Download or read book Spirits Selves and Subjectivity in a Japanese New Religion written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is an examination of the beliefs and practices of Sukyo Mahikari; how this movement, as a product of Japanese culture, shares a normative discourse with Japanese society; and an examination of how culture constructs mind/belief and an examination of ethnopsychological theories of self and spirit possession.
Download or read book Spirits Selves and Subjectivity in a Japanese New Religion written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The State Bearing Gifts written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Japanese higher education as a case study, author Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of 'exchange dramatics' among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of 'value, ' 'exchange, ' and 'role performance' by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the 'gift, ' McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of 'social contract' for understanding state-society relations. Written to be read as both a political and philosophical commentary and anthropological investigation, this work has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly regarding the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitima
Download or read book Handbook of East Asian New Religious Movements written by Lukas Pokorny and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * This Handbook has won the ICAS Edited Volume Accolade 2019. Brill warmly congratulates editors Lukas Pokorny and Franz Winter and their authors with this award. * A vibrant cauldron of new religious developments, East Asia (China/Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam) presents a fascinating arena of related research for scholars across disciplines. Edited by Lukas Pokorny and Franz Winter, the Handbook of East Asian New Religious Movements provides the first comprehensive and reliable guide to explore the vast East Asian new religious panorama. Penned by leading scholars in the field, the assembled contributions render the Handbook an invaluable resource for those interested in the crucial new religious actors and trajectories of the region.
Download or read book Interpreting Japan written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an experienced teacher and scholar, this book offers university students a handy "how to" guide for interpreting Japanese society and conducting their own research. Stressing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach, Brian McVeigh lays out practical and understandable research approaches in a systematic fashion to demonstrate how, with the right conceptual tools and enough bibliographical sources, Japanese society can be productively analyzed from a distance. In concise chapters, these approaches are applied to a whole range of topics: from the aesthetics of street culture; the philosophical import of sci-fi anime; how the state distributes wealth; welfare policies; the impact of official policies on gender relations; updated spiritual traditions; why manners are so important; kinship structures; corporate culture; class; schooling; self-presentation; visual culture; to the subtleties of Japanese grammar. Examples from popular culture, daily life, and historical events are used to illustrate and highlight the color, dynamism, and diversity of Japanese society. Designed for both beginning and more advanced students, this book is intended not just for Japanese studies but for cross-cultural comparison and to demonstrate how social scientists craft their scholarship.
Download or read book Japanese Religions and Globalization written by Ugo Dessì and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the variety of ways through which Japanese religions (Buddhism, Shintō, and new religious movements) contribute to the dynamics of accelerated globalization in recent decades. It looks at how Japanese religions provide material to cultural global flows, thus acting as carriers of globalization, and how they respond to these flows by shaping new glocal identities. The book highlights how, paradoxically, these processes of religious hybridization may be closely intertwined with the promotion of cultural chauvinism. It shows how on the one hand religion in Japan is engaged in border negotiation with global subsystems such as politics, secular education, and science, and how on the other hand, it tries to find new legitimation by addressing pressing global problems such as war, the environmental crisis, and economic disparities left unsolved by the dominant subsystems. A significant contribution to advancing an understanding of modern Japanese religious life, this book is of interest to academics working in the fields of Japanese Studies, Asian history and religion and the sociology of religion.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements written by George D. Chryssides and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements covers key themes such as charismatic leadership, conversion and brainwashing, prophecy and millennialism, violence and suicide, gender and sexuality, legal issues, and the portrayal of New Religious Movements by the media and anti-cult organisations. Several categories of new religions receive special attention, including African new religions, Japanese new religions, Mormons, and UFO religions. This guide to New Religious Movements and their critical study brings together 29 world-class international scholars, and serves as a resource to students and researchers. The volume highlights the current state of academic study in the field, and explores areas in which future research might develop. Clearly and accessibly organised to help users quickly locate key information and analysis, the book includes an A to Z of key terms, extensive guides to further resources, a comprehensive bibliography, and a timeline of major developments in the field such as the emergence of new groups, publications, legal decisions, and historical events.
Download or read book Nationalisms of Japan written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004-10-26 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fresh and original analysis, Brian J. McVeigh confronts both the demonizers and apologists of Japan. He argues persuasively that far from being unique, Japanese nationalism becomes demystified once 'management' and 'mysticism'—the same processes and practices that operate in other national states—are taken into account. Stripping away Orientalist-inspired misconceptions, the author stresses the variety and relative intensity of nationalisms, ranging from economic, ethnic, and educational to cultural, gendered, and religious. He moves beyond state-centered ideologies to explore the linkages between official and popular nationalisms and the complex interplay of ethnocultural, ethnopolitical, and ethnoracial forms of identity. The ambiguity and everydayness of nationalism, McVeigh contends, explain its enduring power. He concludes that modern Japan is imbued with a deeply rooted legacy of 'renovationism' or 'reform nationalism' that accounts for its streamlined state structures, guarded economic nationalism, and highly scrutinized relationship with the rest of the world. Highlighting the pluralism of identity among Japanese, this book will be an invaluable corrective to recent works that glibly proclaim the emergence of 'globalization,' 'internationalization,' and 'convergence.'
Download or read book Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements written by Peter Clarke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential companion to both research and scholarship upon which undergraduates, postgraduates, lecturers and researchers can all be expected to draw.
Download or read book Establishing the Revolutionary written by Birgit Staemmler and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2011 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New religions in Japan claim millions of members and simultaneously provoke criticism and fulfil social functions. This publication serves as a handbook about these new religions on the basis of recent research, written by an international range of scholarly experts.
Download or read book How Religion Evolved written by Brian McVeigh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did many religious leaders—Moses, Old Testament prophets, Zoroaster—claim they heard divine voices? Why do ancient civilizations exhibit key similarities, e.g., the "living dead" (treating the dead as if they were still alive); "speaking idols" (care and feeding of effigies); monumental mortuary architecture and "houses of gods" (pyramids, ziggurats, temples)? How do we explain strange behaviour such as spirit possession, speaking in tongues, channelling, hypnosis, and schizophrenic hallucinations? Are these lingering vestiges of an older mentality? Brian J. McVeigh answers these riddles by updating "bicameralism." First proposed by the psychologist Julian Jaynes, this theory postulates that an earlier mentality existed: a "human" (the brain's left hemisphere) heard voices of "gods" or "ancestors" (the brain's right hemisphere). Therefore, ancient religious texts reporting divine voices were recounting of audio-visual hallucinations—a method of social control when early populations expanded. As growing political economic complexity destabilized god-governed states in the late second millennium BCE, divine voices became inadequate. Eventually, humans had to culturally acquire new cognitive skills (modern religions) to accommodate increasing social pressures: selves replaced the gods and history witnessed an "inward turn." This psychological interiorization of spiritual experience laid the foundations for the world's great religions and philosophies that arose in India, China, Greece, and the Middle East in the middle of the first millennium BCE.
Download or read book Ritual Practice in Modern Japan written by Satsuki Kawano and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2005-03-31 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National surveys indicate that most Japanese, while professing no religious commitment, frequently perform rituals: They regularly tend their family home altars, look after family graves, participate in neighborhood festivals, and visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Are these rituals mere formalities? Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Kamakura city near Tokyo, Satsuki Kawano examines the power of ritual and its relevance for modern urbanites. She reveals the indebtedness of ritual to forms that create an elevated context and infuse the mundane with a sense of moral order. By employing acts and environments common to everyday life, Kawano argues, ritual evokes morally positive values such as purity, gratitude, respect, and indebtedness. Rather than objectify morality in a sacred text or religious doctrine, ritual embodies and emplaces a sense of what it means to be a good person and creates moments of personal significance and engagement. In Kamakura, belief is therefore a consequence and not a prerequisite of ritual engagement. Ritual Practice in Modern Japan effectively challenges the widespread assumption that ritual in non-Western societies has little moral significance and that, with modernization, "traditional" practices inevitably disappear. This is a book that will interest scholars and students of cultural anthropology, ritual studies, and Japanese studies.
Download or read book A Psychohistory of Metaphors written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? Brian J. McVeigh answers this question in A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries by exploring “meta-framing:” our ever-increasing capability to “step back” from the environment, search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar, and generate “as if” forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision. This book demonstrates how analogizing and abstracting have altered spatio-visual perceptions, expanding our introspective capabilities and allowing us to adapt to changing social circumstances.
Download or read book Asian American Religious Cultures 2 volumes written by Jonathan H. X. Lee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 1100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A resource ideal for students as well as general readers, this two-volume encyclopedia examines the diversity of the Asian American and Pacific Islander spiritual experience. Despite constituting a fairly small proportion of the U.S. population—roughly 5 percent—Asian Americans are a widely diverse group with equally heterogeneous religious beliefs and traditions. This encyclopedia provides a single source for authoritative information on the Asian American and Pacific Islander religious experience, addressing South Asian Americans, such as Indian Americans and Pakistani Americans; East Asian Americans, including Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Korean Americans; and Southeast Asian Americans, whose ethnicities include Filipino Americans, Thai Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. Pacific Islanders include Hawaiians, Samoans, Marshallese, Tongan, and Chamorro. The coverage includes not only traditional eastern belief systems and traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism as well as Micronesian and Polynesian religious traditions in the United States, but also the culture and religious rituals of Asian American Christians.
Download or read book The Self Healing Mind written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary psychology explains why some mental illnesses developed, but to answer questions about how to improve our mental well-being in the face of these challenges--how the mind works to heal itself-we should look to more recent changes in mentality. In The Self-Healing Mind, mental health counsellor and anthropologist Brian J. McVeigh postulates that around 1000 BCE, population expansion and social complexity forced people to learn "conscious interiority"--a package of cognitive capabilities that culturally upgraded mentality. He argues that the mental processes that help us get through the day are the same ones that can heal our psyches. Adopting a common factors and positive psychology perspective, McVeigh enumerates and defines these active ingredients of the self-healing mind: mental space, introception, self-observing and observed, self-narratization, excerption, consilience, concentration, suppression, self-authorization, self-autonomy, and self-reflexivity. McVeigh shows how these capabilities underlie the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic techniques and interventions. Though meta-framing effects of psyche's recuperative properties correct distorted cognition and grant us remarkable adaptive abilities, they sometimes spiral out of control, resulting in runaway consciousness and certain mental disorders. This book also addresses how maladaptive processes snowball and come to need restraint themselves. With insights from counseling, psychotherapy, anthropology, and history, The Self-Healing Mind will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and anyone interested in neurocultural plasticity and how therapeutically-directed consciousness repairs the mind.
Download or read book The Other Psychology of Julian Jaynes written by Brian J. McVeigh and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his provocative but critically acclaimed theory about the origin of introspectable mentality, Julian Jaynes argued that until the late second millennium people possessed a different psychology: a "two-chambered" (bicameral) neurocultural arrangement in which a commanding "god" guided, admonished, and ordered about a listening "mortal" via voices, visions, and visitations. Out of the cauldron of civilizational collapse and chaos, an adaptive self-reflexive consciousness emerged better suited to the pressures of larger, more complex sociopolitical systems. Though often described as boldly iconoclastic and far ahead of it time, Jaynes's thinking actually resonates with a "second" or "other" psychological tradition that explores the cultural-historical evolution of psyche. Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Jaynes, points out the blind spots of mainstream, establishment psychology by providing empirical support for Jaynes's ideas on sociohistorical shifts in cognition. He argues that from around 3500 to 1000 BCE the archaeological and historical record reveals features of hallucinatory super-religiosity in every known civilization. As social pressures eroded the god-centered authority of bicamerality, an upgraded psychology of interiorized self-awareness arose during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. A key explanatory component of Jaynes's theorizing was how metaphors constructed a mental landscape populated with "I's" and "me's" that replaced a declining worldview dominated by gods, ancestors, and spirits. McVeigh statistically substantiates how linguo-conceptual changes reflected psychohistorical developments; because supernatural entities functioned in place of our inner selves, vocabularies for psychological terms were strikingly limited in ancient languages. McVeigh also demonstrates the surprising ubiquity of "hearing voices" in modern times, contending that hallucinations are bicameral vestiges and that mental imagery - a controllable, semi-hallucinatory experience - is the successor to the divine hallucinations that once held societies together. This thought-provoking work will appeal to anyone interested in the transformative power of metaphors, the development of mental lexicons, and the adaptive role of hallucinations.
Download or read book Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village written by D. P. Martinez and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety of issues currently at the fore in the anthropology of Japan: the construction of identity, both for a place and its people; the importance of ritual in a country that describes itself as nonreligious; and the relationship between men and women in a society where gender divisions are still very much in place. Kuzaki is, for the anthropologist, both a microcosm of modernity and an attempt to bring the past into the present. But it must also be understood as a place all of its own. In the 1980s it was one of the few villages where female divers (ama) still collected abalone and other shellfish and where some of its inhabitants continued to make a living as fishermen. Kuzaki was also a kambe, or sacred guild, of Ise Shrine, the most important Shinto shrine in modern Japan—home to Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Kuzaki’s rituals affirmed a national identity in an era when attitudes to modernity and Japaneseness were being challenged by globalization. Martinez enhances her fascinating ethnographic description of a single diving village with a critique of the way in which the anthropology of Japan has developed. The result is a sophisticated investigation by a senior scholar of Japanese studies that, while firmly grounded in empirical data, calls on anthropological theory to construct another means of understanding Japan—both as a society in which the collective is important and as a place where individual ambitions and desires can be expressed.
