Abstracts about the Treatises of the Seminer

In the Tibetan calendar, the years are mentioned by a system known as Sexagenary Cycle. Inessence, it consists of the cycle of 60 years----each cycle called a Rab--byung. One of the prob-lems concerning the Chronological Tables is thus decoding this system for our understanding of theyear referred to in terms of the European calendar. But it seems important to mention here thatthere is some risk of inaccuracy in the standard practice of mechanically converting the Tibetan     

Identification,the exercise of democracy and the fear of the Other – the June EU referendum in the UK

ABSTRACT

The focus is the oscillation among leave voters in the EU referendum from the exercise of rights - an act of dis-identification – towards the assertion of identity as members of a British community. This was mediated by voters acting in an association of citizens calling on the equalising agency of the British people whilst claiming membership of a locally circumscribed community, perceived as injured, through entanglement with the Other prominent among them Europeans. Hence the recovery of the injured community as the object of the denunciators’ desire for identity coupled with the fear of the Other. Predicated on this was the resumption of class, gender and ethnic roles reflected in division among voters. The denunciation of togetherness with Europeans served leave voters to substitute the exercise of rights with a longing for identity. Instrumental in this was the lack of deliberation in the plebiscite to articulate the will of individual voters through a general will. The ‘direct power’ exercised enabled many to cast away their role as citizen in an attempt to claim their privileges as members of a racially and culturally demarcated British community. Paradoxically, the voters’ unashamed disavowal of their agency as citizens by seeking to restore a divided social world as the source of their identity was represented as an exercise in democracy. To some playing on words was supplemented by the use of force removing the gap between the discursive exclusion of the Other and the continued physical presence of bearers of different races and culture.     

An Exploration on the Realization of the Approach for Harmonious Ethnic Relations from the Perspective of“the Pattern of Diversity in Unity” Theory

1 .The “Pattern of Diversity in U-nity ” is a true reflection of the Chinese Nation ’ s ethnic relations     

The Impact of Change within the “Cultural Context” of the Contemporary Art of Qiang Paper Cutting-Based upon an Investigation of the Art of Paper -Cutting in Mao County

The original meaning of “cultural context” refers to the socio -cultural background relating to language communication .The cultural context of the Qiang art of paper -cutting in Mao county discussed i...     

State power and the role of education in the constitution of natives’ subjectivities: the Druze in Israel

Collective identities are largely conceived as the essence of human subjectivity, the basis of moral collectivities and the code by which people tend to relate to histories and current affairs. Michel Foucault, notwithstanding, argued that identities are the product of power relations. Through various techniques, such as the classification of populations to certain categories, the hierarchical ordering of these categories, the allocation of differential treatment to those who occupy the various categories and the association between belonging to particular categories and certain jobs and means of living, regimes establish group identities. This process of sorting out, we argue, is the beginning of a laborious endeavor whose final goal is to institutionalize the new identities in the consciousness of the wider public as natural. Education is thought to constitute an essential tool by which regimes inculcate the young generations with constructed identities. Despite that, hegemonic discourses are not stable; rather, they are constantly challenged by all sorts of groups who speak in the name of silenced histories or moral claims. In line with these insights, we aim in this article to trace the Israeli methods employed to constitute the Druze as a distinct ethnic category, which is different not only from the Muslims, a faith community to which they affiliated until 1961, but also from the Palestinian-Arab minority. Particularly, we aim to look at the role that the educational system has played in the constitution of Druze separate identity.     

‘For the sake of the family and future’: the linked lives of highly skilled Indian migrants

ABSTRACT

While in Western literature, migration is generally considered an individual or (nuclear) household phenomenon, Indian context adds the strong presence of parents and extended family to the constellation. This paper addresses how significant others shape the life course events and the migration trajectories of highly skilled Indian migrants to the Netherlands and UK. We employ a qualitative approach to the life course framework to highlight the linked lives that can alter the migration decisions. Our findings are drawn from 47 semi-structured biographic interviews. The results underscore how further migration decisions are often informed by the implications of the different life stages of the linked lives, the key elements being care-giving by and for the parents. Furthermore, we also illustrate how migration provides space for negotiating social norms and expectations: due to the geographical distance between migrants and their parents, the local (non-Indian) context plays a bigger role and thus the need for and timing of conformity with norms can be postponed. The understanding of family life in transnational settings will be enriched when individuals are embedded within the cultural background and linked lives are extended beyond the immediate nuclear family.     

Vastu compliance: the gentrification of India’s sacred spaces and the mobilities of ideas

ABSTRACT

This article examines the mobilities of ideas in the context of sacred spaces in India and transnational flows of trends and services. Mobile subjects on the global stage are still bound by immobile concerns, such as their homes. In this article I examine the anxieties of India’s globally mobile middle and elite classes through their efforts to make their gated multi-storey residences compliant with an ancient form of spatial spirituality: vastu shastra. Now common in advertisements for luxury apartments, I argue that vastu compliance is a form of liquid spirituality that is part and parcel of the privatisation of the urban landscape and the replacement of fixed or local sacred spaces and those that dwell around them: homeless or ‘occupying’ mendicants. In between these two polar opposite mobile subjects of the elite and the mendicant are vastu consultants who derive a living from their knowledge and practice of a form of liquid spirituality growing in popularity around the world.     

Experiments on puerile nations,or the impossibility of surpassing your father: the case of the Anglo‐Greek dialogue

This article is concerned with the dialogic construction of Greek national and British imperial identities. It examines the gendered language in which the Greeks and the British addressed each other in the 1860s and the 1870s. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology, studies of nationalism and post‐colonial theory, it looks at the symbolic structure of Anglo‐Greek cultural exchange. In this analysis, it is argued that the familial imageries both sides employed to describe themselves and/or each other were constitutive of the roles they had assumed in Anglo‐Greek relations, but also part of the very process of Greek nation‐building and British imperialism.     

Icons vs satirical inversions: Islamic rule and the ‘death of the author’ – the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris

The satirical inversions of the images of the Prophet Muhammad by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists that brought the wrath of two gunmen to their authors, projected a world in which the reader is recognised as an autonomous subject. Consequent on this autonomy is the restricted power of the author who used to derive it from the re-enactment of sacred Truth. Multiple and diverse readers, on the other hand, owe their authority from the right of the individual to reason and judge independently, which places them at arm's length from the author. The inverted images drawn by the cartoonists represented a departure from the Prophet's traditional iconic images whose resemblance to the referent left little room for variation among their faithful viewers driven to identify with the Messenger of Allah either by desire to imitate or for fear of punishment. The fixed iconic ‘reading’ by the faithful was mediated by the homogeneous Muslim Community (Umma) whose members were unable to use words to objectify among an association of citizens their internal sense of injury as an excess. As a consequence, this injury caused by the readers operating outside the Community called for the use of force by its members in retaliation (qisas) for the infidels’ reading as sanctioned in the sacred text. The more entrenched the membership of the Umma, largely the product of reading the sacred text – where the author retains his traditional power – the more inclined were the members to resort to brutal force to restore the traditional power of the author.     

International migration and the rise of the ‘civil’ nation

Scholars largely agree that immigration policies in Western Europe have switched to a liberal, civic model. Labelled as ‘civic turn’, ‘civic integration’ or ‘liberal convergence’, this model is not identically applied across countries, since national institutions, traditions and identifications still matter. Even so, the main focus is on processes which allow or prevent migrants to be incorporated into nations usually taken for granted in their meanings. Moving from policies to discourses, this article aims to interrogate what kind of nation is behind these policies as a way to further scrutinise the ‘civic turn’. Exploring how the term ‘civility’ and its adjectivisations are discursively deployed in Italian parliamentary debates on immigration and integration issues, the article points to two opposite narratives of nation. While one mobilises civility in order to rewrite the nation in terms of a common, inclusive, civic ‘we’, the other uses civility to reaffirm the conflation between national identity and the identity of the ethno-cultural majority. These findings suggest the importance of exploring the ‘civic turn’ not only across countries, but also across political parties within the same country to capture the ways in which a liberal, civic convergence in political discourses might hide divergent national boundary mechanisms.     

Two Courts of the’Phags-pa Era

1. Preamble An event which is said to have taken place in 1267, just prior to' Phags--pa's leisurely re-turn to the Mongol imperial court in China was his organization of an entourage of attendants andofficials who were responsible for the wide variety of duties and functions that had accrued to him inthe course of his growing prestige and influence. In keeping with his position in Tibet as the spiritual     

Communities of belonging in the temporariness of the Danish Asylum System: Shalini’s anchoring points

Refugees often find themselves in a protracted situation of temporariness, as applications for asylum are processed, deportations negotiated and possible extensions of temporary protection status considered within the context of increasingly restrictive governmental policies across Europe. Through the case of a young Sri Lankan woman who arrived in Denmark as an ‘unaccompanied asylum-seeking minor’ and spent five years within the Danish asylum system, this article explores how she experienced moving through different legal categories and the institutional settings associated with them. I argue that, by engaging in social relations in the localities where she was situated, she developed places of belonging that could serve as ‘anchoring points’ providing some measure of stability in her otherwise unpredictable and precarious life situation. This case suggests that, even under conditions of protracted temporariness and legal uncertainty, individuals are able to create important anchoring points and develop communities of belonging that can serve them in a difficult process of belonging to Denmark.     

In the name of Ossian: Celtic Galicia and the ‘brothers from the north’

ABSTRACT

The modern Celtic myth is a complex framework because of its variety of constituent elements. In essence, it consists of an empathetic celebration of otherness, based on a timeless narrative and restorative nostalgia, but including nationalist and capitalist-market interests. Since the first edition of the Ossianic poems by James Macpherson in 1760, Celticness has firmly settled within a collective imagination in search of alternative aesthetic, political, and even spiritual values. It has been exploited in different geocultural spaces and articulated in propaganda strategies, to found ethnic consciousness and fill the gaps of history. In addition to other Celtic areas of Europe, Galicia (NW Spain) has a long Celtophile tradition, with relevant intellectual support, ritual symbologies, and media productions. This article focuses on Galician Celtic-based history, icons, events, phenomena like the Real Banda of bagpipes, the Interceltic Festival of Ortigueira, and the renewed archaeological attempt to locate Galician ancestry within Iron Age Celts. Celticness has been the main identity locus in the construction of Galicia as a nation, shaping a specific social awareness and even invoking racial arguments. Comparison is established with Scotland, Brittany and Ireland (the ‘brothers from the north’) in their respective perception and treatment of modern Celticness.     

Fabricatingthe Glory of the “Sun King”：The Divine Kingship and the Shaping of Nation-State in The Fabrication of Louis XIV

Louis XIV ( September 1638—Sep-tember 1715 ) , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, was a monarch of the House of Bourbon who ruled as King of France from 1643 until his death.His reign of 72 year...     

‘A brutal blow against the democratic normality’: unlearning the epistemology of the political

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to rethink our understanding of ‘the political’ through an examination of two novels by José Saramago, Blindness and Seeing. Both novels tackle directly a central, if not the central, signature metaphor of Western political thought, namely that of ‘seeing the light’. This metaphor takes many forms and recurs throughout the tradition of Western political philosophy as a source, legitimiser, and validator of knowing, and perhaps even a guarantor of knowledge. In particular, this metaphor has served to make knowable whatever it is that is signified by ‘the political’. By extension, it also means that whatever might be outside of this epistemological frame is rendered unknowable, if not unthinkable. Both of Saramago’s novels provide a fruitful means to recalibrate how we might know ‘the political’. The novels call into question the epistemic signatures that frame our commonly accepted understandings of ‘the political’ and in so doing provoke us further to question how we might move towards unlearning the epistemology of the political.     

Lévy-Bruhl among the Phenomenologists: Exoticisation and the Logic of ‘the Primitive’

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's impact on continental philosophers from Edmund Hersserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida is documented with specific reference to the question of understanding other cultures. However, the fact that Lévy-Bruhl focused on understanding ‘the primitive’ infected the philosophical discussions of this topic with a certain racism and even, on occasion, a certain exoticism, still visible even in Julia Kristeva's efforts to overcome it.     

Miscellaneous Remarks on the Lineage of Byang La-Stod

In 1974 Tibetan savant Rtsis--dpon Zhwa -- sgab -- pa Dbang--phyug bde--ldan published acollection of historical works selected from his private holding. One of the texts made available as aresult is a short account of the Byang La--stod area in Central Tibet, the Sde--pa G. yas--ro Byang--pa' i rgyag--rabs rin -- po -- che bstar ba(hereafter Byang -- pa' i rgyal -- rabs; it is comprised oftwenty--two folia of which six [ff. 16v -- 21v; the colophon is on ff. 21v--22r] deal with the ab-