
Danish parents engage to a very high degree in contact with their dead baby. The analysis points out that ‘Time’ and ‘Others’ are needed to create a socially comprehensible status for parents and child when birth brings death. In liminal space during the transition, healthcare professionals act as ritual experts, supporting parents and their relatives to ascribe social status to the dead body of the child through ritualised acts. Instead of only thinking of this period as ‘memory‐making’, we suggest regarding it as a time of ontological clarification as well.
This article draws from an Africentric perspective to engage the ways in which the notion of moral injury is approached within psychology. The paper argues for the need to interrogate dominant ...Eurocentric approaches to moral injury and calls for more openness towards non-Western belief systems. The paper attempts to show how rituals that are perceived in the African context to be healing and transformative continue to be absent in the mainstream psychology literature and theorization. For this reason, there is a call for the centring of Indigenous healing rituals if the discipline is to make a positive and inclusive contribution in the scholarship of moral injury. The article is significant given its potential to contribute to the body of knowledge on the importance of centering African perspectives when engaging the notion of moral injury.
Summary
Archaeological excavation of a natural boulder chamber on the upper slopes of Bengorm Mountain, County Mayo, in the north‐west of Ireland revealed evidence for complex Neolithic funerary ...rituals spanning several centuries. With virtually no subsequent evidence of animal or human disturbance, the site presents an exceptional insight into well‐preserved engagements with the dead at a remote mountain location where themes of secrecy, continuity and ritual grammar are highlighted. The chamber was used for processing individuals of all ages but there is a tentative suggestion that the space was reserved predominantly for males. Ancient genomic analysis reveals kinship between at least two adult males, both of whom were almost certainly intermediate to dark skinned, with brown eyes and dark brown or black hair. Both individuals were also lactose intolerant.
•Examined a proposed metacognitive conceptualization of cyberchondria.•Includes metacognitive beliefs about health-related thoughts.•Beliefs about rituals and stop signals distinguish cyberchondria ...from health anxiety.•Findings from two studies support the metacognitive conceptualization.
Cyberchondria refers to the repeated use of the Internet to search for health information that leads to negative consequences. The present set of studies examined the tenability of a proposed metacognitive conceptualization of cyberchondria that includes metacognitive beliefs about health-related thoughts, beliefs about rituals, and stop signals. The contribution of those variables to cyberchondria was examined among 330 undergraduate students from a U.S. university in Study 1 and 331 U.S. community respondents in Study 2. All participants reported using the Internet to search for health information. Across both studies, metacognitive beliefs, beliefs about rituals, and stop signals shared positive bivariate associations with cyberchondria and accounted for unique variance in cyberchondria scores in multivariate analyses. Beliefs about rituals and stop signals emerged as relatively specific to cyberchondria versus health anxiety in multivariate analyses. Results provide preliminary support for a metacognitive conceptualization of cyberchondria, with extensions of the present findings discussed.
This article is about the calendrical, climactic and especially cosmological implications of Karthigai Deepam, an ancient Tamil celebration pivoted around the lighting of lamps that precedes ...Deepavali, the quintessential, ubiquitous but also comparatively recent festival of lights. Karthigai Deepam signals the end of the rains, intensifying winter chills and winds and shorter days. Juxtaposing festival observances in homes and those in temples, I demonstrate how its overriding concerns with generating light and warmth are part of ritual efforts to defend against elemental and existential threats of darkness and cold. Linking sacred time and mythical events with chronological time and human activities, this calendrical ritual joins together the divine and the mortal. Tracing the movement of fire and its various iterations as it traverses and connects the natural, cosmic, temple and home, this festival, I propose, renders the cosmic intimate and the intimate cosmic. Some rituals not only embody but also put cosmology into dynamic practice.
In Pakistan, one of the most significant celebrations on the Muslim calendar, Eid al‐ Azha (Feast of the Sacrifice), is marked by two major rituals. At the center of the festival is the animal ...slaughter remembering the prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son. The second, dating to Pakistan's earliest days as a nation, is the collection of animal hides from the sacrifice. NGOs, political parties, and madrasas annually compete to collect and auction the sacrificial skins. This paper examines how Alkhidmat Foundation–the social welfare branch of the Islamist party Jama'at‐e‐Islami–invests in a risky fundraising ritual that animates the value of sacrifice in their humanitarian work. While historically the auction of animal hides has been lucrative, over the last decade, the income has come under threat due to the rise of synthetic leathers on the global market, inflation, and climate change, which have left Pakistan's leather commodity in peril and, with it, the fate of a major source of income for the country's social services. Pakistan's skins collection offers insight into a fundraising practice that instantiates sacrifice writ large: of time, safety, and resources, and sometimes, of intimate relations. Sacrifice is the motivating value that underpins dedication to the annual hide collection and articulates Alkhidmat's humanitarianism through the human capability of sacrifice.
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