non-Western Systems Research Articles

Snapshot of a quantized body: Learning from the Daoist body

In Snapshots from Home, Karin Fierke calls for radically repositioning the apparatus through which we interpret the world, inviting us to bridge the seemingly insurmountable chasm between quantum science and ancient Asian thought and practice to think about a more Global International Relations. Specifically, we are daringly tasked to consider how the ‘weird’ mathematics of quantum physics and science is paralleled by deeply relational ancient non-Western systems of knowledge. Fierke’s starting point is Bohr’s wholistic quantum physics but her main interest and focus is a deep reflection on its broad similarities with Buddhism, Hinduism and Daoism. Considering the parallels Fierke draws between the relational frames of quantum science and Daoism in the context of a raving pandemic, I feel challenged to bring the body into the conversation. How does Fierke’s apparatus prompt us to think and act ethically in relation to the emerging postgenomic body arising from recent advances in microbiology including quantum microbiology ? It is a permeable body that is deeply quantum entangled in and with the natural and social-cultural environment and/or context. What can we learn from the relational strategies and actions attached to the Daoist body to thinking about the contemporary quantized bodies and the governance of their health?

Tlacoqualli in Monequi "The Center Good"

Tlacoqualli in Monequi "The Center Good"

Coloniality and Identity in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007)

ABSTRACT Africa in general and South Africa in particular remain entangled in colonial power matrices which some decolonial writers have described as “coloniality.” Coloniality refers to the perpetuation of quasi-colonial relations between the West and former colonized territories long after the official end of colonialism. Decoloniality is a theoretical paradigm that seeks to identify and critique legacies of colonialism that continue to influence the lived experiences of those who were formerly colonized. The production of knowledge and systems of knowing in former colonized territories remain trapped in erstwhile-colonial power structures in the same way that neocolonial global relations continue to influence postcolonial economies and livelihoods. Thus, coloniality encompasses the continued marginalization of non-Western peoples, cultures and knowledge systems. In this article, we read Kopano Matlwa’s debut novel Coconut, as a decolonial text that highlights the persistence of colonial matrices of power in the day to day lives of black South Africans. The novel deploys the metaphor of “coconut” to interrogate coloniality of being among young South Africans. We are particularly interested in the complexities and contradictions of negotiating new cultural identities in the context of a post-apartheid society that “breathes” coloniality.

First Nations Healing: From Traditional Medicine to Experimental Ethnopharmacology

Abstract Focusing on First Nations traditional medicine, we investigated whether traditional knowledge of medicinal plants can be validated by modern scientific methods of molecular and cellular pharmacology and whether this information is of value for improving current therapy options. Based on two projects on medicinal plants of the Gwich’in – a First Nations group on the Canadian North West Coast – we found that extracts from several plants traditionally used medically were able to kill tumor cells, including otherwise multidrug-resistant cells. Investigating medicinal plants from Indigenous communities raises questions about ownership, appropriation, and commercial use. At the same time, because of the intricacies of patent law, publishing scientific investigations on medicinal herbs represents an effective way to prevent biopiracy. Therefore, research cooperation between industrialized and developing countries, and between Western and non-Western knowledge systems will facilitate ethically sound ethnopharmacological research and merge a diversity of competencies and knowledges.

Guidebook to a Foreign Land

Comparative law, a critic might point out, is a foreign country. A kind of “land that time forgot,” comparative law belongs to a more innocent time before cheap air travel and foreign legal qualifications demystified transnational legal practice for many lawyers.1 Those inhabiting this isolated kingdom are oddly monocultural, and their earnest fascination with the foreign seems as outdated as their fixation with “comparison,” a method that was last modish in the nineteenth century.2 Professor Gunter Frankenberg’s important new book, Comparative Law as Critique,3 is a critical guidebook to this charming but parochial land. Written by a long-time observer of comparative law, the book maps mainstream discourses in comparative legal scholarship, subjecting them to the same Orientalizing gaze that comparative law has traditionally cast on non-Western legal systems. The book also provides a thought-provoking meta-discussion on critical scholarship,4 a topical section on Muslim veiling,5 and essays on human rights and access to justice.

THE COMMON-LAW AUTHORS ON CONTRACTUAL CAPACITY IN PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL LAW

Contractual capacity in private international law concerns the law applicable to the competence of a natural person to create rights and duties by concluding a contract with another (natural or juristic) person or persons. Sometimes it is implied that contractual capacity is no longer such an important issue in private international law due to, for instance, the emancipation of married women. However, it is suggested that this development indeed increases the relevance of the topic, as today a husband’s contractual capacity could be dependent on the consent of his spouse, while a century ago this was invariably the position only in respect of the wife’s contractual capacity. In any event, there may be many non-Western legal systems where a married women’s contractual capacity remains limited. In respect of the age of majority, it is true that many legal systems now accept 18 years as the legal age. Nevertheless, a substantial minority of legal systems adhere to ages above or below. Contractual capacity may also be affected by mental illness, curatorship (for instance, in the case of prodigality and insolvency) or emancipation. It is therefore clear that contractual capacity continues to play an important role in private international law.Nonetheless, the law in this regard is far from clear in South Africa. There is authority in case law for the lex rei sitae or the lex situs (the law of the country where the property is situated) to govern capacity in contracts involving immovable property. In respect of other contracts, the courts have applied the lex domicilii (the law of the country of domicile), the lex loci contractus (the law of the country where the contract is concluded) and the (putative) (objective) proper law of the relevant contract. A clear choice between these legal systems has not yet crystallised. There is also no Supreme Court of Appeal (nor Constitutional Court) decision in this regard and therefore no binding authority.An investigation of the views held by the common-law authors on contractual capacity in private international law may therefore prove valuable in addressing the issue. An analysis is offered in the concluding remarks on whether the views held by the authors have been received in South African case law.

Folk models and the law

This article considers the relationships between the disciplines of law and anthropology, as portrayed in the work and embodied in the life of Franz von Benda-Beckmann. Starting with an assessment of the Bohannan–Gluckman debate over the relevance of Western legal categories for understanding non-Western (‘folk’) legal systems, it shows how the work of von Benda-Beckmann transcends this dispute by concerning itself with the relations between such different legal systems, that is, with legal pluralism as that notion was gradually refined through the work of Franz himself and others. ‘Western’ legal systems and their distinctive modes of reasoning and understanding, too, are proper objects for anthropological analysis and concern, not only the ‘folk’ systems on which anthropologists initially focused. And as von Benda-Beckmann argued, the approaches in both contexts should be the same; above all, legal anthropologists must avoid the ‘expertise-trap’ of deferring to academic lawyers when it comes to understanding how formal state law works.

General Patterns, Regional Features and the Concept of Non-Western Democracy

The article analyzes the approaches to democratization in the Western and non-Western political systems. The author dwells on the methodology for comparative analysis and the system approach, explains the fundamental differences between Western and non-Western political process, taking into account a wide spectrum of socio-cultural, political, economic and ideological factors. The article also examines the peculiarities of the non-Western political systems, their typology and the formation of the concepts of non-Western democracies.

Was Fashion a European Invention?: The Kimono and Economic Development in Japan

It is still widely assumed that the emergence of fashion was a uniquely European phenomenon and that, conversely, non-Western clothing systems must have remained static and “traditional.” Hence, in the case of Japan, clothing modernity continues to be equated with the adoption of Western-style dress. This article presents evidence that, through the period of Japanese economic growth and industrialization from the eighteenth century to World War II, the kimono outfits that most women continued to wear were subject to a process of change that can only be understood as fashion. As a result, by the interwar period, kimono fashion had become a mass-market force that continued to influence the production and consumption of dress, even as, in the postwar period, most women switched to Western-style clothing. Fashion is thus not necessarily a European invention and can represent a significant economic force, even if it comes in distinctively non-European forms.

THE CHINESE LANGUAGE IN THE SATURDAY REVIEW: A CASE STUDY IN SINOPHOBIA’S SCHOLARLY ROOTS

A drastic shift in British perceptions of China took place between the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. Up through the first decades of the nineteenth century, China and its ideals as well as its art and aesthetic were widely admired. Yet by the end of the century, the discourse surrounding China had become very different: no longer were the Chinese admired for their art or their morals; instead, they were castigated as amoral, pitiless, inscrutable liars. Why and how this change took place has not yet been explored in part because scholars have tended to focus on either the beginning of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, rather than on the years between these periods. Yet those years saw the rise of sinology, which became established as a field of scholarship in precisely the period (from roughly 1870 to 1901) that has so far been neglected. This scholarship, highly specialized though it might seem (and was), was not confined to the Ivory Tower; it made its way to the educated, upper-middle-class reading public through periodicals. If we look at what British periodicals were teaching their readers about China and the Chinese language during this gap period, we can see – perhaps surprisingly – a concerted and earnest effort being made to avoid assumptions that the Chinese need British help and to avoid pro-Christian judgments, in favor of an attempt to learn the workings of the Chinese language as the first step towards understanding the Chinese on their own terms. What scholars learn and what periodicals teach about the Chinese language, however, leads these very same would-be enlightened people, in the end, to see the Chinese as cunning children incapable of complex thought or basic feeling, and therefore incapable of progress or morality. In other words, the increasing British prejudice against the Chinese originated to an important degree in the work of the first scholars of sinology, rather than in the fears of the ignorant or the culturally-marginalized. Examining this process challenges a paradigm dominant in postcolonial studies, in which modern scholars decry the supremacy of Western systems while problematically replicating a narrative in which the concept of Western systemic supremacy is not challenged and the existence of non-Western systems is not acknowledged. In the case of China, the complexity of its written and spoken language systems helped frustrate Western efforts at colonization, and this systemic resistance to Western domination was constructed by Western scholars in such a way as to create and justify sinophobia.

Rationality and autonomy from the Enlightenment and Islamic perspectives

Rationality and autonomy are foundational concepts in anglophone or ‘Western’ countries that originated primarily from the Enlightenment period. When compared with ‘Western’ ideologies, non-Western belief systems such as Islam may not appear, at first glance, to place as much emphasis on the value and attainment of rationality and autonomy. This may lead some people to conclude that Islam necessarily marginalises or even suppresses its believers’ development of rationality and autonomy. This article compares the concepts of rationality and autonomy from the Enlightenment and Islamic perspectives. It is argued that there exist Islamic traditions that promote the inculcation of ‘normal rationality’ and ‘normal autonomy’ within a convictional community from which beliefs develop. However, the extent to which Muslims are encouraged to cultivate and exercise their rationality and autonomy would depend, among other factors, on the specific interpretations of rationality and autonomy privileged by the Islamic tradition they belong to.

The Islamization of English Literary Studies

In today’s world where the former colonized are reshaping their relation with the colonizer, the concept of decolonizing or indigenizing education is widely discussed in postcolonial studies. Decolonizing/indigenizing education counters the western systems of knowledge’s hegemony over those of non-western systems of thought and requires the development of a new approach to education that keeps in view the indigenous societies’ socio-cultural and religious values and traditions. The Islamization of Knowledge undertaking maintains a similar approach, but additionally requires an Islamic perspective on knowledge. Among all western disciplines, English literature is arguably the most culturally charged and carries western value-laden ideas. This reality points to the need to look at it from Islamic perspectives. Based on this theoretical concept, this study seeks to establish the urgency and feasibility of Islamizing English (British) literary studies.

The Islamization of English Literary Studies

In today’s world where the former colonized are reshaping their relation with the colonizer, the concept of decolonizing or indigenizing education is widely discussed in postcolonial studies. Decolonizing/indigenizing education counters the western systems of knowledge’s hegemony over those of non-western systems of thought and requires the development of a new approach to education that keeps in view the indigenous societies’ socio-cultural and religious values and traditions. The Islamization of Knowledge undertaking maintains a similar approach, but additionally requires an Islamic perspective on knowledge. Among all western disciplines, English literature is arguably the most culturally charged and carries western value-laden ideas. This reality points to the need to look at it from Islamic perspectives. Based on this theoretical concept, this study seeks to establish the urgency and feasibility of Islamizing English (British) literary studies.

Residents’ attitudes toward the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai prior to and during the event

This paper examines residents’ attitudes to a major non-sport-related mega event, the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Resident attitudes research can ascertain how best to accommodate host community views, a key issue in developing sustainable tourism strategies. The paper breaks new ground by examining attitudes both before and during the event, revealing considerable fluidity in attitudes, and it examines residents’ attitudes in China, reflecting the importance of non-western cultural and political systems on attitude development. The paper contributes to longitudinal research, an area where little research is available. Two studies were conducted before and during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo using the same survey instrument. It is based on a representative sample of residents of Shanghai who were asked about their attitudes to Expo 2010. Results indicate that residents on the whole strongly supported (77.9%) or supported (12.7%) the event with all the average scores of the attitude items higher than 5 (on a 1–7 scale). Some negative impacts were identified such as increased prices, traffic problems, crowding and congestion. Residents were classified into three groups in the pre-event survey (whole embracer, ambivalent embracer and neutralist), according to their level of support, and two groups for the survey during the event.

Mapping Edible Aroids

ABSTRACTAs the world's most ancient food crops, aroids or taro (L. Araceae) are embedded in many western and non-western cultures. ‘Everybody’ knows aroids. However, as plants and foods, they are reputedly difficult to recognize. The plants, but also aroid dishes, are of economic importance and an expression of social and cultural values for around 400 to 500 million people worldwide. However, aroids are little known outside of non-western food systems. The cultivation of aroids is foremost restricted to small farmers, and its consumption to ethnicities in and from subtropical regions and the developing world, where 60% of the world's food is produced by around two billion small farmers, the vast majority living in extreme poverty. In the Western world millions of migrant workers consume aroids; and both migrants and edible aroids are held in low esteem.Interestingly, several members of the aroid plant family are among the world's most popular ornamental plants and held in high esteem by millions of weste...

Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a “Different” Freedom in Modern India

IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, subaltern historians and postcolonial scholars have brought to our attention the need to question the generally assumed universality of Western categories in framing the histories of the rest of the world.1 The exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-Western countries, they say, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also resulted in the histories of these countries being presented in negative terms as a deviation from the universal trajectories of capital, democracy, and liberalism, which are themselves grounded in particular historical experiences of the West. Thus, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, has argued, most scholars trained in this intellectual tradition have characterized India as “not modern” or “not bourgeois” or “not liberal.” The new intellectual sensitivity toward non-Western systems of thought has resulted in a significant number of works that deploy the critical category of difference. Yet none of the four major schools of historiography on modern India—Marxist, Cambridge, nationalist, and subaltern—has extended this notion of difference to the discourse of freedom associated with the Gandhian nonviolent resistance movement against British colonialism. This is a surprising omission, given the striking ways in which the Gandhian discourse of freedom departed from the Western discourse of freedom. While the distinctiveness of the Gandhian movement in relation to other forms of anticolonial resistance of the day was evident to Gandhi’s contemporaries and has been noted by scholars, the use of difference as an analytical category to

Evidence Base for the Use of Selected Complementary and Alternative Therapies by Patients With Diabetes

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and associated therapies are getting increased attention as growing numbers of Americans are exploring their use. The term “complementary medicine” refers to therapies that are used with or taken in conjunction with allopathic Western medicine. The term “alternative therapies” refers to therapies that are considered nontraditional, non-Western therapies that are used instead of allopathic medicine. The term “integrative medicine” is the more current designation of such non-Western therapies and systems of care. The term is inclusive and provides a more comprehensive consideration of a blending or integration of therapies used in Western and non-Western systems of care. However, the term “CAM” is perhaps the most familiar and is used more commonly throughout the articles in this Diabetes Spectrum From Research to Practice section. CAM therapies are growing in popularity among both the public and health care professionals. In fact, it has been reported that annual visits to providers of CAM therapies now outnumber visits to primary care physicians.1 The annual National Health Survey in 2007 found that 38.8% of adults and 11.8% of children in the United States reported use of a form of CAM in the previous 12 months.2,3 The frequency of CAM use demands increased familiarity with the …

Emerging Paradigms in Medicine: Implications for the Future of Psychiatry

The causes of mental illness remain obscure in spite of rapid progress in the neurosciences. This is due in part to the fact that contemporary biomedical psychiatry rests on philosophically and scientifically ambiguous ground. In Western medicine paradigms, theories from physics, chemistry, and biology form the basis of an explanatory model of illness, including mental illness. Symptoms are conceptualized as subjective descriptions of effects caused by factors characterized in empirical terms. Conventional biomedicine asserts that all causes of illness, and by extension, mechanisms of action underlying legitimate treatment approaches, rest on biological processes that can be described in the reductionist language of Western science. However, in contemporary Western psychiatry, there is no single adequate explanatory model of the causes of mental illness. What remains are competing psychodynamic, genetic, endocrinologic, and neurobiological models of symptom formation reflecting disparate ideological positions and diverse clinical training backgrounds of mental health professionals. There is no unifying theory in psychiatry because no single explanatory model has been confirmed as more valid than any other. I hypothesize in this article that the synthesis of ideas and clinical approaches from Western biomedicine and non-Western systems of medicine based on understandings of human consciousness, the neurosciences, complexity theory, and quantum field theory, will lead to rapid evolution of conventional Western biomedical psychiatry toward truly integrative mental healthcare. The result will be the emergence of an integrative mental healthcare model that will more adequately address the disparate causes, conditions, and meanings of symptoms combining multimodal approaches from Western biomedicine and non-Western systems of medicine.

Universal human rights and non-Western normative systems: a comparative analysis of violence against women in Mexico and Pakistan

How universally useful are human rights in addressing violence against women? This article addresses this question by looking at the link between gender, ethnicity and human rights to uncover the complexities that underpin current debates about universal justice and multiculturalism. While my discussion of rape in Mexico and Pakistan illustrates significant particularities with respect to how violence against women is constituted in these different cultural contexts, it also shows that culturally specific manifestations of violence against women often share striking similarities in the way that they are allowed to persist, justified and made invisible. As such, they are part of a global mechanism that reproduces gender subordination in a predominantly patriachal world.

The Work of Culture in the Treatment of Psychosis in Migrant Adolescents

Psychotic illness in an adolescent is a catastrophic event for families, particularly migrant families, who tend to use mental health services less than mainstream families. This article presents a clinical approach that takes into account the work of culture in the construction of meaning and the development of coping strategies for migrant families faced with the onset of psychosis in an adolescent. This approach transforms the therapeutic space into a transitional one that allows the interplay of many different interpretations and strategies to deal with the crisis. Recognizing the potential value of non-western systems of knowledge, offering help as the family grieves the loss of its expectations for their child, mobilizing support systems, and strengthening the therapeutic alliance are the key elements in this process.