Documents found
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221.More information
In many countries, various religious associations are often involved in the provision of social care and services, alongside the State and secular non-governmental organizations. However, these religious groups do not necessarily share the same distributive logics, such as regarding beneficiary selection criteria. For example, among Muslims, there is disagreement about whether non-Muslims can benefit from the zakat, the obligatory religious alms that Muslims must give to the poorest. How are such donations practices framed in modern secular states, and what implications this has on their legitimation? This article addresses these questions by discussing the legislative measures that apply to charities in North India and the various ways in which Indian Muslim philanthropic organizations adapt their distributive practices. By examining how Muslim organizations navigate between the demands of the state and their own principles regarding the use and distribution of donations, this article investigates the power relations between the state and religious groups and demonstrates how the regulation of religion is shaping new forms of mutual aid.
Keywords: Larouche, don, philanthropie, législation, organisations religieuses, musulmans, État, Inde, Larouche, donation, philanthropy, legislation, religious organizations, Muslims, state, India, Larouche, don, filantropía, legislación, organizaciones religiosas, musulmanes, Estado, India
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222.More information
The materiality of the cinematographic image makes film an "art" of the present. Film, institutionalized as narrative (of anti-narrative with the avant-garde), took on the role of representing the past. But when film resists the literary model and explores its own materiality, its images produce a different temporality, one that threatens the linearity and the dialectics of Western history. This article deals with the problematic of time in the work of the Italian film-director Pier Paolo Pasolini. In particular the author discusses how his "going back to mythical past" in fact leads to the production of a temporality where prehistory and history are no longer organized along a horizontal, or a vertical, axis. Myth and history coexist and contaminate each other. At the same time, their coexistence dramatizes the break that keeps them apart. In this regard, Pasolini's work becomes especially interesting in his "Third World" movies (from Oedipus Rex to Notes for an African Orestes, to The Trilogy of Life, etc.) that stage the mediation, accomplished by audio-visual technique, between Western culture and other cultures and that criticize the idea of development and progress, and, consequently, of a universal and linear temporality.
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223.More information
Starting from a stylistic reading of the most celebrated Hindi contemporary novelists, Nirmal Verma, this paper aims at comparing the formal devices of indeterminacy and indefiniteness with what the author himself emphasizes in his philosophical essays as an important basis for Indian traditional culture – the notions of self, time, space, myth. It is then attempted to compare these art reflections and practices with the reading of Indian society, both classical and contemporary, by sociologists, anthropologists and psychoanalysts, in order to find out where subject and subjectivity surface. The central question is the genesis of subjectivity in India and its mapping in the social contemporary space.
Keywords: Montaut, sujet de conscience, éthique de la relation, Nirmal Verma, temps présent, intérieur/extérieur, objectif/séparé, Montaut, Subjectivity, Ethic of Relation, Present Time/Tense, Nirmal Verma, Interior/Exterior, Objective/Separate, Montaut, sujeto de consciencia, ética de la relación, Nirmal Verma, tiempo presente, interior/exterior, objetivo/separado
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224.More information
In his book Homo Hierarchicus, Louis Dumont proposes a model, using the example of India, wherein "status [hierarchical ordering of caste memberships] encompasses power [domination through rights to land]." In later publications when dealing with anthropological method in general, Dumont tends to refer to the Indian case as an illustration of a universal logic: the "encompassment of the contrary." The aim of this paper is to clarify this logic through the discussion of two possible alternatives. In the first instance, the Indian case does not lead to any comparison; rather, through historical processes, pollution and prohibition beliefs in the religious sphere gained such importance that the influence of economic and political domination on the social organization of differences was reduced. In the second instance, the Indian case does provide a comparative model: here, however, this paper argues that a set of concepts is still missing—concepts in which "status" is seen as the social organization of membership. (In any society, status inevitably creates a level of self-contradiction but manages to include it; in other words, encompassment is the inclusion of a contrary which stems out and is constitutive of the encompassing term.) This two-level model seems to invite general comparison. However, the current view must then be modified on three points: 1) the analysis of the reversal of practices and superiority within a given society (Part I of the discussion, published in this issue, contrasts Dumont’s, Needham’s and Dupuy’s models); 2) the analysis of impurity in India and its relation to power, on the points where Dumont himself admits that his conclusion is unsatisfactory (Part II discusses the Indian case on new grounds but remains within the limits of the ethnography presented in Homo Hierarchicus); 3) the evolution of Dumont’s models and formal vocabulary in his various publications: the rather strange use of "contrary" or "contradiction" and the even stranger parallel Dumont draws between the logic of Indian society and the myth of Adam and Eve. (This discussion, presented in the Annexe, concludes the elaboration of the notion of "hierarchical reversal" as an anthropological tool useful in the analysis of any society.)
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225.More information
Based on a multi-site anthropological survey (France, Switzerland and India) and mixing semi-directive interviews and participant observation, this article immerses in the universe of yoga practitioners who go on “yoga holidays” or to ashrams. Yoga tourism is investigated starting from the motivations to expose some characteristics in terms of location, temporality, and activities, and then looks at the consequences of these journeys on life paths. Moving from the macro-social to the micro-social scale, ashram retreats often mark a passage to become fully engaged in a practice, or even change one’s life.
Keywords: tourism, yoga, wellness, ashram, heterotopia., tourisme, bien-être, yoga, ashram, hétérotopie
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226.More information
The South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC) was founded in 1985 for promoting a somewhat unique model of regionalisation. On the one hand, SAARC sought to foster dialogue between countries which seemed enmeshed in serious political strife, the roots of which lay in two hundred years of colonialism. On the other hand, the members consciously wished to exclude from SAARC'S jurisdiction these political issues. Rather, their aim was to develop linkages in the realm of culture, education and economies which could moderate these political differences without directly confronting them. Unfortunately, this approach did not succeed in fortifying either economic or political linkages between the member states, and resulted increasingly in a "sAARC-pessimism". The nineties however, have dramatically changed the course of SAARC. The end of the Cold War and the redefinition of state-society relations within each of the member states seem to have engendered a structural necessity for SAARC; moreover, in keeping with the contemporary global tendency to ascribe a greater primacy to economies over politics, the political differences between SAARC members seem to be gradually giving way to a more active and effective SAARC. However, this new SAARC-optimism-premised solely on the enthusiasm of economic actors, is also premature. In other words, whether economic interests can provide the necessary cementing factor to actually pull together a regional force in South Asia remains an open question.
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227.More information
ABSTRACTThis paper presents pollen data from the Nilgiri hills in South-West India subjected to the summer monsoon climatic regime. The sequence comes from a new 9-m core (A2) collected in one of the Sandynallah swamps (11°26'N, 76°38'E) at an elevation of 2200 m. Forteen conventional radiocarbon dates have been obtained from nine bulk samples. They clearly indicate that the lower part was deposited during the last glacial period and confirm previous information from this area. The oldest dates, 27,000 to 35,000 yr BP, measured at the Laboratoire souterrain de Modane (France), present consistent results. The lower part of the pollen sequence dates from the last glacial period (isotopic stage 3) before the last glacial maximum. The upper three metres were deposited during the last 5000 years. The record of the lower Holocene is apparently missing. Pollen analysis was undertaken on 65 samples.The pollen flora appears to be strongly dominated by grasses and swamp plants accounting for more than 80 % of the total counts. High counts were done which allow to recognize 95 distinct taxa among which 55 are attributed to tree forest elements. The glacial period is dominated by C4 grasses associated with a significant signal of Artemisia and Apiaceae. During the late Holocene a sharp peak of Michelia, a semi-deciduous tree of the montane forest among the Magnoliaceae is dated at around 3800 yr BP. Its association with other forest components such as Olea, Glochidion. Ilex and Rapanea favour the interpretation that a mosaic of grassland and forest existed in the Nilgiri hills since a few thousand years, well before human impact on forest.