Catholicism and Conservation: The Potential of Sacred Natural Sites for Biodiversity Management in Central Italy

The connection between religion, nature and conservation has become a prominent topic among scholars and conservation practitioners. Numerous studies have shown that spiritual beliefs have contributed to preserving important biodiversity in sacred areas around the world. In Western contexts, however, that link has been underexplored, perhaps due to a common view of Christianity as anti-naturalistic. Here, I rely on a literature review and first-hand observations to identify patterns and trends characterizing Catholic sacred sites in Central Italy. I show that a high proportion of the sites are located in natural areas, and that some types of sites and strands of Catholicism are associated with natural settings more frequently than others. Further, these natural sacred sites often display ecological features that highlight their important conservation role. Greater awareness and consideration of local spiritual heritages are recommended to guarantee more effective and integrated management of the sites.     

The Photograph and the Malanggan: Rethinking images on Malakula,Vanuatu

From the recent efflorescence of anthropological engagements with photography we are by now aware that photography is an embodied practice and that photographs are complex materialisations of the subjective and experiential as well as the objective and evidential. Despite discussions of ‘visual repatriation’ (e.g. Brown and Peers 2006 ), and of local responses to colonial photography and other kinds of archival images in the Pacific, little has been discussed regarding the status of photographs as particularly ‘Pacific’ artefacts—objects that make sense in indigenous terms as well as being understood in terms of the connections to other places that their production and circulation might signify. Following Wright’s exhortation to recognise ‘the provincial nature of Eurocentric notions of photography and … suggesting that a certain corporeality and materiality constitute elements of its identity’ (2004: 74) , I discuss the resonance of historical photographs in Vanuatu, building an analogy with Malanggan—funerary carvings from Northern New Ireland. I do not mean to suggest that photographs are complex ritual artefacts, but rather follow the ways in which Malanggan have been used as anthropological conceits, in order to discuss the representational efficacy and materiality of Melanesian images in facilitating the crystallisation of memory and history ( Küchler 1988 ), the enchantment of technology ( Gell 1998, 1999 ), and the consolidation of certain kinds of property relations ( Strathern 2005b ). As my title suggests, I draw on Strathern’s combination of Malanggan and Patents to rethink the potential utility of Malanggan as a ‘way to think’ about the meanings of photographs in Pacific communities.     

The Immanence of Transcendence: God and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire Coast

In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant churches), local experiences of ‘divine providence’ and ‘demonic attack’ abound. Bodily fluids, scraps of paper, video cassettes and prawn trawlers were immanent carriers of divine and demonic activity. Viewed through the lens of Weberian social theory, the experiences of Scottish fisher families show how the life of the Christian resembles an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the Christian placed awkwardly in-between. Because, locally, ‘there is no such thing as coincidence’, these Christians expected to experience both the transcendent ordering of life by divine providence through God's immanence and the transcendent disordering of life by demonic attack through the Devil's immanence. Where this ordering and disordering frequently occurred through everyday objects, seemingly mundane events – being given a washing machine or feeling sleepy in church – were experienced as material indexes of spiritual reality. Drawing on the work of Cannell (on transcendence), Keane (on indexicality) and Wagner (on symbolic obviation), this paper argues that attending to the materiality of Scottish Protestantism better equips the anthropology of religion to understand Christian experience by positing immanence as a kind of transcendence and transcendence as a kind of immanence.     

Seeking healing transnationally: Australians,John of God and Brazilian Spiritism

João de Deus (John of God) is a Brazilian faith healer who has become increasingly well‐known outside Brazil. In 2006 alone he was invited to conduct healing events in Germany, the United States of America and New Zealand. He returned to the United States of America and New Zealand in 2007, and in 2008 was once again in the United States of America. There are plans for him to come to Australia in the near future. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in Brazil, New Zealand and Australia and on interviews with Australians in Sydney. Here, I explore the stories of Australian followers of John of God and their reasons for seeking his healing system. I argue that Western New Age and alternative medicine concepts of healing produce a disposition ( Bourdieu 1972 ) towards ‘traditional’ healing from exotic lands. I show that the reinstatement of a connection between healing and religion, the construction of context that gives meaning to illness, and empowerment through surrendering to a higher power are three important factors that help to explain why people shun Western medicine in favour of alternative practices.     

Healing Animals,Feeding Souls: Ethnobotanical Values at Sacred Sites in Central Italy

Healing Animals, Feeding Souls: Ethnobotanical Values at Sacred Sites in Central Italy. Ethnobotanical knowledge is a fundamental repository of the values and applications of different plants. This knowledge is often related to spiritual beliefs and religious sites, where plants have been nurtured and conserved for their use in rituals and traditional practices. While this link is well known for different areas of the global south, it has hardly been investigated in relatively more secular and modernized Western contexts. Here, we use first–hand vegetation surveys and published records to examine the occurrence of ethnobotanical values at 30 Catholic shrines in Central Italy, and compare them with an equal number of non–sacred control sites. We ask this: to what extent is there an association of useful plants with sacred places in Italy, as found in other cultural contexts? We show that a greater number of useful plants are found at sacred sites. While this is mainly a consequence of the higher species richness of sacred sites, an association with plants used in animal husbandry is particularly evident, and likely related to the deep historical connection between sacred places and pastoralist traditions in Central Italy. Also, we show that there are significant variations in the distribution of old trees; the largest specimens are found at the center of sacred sites, while tree size visibly decreases away from the shrines. This indicates also that individual trees have been actively managed and conserved at sacred sites, probably driven by the symbolic values that old trees frequently embody.     

Whales, dolphins or fishes? The ethnotaxonomy of cetaceans in São Sebastião, Brazil

Tree worship is very common worldwide. This field study surveys the ceremonies and customs related to sacred trees in present-day Israel; it includes the results of interviews with 98 informants in thirty-one Arab, Bedouin, and Druze villages in the Galilee. The main results are: 1. Sacred trees were treated as another kind of sacred entity with all their metaphysical as well as physical manifestations. 2. There is not even one ceremony or custom that is peculiar only to a sacred tree and is not performed in other sacred places (such as a saint's grave or a mosque). 3. Few customs, such as: quarrel settling (= Sulkha), leaving objects to absorb the divine blessing and leaving objects for charity) seem to be characteristic of this region, only. 4. In modern times, sacred trees were never recorded, in Israel, as centres for official religious ceremonies including sacrifices, nor as places for the performing of rites of passage. 5. There is some variation among the different ethnic groups: Kissing trees and worshipping them is more common among the Druze although carrying out burials under the tree, leaving water and rain-making ceremonies under them have not been recorded in this group. Passing judgments under the tree is more typical of the Bedouin in which the sacred trees were commonly used as a public social centre. Most of the customs surveyed here are known from other parts of the world. The differences between Muslims and Druze are related to the latter's belief in the transmigration of souls.     

‘You have to call the right name' – Operation Joshua meets Cosmology and Catholicism at Lake Chambri in Papua New Guinea

In the Sepik, names feature centrally in political and religious contexts. Esoteric knowledge about totemic names enables Nyaura men to achieve status and power and can set them in contact with spirits. A recently arrived Pentecostal/evangelical movement—Operation Joshua—claims to have found the true name of God, whom it presents as being radically different to the beings people's ancestors have known. At Lake Chambri, however, the Nyaura (West Iatmul) community Timbunmeli had accommodated Catholicism to their culture long before Operation Joshua came to their village. While Operation Joshua demonizes Nyaura spirits, the Catholic community understands God to be an ancestral being for whom different clans know different names. Taking a political ontology perspective, I analyze the encounter of Operation Joshua and Nyaura Catholicism in Timbunmeli in relation to cosmo‐ontological politics pursued by ambitious Nyaura men and different denominations. I suggest that denominational pluralism creates ontological pluralism in Timbunmeli, where different actors engage different truth claims concerning the being and reality of central Christian figures in their world‐making practices.     

The Innovative Materiality of Revitalization Movements: Lessons from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

ABSTRACT  Although Wallace's revitalization movement model has been successfully utilized in scores of ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of societies throughout the world, revitalization is considerably less well documented in archaeological contexts. An examination of the materiality of revitalization movements affords an opportunity to redress this lack by investigating how material culture creates and constrains revitalization phenomena. In this article, I reconsider the revitalization model through a case study focusing on the archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, emphasizing the central role of materiality in the formation and mediation of these movements. In doing so, I examine the archaeological signatures of revitalization movements, concluding that they are highly negotiated and heterogeneous phenomena and that the materiality of these episodes cultivates cultural innovation. I also seek to demonstrate that the distinctive types of material culture produced through revitalization are not epiphenomenal but, rather, are crucially constitutive of revitalizing processes.     

The spaces of religion: a view from South Asia★

Anthropologists have spilt much ink deconstructing concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. Religion, possibly the most misleading such concept, has proved highly resistant to the acid of cross-cultural comparison. Debates about the nature of religion go back to sociocultural anthropology's beginnings as a discipline and beyond. Proposed definitions have been numerous, but none has come close to universal acceptance, mainly because conventional definitions are secularized versions of Abrahamic, and especially Protestant, positions and reproduce their essentialism and intellectualism. I argue that by looking closely at the way religious phenomena are conceptualized in South Asia, and especially at how distinct types of religion are practised in characteristically different spaces, a fresh take on the subject is possible. Religion as practised is not one thing but at least three distinct activities and should be conceptualized as such. But, if that is so, how and why is the totalizing conventional view still so pervasive and so powerful? Seeking the answer to that question takes us back to the constitution of modernity and the relationship of religion to the nation-state. The way forward is to contest the way in which religion has become the last bastion of pure essentialism.     

Critical ontologies: rethinking relations to other-than-humans from the Bolivian Andes

Drawing from fieldwork and archival research carried out in Bolivia between 2010 and 2017, this article undertakes a rethinking of Indigenous ontologies in light of Bolivian interlocutors’ efforts to navigate deeply precarious ties to named places and saints. Attention to such instabilities challenges romantic accounts of ontology that presume a stable domain of materiality or religiosity outside of practice. During fieldwork in central Bolivia, I learned about the ways that Quechua farmers negotiated the relational and ecological effects of a divisive history of indentured labour and sexual violence through acts of devotion including paraman purina (‘walking for rain’), feasting, flute-play, dance, and chapel prayer each February for the Patron Saint La Virgen de la Candelaria, named places, and the Pachamama. These practices sought to rebuild ties to named places that were interrupted by the forbidding of offerings by the prior hacienda master and reshaped by state projects of Indigenous revivalism. These devotional practices, and participants’ narrations of them, offer insight into the political workings of Indigenous ontologies in twenty-first-century Bolivia. I propose critical ontologies as a scholarly lens that insists upon placing relations with other-than-humans within broader fields of legal and political contestation over rights, nature, and Indigeneity.     

Cinema Itself: Cinephobia,Filmic Anxieties,and Ontologies of the Moving Image in Pakistan

Anxieties over the particular ontology and materiality of the film image—rather than moral concerns over the co-mingling of bodies in the built and social space of the cinema—have been addressed by two formative figures in the philosophy of Pakistan as a political and religious idea: Muhammad Iqbal and Syed Abul A'la Maududi. Their arguments provide two divergent examples of the ways in which the permissibility of film in Pakistan has been expressed. This essay is driven by such instances in which the epistemology—and in some cases permissibility—of technological objects is negotiated via their very ontology.     

Technological biology? Things and kinds in synthetic biology

Social scientific and humanistic research on synthetic biology has focused quite narrowly on questions of epistemology and ELSI. I suggest that to understand this discipline in its full scope, researchers must turn to the objects of the field—synthetic biological artifacts—and study them as the objects in the making of a science yet to be made. I consider one fundamentally important question: how should we understand the material products of synthetic biology? Practitioners in the field, employing a consistent technological optic in the study and construction of biological systems, routinely employ the mantra ‘biology is technology’. I explore this categorization. By employing an established definition of technological artifects drawn from the philosophy of technology, I explore the appropriateness of attributing to synthetic biological artifacts the four criteria of materiality, intentional design, functionality, and normativity. I then explore a variety of accounts of natural kinds. I demonstrate that synthetic biological artifacts fit each kind imperfectly, and display a concomitant ontological ‘messiness’. I argue that this classificatory ambivalence is a product of the field’s own nascence, and posit that further work on kinds might help synthetic biology evaluate its existing commitments and practices.     

The Impacts of Global and National Policy on the Management and Conservation of Sacred Groves of India

India is home to thousands of community-protected forests, called sacred groves. Sacred forests or groves are sites that have cultural or spiritual significance to the people who live around them. These areas may also be key reservoirs of biodiversity. In India, most sacred groves are managed by a community group, not by a government agency. They are often private or community land, not formal protected areas or parks. This poses an interesting challenge in terms of future management and possible policy relating to the sacred groves. On the international level, organizations such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and UNESCO have created guidelines for management of sacred sites. On the national level, India’s past Forest Acts and recent Forest Rights Act have relevance to the sacred groves. Local differences in land tenure also affect the groves. Ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 in the states of Meghalaya and Karnataka, India, evaluated the historic and current management and beliefs associated with sacred forests. Cultural change and pressure to use natural resources within the groves is leading to reduction of these forest areas. In the future, a creative combination of policy approaches to conserve groves that respects their spiritual values is recommended.     

The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity

ABSTRACT  In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process called "absorption," which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for "absorption." Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greater focus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have these experiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social process to which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are all important in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religion within the culture-and-cognition school.     

Computational model for perception of objects and motions

Perception of objects and motions in the visual scene is one of the basic problems in the visual system. There exist 'What' and 'Where' pathways in the superior visual cortex, starting from the simple cells in the primary visual cortex. The former is able to perceive objects such as forms, color, and texture, and the latter perceives 'where', for example, velocity and direction of spatial movement of objects. This paper explores brain-like computational architectures of visual information processing. We propose a visual perceptual model and computational mechanism for training the perceptual model. The compu- tational model is a three-layer network. The first layer is the input layer which is used to receive the stimuli from natural environments. The second layer is designed for representing the internal neural information. The connections between the first layer and the second layer, called the receptive fields of neurons, are self-adaptively learned based on principle of sparse neural representation. To this end, we introduce Kullback-Leibler divergence as the measure of independence between neural responses and derive the learning algorithm based on minimizing the cost function. The proposed algorithm is applied to train the basis functions, namely receptive fields, which are localized, oriented, and bandpassed. The resultant receptive fields of neurons in the second layer have the characteristics resembling that of simple cells in the primary visual cortex. Based on these basis functions, we further construct the third layer for perception of what and where in the superior visual cortex. The proposed model is able to perceive objects and their motions with a high accuracy and strong robustness against additive noise. Computer simulation results in the final section show the feasibility of the proposed perceptual model and high efficiency of the learning algorithm.     

Computational model for perception of objects and motions

Perception of objects and motions in the visual scene is one of the basic problems in the visual system. There exist ‘What’ and ‘Where’ pathways in the superior visual cortex, starting from the simple cells in the primary visual cortex. The former is able to perceive objects such as forms, color, and texture, and the latter perceives ‘where’, for example, velocity and direction of spatial movement of objects. This paper explores brain-like computational architectures of visual information processing. We propose a visual perceptual model and computational mechanism for training the perceptual model. The computational model is a three-layer network. The first layer is the input layer which is used to receive the stimuli from natural environments. The second layer is designed for representing the internal neural information. The connections between the first layer and the second layer, called the receptive fields of neurons, are self-adaptively learned based on principle of sparse neural representation. To this end, we introduce Kullback-Leibler divergence as the measure of independence between neural responses and derive the learning algorithm based on minimizing the cost function. The proposed algorithm is applied to train the basis functions, namely receptive fields, which are localized, oriented, and bandpassed. The resultant receptive fields of neurons in the second layer have the characteristics resembling that of simple cells in the primary visual cortex. Based on these basis functions, we further construct the third layer for perception of what and where in the superior visual cortex. The proposed model is able to perceive objects and their motions with a high accuracy and strong robustness against additive noise. Computer simulation results in the final section show the feasibility of the proposed perceptual model and high efficiency of the learning algorithm.     

Atmospheric resonance: sonic motion and the question of religious mediation

Because of its material characteristics, the sonic poses a challenge to the influential paradigm of religion as mediation. This article makes a case for a neo-phenomenological analytic of atmospheres in order to do justice to the sonic in anthropological approaches to religion. Approaching the sonic as atmospheric half-things, I propose a different understanding of religious mediation from the one developed in contexts where images, objects, and technical media dominate. Based on research on the recitation of Urdu devotional poetry among Mauritian Muslims, it is suggested that sonic religion does not function as a stable in-between connecting humans and the divine. Instead, it operates through processes of resonant bundling, intertwining different strands of lived experience, including religious traditions.