Orientation towards a point of political and historical allegiance outside the boundaries of the nation-state is often taken to be a defining quality of diasporas, and this aligns with the ubiquitous tendency of Islamic practice to engage with sources of long- distance, or indeed global, religious authority. In this article, I shall investigate…[Read more]

During the last five decades, public, intellectual, and academic debates have created an increased awareness of so-called transhumanist discourses and social movements accompanied by a diverse body of theoretical works in philosophy, social sciences, and humanities which can broadly be described as posthumanist. Building on a three year long…[Read more]

In recent years social scientists have been interested in the growth and transformation of global cities. These metropolises, which function as key command centers in global production networks, manifest many of the social, economic, and political tensions and inequities of neoliberal globalization. Their international appeal as sites of financial…[Read more]

This paper explores how everyday religious narratives in post-disaster contexts can be interpreted as key sites of agency articulated in resistance to dominant discourses of disaster relief. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among affected communities after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, we argue that religious discourses code everyday actions with…[Read more]

Declaration of the Social Movements: Ten Peoples’ Principles Against Land Grabs, Evictions and Neoliberalism. “Let a New World be born in Bandung for a genuine land reform, not land grabs!” — Bandung-Indonesia, September 24, 2018.

On 24 September 2018, hundreds of people demonstrated in front of Gedung Merdeka in Asia-Afrika Street, Bandung, West Java, where the Global Land Forum (GLF) 2018 was happening. This was the eighth gathering of the forum since the inaugural conference in Rome in 2003. The opening of the three-day event coincided with Indonesia’s National Peasants’ Day.

Punk in Indonesia has often been described as a spectacular performance of disorder and resistance, a youthful style that posed a disruptive challenge to the authoritarian hierarchy and discipline of the New Order regime. The punk scene in Bandung has developed in the context of what is often referred to as ‘post-authoritarian’ Indonesia. Punk giv…[Read more]

An interpretation of the rock art appearing in The Shaft at Lascaux and a discussion of Aurignacian Rites of Passage

In this chapter I discuss how contests about religious language have revolved around a contrast between, on the one hand, a preference for literalism, with its emphasis on reference and denotation; and on the other hand, a valuation of the poetic functions of language and its material properties. Turning to the issue of electronically mediated…[Read more]

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorce…[Read more]

Le mouvement féministe haïtien vient de célébrer ses 100 ans: occasion idéale pour réfléchir à la réalité des Haïtiennes, tout en y intégrant des courants de pensée européens, américains et panafricains.Le mouvement féministe haïtien vient de célébrer ses 100 ans: occasion idéale pour réfléchir à la réalité des Haïtiennes, tout en y in…[Read more]

In this article, it is pointed out that the seclusion of girls at puberty could have existed for more than 40,000 years. The more likely mechanism of diffusion of the ideas around seclusion was the migration of our ancestors not the cultural transmission itself. The customs of Australian Aboriginal people provide a window into the past and some…[Read more]

This book is an example of how well cultural history can be written along with a critical analysis of textual sources. This book explores the various facets of the Hindu Brahmin identity and its relevance in the present. This book is a great resource for scholars of Sanskrit, Hinduism, mythology, social stratification, folklore, performance,…[Read more]

This Chapter provides simple but valuable insights to Upper Paleo abstract values such as Time, Life After Death, Social Roles, etc. Introduction to ‘Soft Cultural Institutions’. Understanding how abstract valuations become embedded into social structure is especially important in terms of understanding nonverbal language and symbolic sets.

This is the five image hypothesis for the thesis One Godz which follows.

Book Review Tragic Views of the Human Condition: Cross-Cultural Comparisons between Views of Human Nature in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy and the Mahabharata and Bhagavadgita by Lourens Minnema, Prabuddha Bharata March 2015

Book Review The Way of Ayurvedic Herbs Karta Purkh Singh Khalsa and Michael Tierra

Book Review Swaraj: Thoughts of Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, Raja Rammohun Roy, Tagore & Vivekananda by Amulya Ranjan Mohapatra

This book is a collection of the English translations of François Laruelle’s writings, mainly from the first two stages of the five-stage development of his thought of non-philosophy. The tone of the book is set by the wonderful introduction by the editor, Robin Mackay, who brings out the dissatisfaction of Laruelle that propelled him to re…[Read more]

The very thought of death brings to mind fear and the prospect of facing something unknown. The average person is seldom prepared for death. Encountering death is the worst nightmare for most, only this is the last nightmare. We have funny notions about death. We feel it is alright if a person dies at an advanced age, particularly if without any…[Read more]