Social and Cultural Anthropology

Art therapy, as a means of self-expression and healing, is used in a variety of clinical and rehabilitation settings. Here, it is tested with a population judged to be involved in terrorism-related activities. This paper presents an extensive review of the art therapy program at Mohammed Bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The objective of this study is to showcase the use of art therapy in the care and rehabilitation of ex-jihadists, with suggestions for best practices. This paper is the first description in the literature of the efforts of the Saudi government to explore the use of art therapy in counterterrorism. Art therapy outcomes on a population incarcerated for terrorist activities are presented alongside treatment and reconstruction of extreme ideology through art production. We conclude that a successful art therapy program is required within the overall approach to counterterrorism. Further, a strong understanding of the cultural backgrounds of the subjects, along with recommendations for relying upon specific artistic components of the therapeutic process are clearly indicated. According to government sources, together with the other programs offered to ex-jihadists, the art therapy program discussed here, which has been in operation since 2007, has achieved an 86.17% success rate, with (as of January 2015) a 13.83% recidivism rate. This is a strong indication that art therapy is an efficacious approach in counterterrorism.

El texto presenta una introduccion a los debates sobre los museos etnologicos en la ultima decada, mostrando la evolucion de los modelos aparecidos en la nueva museologia en la actualidad. Analiza la evolucion de los museos al aire libre, de los ecomuseos, de los museos de sintesis y presenta renovaciones museologicas como la museologia critica, los museos de civilizacion, los economuseos y las polemicas sostenidas a raiz de la inauguracion del Museo Quai Branly y de los proyectos de Museo de la Civilizacion de Europa y la Mediterranea y el Museo des Confluences. El autor considera que despues de una cierta crisis de los museos etnologicos, los nuevos proyectos suponen un reto importante para el relanzamiento de los nuevos museos etnologicos, que forzosamente deberan reinventarse a traves de formulas innovadoras e interdisciplinarias.

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

We can chart how similar characteristics are inscribed, marked and stuck on other bodies too: femininity; hypersexuality; criminality, for example, whilst others do not. But before we explore this condensing, sticking and fixing process we need to understand four other processes that provide the framework for the rest of the book. Firstly, how do certain bodies become
inscribed and then marked with certain characteristics?  Secondly, what systems of exchange enable some characteristics to be read as good, bad, worthy and unworthy? Thus, how is value attributed, accrued, institutionalised and lost in the processes of exchange? And how is this value both moral and economic?  Thirdly, how is value produced through different perspectives (different ways of knowing, hearing and seeing that represent particular interests)? Then fourthly, we need to know how these systems of inscription, exchange, valuing, institutionalisation and perspective provide the conditions of possibility for being read
by others in the relationships that are formed between groups; what are the effects? This, therefore, is a book about he condition of possibility that make class. It is not about how class is lived

Social scientists commonly know that time is a social construct and a tool for governing by those holding power. Yet, how exactly is time used for governing? This article examines how timescape (embodiment of approaches to time) works in practice as a tool of power by considering multiple networks of time that manifest in al-Batuf/Beit Netofa Valley planning policy. This valley's agriculture, mostly owned by Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, is considered by ecologists and officials a unique traditional agriculture landscape and wetland habitat that has become scarce in Israel due to its development and wetland drainage. Assembling separate modes of anthropological inquiry that attend to time as a technique, I show that knowledge, ethics, and time management are not separate spheres of governance but rather interwoven as one timescape tool of governing. Thus, the case of al-Batuf/Beit Netofa elucidates the ways in which time is used for governing in the context of an agricultural-environmental development policy and plan.

In the field of identity politics and cultural identity, the representation of differences plays a crucial role. The extent of the differences a society has determines the social outcomes in divergent ways. Surely, there are other variables that cause social anxiety or communal solidarity such as religious views, socio-political conditions and also gender relations. To the point of departure, the case of homosexuality, or in a general way, the boundaries of sexuality is very controversial field so as to reveal the effects of ideologies, social conditions and historical past where all of these evolved through times. In order to understand and to reach a general view, the experiences of small towns are very decisive and unavoidable parts of such studies. As a basic explanation, that is why Arlene Stein chooses to make an ethnographic study in the USA around 1990s. In this paper, I will try to make a basic analysis of ‘The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle Over Sex, Faith and Civil Rights’ by presenting my reading of this story and through reacting to the general points.

This article examines how 'safety case' experts working on Finland’s nuclear waste repository project at Olkiluoto summoned, conjured, or channeled memories of Seppo—a deceased colleague whose ‘specter,’ as some put it, still ‘haunts’ their scientific community. For some, Seppo’s postmortem presence manifested as gaps in knowledge left behind by an expert often reluctant to document the methodological assumptions underlying his knowledge-practices. For others, it manifested as anecdotes about Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity as well as his more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. Still others caught themselves asking ‘What Would Seppo Do?’ while troubleshooting at work. Inspired by anthropological and philosophical work on ancestors and haunting, the article unpacks how the multi-millennial time horizons of nuclear waste risk, the intergenerational time horizons of expert succession, and the everyday time horizons of a single expert life-course shared entwined fates. It focuses less on what knowledge disappeared when an expert’s body died – or how it could have been preventatively backed-up or managed – and more on what has lived on of the expert in and through surviving colleagues. Analysis of 'afterlives of expertise' like these can, it concludes, provide insights for a current moment of intergenerational transition in nuclear energy sectors in Europe, North America, and beyond.

Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.

Lost in Transition tells of ordinary lives upended by the collapse of communism. Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake.

Endorsements

“The collapse of the Soviet empire entailed not only the Blitzkrieg dissolution of the socialist economies and one-party states of Eastern Europe, but also immediate accidental and incidental changes in the everyday lives of its residents. With an ear for the ironic, the sensual, the playful, and the tragic, Kristen Ghodsee tells personal stories from this period of dissolution, which began several decades before the Berlin Wall came down. Drawing from her encounters in many years of research in Bulgaria, she portrays the changing nature of experience in that place during that time. Though understood as impoverished at the time, this socialist experiment reveals, in retrospect, lives filled with adventure, surprising friendships, and an openness to forms of engagement and being that makes the fullness of the free market and democracy in the post-Cold War order of today seem, by comparison, pale and predictable.”—John Borneman, Princeton University

“These charming essays have an unintended consequence. Not only are they a documentary ethnography of the lives of people caught up in the painful transition from socialism to capitalism. They are also a sort of Bildungsroman of a young American discovering another world and shedding stereotypes.”—Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ochocientas casitas unifamiliares de planta baja en la orilla del río Besós, cada una de un color diferente, comprimidas entre una zona industrial semiabandonada y la nueva Barcelona del AVE y del Fòrum. En este lugar de márgen, desconocido y estigmatizado, grupos de migrantes y autóctonos lucharon juntos para crear un paisaje humano excepcionalmente denso y rebelde: un barrio anticlerical y anarcosindicalista, en el cual la resistencia duró ochenta años, donde buscaron amparo Buenaventura Durruti, Quico Sabater y un sinfin de excluidos e indeseados de todos los sitios y de todas las épocas.

Mientras las excavadoras del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona avanzan en el derribo de esta ciudad horizontal, un grupo de habitantes retoma la histórica tradición de lucha del barrio para oponerse al nuevo urbanismo de bloques de pisos, reivindicando la importancia de sus calles, de sus estilos de vida, y de la convivencialidad que permitía la forma urbana de qué se habían apropiado.

Este trabajo es el resultado de una implicación a la vez etnográfica, política y humana con el barrio de Bon Pastor durante los años del derribo (2002-2012), para desvelar la profundidad del trauma que representa la desaparición progresiva de un barrio, con sus memorias de autogestión y autonomía, con su vida cotidiana basada en la proximidad, con sus fiestas que servían para resolver conflictos, y de sus conflictos que creaban comunidad.

Questo libro si inserisce nella lunga tradizione dei Festschrift: un omaggio festoso di studi e di riflessioni offerti, in occasione del settantesimo compleanno, a Piercarlo Grimaldi. Il volume è soprattutto un liber amicorum, la testimonianza concreta e sincera dell’affetto e dell’amicizia verso uno studioso che ha fatto della riflessione critica non solo il proprio impegno professionale, ma anche la propria ragione di vita e che sempre ha posto la qualità dei rapporti umani e delle relazioni personali al centro del suo modo di essere e di operare.
Il volume raccoglie i contributi di quarantacinque autori, solo alcuni degli amici che nel corso dei decenni hanno via via accompagnato Grimaldi sui sentieri antropologici che lui ha instancabilmente percorso. Gli autori si sono misurati su temi e metodologie della ricerca vicine agli interessi e alle sensibilità antropologiche su cui Grimaldi si è confrontato nel corso della sua quarantennale pratica di ricerca: Antropologia del cibo, Antropologia simbolica, Sacro e profano, Feste e riti, Animali mitici, Fonti e ricerca etnoantropologica e Musei ed ecomusei.

Dowsing is a customary means of finding hidden things – especially water and minerals – and is found across northern Europe and the Americas. It recently became the subject of some controversy after a scientist revealed that 10 out of the 12 British water companies stated on Twitter that they used the practice, despite a lack of scientific evidence for its efficacy. In this article, the author analyzes the contours of this controversy in order to identify underlying cultural attitudes towards knowledge and the landscape it reveals. He concludes by sounding two notes of caution regarding the critical posture adopted by scientists who are rushing to condemn this customary practice, stressing the importance of understanding the nature of dowsing as a cultural form regardless of its efficacy and the need for scientists to be mindful of their own biases and preconceptions.

Course: Contested Natures: The politics of knowing, living, developing and conserving nature
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
        Werner Heisenberg
We live in a global society that has committed through international agreements to protecting nature and its biodiversity, but we rarely stop to think about what defines nature; who has the power to define it, own it or access it; and how culture informs how we understand nature and live with it. 
In this course, we will examine central cultural and socio-political trends and concerns regarding the interactions between nature and society.  We will explore multiple ways of understanding nature in diverse societies, examine nature as a resource for exploitation, as an asset to be protected and managed, and as a natural-cultural construct – in order to understand a wide range of meanings and practices that comprise human-nature dynamics.
This course engages predominantly with socio-cultural and environmental anthropology literature and it often intersects with environmental history, social studies of science, and sociology. Classroom lectures will provide the necessary disciplinary background.

Ultimately climate change is the product of consumption; greenhouse gases are produced by making things and energy, moving things, and carrying people around. Simply put, more people are using more energy and creating and using more “stuff” than ever before in the history of the planet. Besides lamenting the passing of low-impact village-level societies, what does anthropology have to say about consumer culture which might actually be useful in thinking our way towards more sustainable levels of consumption? I argue that a drastic re-orientation of the way we teach anthropology is in order; what do we want our students to learn about the world and what kind of skills do they need? The same argument can be made for the public messages we extend in our popular publications.

The local festival dedicated to the Anniversary of the Vision of Agia (Saint) or Osia (venerable, blessed, saint) Pelagia is celebrated on the Greek island of Tinos and is dedicated to one of the most recent Orthodox saints, Agia Pelagia, a nun who was sanctified in 1971. After the great Greek War of Liberation (1821) broke out, the pious nun Pelagia had several mystical visions which lead to the finding of the miraculous icon of the Annunciation. According to the tradition, Pelagia repeatedly saw, in her visions, the Panagia (Virgin Mary), who ordered her to start digging to find her icon. In 1823, the icon was unearthed in the field where it had remained for about 850 years. “Pelagia’s Vision” is celebrated annually on 23 July. During the festival the church housing her skull next to her cell in the monastery of Kekhrovouno, where she had the visions, is particularly important.
Based on a presentation of this festival and some other relevant rituals from Greece where I have conducted fieldwork, the article will explore some aspects of the way myths are important when re-presenting the past in the Greek context both, earlier and today.

Keywords: Method, Myth/s, Gender, Greece, Festivals

The book is devoted to the analysis of ethno-linguistic and socio-cultural foundations of the identity of Dagestanis. The author discribres
particularities of  ethno-linguistic situation in the Mountainous and Lowland districts of Dageston, the influence of migration, urbanization, ethnic mixations on the cultural and language identity,  as well as the correlation of ethnic and religious identitues,  forms of actualization of ethnic and civil  consciousness,  ethnic stereotypes and other components of consciousness of Dagestanis. Special attention is paid to the problem of preserving the language diversity and cultural identity of the peoples of Dagestan.The book is intended for anthropologists, historians, philologists.
culture and a wide range of readers interested in Etnea-
takovymi and ethno-cultural problems.

Whoredom in the Wild West has created a plethora of pseudo-historical “memorabilia”, artifacts that have become part of popular culture. Brothel tokens are part and parcel of the “Wild West” image portrayed by the media and western novels. Strong sexual economies were prevalent in most western towns due to their unusually high male population ratios and are always present in mediums that portray western American life including reenacted historical western American towns such as Tombstone, Arizona.

Mexican cuisine has emerged as a paradox of globalization. Food enthusiasts throughout the world celebrate the humble taco at the same time that Mexicans are eating fewer tortillas and more processed food. Today Mexico is experiencing an epidemic of diet-related chronic illness. The precipitous rise of obesity and diabetes—attributed to changes in the Mexican diet—has resulted in a public health emergency.

In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico—sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have resulted in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives.

From the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries small wooden plates, or trenchers, were used to serve special sweetmeats and sugared fruits to guests at the ‘banquet’ course held at the conclusion of meals in prosperous English households.  Painted and gilded with flowers, images and written texts that were often biblical or moralising but sometimes bawdy, the trenchers were intended to provoke discussion amongst the diners, encourage conviviality and provide prompts for story-telling.  The paper argues that understanding these decorative objects can help towards a reconstruction of the ephemeral spectacle of the banquet as theatre within elite dining cultures of the time.

Mediante las voces y experiencias de campesinos quechuas de las comunidades de Ocros y Huancapi (Ayacucho), Los silencios de la guerra. Memoria y conflicto armado, hurga en los rastros de los años de violencia que enlutaron al Perú a fines del siglo XX. El agudo análisis de la antropóloga Valérie Robin Azevedo es una etnografía sensible de los secretos de las memorias campesinas de la guerra contra Sendero Luminoso, donde se rememora el pasado en fiestas patronales y en carnavales, en la creación musical y en los bailes comunales, en los sueños o en las apariciones de un santo milagroso.
¿Cómo se construyen hoy los recuerdos de la guerra y qué se silencia del pasado? ¿Qué muestran y qué ocultan las narraciones y celebraciones que escenifican lecturas parciales del pasado? Este fascinante libro nos revela las encrucijadas campesinas que siguen buscando rutas de convivencia pacífica hacia el futuro para reconstruir los lazos sociales profundamente dañados por la guerra interna.

Human culture and language are deeply intertwined. Anthropologists would have difficulty understanding a culture without becoming familiar with its language and vice versa. In fact, neither one can exist without the other. Like culture, language is continually changing. Societal norms and practices impact the ways that people communicate with each other. Thus, by looking at how people speak to each other, we can deduce certain things about their relationships and relative status in society.

Musical Culture and Art of the Arctic Peoples is  collection of scientific papers by Yu. Sheikin, O. Dobzhanskaya, Z. Ivanova-Unarova, S. Ode, T. Ignatieva, V. Dyakonova, L. Kardashevskaya. It consists 21 articles which are devoted to describing of musical instruments, different genres of musical folklore, ritual musical traditions and different aspects of musical culture of Arctic peoples (Evenks, Nganasans, Sakha, Yukaghirs and other Siberian peoples).
Papers are in English, French, German.
This is textbook for students of Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts (Yakutsk).

This research paper is an examination of diverse literature on gentrification, community revitalization and displacement. With the intent of understanding the impact, gentrification has on the displacement of long - term residents.  The research focuses on five neighborhoods located in New York City.

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology.

Some Endorsements for Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy:

“[Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy] is more than an anthology. It is a wisely crafted collection of classic and contemporary scholarship noting that what many are seeking is what has always been, a perennial philosophy, that remains foundational. As one of the authors, Tage Lindbom, properly notes, ‘Secularization is a fish in troubled waters.’ This book claims the waters and is essential reading for all those who may have forgotten or are simply ignorant of the rich foundation provided by the perennial philosophy.”
—Ralph W. Hood, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, past president of the Psychology of Religion division of the American Psychological Association, co-founder of The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and co-author of The Psychology of Religion

“A necessary and bracing critique of the assumptions and limitations of contemporary Western psychology, this generous volume is also a passionate call and learned guide towards a truer perspective that embraces man's spiritual nature.”
—Gabor Maté, M.D., and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Knowing the nature of the mind is perhaps the most difficult undertaking, especially in today’s world. To comprehend the nature of mind one needs to turn to the domain of religion and spirituality. Yet the truth of the mind and its complexity cannot explicitly be defined in words. Inner or transcendent wisdom sees the mind’s own nature without the duality of the seer. Suchness (tathatā) of mind is only experiential and not expressible. The words used to describe thought are themselves a product of thought, which is conditioned and limited. Thus, differences and contradictions are unavoidable. Therefore, a comparative study of different viewpoints and commentaries is immensely important to awaken the inner intelligence to see the mind as it is. Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is an outstanding effort in this direction.”
—Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister (Kalon Tripa) of the Tibetan Government-in-exile, author of Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism and Today’s World

“The rise of psychology has impacted the study and practice of spirituality, the experiences and attitudes relevant to ultimate human values that transcend ordinary behavior. Each chapter of this remarkable book demonstrates this interaction in a unique and provocative way. But rather than using psychology to reduce and ‘psychologize’ spiritual topics, its authors demonstrate how directives from the spiritual traditions can enhance and even illuminate the enduring importance of psychology in the 21st century.”
—Stanley Krippner, Saybrook University, co-author of Spiritual Dimensions of Healing

“The work at hand is a thinking and debating man’s delight. If you have any interest at all in attempting to include an educated and enlightened view of man’s higher functions in your purview of the world, you will learn from and enjoy this collection of essays. If you already have some knowledge in this area, brace yourself: you may see some of your favorites sharply criticized. A thought-provoking work.”
—Bruce W. Scotton, University of California, San Francisco, co-editor of Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology

“This book, superbly edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, is a masterful critique of the field of psychology and its loss of the sacred ground in which it once was rooted. It offers depth psychologists an opportunity to contemplate timeless truths echoed through the centuries by perennial philosophers who have always claimed psyche is subordinate to Spirit. Although ignored in depth psychology’s early years due to prejudice and lack of understanding, this is a message today’s psychotherapists must take seriously. Human beings need a deeper and wider transpersonal vision of who and what we are, which the saints and sages of the world’s spiritual traditions have always pointed to. In psychotherapy with a therapist committed to such a vision, patients penetrate into their unconscious depths and not infrequently awaken to the Ground of all Being. Their suffering itself occurred because they had turned away from Spirit. Above all, this volume passionately calls upon depth psychology to remember its origin in the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religions. There is something of a polemic in these pages. It deserves to be considered by depth psychologists of all persuasions.”
—Bryan Wittine, Transpersonal psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst

“This anthology from Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is a must reference for anyone who is interested in psychology and its relationship to spirituality, and in developing an inclusive dialogue between disciplines that favor an integral outlook on the person and his or her potential. Selections in this anthology will inspire us to reexamine the metaphysical underpinnings of psychology, and remind us how important it is to rise above science’s attempt to reduce the human being to an epistemic object.”
—Sangeetha Menon, National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bangalore, India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Beyond Experience: Consciousness in Bhagavad Gita

“This anthology has some of the most discerning essays and reviews on spirituality and psychology, which provide much-needed care and caution to all those engaged in bringing them together or who wish to do so in future. Therefore, it is a must-read for all those who teach, research, consult, or study in such frontier areas as transpersonal psychology, states of consciousness, mind-body relation, holistic health, Indian psychology, and so on. It will be an invaluable textbook for courses in these and other related areas. I congratulate the editor of the book.”
—Kiran Kumar K. Salagame, University of Mysore (India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Psychology of Meditation: A Contextual Approach

“One of the finest collections of essays on the Perennial Philosophy—a must-read for all psychologists who are engaged with spirituality and transpersonal psychology. The essays which critique modern psychology (including transpersonal psychology, and the framework of Carl Jung), in the light of the Perennial Philosophy are a revelation and make compelling reading. The book serves as a corrective to the excesses of modern psychology, and to this end Sotillos has done a commendable job. I for one will include the book in some of the graduate courses that I teach.”
—Suneet Varma, University of Delhi, co-editor of Foundations of Indian Psychology

“To its credit modern science by-and-large is becoming more cognizant of the essential connection between spirituality and psychological health and well-being and most of all its positive implications within the field of psychology. While there is ample data to document this in a plethora of academic journals and books, this new book Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy adds a novel contribution to the dialogue between psychology and spirituality, which captures many nuances that for the most part go unnoticed within these discussions, and last but not least, it provides a keen eye of discernment to understand this intricate relationship on a deeper level that is crucially needed. This work will be a valuable asset to students and long term mental health practitioners and professors alike who seek to better understand the relationship between psychology and spirituality.”
—Harold G. Koenig, Duke University, Director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, co-author of The Handbook of Religion and Health

This paper examines a variety of cyborg figures in science fiction and art, and investigates how these posthuman subject’s perceptual capacities are altered through their “cyborging,” how this might lead to greater intersubjective understanding and empathy, and advocates an embodied phenomenology for these figures. The cyborg and the posthuman are not necessarily synonymous but share similar political and ethical goals in theory: to radically redefine the human and the humanities, in order to see a way to better intersubjective and interspecies relations.
Ghost in The Shell, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Harbisson.