Mary Douglas

The dissertation focuses on the texts of a religious movement known as Tianshidao (the Way of the Celestial Masters) from the 2nd to the 5th century CE. Tianshidao is presented as a multifaceted tradition that should not be reduced by a predefined essence or a teleological vision of history. Instead of reconstructing one coherent cosmology, the author interprets the texts as representing various alternative cosmologies. They are compared according to the theory of cultural bias of Mary Douglas, in terms of grid and group. Special attention is paid to the employment of the bureaucratic imagery and the representations of time which are interpreted in the context of the cultural bias and the various modes of relationship towards the institutions of Tianshidao and the state. The author also analyses the millennialist character of the movement which was noted by previous research and distinguishes between various types of millennialism.

This article explores the world-building activities of players of the tabletop game Blood Bowl—a game that parodies American Football within a fantasy setting. It utilizes a ritual framework to focus on players’ activities relating to the considerable amount of luck inherent to the game. Based on fieldwork and survey data, it interprets players’ rituals and other actions as an effort to enact a particular social space, a “magic circle,” where enjoyable risk-taking and “edgework” take place. This social space is then analyzed within the Mary Douglas-derived theory of sociocultural viability (cultural theory). Using the theory’s typology, Blood Bowl tournaments can be characterized as individualist–hierarchy hybrid institutions. The article contributes by offering cultural theory as a tool for analyzing and comparing risk-taking behavior in diverse social contexts. The worlds built through Blood Bowl play are both analyzable and comparable with those integral to other social institutions, with cultural theory’s social solidarities ubiquitous. The article thus innovates by linking literatures on leisure and gaming with broader social theory.

Dirt is evoked to signify many important facets of mountain bike culture including its emergence, history and everyday forms of practice and affect. These significations are also drawn upon to frame the sport's (sub)cultural and counter-ideological affiliations. In this article we examine how both the practice of mountain biking and, specifically, mountain bike trail building, raises questions over the object and latent function of dirt, hinting at the way that abjection can, under certain circumstances, be a source of intrigue and pleasure. In doing so, we suggest a re-symbolization of our relationship with dirt via a consideration of the terrestrial.

Extending social anthropologist Mary Douglas’s theory of purity and danger, this article employs a form of textual and discourse analysis and draws on subcultural identity theory. The article argues that one central aspect of social formation occurs through definitional battles or arguments situating theological boundaries and setting the socio-religious parameters of an inchoate group. The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) offers a clear example of discursive scrimmaging. In the late 1990s and 2000s, insiders sought to legitimate the movement through a series of strategies. Published definitions and descriptions worked to establish the normative agenda of the movement and in applying methods of hyper-specification and internal categorical nuance vied with one another over criteria lists and theological validity. Critical outsiders attempted to discredit the nascent ECM through an inverse set of gatekeeping strategies. This essay underscores the centrality of language, print text, and media in the production of new subcultural identities and suggests that the ECM’s effective problematization by gatekeepers has marked the movement as dangerous to evangelicalism’s traditional boundaries, thus compelling the emergence, via textual discourse, of a quasi- or post-evangelical identity.

Punktem wyjścia artykułu jest antropologiczna koncepcja Mary Douglas zaprezentowana w pracy „Czystość i zmaza”, w której opisuje uniwersalne dla wszystkich społeczeństw sposoby radzenia sobie se "skalaniem", czyli zaburzeniem porządku. Douglas wyróżnia pięć takich zasadniczych działań. Przykładem sytuacji jawnie zakłócającej czystość porządku społecznego był masowy coming out gejów i lesbijek w przestrzeni publicznej, poprzez organizowanie marszów i demonstracji domagających się uznania ich istnienia przez heteroseksualną większość Polaków. Sytuacja ta w efekcie doprowadziła w 2005 roku do zjawiska zwanego paniką moralną czyli wybuchu niepokojów społecznych wywołanych przekonaniem o załamywaniu się porządku społecznego. W efekcie podjęte zostały różnorodne działania mające na celu wyeliminowanie „skalania” i ochronę tradycyjnego, heteroseksualnego ładu. W części empirycznej artykułu przyjrzymy się sposobom przedstawiania homoseksualistów jako zagrożenia, które wyróżnione zostały w prasie przy pomocy jakościowej analizy publikowanych materiałów z okresu 2004 i 2005. Następnie zobaczymy, które z działań, jakie omawia Douglas, zostały podjęte w sytuacji homoseksualnej paniki moralnej oraz czy doprowadziły one do usunięcia „skalania” i tym samym ochrony tradycyjnego porządku.

Final and Published version :
“Il potere delle batutte : transformazione sociale, cultura popolare e media nell’Albania post-socialista.” in ed.
Antonio d’Alessandri, Armando Pitassio, Dopo la Pioggia. Gli Stati della ex Jugoslavia e l'Albania
(1991 - 2011), Italia: Argo, AISSEE, Octobre 2011, pp. 379-394.

The concepts of purity and pollution were central to the maintenance of social boundaries in ancient Egyptian culture. Anthropological approaches, in particular the work of Mary Douglas, are useful in examining their impact on social structure and individual lived experience. Cleanliness and dirtiness were represented as defining characteristics of the ancient Egyptian elite and lower class. Dirty laborers were compared to animals, reinforcing the perception of the existing social order as natural. Even the process of cleaning itself could be presented as potentially polluting, when enacted by the lower class. The control of space and the body according to purity requirements were used to enforce social boundaries and restrict access. In the Middle Kingdom in particular, the introduction of literature, and innovations in iconography and scene-types depicted in tomb chapel decoration and tomb models may indicate new developments in society. Fear of pollution is particularly evident in the literary theme of “the reversal of order,” a nightmare vision of a world upturned, primarily the inversion of social status.

This paper seeks to build on D. W. Gooding’s well-known proposal (Eretz-Israel 16, 1982) that the book of Judges exhibits a chiastic structure with the Gideon narrative in the central position.  Recently, anthropologist Mary Douglas made a significant contribution to our understanding of complex chiastic devices in ancient Mediterranean literature (Thinking in Circles; Yale, 2007), and she calls these patterns “ring compositions.”  Based on her exposition of the essential components of ring compositions, it is here suggested that the entire book of Judges also follows the same pattern.  It will be demonstrated that the same themes which appear in the prologue and epilogue of Judges also appear in the centrally located Gideon narrative.  Also many common motifs will be noted between the parallel accounts of Othniel/Samson, Ehud/Jephthah and Deborah/Abimelech.

Mary Douglas is a prominent figure in the pantheon of religious studies, but the relevance of Douglas's influential theories about ritual pollution for Classical Indian Buddhism, a literate tradition that is sometimes critical of ritual and often explicitly distances itself from physicalized interpretations of bodily impurity, is not obvious. In fact, students of Classical Indian Buddhism have often argued that ideas about ritual impurity, including blood taboos, hold no place of importance in that tradition. This article brings together materials from the Indian Buddhist tradition and Douglas's theories of pollution in society to fulfill the dual purpose of testing Douglas's theory in a new arena and better articulating and explaining Indian Buddhist notions of female impurity.

My goal in this thesis is to concentrate on the origins of Islam as we can understand it from the
Quran itself, without using other, later sources. At the same time, I am interested in the relationship
between pre-Islamic Arabia and early Islam. My method will be based primarily on Mary Douglas
and her grid-group analysis.
This British anthropologist attempted to analyse different social situations, in which various
systems of understanding the world are formulated, using the parameters of “group” (the degree to
which the borders of a group are defined) and “grid” (the number of rules by which an individual is
controlled). These two parameters then made it possible for her to classify different cosmologies
according to their ideas and their social reality.
Applying this method, I will attempt to extract from the Quran – not primarily a narrative text – a
description of the change of early Muslims’ social situation and development of their religious ideas
which is connected to it, and I will attempt to use Mary Douglas’ anthropology to explain how such
a transformation happened and could happen.

A series of journalistic books and articles exploring the Alt-Right provide detailed empirical data critical to understanding the underpinning social networks of the Alt-Right. However, intensive media focus on young, working-class-usually American-white supremacists sharing extremist material over the internet masks incidences of closely related racist, conspiracist, misogynist, and 'anti-elitist' ideology in wider, often middle-class mainstream media, politics, and social policy discourse. This article problematises these narratives. Drawing partly on the work of Mary Douglas and Antonio Gramsci, we contribute to ongoing national and international 'Alt-Right' debates with an interdisciplinary, political-anthropological model of 'mainstremeist' belief and action. This approach highlights the links between 'fringe' and 'centre' into an entangled social network seeking to deploy social policy as a tool of misogynist, patriarchal, racist, and classist retrenchment.

This paper focuses on the structure of Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12), arguing that the sūrah demonstrates the most prominent features of ring composition more intricately than scholarship has thus far acknowledged. This paper first considers guidelines for arguing for ring composition, following critical scholarship on ring composition and Mary Douglas’ Thinking in Circles. It then demonstrates that Q 12 displays an intricate structure of mirroring, concentric composition, and parallelism, and draws attention to the literary markers and correspondences between mirrored elements throughout the narrative. The final section goes beyond the form of the sūrah to address its broader argument by placing it in the context of the third Meccan phase of the Prophet Muḥammad’s mission. The themes of betrayal, treachery, exile, reconciliation, forbearance, and reunion are central to this narrative and reflect the anxiety and despair of Muḥammad in this period. This paper demonstrates the utility of analyzing passages of the Qurʾān for ring composition, while adhering to stricter criteria for this type of analysis.

Anton Szandor LaVey wrote The Satanic Witch in 1970 as a response to the contemporary discourses of his time: feminism and the occult revival. This essay focuses on LaVey's treatment of the scent of feminine fluids-blood, sweat, and urine-in The Satanic Witch and selected texts in order to demonstrate that LaVey's emphasis on the importance of bodily secretions is an extension of his carnal-magical worldview; he employs the arcane language and aesthetics of the occult to methods of physiological and psychological manipulation in order to influence others and achieve desired ends. Throughout this essay I apply Mary Douglas' theories in Purity and Danger (2002 [1966]), which address our notions of contagion, dirt, and taboo; feminist rhetoric on 1960s and 1970s feminine hygiene products and their putative cleansing of natural feminine scent; and finally, the use of sexual fluids in esoteric magical practices such as described by Aleister Crowley. This article illustrates that LaVey's use of feminine fluids for magical efficacy reflects his notion that magic is firmly rooted within one own's body, and the capacity of one's own will, while also incorporating and responding to the surrounding discourses of his time.

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

Pork consumption, or to be more precise, its avoidance, became a major issue in the study of ancient Israel in the 1980s. Subsequently, it became closely associated not only with the debates over Israel's emergence in Canaan and ethnic interaction during the Iron Age I, but also regarding the transformations of Philistine society, as well as with general debates on relations between pork consumption and taboos, ecology, and environment. Relying on the vast database that accumulated, it is my aim here to reexamine the distribution of pork-consuming communities during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages in order to see if clear and meaningful patterns can be identified. Subsequently, the paper will study the emerging patterns, and examine how they should be interpreted, and whether patterns of consumption and avoidance can, or cannot, be associated with the different groups that inhabited the region at the time, and if the explanations to these patterns should be attributed to culture or to ecology and economy.

Dr S. Morgyn Wagner completed this unpublished PhD thesis shortly before her death in November 2003. It was submitted and examined posthumously, and the doctorate was awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2005. Through the lens of Mary Douglas's theory of purity and pollution, the thesis explores the beliefs and practices of the Irish monastic movement known as the Céli Dé in the eighth and ninth centuries. It appears that the thesis is not available in Edinburgh University Library; as such, and in response to recent queries, I have decided in my capacity as her academic executor to release the thesis here. THIS WORK IN ITS ENTIRETY IS TO BE ATTRIBUTED TO S. MORGYN WAGNER; James E. Fraser contributed nothing whatsoever to its authorship and must not be credited as its author.

The article examines Mohsin Hamid's third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), by focusing on the problem of filth, understood metaphorically, in moral and formal terms, but above all literally, in terms of actual pollution and lack of access to clean water in the economically fastest growing region, plagued by disastrous social inequality. The novel, written in the form of a second-person self-help guidebook, is analysed against the background of the Pakistani author's whole literary output. Drawing upon anthropological and philosophical/sociological studies, Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger as well as Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives and Liquid Fear, the article presents Hamid's ecologically and ethically engaged work as itself an impure, hybrid text which, like all of Hamid's writings, challenges the " centre " vs. " margins " hierarchy, and is characterised by a boundary-blurring, and system-changing ambition.

Published in Acta Philologica 51-52, Wydział Neofilologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego / the Faculty of Modern Languages ​​at the University of Warsaw, 2017, pp. 71-80.

This paper outlines an anthropological reading of Thai ghost films and their uncanny protagonists as a dialectic synthesising ethnographic material with film analysis in an attempt to operationalize the premises of the ‘ontological’ and ‘spectral turns’. The paper is the first systematic study of Phi Krasue – one of Thailand’s most iconic uncanny beings – and its cinematic and vernacular ghostly images. It grew out of an attempt to make sense of local Khmer-speaking interlocutors’ acceptance and reproduction of an idiosyncratic origin myth that locates the origin of Phi Krasue in Angkorian Khmer culture. Based on Mary Douglas’ and Julia Kristeva’s theories the paper identifies abjection and its essential ambiguity as the logical principle structuring imaginations of Phi Krasue in vernacular and cinematic contexts. I argue that the reading of a ghost film’s social message depends on spectators’ embodiment of vernacular ghostlore and thus on an implicit knowledge of the cultural semantics Thailand’s phi manifest. However, this paper offers not only a structural explanation for the self-evidence of Phi Krasue’s origin in Angkorian Khmer culture, but also for the Khmer-magic link as the most important socio-cultural stereotype characterizing the category ‘Khmer’ in Thailand’s contemporary popular culture. Finally, the paper identifies ‘filthiness’ as the social idiom used to explicate abjection as the logical principle structuring processes of ‘self-formation’ in contemporary Thailand.

German below
This text operates with the assumption that dirt is a concept inherent to most, if not all societies. The findings of the medieval German village Diepensee are analysed as refuse. In the tradition of Chaîne opératoire a methodology is introduced, which I name Chaîne éliminatoire. With this methodology and simple statistics, the position in time and space is analysed for the findings groups ceramics, burnt clay, animal bones, metal, slag, stone and glass. Also the relationship between the findings groups is analysed. This is based on the concept of a society of things or a network of things (Fél/Hofer 1969; 1974, 34, 37, 305). Different findings groups show different concentrations in certain spatial and chronological contexts. To explain these, medieval concepts of hygiene are applied. According to these, processes of rotting and fouling, which produce bad smells and promote miasms, have an important role. Consequently, in Diepensee animal bones seemed to be more problematic than other findings groups. They were quickly and carefully disposed, and so were presumably other rotting substances. During the second half of the 13th century, the economic net in the Brandenburg landscape developed and enabled the villagers to distribute bone, maybe also ham and animal skin. Re-use is part of a medieval farming habitus, which leads to ambivalent positions when it comes to potentially dangerous substances such as animal remains. That storing and reuse were part of a peasant habitus is most visible from iron objects. A village fire around 1300 preserved about a dozen metal hoards of the same time-horizon. These were in or over stone cellars and remained in position after the catastrophe. Other common agrarian recycling techniques, as manuring or the use of rubble to fix pathways or fill open structures can only be assumed. It is, however, very likely, that the agrarian community, with a general affinity to recycling, practiced these techniques. The developed distribution networks and the clear concepts of hygiene produce an image of medieval cosmology, which influenced practice also in the Brandenburg village Diepensee. A comparison with archaeological projects, written sources, and ethnological data allows far-reaching conclusions about the medieval mentality. It is in principle possible to work on the raised questions with existing archaeological methods. Phosphate analysis and micro as well as macrorest analysis should be adopted for future projects. Together with traces of abrasion and fragmentation, such as gnawing marks, fragment size and statistics a denser picture of medieval disposal can be derived.



GERMAN:
Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass es sich beim Schmutz um ein Konzept handelt, dass den meisten, so nicht allen, Gesellschaften inhärent ist, werden die Funde der archäologischen Ausgrabung in Diepensee als Abfälle des mittelalterlichen Dorfes betrachtet. Hierfür wird in der Tradition der Chaîne opératoire eine Methodologie etwickelt, die Chaîne éliminatoire genannt wird. Mit dieser Methodologie und einfachen statistischen Methoden werden die Stoffgruppen Keramik, Brandlehm, Tierknochen, Metalle, Schlacke, Stein und Glas auf ihre Verteilung in Zeit und Raum untersucht. Die Untersuchung erfolgt einerseits pro Stoffgruppe, andererseits wird das Verhältnis der Stoffgruppen zueinander ermittelt. Grundlegend ist hierbei das Konzept der Dinggesellschaft oder des Netzes von Dingen (Fél/Hofer 1969; 1974, 34, 37, 305). Für verschiedene Stoffgruppen können unterschiedliche Positionen oder Werte ermittelt werden. Zur Gliederung wird auf mittelalterliche Hygienekonzepte zurückgegriffen. Nach diesen kommt dem Geruch und dem Vorgang des Rottens und Faulens eine prominente Rolle zu. Es ist daher konsequent, dass Tierknochen problematischer waren als andere Stoffgruppen. Einerseits wurden sie (wie wohl auch andere rottende Abfälle) rasch und sorgfältig entsorgt. Andererseits war es ab der zweiten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts, mit fortschreitender Erschließung der brandenburgischen Landschaft, zunehmend möglich, Röhrenknochen, möglicherweise auch Schinkenhaxen und Tierhäute, zu distribuieren. Diese Möglichkeit wurde von der Bevölkerung Diepensees wahrgenommen. Eine weitestmögliche Wiederverwertung entsprach dem bäuerlichen Habitus, führte jedoch bei potentiell gefährdenden Objekten wie Tierresten zu Ambivalenzen. Dass Aufbewahrung von Abfällen und Wiederverwertung Teil des bäuerlichen Habitus waren, zeigt sich am deutlichsten für die Eisenfunde. Durch den Dorfbrand sind rund ein Dutzend zeitgleiche potentielle Altmetalllager erhalten. Diese befanden sich in oder über Steinkellern und wurden nach der Brandkatastrophe nicht mehr geborgen. Weitere agrarische Wiederverwertungstechniken wie Düngen oder Verwendung von Schutt zum Verfüllen oder Befestigen offener Strukturen können nicht eindeutig erfasst, sondern nur vermutet werden. Es ist jedoch anzunehmen, dass die bäuerliche Gesellschaft, mit einer generellen Affinität zur Weiterverwertung von Reststoffen, diese Techniken praktizierte. Das Ausmaß von Anbindung an überregionale Distributionsnetze, sowie die erfassbaren Konzepte zur Behandlung von Abfällen in Diepensee vermitteln den Eindruck einer mittelalterlichen Kosmologie, die auch das Handeln der Bevölkerung von Diepensee beeinflusste. Zur Interpretation werden vergleichbare archäologische Grabungen, schriftliche Quellen und Studien der ethnologischen Fächer verwendet. Die Vergleiche erfolgen über teils erhebliche zeitliche und räumliche Distanzen. Der interpretatorische Mehrwert ist jedoch sehr hoch. Kulturhistorisch orientierte archäologische Müllstudien enthalten großes Potential zur Ermittlung vergangener Praktiken und Vorstellungen. Strukturen und Techniken im Umgang mit Dingen geben einen ersten Einblick in ländliche Vorstellungswelten. Es ist prinzipiell möglich, die aufgeworfenen Fragen mit den zurzeit vorhandenen archäologischen Mitteln zu bearbeiten. Phosphatanalysen und Makro- wie Mikrorestanalyse sollten idealerweise auf zukünftigen vergleichbaren Grabungen durchgeführt werden. Zusammen mit der Untersuchung von Abrasionsspuren wie Tierverbiss, der Fragmentgröße und den allgemein zugänglichen Mitteln der Tabellenkalkulation lässt sich so ein immer dichteres Bild mittelalterlicher Kosmologie(n) ermitteln.

The theory of the firm initially developed by Ronald Coase has made explicit the political nature of firms by putting hierarchy at the heart of the economic process. Theories of workplace democracy articulate this intuition in the normative terms of the conditions under which this political power can be legitimate. This paper presents an organizational theory of workplace democracy, and contends that the democratization of firms requires that we take their organizational dimension explicitly into account. It thus construes democracy as an organizational principle and juxtaposes it to market, hierarchy, and norm-compliance as rival principles for the organization of economic activities. Attempts to construe democracy as an organizational principle with unique features in the tradition of transaction-cost economics are discussed before proposing an innovative solution based on an updated version of grid/group cultural theory of politics, adjusted to accommodate the basic requirements of democratic theory.

Few studies of Caravaggio's work neglect to mention his controversial depiction of dirty feet. But what is at stake in this beyond a breach of decorum where evangelists, pilgrims and the Virgin Mary all  present their blackened soles? This paper uses Mary Douglas's work on Purity and Danger to frame the problem of dirt in painting as 'matter out of place' within the contemporary 17thC rituals of footwashing and pilgrimage. It also uses Michel de Certeau's essay 'Walking in the City' to engage with how this dirt is re-articulated and negotiated in print culture of the period.

La società in cui viviamo in questa nostra epoca viene spesso definita come società della conoscenza o anche come società del rischio. Ma se all’ignoranza abbiamo sempre attribuito l’origine dei rischi e alla conoscenza la soluzione dei nostri problemi, come possiamo superare la contraddizione tra sovrabbondanza informativa e uso dannoso dell’informazione? Coniugando lavoro teorico e ricerca empirica, il volume intende rispondere a questo interrogativo esaminando il nesso che intercorre tra comunicazione e incertezza scientifica.
Oggi più che mai, in piena infodemia, risulta essenziale non solo tematizzare la complessità specifica che ci ritroviamo a dover governare nella vita quotidiana, ma anche individuare modalità di analisi non banali, capaci cioè di scalfire quel dato per scontato che non funziona più, per progettare percorsi d’azione lucidamente realistici in uno scenario nuovo. Dai fenomeni meteorologici estremi all’innovazione biotecnologica basata sui virus, dalla regolamentazione degli OGM alla gestione dell’emergenza fitosanitaria del caso Xylella fastidiosa in Puglia, ciò che tiene insieme e consente un dialogo tra i diversi contributi è riassunto nel concetto multidimensionale di delega fiduciaria, a sua volta a fondamento di una evoluta democrazia rappresentativa. Essa, infatti, esprime il nesso di solidarietà tra individui, organizzazioni e istituzioni, che in una società funzionalmente differenziata non si dà mai in modo statico e definitivo, bensì risulta fortemente assoggettato a dinamiche che possono essere dissipative o costitutive di un nuovo assetto.
Lo scoppio della pandemia Covid-19, che non ci ha ancora abbandonato, in quanto fatto sociale totale che non può avvalersi di esperti totali, non ha fornito solamente un ulteriore caso studio su cui riflettere, ma ha reso ancora più urgente l’elaborazione di un modello interpretativo delle dinamiche sociocomunicative che sostanziano quel concetto. L’utilità pragmatica del modello che qui presentiamo, sintesi preliminare e guida per ulteriori indagini volte a migliorarne la capacità euristica, è situabile nella sfera della gestione del rischio e nella sua comunicazione.
Il lavoro del gruppo di ricerca rientra nelle attività del Centro interuniversitario MaCSIS (www.macsis.unimib.it/centro-macsis), costituito da Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca e Università degli Studi di Pavia, per la ricerca e sperimentazione nella comunicazione della scienza nella knowledge-society.

This article examines the Qur’ānic references to al-muhājirūn as an expression of a world renouncing current in the early Qur’ānic movement. Throughout the Qur’ān the muhājirūn are idealized for their willingness to leave their homes, wealth, and families behind in order to emigrate in the path of God. Traditionally, these emigrants have been interpreted through the lens of later Muslim exegesis as referring to the early believers who accompanied Muhammad on his emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622. In general, however, there is little evidence to suggest that the Qur’ān is referring to a specific historical emigration event. Based on the theoretical framework of Peter Sloterdijk and Mary Douglas, this article argues that the Qur’ānic employment of the root h-j-r basically centers on an ascetic distancing from worldly attachments, and that this uprooting into a new mobility denotes a central aspect of the piety of the early Qur’ānic movement.

Monsters lurk within mathematical as well as literary haunts. I propose to trace some pathways between these two monstrous habitats. I start from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s influential account of monster culture and explore how well mathematical monsters fit each of his seven theses (Cohen 1996). The mathematical monsters I discuss are drawn primarily from three distinct but overlapping domains. I will describe these in much greater detail as they arise below, but here is a brief preview. Firstly, late nineteenth-century mathematicians made numerous unsettling discoveries that threatened their understanding of their own discipline and challenged their intuitions. The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré characterised these anomalies as ‘monsters’, a name that stuck. Secondly, the twentieth-century philosopher Imre Lakatos composed a seminal work on the nature of mathematical proof, in which monsters play a conspicuous role (Lakatos 1976). He reconstructs the emergence during the nineteenth century of a proof of the Euler Conjecture, which ascribes a certain property to polyhedra. Lakatos coined such terms as ‘monster-barring’ and ‘monster-adjusting’ to describe strategies for dealing with entities whose properties seem to falsify the conjecture. Thirdly, and most recently, mathematicians dubbed the largest of the so-called sporadic groups ‘the Monster’, because of its vast size and uncanny properties, and because its existence was suspected long before it could be confirmed.

Joy and Suffering – the Image of Christ and His Enemies in “Historyja
o chwalebnym Zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim” by Mikołaj of Wilkowiecko and
in “Rozmyślania dominikańskie”

Summary

My chapter is focused on the depiction of Christ in the History of the Glorious Resurrection, which is compared with the descriptions occurring in three meditative Polish prose texts from the early 16th century: Rozmyślania dominikańskie, followed by Baltazar Opec’s Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta, Rozmyślanie przemyskie and Sprawa chędoga o Męce Pana Chrystusowej. In Passion literature the purity and beauty of the Savior’s body we know from the work of Wilkowiecki is opposed to the ugliness (or impurity) of the Messiah’s antagonists. I investigate these problems in the context of the humoral theories functioning in medieval and early modern medical science. To analyze the aesthetics of ugliness present in the texts (including the depictions of human body secretions), Mary Douglas’ interpretation of the notion of purity and its function in culture is applied.

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case
for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate
became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by
religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes
Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing
around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful
through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare
newspaper coverage in Germany, Israel and Turkey, and reveal
transnational discursive dynamics that transgress national
boundaries. We show how ‘otherness’ of Muslims and Jews
remains present in a self-perceived secular, liberal imaginary.

In North Bihar, mud ensures prosperity for farmers, but also materially signals the lower status from which their wives try to raise the family, even at the cost of risking their own and their children's lives. This article provides a semiotic analysis of mud, an ambiguous material in its physical combination of land and water, a substance with specific gendered and class dimensions, and a symbolic marker whose presence on bodies indexes their socio-political identity. The sensuous relationships that revolve around mud and the prejudices it indexes illuminate meanings of dirt within processes of environmental knowledge and risk. By attending to the semiotic processes through which we understand nature, this article suggests that mud naturalizes the discrimination at the origin of dirtiness. Historical and political circumstances, such as the progressive loosening of the links between caste and occupation, show that mud is not dirt, but it becomes dirt when other kinds of dirt lose their meaning.
Résumé Dans le nord du Bihar, la boue assure la prospérité des fermiers, et signale également, sur plan matériel, le statut inférieur auquel les femmes de fermiers tentent d'échapper en élevant leurs familles, et ce au péril de leurs vies et de celles de leurs enfants. Cet article présente une analyse sémiotique de la boue, une matière ambiguë dans sa combinaison physique de la terre et de l'eau, une substance qui comporte des dimensions de classe et de genre spécifiques, et un marqueur symbolique dont la présence sur les corps indexe leur identité sociopolitique. Les relations sensuelles autour de la boue et les préjudices qu'elle indexe mettent en lumière les significations de la saleté au sein des connaissances sur l'environnemental et le risque. En observant le processus sémiotique par lequel la nature est comprise, cet article suggère que la boue naturalise la discrimination à l'origine de la saleté. Les circonstances historiques et politiques, telle l'atténuation progressive des liens entre caste et occupation, montrent que la boue n'est pas saleté, mais devient sale lorsque d'autres types de saleté perdent leur signification.
Resumen En el norte de Bihar, el barro garantiza la prosperidad para los agricultores, pero también señala materialmente el estatus inferior desde donde sus esposas intentan criar a la familia, incluso a costa de arriesgar su propia vida y la de sus hijos. Este artículo presenta un análisis semiótico del barro/lodo, un material ambiguo en su combinación física de tierra y agua, una sustancia con dimensiones específicas de género y clase, y un marcador simbólico cuya presencia en los cuerpos humanos moldea la identidad sociopolítica de los mismos. Las relaciones sensoriales que giran en torno al lodo, así como los prejuicios que éste conlleva, iluminan los significados de lo sucio en los procesos de conocimiento y riesgo ambiental. Al prestar atención a los procesos semióticos a través de los cuales entendemos la naturaleza, este artículo sugiere que el lodo naturaliza la discriminación en el origen mismo de lo sucio y lo enlodado. Circunstancias históricas y políticas tales como el debilitamiento progresivo de los vínculos entre casta y ocupación muestran que el lodo no es sucio, sino que se convierte en sucio cuando otros tipos de suciedad pierden su significado.

The bellybutton as both a reminder of the womb and our 'diploma of independence' from it,  the author suggests we take the bellybutton as a new metaphor of the self.

Reminding us that the "omphalus stone" at Delphi was the mythic center of the Greek world of its time, the book is about the logic of the self in regards to the concept of civilization. As we move on to the next Axial Age, most of us dread a painful and hazardous process, and from a humanistic standpoint, some fear a still-birth.  But the author suggests that given a little mild self-derision at human ambitions we can grease the passage through the birth canal with hope.  Tansson believes the coming era might  be fashioned as a new womb of Humanism such that future generations of children shall be born free.  We shall all happily accept Gaia's motherly monicker (knowingly tied to the apron strings of matter) “my little bellybutton!”  At the very least we shall take it on the chin when someone assaults us with the 'navel yell': “you bellybutton, you!”  For we, even the greatest of all times, must be put in our place.

Curso de posgrado para el FLACSO de Quito, Ecuador. Tomando como eje mi libro sobre Paradigmas y Estrategias en Antropología Simbólica dicté este curso a lo largo de todo un mes de enero por iniciativa de Hernán Vidal, quien estaba allí cursando su maestría.