“Where do we find ourselves?” are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” first words. The query is the author’s starting point for a number of philosophical considerations; it’s also the point of departure for our making sense of pain, through the reading of both Emerson’s essay and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The essay hipothesises that Joyce’s “We walk…[Read more]

INDONESIA PROMISED AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM of agrarian reform. Based on that ambition, Jokowi’s government released a presidential regulation on agrarian reform. This was done, together with the 2018 Global Land Forum meeting, in Bandung, several months before the presidential election. This month, the Indonesian presidential election has been a c…[Read more]

Introduction to the literary theory, form, and style of Modernism, a literary movement that dominated the first half of the 20th century and continues to exert its influence over literature today, which, tellingly, is described by the label post-Modernism.

Introduction to the literary theory, form, and style of Modernism, a literary movement that dominated the first half of the 20th century and continues to exert its influence over literature today, which, tellingly, is described by the label post-Modernism.

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

The Fairy Tale as Secular Scripture begins from the premise that fairy tales are a battleground in twenty-first century American culture. Hundreds of fairy tales enter the cultural space each year and are met with both acclaim and censure. Fairy tales are censured even as we consume them, but these cultural moments have been underexamined in…[Read more]

Walt Whitman, a world poet and the father of American free verse, has been received by diverse audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements of different countries. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has rem…[Read more]

With the advance of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s, lifelong learning emerged in the policy frameworks of the United States, Canada, and the EU. Neoliberal policies during this era worked to orchestrate personal development within the increasingly flexible processes of global capitalism, placing both within the rhythm of a personal life…[Read more]

Les usages de la reproduction sonore parmi les musulmans mauriciens illustrent les liens entre religion publique et médiation religieuse. Les usages de la reproduction sonore parmi les musulmans mauriciens illustrent les liens entre religion publique et médiation religieuse. Ces deux dimensions de la religion s’appuient sur des objets mat…[Read more]

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]

Jorgenrique Adoum (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez), ʿĀ’ishah al-Bāʿūnīyah (translated by Th. Emil Homerin), Rachel Tzvia Back, Dan Bellm, Luis Enrique Belmonte (translated by Guillermo Parra), Daniel Borzutzky, George Economou, Sa rah Tuss Efrik (translated by Johannes Göransson), Paul Éluard (translated by Carlos L…[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]