Product Of Beliefs Research Articles

Giving voice to the Csángó figure: participation roles and the production of belief in language revitalisation

AbstractLanguage revitalisation gives voice to those who participate in it. But it is not always clear whose voice the participants make heard. It is also not straightforward who hears and wants to listen to the voices that are raised during language revitalisation. In this article, we present a language educational programme which aims to give voice to the participants of the Moldavian Hungarian (also calledCsángó) language revitalisation in North-East Romania. Applying the Goffmanian participation framework, we demonstrate that the participants of the programme collaborate in giving voice to a Csángó-speaking figure while covertly performing different roles. Drawing on our linguistic ethnographic research, we point out how this institutionalised participation framework promotes the achievement of one of the objectives of language revitalisation: the restoration of past language practices. Nevertheless, it also creates an obstacle to another: to the way that the speakers of this language can have a voice worth hearing. The analysis highlights the tensions of institutionalising a participatory framework in language revitalisation, which aims to produce the belief in a Csángó figure representing the essential link between language and (national) community.

Michael L. Raposa Plays with Peirce, Love, and Signs: Review Essay on Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

Michael L. Raposa Plays with Peirce, Love, and Signs: Review Essay on <i>Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning</i>

Postulate of the General Theory of Memories

Knowledge about the functioning of the human mind remains the objective of numerous researches around the world. In the present work, we postulate an unprecedented perspective of the connection between the formation of memories and the production of beliefs from the early stages of human brain development to adulthood. For this, we will use the General Theory of Memories (GTM), which postulates how it is possible to identify, understand and transform limiting beliefs.

The social amplification of risk and landowner liability fear in the U.S. Northern Forest

Research has documented a gap between fears of landowner liability in recreation-related injuries and the legal protection provided by state limited liability laws. This research calls for landowner education to close this “perception-reality” gap and encourage more recreation on private lands. Education by itself, however, may be insufficient because of social discourse about a liability crisis. This study tested the social amplification of risk framework to predict landowner fear of injury lawsuits, and recreational access decisions. The study sampled landowners across the four Northern Forest states in the Northeast United States, and found partial support for the social amplification process. Landowner lawsuit fear and access decisions were the product of belief in a liability crisis, perceived adequacy of the laws, parcel size, and familiarity with the laws. The results indicate that outreach efforts should focus on developing a toolkit of management practices tailored to individual landowners that reduce the uncertainty of liability risk. Management implications1.The data provided partial evidence for a social amplification process. Residents in New York, where high-profile recreation-related injury lawsuits are far more frequent than other Northern Forest states, were significantly more fearful of lawsuits and more likely to restrict recreational access to their land.2.The perception of a liability crisis was widely acknowledged among Northern Forest landowners in spite of liability laws that protect landowners. Those who believed more strongly in a liability crisis were more fearful of lawsuits.3.Those who were more fearful of lawsuits were more likely to impose partial restrictions on recreational access to their land or to completely eliminate all recreational access to their land. The amplification of risk in public discourse about landowner liability has real consequences for recreational access restrictions on private lands.4.Knowledge of limited liability statutes, however, had no effect on liability fear. Moreover, greater knowledge of liability protections produced more partial access restrictions to recreational access. This suggests that managing recreational risk on private lands requires more than legal solutions and public education efforts about limited liability statutes.5.Those who believed that limited liability statutes offered adequate landowner protection were less fearful of lawsuits and less likely to restrict all access to their land. This finding suggests that public education efforts should focus more on the performance of the laws, rather than simply on the description and purposes of the law.

Magic vs. Science in the Historiography of Science

The historiography of scientific studies has suffered from a great impact, that is rarely referred to, from anthropological analyses of magic in so-called primitive societies. The emphasis brought by criticism during the 1950/1960’s of Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 classic, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, brought a fresh look at certainties already consolidated in Western thought, especially those relating to rational human characteristics and science. For the history, these criticisms were interesting because they were presented science as a historically situated activity, in the same way as magic. It favours, therefore, the proximity of historians tout court with the history of the sciences that resists its absences even today. This renewal helped to create a scenario that would enable David Bloor to develop the strong program of Sociology of Knowledge in the 1970s. Such a program indicates the analogous process that involves both the social production of beliefs and that of scientific truths. In this paper I evaluate the proximity of magic-science from the point of view of contemporary studies about scientific activity, questioning the concepts of rationality and logic as if they were exclusive qualities of scientific activity.

What can economics teach us about Santa Claus?

In this paper we sketch a theory about the role of supernatural beliefs in incentivizing “good” behavior among children by parents. We present a simple theory on the production and the use of certain supernatural beliefs by parents to influence their children’s behavior. A prime example of this is the idea of Santa Claus and the idea that Santa Claus rewards children according to how well they have behaved during the year. We show that under standard conditions parents face a time inconsistency problem when trying to incentivize their offspring. We claim that the production of beliefs in certain supernatural or quasi-supernatural persons who allegedly have infinite lives can help parents discipline their children. Finally, we extend this logic to a community and its ruler or rulers. We show that rulers can have incentives to influence the beliefs of their subjects. This incentive is greater whenever the ruler is a monopolist and when he or she expects to rule for a long period. Rulers with limited ability and/or superior technology for producing beliefs will also supply more supernatural stories to enforce their rule.

Beyond the Attention Space

Frompublishinghousestocreativewritingprogrammes, little magazines to literary prizes, the past decade has seen what Amy Hungerford calls a ‘wave of scholarly interest in the institutions of contemporary literary production’, examining ‘exactly how the sausage of literary culture is made’ (p. 161). Exemplified by books like James English’s The Economy of Prestige (2008) and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009), and inspired, in many ways, by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this expanding body of work defines ‘literary production’ as more than merely the production of literary texts. Instead, it illustrates how the numerous actors and organisations involved in the creation, circulation, and reception of such texts collectively condition, in Bourdieu’s phrase, the ‘production of belief’ in literature itself, as a locus of cultural value.1 Where Hungerford’s previous book, Postmodern Belief (2010), traced the persistence of religious values in twentieth-century fiction, Making Literature Now explores this other, perhaps more pervasive, form of belief, and its material basis in the ‘labour of those who read, write, review, teach, make, distribute, design and sell’ literature today (p. 4).

PAGAN AND RELIGIOUS MEMORY OF ANTIQUITY AS SOCIAL PHENOMENON

The aim of this article is to elucidate the essence of pagan and religious memory, which basics were defined by M. Halbwachs. Collective ideas, by L. Levy-Brules, unconsciously go from generation to generation and in the same time it is a product of belief. Religious memory assumes a work with recollections that is confirmed by history, entirely full of religious ideas. In the article is analyzed the classification of processes, connected to saving of religious past of the people, among which are interpenetration of religions, compromise of new and old, which is connected to commemoration of dead, resurrection of ancient religions and so on.

A critique of the music school as a conservative system of music production

This article explores the music school as a locus of musical production that is rarely subjected to critique. Departing from the viewpoints of Bruno Nettl (1995) who describes the music school as a society “ruled by deities with sacred texts, rituals, ceremonial numbers, and a priesthood”, it is hypothesised that many of the questions put forward in his Heartland excursions (1995) still pose challenges to schools of music (or tertiary departments of music) in South Africa today. While the new musicology has taken local music scholarship by storm and turned its more traditional, formalist-oriented practices upside down, it can hardly be denied that this progressive discipline is still practised within institutionalised contexts that are heavily invested in the autonomy principle. Within the South African musical landscape, this is most true for those schools of music or tertiary music departments viewed as leading institutions.The aim, therefore, of this paper is to introduce questions relevant to a critical dissection of the dichotomy between the premises of a cultural or critical musicology, and the institution of the music school as a conservative “production of belief”. Stephen Miles 1997: 744) – specifically in a country where musical pluralism is an important aspect of all tertiary education, namely, developing skills and knowledge that are relevant specifically to the complex demands of our multi-faceted society. Accordingly, the way in which the autonomy principle continues to reinforce the legitimacy of the idea of autonomous music will be investigated – a principle constructed so subtly that implicit supremacy is promoted most effectively through the unspoken practices of concert requirements, the emphasis on music competitions, faculty status, and other internationally recognised markers of musical prestige. This principle clearly underlies a pre-defined set of professionalised values forming the foundations of “successful” music institutions. However, finally it will be argued that music schools, in pursuing a truly critical mediation between music and society, should not engage only with questions of music's social meaning, but in particular with the question of how music comes to be socially meaningful.

The cosmopolitan tribe of television buyers: Professional ethos, personal taste and cosmopolitan capital in transnational cultural mediation

This article analyses the professional ethos and practices of television buyers in France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. During interviews and ethnographic observations, the professional ethos of this ‘cosmopolitan tribe’ proved to be remarkably similar across national backgrounds. This article discusses the relation between personal taste and professional ethos in television buying, pointing to specific forms of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ central to this process. Moreover, it develops a typology of buyers, each type representing a different solution to the tensions between culture and economy, consumption and production and national and transnational inherent in transnational cultural mediation. This analysis of the practices of transnational cultural intermediaries highlights several limitations of Bourdieusian accounts of cultural mediation. Moreover, it opens up new questions about (transnational) cultural mediation, the shaping of professional habitus and ‘the production of belief’ in the cultural field.

The Weakness of Believing: A Dialogue with de Certeau

What this essay attempts to examine, through a negotiation with the work of de Certeau on the nature of ‘weak believing’ in a post-Cartesian world, are the cultural transformations in the production of belief. It begins with a glimpse at our contemporary ‘mediated’ society and then explores de Certeau's work (from the late 1960s to the 1980s) on the dissemination of the event of Christ and the varieties of believing it generated. It raises the question of what does it mean to say ‘Credo’ today when the ecclesial is displaced as the dominant site for the production of belief by civil society, the secular state, and the diversification of institutionalised expertise. In conversation with de Certeau's work, it attempts to answer that question.

Múltiplas pertenças, desinstitucionalização e desregulação da crença. Refletindo a modernidade religiosa no Brasil

This paper discusses the religious movement and belief, a characteristic phenomenon of modernity, diversity and religious pluralism. It investigates the refusal and the fragility of institutional belonging in a religious community, the deregulation of belief through new forms of belief as a recomposing of religion. As empirical allowance, it offers biographical description of trajectories of two migrants of East and Mid-West regions of the country. In the search of overcoming and understanding themselves, they visit various religions, building religious-social non-institutional linkages, a self-composition and recomposing through beliefs bricolage , unusual seams from an institutional point of view. It notices, finally, the multiple membership marked by religious mobile membership and the refusal of control and regulation of the institutions on the production of belief.

Goals and expectations as elements of attitudes toward political parties

The main goal of presented research has been testing of the expectancy-value theory (which originally connects level or strength of motivation of an individual to stand for particular goal, at one side, and product of belief that desired goal is reachable and value or valence of that goal, at the other side), or more exactly, to see is it possible and in which degree, to apply this theory to attitudes toward political parties in Serbia. To accomplish this, 255 subjects has estimated importance of 18 social and 19 personal goals, then they estimated expectancies of main political parties to fulfill those goals, and finally subjects has been questioned about their attitudes (global evaluations) toward the parties. Results confirm assumption that products of expectancies from the parties and acceptances of appropriate goals (both social and personal) are in positive correlation with attitudes toward those parties. However, the assumption that attitudes and products of expectancies and goals would correlate higher than attitudes and only expectancies has not be confirmed. This means that expectancy has more importance than goal in the expectancy-goal product. As a conclusion, there is a tendency of alignment between affective relationship toward parties and expectancies (as cognitive elements) that parties can manage to fulfill different goals. .

Narrative and Ethics: The Structures of Believing and the Practices of Hope

The correlation of narrative and ethics has a long history in literature, and frequently ethics has been associated with a transcendental notion of truth. The recent attention to narrative and theology has offered more theoretical reflections of both poetic and hermeneutical practices that return us to the earliest literary, philosophical and theological productions. In this essay, I wish to present a different way of examining the correlation of narrative and ethics; one less orientated towards Scripture and less concerned with the Church. The narratives I consider are secular fictions from the modemist period. Through examining these works phenomenologically and the role the imagination plays in the production of beliefs, I argue that all narratives structure emotions, desires and hopes and this structuring continually opens up a transcendent horizon.

Whence useful plants? A direct relationship between biodiversity and useful plants among the Dusun of Mt. Kinabalu

Traditionally the Dusun indigenous people of Borneo consider Mt. Kinabalu the home of spirits and ancestors, and they are loath to climb the summit without good cause and plentiful propitiation. In apparent accordance with these beliefs, Projek Etnobotani Kinabalu has recorded few useful plants at high elevations on Mt. Kinabalu. We ask the question: is this an ecological relationship with fewer useful plants being collected at high elevations, or is it an ethnological product of belief with fewer plants collected where people fear to tread? With an indigenous Dusun plant expert (second author) well versed with all areas of Mt. Kinabalu, data on the number and kinds of useful plants were collected for dominant and indicator plant species (168 spp.) among all ecologically identified vegetation types. Results indicate that there are more useful plant species at lower elevations – but there are also more unused species. Once the data are corrected for change in the number of plant species with elevation (useful spp./total spp.), the proportion of useful species are not significantly different over elevation. Thus, useful species are a function of overall biodiversity (i.e., number of useful spp. are correlated with number of plant species, a secondary ecological factor) and not a direct ecological correlate with elevation. The number or kinds of uses also correlates with total number of plant species. In support of direct ecological causation, there is evidence that edaphic conditions (i.e., ultramafic and other poor soils) are associated with reduced proportions of useful species. Ultimately, both ethnological and ecological factors contribute to patterns of people's use of plants with many implications for conservation and biodiversity.

Plantinga's proper functioning analysis of epistemic warrant

In recent articles and a forthcoming two-volume work, Alvin Plantinga formulates and defends a novel analysis of the concept of epistemic warrant.! He uses the term 'warrant' to designate the quality which, or quantity enough of which, is necessary and sufficient to make true belief knowledge. He argues that no other account of warrant (or justification) succeeds in being sufficient to fill this role. He holds that the primary difficulty with these views is their failure to incorporate as a necessary condition for warrant that one's cognitive equipment function properly in the production of beliefs. I will argue that there are good reasons for rejecting Plantinga's position as he intends it to be understood. My argument can be stated as a dilemma: (1) If the concept of proper functioning is analyzed in terms of an actual designing process or agent,2 then Plantinga's account is subject to at least one of two types of counterexamples which show that proper functioning is not necessary for warrant. (2) If the concept of proper functioning is not analyzed in terms of an actual designing process or agent, then Plantinga's account either offers no clear advantage over reliabilism, or it is not clearly distinguishable from reliabilism. Hence, (3) Either Plantinga's account is subject to counterexample, or it is not a satisfactory and distinctive alternative to reliabilism. I will now explain and defend (1) and (2).

St Augustine and the problem of deception in religious persuasion

A substantial body of literature has been produced in the twentieth century by religious and philosophical writers on the ethics of belief. Discussion of this topic has generally focused on the processes leading up to belief within the individual, so that it would not be inaccurate to say that for most of these writers ‘the ethics of belief’ means ‘the ethics of coming–to–believe’. There has been little attention among these writers, however, to the moral questions which surround the production or inducement of beliefs in others, to the ethics of persuasion. An extension of the ethics of belief to cover moral issues which arise in connection with persuasion seems reasonable; the ethics of belief, widely construed, might be said to encompass questions about both the production of beliefs within oneself and the inducement of beliefs in others.

The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods

The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods