Versatile Capacities and Missed Opportunities. A Case Study on Religious Minority Communities’ Roles in Urban Resilience Amidst COVID-19 in Helsinki, Finland

The Kalasha are a religious, ethnic, and linguistic minority community in Pakistan. They are indigenous people living in remote valleys of the Hindu Kush Mountains in northern Pakistan, neighboring Afghanistan. The Kalasha are pastoral, as well as agricultural people to some extent, although they are increasingly facing pressures from globalization and social change, which may be influencing youth and community development. Their traditional world view dichotomizes and emphasizes on the division of the pure (Onjeshta) and the impure (Pragata). There remains a scarcity of literature on mental health and resilience of indigenous communities in South Asia and Pakistan generally, and the polytheistic Kalasha community specifically. Thus, the current study was conducted with the aim to explore the cultural protective factors (resilience) of the Kalasha youth (adolescents and emerging adults) and to explore their perceived etiological understandings and preferred interventions for mental health support systems. The theoretical framework of Bronfenbrenner's (1, 2) ecological systems model was used. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was conducted, considering the advantage of its idiographic approach and the “double hermeneutic” analytic process. This methodology was consistent with the aim to understand and make sense of mental health and resilience from the Kalasha indigenous perspective. A total of 12 in-depth interviews were conducted with adolescents and emerging adults (5 males, 7 females), along with ethnographic observations. The analysis revealed 3 superordinate themes of mental health perceptions and interventions, each with more specific emergent themes: (1) Psychological Resilience/Cultural Protective Factors Buffering Against Mental Health Problems (Intra-Communal Bonding & Sharing; Kalasha Festivals & Traditions; Purity Concept; Behavioral Practice of Happiness and Cognitive Patterns); (2) Perceived Causes of Mental Health Issues (Biological & Psychosocial; Supernatural & Spiritual; Environmental); and (3) Preferred Interventions [Shamanic Treatment; Ta'awiz (Amulets); Communal Sharing & Problem Solving; Medical Treatment; Herbal Methods]. The overall findings point to the need for developing culturally-sensitive and indigenous measures and therapeutic interventions. The findings highlighted the Kalasha cultural practices which may promote resilience. The findings also call for indigenous sources of knowledge to be considered when collaboratively designing public health programs.

Objective: Education is the system of instruction designed to provide individuals with the tools they need to take part in day-to-day activities. It rejects ignorance and instils moral values in individuals. The functioning of the education sector is dependent upon the availability of different resources, most notably financial resources. Education funding comes from a variety of sources, including government spending, fees, educational loans by nationalized banks, cooperative societies, and others. Among these, educational loans have been identified as an alternative method of financing education. This study attempts to examine the Arivu loan Scheme's education loans for religious minorities. ABCD analysis was performed to determine its advantages, benefits, constraints, and disadvantages. Methodology: This study made use of secondary sources in order to have comprehensive evidence-based research on educational loan under the Arivu scheme. The semi-systematic review is carried out using various government publications and articles from newspapers, Google Scholar, Srinivas publications, Research Gate, SSRN, and other sources. Findings: A thorough examination revealed that in India religious minorities face challenges in the areas of social status, economic expansion, and higher education opportunities. Students from religious minority communities can pursue professional courses through the Arivu loan Scheme. This scheme benefited a large number of religious minority students and also found that Pupils are adversely affected because the government has ceased releasing funds for Arivu loan scheme during the Covid-19 pandemic. Practical Implications: This research will inform students about the state government-sponsored Arivu Educational Loan under KMDC, which helps students from religious minorities pursue higher education. It will also assist government officials in learning more about the funds allotted by the government and the total number of students in Dakshina Kannada who benefited from the Arivu educational loan scheme, which improves minorities' educational standing. Originality/ value: As a secondary data-driven study, it may provide an overall perspective on Arivu Educational Loans under KMDC. This Arivu loan will improve the status of the religious minority community, but the concept of the Arivu education loan by KMDC can also be better understood by conducting a primary survey, which serves as the study's limitation. Paper type: Case study

When designing, implementing and assessing public policies, and, in particular, those affecting the public management of religious diversity, it is increasingly common to include ethnographic approaches from the field of social anthropology and the broader social sciences. Ethnographic practice can provide more representative and accurate perspectives on the actors, settings, and social phenomena subject to regulation. This article presents the findings of an ethnographic study on two minority religious communities, conducted by a team of anthropologists within the framework of a broader research project on religious freedom in Spain, led by jurists. Based on two case studies—the teaching of Evangelical religion in state schools and Islamic burial practices—our study analyses the implications of the varying degrees of public recognition, as well as how this recognition actually manifests in the everyday practice of religious groups within a context of religious diversity. The study also examines the barriers to the full participation of these communities in public institutions and civil society, as well as the discourses, strategies, and practices they develop to overcome these challenges.

In contemporary Europe, where the hegemony of modern secular governance remains largely uncontested, how do minority religious communities – especially Muslims – negotiate the tension between religious duty and forms of secularised civic belonging? This contribution takes Twelver Shi’a Muslim activism in Europe as a starting place to interrogate the encounter between Islamic and secular values. In particular, I examine the emergence of what I call the discourse of ‘Shi’a rights’, through which Shi’a Muslims are seeking to gain minority recognition within the European context. Combining elements of Shi’a Islamic ethics with the language of secular humanitarianism, the discourse of ‘Shi’a rights’ is emancipatory and outward-facing while simultaneously being exclusionary and particularistic in the way it promotes specific understandings of what it means to be ‘Shi’a’. Crucially, I argue that this ambivalent nature of ‘Shi’a rights’ is a product of the encounter with secular liberal governance, especially the secular ideal of religious equality. Rather than representing a natural division between religion and society, contemporary secularism cultivates particular ethical attachments that ultimately serve to problematise the status of religious minorities. A focus on ‘Shi’a rights’ in Europe thus serves to illuminate the fractures and fissures that contemporary secular discourse seeks to hide.

Utilising an ecological framework, this study presents a meta-analysis of four sub-studies investigating the socialisation experiences of young people affiliated with a religious minority community. More precisely, it is a study of how this particular socialisation context affects the individual's construction of a personal value system and religious identity and how the developing person interacts with his/her environment. Seventh-day Adventism in Finland is the context for this case study. The research adopts an educational perspective on religious socialisation, placing a special emphasis on youth as the phase during which values and memberships are negotiated and constructed with increasing independence from parental values and opinions. The mixed-method study includes both quantitative and qualitative data sets (3 surveys: n=106 young adults, n=100 teenagers, n=55 parents; and 2 sets of interviews: n=10 young adults and n=10 teenagers).Results indicate that the religious community has an important influence on these young people's religious socialisation, both in terms of commitment to denominational values and lifestyle and in providing a religious identity and anchoring them in the social network of the denomination. Furthermore, the network of the religious community generates important social resources (or social capital) for both the youth and their families, with tangible as well as intangible benefits and bridging and bonding effects. However, the study also illustrates the sometimes difficult negotiations that young people face as teenagers in negotiating between differentiation and belonging, when there is tension between the values of a minority group and those of the larger society and one wants to — and does — belong to both. It also demonstrates the many different ways one can choose and yet find a personally meaningful way of being an Adventist.

On 11 March 2020, the Danish Prime Minister announced a forthcoming lockdown of Danish society due to the COVID-19 pandemic and shut down all public institutions, including the national church. Instructions for the lockdown of religious minority communities were issued a week later. The total lockdown of the Danish religious landscape is both historically unprecedented and radical in a global context, and it raises questions about mediatized religion and religion–state relations in a postsecular society. Building on quantitative and qualitative data collected during the lockdown and the gradual opening of society in 2020, this article examines the media usage of the Danish national church and of the 28 recognized Muslim communities. It reevaluates Heidi A. Campbell’s ‘religious-social shaping approach to technology’ by examining how religious communities sought to establish continuity between their offline and online practices to maintain authority and community cohesion. We conclude (1) that the willingness of religious communities to cooperate with authorities was high, (2) that the crisis affected religious communities’ organizational framework and societal position, and (3) that Campbell’s approach needs to pay further attention to the conflict-producing aspects of negotiations on digitalized rituals, the importance of transnationalism, and differences between minority and majority religion.

INTRODUCTION The last three decades of the twentieth century witnessed a fundamental shift in Islamic politics in Malaysia. Islamic resurgence throughout society produced a discernible response at the level of the state directed towards conscious and concerted Islamization through the organs of state. This went hand in hand with a power struggle between the main Muslim political actors in Malaysia. This intra-Muslim struggle concerning the shape of Islamization in Malaysia has had a series of dramatic knock-on effects on religious minority communities in that country. In this chapter the impact of Islamization in Malaysia, with particular reference to religious minorities will be considered. The various themes addressed will be seen through the eyes of the minorities, as it were. PERCEPTIONS OF ISLAMIZATION THROUGH NON-MUSLIM EYES What are the hallmarks of Malaysian Islamization according to the perception of the religious minorities? Several features are key. Demographics Recent decades have witnessed verifiable demographic changes in Malaysia which are significant to the Islamization process from the perspective of the religious minorities. The national census taken in the year 2000 showed that the Muslim proportion of Malaysia's population had increased from 58.6 per cent to 60.4 per cent over a ten-year period. The Muslim percentage had been counted as 53 per cent according to the 1980 census, so there had been a rise of 7 per cent in 20 years. In 2000 figures for other religions stood at 19.2 per cent for Buddhism, a significant reduction from the 28 per cent recorded in the census of 1970; 9.1 per cent for Christianity, up from 6.4 per cent in 1980; and 6.3 per cent for Hinduism, down from 7 per cent in 1980. Though conversion to Islam accounted for some of this change, a greater cause was the changing ethnic composition of Malaysia's population. The 2000 census recorded that Bumiputera — Malays and indigenous tribes in Sarawak and Sabah — constituted 65.1 per cent of the population, up by 4.5 per cent in 10 years, while Chinese represented 26 per cent, down from 28.1 per cent in 1990 and 37 per cent in 1957. As the vast majority of the Bumiputera are Muslim, and the majority of the Chinese are non-Muslims, especially Buddhists, such changes in ethnic composition of the population had a telling effect on the religious mosaic of Malaysia.

Within the recently launched SPICE project, citizen curation methods and tools are being co-designed through five museum case studies in Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Israel. In each case study a museum is working with partner groups and organisations to introduce tools and methods that support citizen curation for visitor groups that tend to be underrepresented in cultural engage- ment, including people living with disability, older people, asylum seekers and minority religious communities.

In Serbia, minority religious communities are usually seen from one type of minority identity – ethnic one. Thus, the lack of research still exists when it comes to the religious identity of minority communities and the complex relationship between ethnic and religious identity. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork among neo-Protestant Romanians in Vojvodina, in this paper I am analyzing ethnic and religious identity of minority communities as double minorities. Starting from the hypothesis that boundaries of ethnic and religious identity are not predefined and static, I analyze narratives collected in four neo-Protestant communities. The case study of Romanian neo-Protestants in this paper indicates what is the role of conversion in ethnic and religious minority communities, but also how religious identity becomes more important in supra-national religious groups.

This chapter examines the significance of Christianity in the public sphere through a case study of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960)—one important Japanese Protestant leader—whose vision and activities had a formative influence and social impact during the first half of the twentieth century. As a prolific author, social reformer, evangelist, and public speaker, his influence extended far beyond the minority religious community. Under Kagawa’s leadership, counterpublics were forged and, on occasion, representatives of this minority tradition—so often regarded as peripheral to mainstream Japanese society—were also given a role to play in the dominant public sphere. This study highlights Kagawa’s distinctive contributions through a review of his activities in the changing political environments of Taishō democracy and wartime Japan.

The statutory prohibition against ritual slaughter, which does not stun the animal prior to slaughter, as required in most Western nations, poses a significant challenge for the international right to freedom of religion or belief in European nation-states. This prohibition is important not only in Europe, or because of the prohibition itself, but because it implicates the legal status of two minority religious communities in these nation-states, those of Judaism and Islam. Some animal rights advocates have objected to ritual slaughter without stunning because, in their view, it causes needless suffering by the animal, and they have been successful in getting their views enacted into law in a number of European countries. Indeed, some countries prohibit ritual slaughtering altogether, as we shall discuss below.This paper argues that the right to freedom of religion or belief requires nation-states to respect the rights of religious minorities that engage in ritual slaughter, even if they recognize the importance of avoiding unnecessary suffering of animals. Following a review of the legal status of animals in rights discourse generally, we will show why the prohibition of ritual slaughter needlessly results in discrimination against religious minorities, and why it is important that nation-states attempting to reduce animal suffering more clearly specify realistic alternatives for avoiding such suffering that are compatible with current religious mandates about animal slaughter. We will also consider whether the alternative of importing kosher orhalalmeat in place of ritual slaughtering, proposed by some nation-states as a method of alleviating the harm to religious minorities, is an effective and fair alternative.

ABSTRACTWithin the international system, small states are expected to act a certain way vis-à-vis threats, regardless of whether the threats are objective or subjective. Does the same hold true for small non-state actors within a state? Can we expect size to be so significant as to determine how small non-states actors act? This article engages these questions by looking at four religious minority communities in Latvia and Lithuania: Hare Krishnas, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims. All four groups are demographically small and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, all four have viewed their values and identities as threatened (though, to differing extents) by the governments, local populations, and societal organizations. Through a series of interviews, this article looks at these relations through the eyes of representatives from these four religious communities. Though all four communities see insecurity as a factor in their relations with others, the evidence suggests that size is less of a causal variable than expected.

This chapter argues that research in the field of religious minorities needs to move away from the perspective of the majority society in favour of a civil society approach in which the interests of the religious minorities are built into the research design. The younger generation is under pressure not only to assimilate the values of the majority culture when it comes to professional development, but also to maintain the family's traditional—that is, religious—values. Integrating the perspectives of the religious minority communities into the research design itself permits markedly more nuanced findings, offering a more in-depth and accurate picture of the new ecology of religion.

El artículo propone un análisis de la comprensiónque tienen las mujeres integrantes de comunidades religiosas minoritarias presentes en contextos urbanos aragoneses (musulmana, evangélica y ortodoxa) acerca de la mediación de dicha pertenencia y de su condición femenina, en sus dinámicas de visibilidad y de socialidad. Para ello, desde una perspectiva etnometodológica, se ha realizado un análisis del discurso obtenido a partir de entrevistas enprofundidad a mujeres pertenecientes a estas denominaciones religiosas minoritarias. Estas mujeres comparten una comprensión desu visibilidad marcada por una múltiple otredad: la que se derivade su religión, la de foraneidad que se asocia a la misma y la femenina.Al mismo tiempo, existe una dualidad emocional y funcional dela comunidad religiosa como mediación de las dinámicas de socialidad.Visibilidad y socialidad se articulan en la mediación que implicala condición femenina y la pertenencia religiosa de estas mujeres.

This article re-evaluates the experiences of and perspectives towards religious minority communities in early modern London through a consideration of minority homes and the negotiation of private space. It considers the juxtaposition between the necessity of observing ‘private religion’ for those whose outward practice was restricted and the distrust of nonconforming acts which took place behind closed doors. It argues that the concern with regulating ‘appropriate behaviour’ in private spaces — in this instance, religious practice within the home — prompted a widespread desire to locate the streets and neighbourhoods where potentially subversive religious practices were taking place. Furthermore, the acknowledgment that certain parishes were inhabited by French, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant Nonconformist communities — groups that were by definition dislocated from the religious and administrative functions of the parish — acted to shape the means by which public and private spaces of early modern London were experienced.