Quest For Purity Research Articles

7 - The Taiping and the Aladura: A Comparative Study of Charismatically Based Christian Movements

The paper utilizes the comparative method to work towards an understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions that eschews the distinction between so- called traditional and world religions. It highlights the importance of charis- matic authority based on prophetic vision in two disparate geographical and cultural contexts. Both the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) and the Aladura churches in southwestern Nigeria in the early twentieth century represented adaptations of Christianity to local circumstances. Although the Aladura churches did not have the politically subversive impact of the famous Chinese rebellion, their popularity as movements of prayer and healing reveal a similar dynamic: of leadership based on visions and extraordinary states of consciousness; rivalries for power based on competing visions; and strategies of routinizing charisma through institutions and Biblical texts. Both movements exhibited a concentra- tion of spirituality, expressed in anti-idolatry and a quest for purity, that mobi- lized energies and led to dramatic change. Jung's theory of withdrawal of pro- jections may better describe this process than Weber's theory of disenchantment.

Reading Le Jingyi’s Back: The Creation and Construction of the Sino-Steroid Spectre in the Western Media in the Post–Cold War Era

This paper tells the story of Le Jingyi, a former World Championship Chinese swimmer, describing how the Western media portrayed, represented, and discursively deconstructed her image, especially her physique, to create the spectral and hyper-masculinised image known as the ‘Sino-steroid spectre’. Although Le never tested positive for drug usage, the Western media demonised her, depicting her as the definitive symbol of a doped female athlete, using such derogatory terms as ‘Chinese drug machine’, the ‘spectre of the monster’, the ‘most muscular of swimmers’, the ‘human harpoon’, a ‘walking hypodermic needle’, and so on. Le’s domination in women’s swimming awakened the fears Western media once reserved for the East German swimmers. This study investigated how the paranoid steroid phobia fed the West’s self-image as pure, superior, and entitled. Within this political culture, steroids became a pivotal rhetorical resource in the Western quest for purity in the modern history of sports. This study’s significance lies in its analysis of how the Western media’s obsession with one athlete’s deviation from their stereotypical image of the ideal Chinese woman revealed more about their own misogyny and xenophobia than about Le’s ability.

Purity and Danger in Fin-de-Siècle Culture: A Psycho-historical Interpretation of Wagner, Stoker and Zola

According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, the quest for purity is usually accompanied by fears of change, ambiguity and transgression. Translating Douglas’ insights into historical terms, one may assume that sensibilities about what is pure and what is impure grow stronger during times of intense social and political change, as exemplifi ed by the stormy decades around 1900. This period was characterized by a profound identity-crisis and at the same time was marked by a quest for purity. One may think of a deepened concern for hygiene, of the rise of racist movements, but also of an intense longing for cultural reform and regeneration. Notwithstanding their many differences, these phenomena are linked through their concern for the formal distinction between what is pure and what is impure. A study of the work of Wagner, Bram Stoker and Zola gives some insight into the language of purity, serves to show the religious meaning of formal categories of purity and impurity, and makes it clear that the quest for purity in one area is related to the quest for purity in another area.

The Hijra in French Salafism: A Quest for Purity Through Religious Migration

This article reports the results of an ethnographic study of migration patterns (al‐Hijra) in French Salafist communities. The study reveals the break that Salafist believers attempt to achieve with their social and cultural environment after they embrace this puritanical, hard‐line form of Islam. For Salafists, migration represents a physical and above all moral exile that begins before converts depart for predominantly Muslim countries. Indeed, the migration process begins gradually as believers seek to distance themselves from ‘sources of perversion’ in France that Salafists oppose.

The Law in Quest for Purity: Tracing Things or Men?

The Law in Quest for Purity: Tracing Things or Men?

Book Review: David Chidester: Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa

David Chidester’s Wild Religion focuses on religious diversity and South Africa “from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the Football World Cup in 2010” (viii). It is not a conventionally defined description of particular faith communities or sacred rituals but rather an attempt to describe in a well-informed story-telling anecdotal way how ritual and the sacred are used (and misused) “for negotiating a human identity” in times of transition. Thus it is “wild” religion, a reaction to a new and “wild” world that throws both punches and surprises. The “sacred” is then used to either vent frustration and anger—thus disruptive of social order, or it can be used in a way to deal with it, to pacify and interpret it, to recreate social order. It is “a hybrid of order and chaos” (4). Wild Religion is a sociological study of religion in an extremely interesting time and place written in an original, scholarly and entertaining way focusing on a truly diverse and multicultural society in transition. However, it discusses the phenomena with examples from all over the world and from various times in history. It never gets dull but it often made me wonder if all of this is really an accurate and a just rendering of reality. One can prove your point that the religious scenario is actually constant chaos by simply telling and quoting enough (well documented!) stories. It truly is a bit wild, like the hair raising stories about hair (5–10)! But I guess that is the point that the author wants to make, it is a messy chaos even though one can find a basic logic that helps one to understand the constant fluctuations. What exactly this basic logic is becomes clear and is well articulated in the final chapter. After critiquing systematic descriptions of the religious system of the Amazulu and the highly respected and often quoted work of John Mbiti, the author concludes that such “utopian” religious systems simply never existed (192). He continues (192): Neither a stable and enduring system nor a perennial mentality that persisted unchanged from time immemorial, African religion is an open set of resources and strategies for sacralising. The word “transact” and “transactions” are often used. They refer to the coping mechanism that people and people groups use to deal with changing realities. The setting of the changing reality is usually illustrated from the context of colonialism as well as the modern era. Religion, in utterly original ways (called “wild”), used the sacred to cope with identity changes and used and misused the processes to the advantage of persons or peoples, often politically, economically and socially. On page 196, after some interesting illustrations, the author once again concludes: …these cases utterly defy any construction of African traditional religion as a stable system or a distinctive mentality. They demonstrate the relational character of indigenous religion. The transactions suggest the variety of ways in which indigenous religion is not preserved in splendid isolation from time immemorial but always entangled in a changing world. The different chapters of the book document the evidence that leads to these conclusions. Chapter two, for instance, maps the morphology of the sacred by looking at the symbolic in the history of Cape Town being the mother city of South Africa. In a truly fascinating way he outlines his case which is a particular understanding of religion (44): I would like to propose in conclusion that the term religion can be recast to designate a category of human activity that comprises not only beliefs and practices, whether in relation to transcendent forces, sacred objects or ultimate concerns, but also resources and strategies – the resources that are appropriated and the strategies that are deployed – within an urban political economy of the sacred. His interpretation of this definition of religion is then very well illustrated by interpreting the recent history of urban gangs in Cape Town with regard to the role that the sacred played. The rest of the chapters deal with violence, fundamentalism, heritage, spirituality, and the quest for purity and power as well as an enjoyable chapter of the influence of the soccer World Cup on the country and on religion in particular. Another very important conclusion one finds on page 198. He calls religion in South Africa “wild” because of its preoccupation with modernity, trying to cope with “what’s next.” “Christianity and indigenous religion have been interwoven in South Africa.” I think this is an important conclusion and applicable to most of sub-Saharan Africa. Whether the hope that the book promised for South Africa is indeed real hope is open to be questioned for the prophecy with which it ends is that religion will stay wild.

Tolstoyans on a Mountain: From New Practices of Asceticism to the Deconstruction of the Myths of Monte Verità

The decades before the Great War were a period of exciting cultural creativity and great social upheaval. Both men and women cultivated a great range of interests in ethical, feminist, mystical, spiritualist and sexual ideas and practices. Max Weber referred to this diversity as a ‘department store for worldviews’. Recent historiography has dubbed this period ‘the age of nervousness’ or ‘the quest for purity’. New fascinations held many people in their thrall: the culture of the body and, more specifically, the Life Reform movement. Some felt inspired by their ethical hero Count Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer and pacifist. Tolstoyan colonies based on his philosophy of back-to-nature simplicity were founded in several European countries. One of the places where Tolstoyans experimented with new practices of asceticism was the Monte Verità near Ascona, a village on the Lago Maggiore in the Swiss region of Ticino. This article deals with the transformation of this Tolstoyan colony into a nature cure sanatorium, inspired by ethical and aesthetic values. As a case study it addresses crucial, but ambivalent, aspects of modernity in the ‘natural’ life of nude sunbathing, vegetarian meals, walking barefoot, living in wooden light-and-air cabins and free love marriages. However, this microcosm of Belle Époque Europe has also been the subject of much mythification. The article argues that these forms of myth-making reveal different narratives and models of identification. Deconstruction of Monte Verità myths reveals their popularity as counter-culture narrative (discourse) in the historiography of the 1970s. During the last decade, a comparison between the elitist, artistic lifestyle experiments on Monte Verità and trends in our modern, mass culture (referring to ‘personal authenticity’ or to Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’) seems to be gaining in influence.

The Quest for Purity: The Role of Policy Narratives in Determining Teen Girls’ Access to Emergency Contraception in the USA

Over the last century, US policymakers have implemented laws, policies, and programs, such as abstinence-only sex education programs, that are specifically aimed at preserving the sexual purity of teenage girls while maintaining parental authority over them. The most recent case is the policy of restricting teen girls’ access to emergency contraception, which is now available over-the-counter (i.e., without a prescription) to women over the age of 18. Using the case of emergency contraception as an example, the author discusses how contemporary reproductive health policy in the USA is not only influenced by this history of governmental regulation but also by the ingrained cultural fears and anxieties about teenage sexuality and reproduction that motivate these actions. The author shows how policy narrative analysis in particular was a useful tool in revealing assumptions driving the policy to restrict teen girls’ access to emergency contraception, and how it allowed her to predict that teen girls would be placed at the center of debate when many of her reproductive health colleagues mistakenly assumed that emergency contraception would be granted over-the-counter status without controversy.

Purity and Democracy: Beauty Ideals and Pollution Reduction in Democratic Reform

In debates on democratic reform, the logic of spring cleaning resurfaces over and over again. Different democratic, “beauty ideals,” inspire different types of cleaning in the home of democracy. Where one particular vision of democracy is, “polished up,” rival visions are, “rubbed out,” usually at the same time. Informed by Douglas’s take on cleaning ritual and pollution reduction, this article distinguishes four such beauty ideals, pendulum democracy, consensus democracy, participatory democracy, and voter democracy, as well as the tensions among them, which can be made productive as well as destructive, as the real world of democracy illustrates. This article argues that viable democracies cannot afford too much cleaning of one particular type, unchecked by rival visions of democracy. The advice to democratic theorists and reformers alike is to keep mixophobia, the fear of mixing related to the quest for purity, in check as much as possible.

Al-halqa in Arabic Theatre: An Emerging Site of Hybridity

Traditional Western scholarship on Arabic theatre has borne a strong colonialist imprint, interpreting such theatre almost entirely as a form borrowed from Europe and essentially developed according to European practice. In the later twentieth century, however, more attention has been paid both by Arab scholars and dramatists to performance techniques and practices from their own culture. Of particular importance has been the circular space, the halqa, widely utilized in popular performance, where the audience gathers around and interacts with performers at their center. This essay provides a brief history of the use and symbolism of the halqa, and then discusses its utilization by a number of leading modern dramatists and directors from across the Arab world—from Tayeb Saddiki in Morocco and Abdelkader Alloula in Algeria, to Sa’dallah Wannus in Syria. Major works of each of these dramatists are analyzed to show how each has employed the traditional halqa as a means to explore liminality, hybridity, and postcolonial agency. In order to retrieve this performance tradition, theatre in the Arab world has become more and more improvisational and self-reflexive, even though such retrieval is still negotiated within the paradoxical parameters of appropriating and dis-appropriating the Western models. This modern effort started with the call for an original/autochthonous Egyptian/Arabic theatre by Yusif Idris, whose masterpiece, al-Farafir (The Flipflops), is still considered a central reference, with a strong aura of authority all over the Arab world. Idris’s challenge, in turn, has led some to the “worship of ancestors” and to a ceaseless quest for purity in the name of “authentic” Arabic theatre. The reality, however, is that even so-called indigenous performing traditions such as that of the halqa are cultural constructs undergoing continual change.

Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice Heather Keith Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice. Cressida Heyes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. ii + 223 pp. $39.95 h.c. 0-8014-3684-2; $17.95 pbk. 0-8014-8669-6. Cressida Heyes might appreciate William James' suggestion that "The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one" (James 1907, 50). Like James, Heyes is engaged in exploring the interaction of theory and practice, especially toward the improvement of both. In Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice, Heyes takes on one of the most dominant issues in contemporary feminist theory, indeed, in philosophy: the problem of essentialism. As Heyes argues with strong scholarly support and sharp insights, essentialism poses a problem, no matter on which side of the debate one falls. Essentialists support the troublesome idea that there is "an essential 'womanness' that all women share" (Heyes 2000, 51), while anti-essentialists are stuck with a philosophy that often provides very little in the way of practical distinctions and definitions that one might find useful in feminist activism and research. Heyes attempts (in a pragmatic move?) to find a "middle ground" to this debate by developing a feminist theory deeply rooted both in her practical experience as an activist and in her interesting appropriation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. As much as a pragmatic analysis (perhaps as found in the work of James or of contemporary pragmatist-feminists) might contribute to Heyes' project, however, it is decidedly absent. Heyes begins this work by laying out the problems of essentialism in feminist theory and in philosophy more generally. In outlining biological, metaphysical, and linguistic essentialism, Heyes points out the danger in assuming that there is an essence of womanhood. This is historically evident in Philosophy (Heyes' capitalization), with its quest for purity (as Heyes co-opts Maria Lugones' term). Philosophical traditions that make universal claims, whether about metaphysics or ethics, lend themselves to the exclusion of groups that do not fit into whatever categories of human existence are dominant. Heyes suggests that feminist theory, using many of the same methods as traditional Philosophy, can yield the same unfortunate results. Instead, Heyes wants to "go back to the rough ground," as Wittgenstein writes, of ambiguity and difference, [End Page 326] on the one hand, and politically pragmatic generalizations about women, on the other. This is important to feminists, Heyes offers, since they "should be worried about a theoretical trend that risks undermining feminist political action rather than making it more just" (98). In further developing the theoretical foundation for her project, Heyes discusses essentialism in feminist methodology itself. In its desire to make claims about women's experience, feminist theory often makes what many believe to be unwarranted generalizations. For example, Heyes points to the often criticized ethics of care developed by Carol Gilligan, which suggests that there is a distinctive woman's voice. On the other side of the issue, there are theorists such as Elizabeth Spelman, who contends that such generalization leads to an essentialism that excludes many women, since often the experiences of majority groups (white, middle-class, heterosexual women) stand in for all women. Following this theme, Heyes explores "identity politics" and the fine line between solidarity and exclusion. One benefit of identifying specific interest groups for political purposes is that difference is recognized (such as the uniqueness of the experiences and issues of black women). A danger, however, is that others can be excluded, even when common experiences and interests can be addressed (such as the fact that women as a group are the victims in the vast majority of acts of sexual violence). To mediate arguments between positions of essentialism and anti-essentialism, Heyes explores "anti-anti-essentialism," which admits the dangers of essentialism while also allowing for the possible benefits of the occasional united front that rhetorical generalizing (though always within certain contexts) can provide (especially, as Heyes points out, since there is a difference between universalizing and generalizing). Heyes restates...

Dewey and Latina Lesbians on the Quest for Purity

If Dewey were alive today he would be interested in, and on the side of, one of the most radical and insightful group of feminist thinkers at the end of the twentieth century: Latina Lesbian Women in the U.S.A. (LLWU). Latina lesbians are only one of many marginalized groups in U.S. society whose existence is problematic from a certain pre dominant metaphysical perspective. According to this perspective, to have a multiple identity or to be in between cultures, genders, or races is to be ambiguous, impure, and therefore inauthentic or anomalous. This perspective is more than an academic abstraction. It is deeply embedded in the ways we are taught to experience or conceive the world. This is evident from the fact that it continues to be responsible for the identity crisis experienced by Latina lesbians and, in general, many hyphenated Hispanics in the United States, for example, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Newyo-Ricans, and Texa Ricans like myself. I will provide a Deweyan criticism of this meta physical perspective and compare it with some recent feminist critiques. But first let me introduce the problem of identity as it has been experienced by Latina lesbians.

The use of fiction to interpret architecture and urban space

In this essay I want to revise the interpretation of architectural and urban space by questioning the supremacy of technical pronouncements on the city and its architecture. The essay traces the strands of a theoretical position. The first is that apparently natural or objective characteristics of space can be interpreted in terms of capitalist activity, particularly the pursuit of profit. The second is that the quest for purity, expressed by taboos against pollution, permeates architectural and urban practice. And the third is that fictions, particularly in film and the novel, can be used in a number of ways to reveal unseen workings of architecture. It sets out both to make connections across a range of scales, from the architectural detail and the interior, to city strategy, and, in apparent contradiction, to encourage ways of thinking about space that transgress these, and other categories. This text uses the privileges of fiction. It shifts between one technique for deciphering space and another. At times one or the other, or both, disappear from view. And at other times all three approaches are brought into play. In teaching modern architectural history, the work from which this essay springs, I have had recourse to all of these approaches. Here, I try to indicate what the interconnections and disjunctures between the three views could be.

Convention and Conversion: Patterns in Late Medieval Piety

Ernst Troeltsch is known to church historians largely for his classic threefold distinction of church, sect, and mysticism. InThe Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Troeltsch describes the church as an institution enmeshed with society and making accommodations to the world's imperfections; the sects, driven by a quest for purity, refuse to make accommodations or compromises, while the mystics stand aside from this conflict and concern themselves with “a purely personal and inward experience” in which “the isolated individual, and psychological abstraction and analysis become everything.” Troeltsch sees mysticism not as a phenomenon naturally at home within the church but rather as one that leads away from the establishment, and it is perhaps this perception in particular that gives his work lasting relevance. The assumption that mysticism veers naturally in an antiecclesial direction, and that its more orthodox manifestations are anomalies requiring explanation, remains very much alive in the literature. Indeed, from the perspective of cultural materialism, it is the political, antiecclesial, subversive bite of mysticism that is its most interesting feature. On this point liberal Protestantism and postmodernism have come together, theology and cultural studies have embraced. Troeltsch's schema thus retains relevance well beyond the sphere of historiography.

Children and the Quest for Purity in the Nineteenth Century Scottish City

The seemingly uncontrollable demographic expansion of Scotland's cities during the nineteenth century, especially Glasgow, provoked considerable anxiety about community fragmentation and the deterioration of the urban environment. The scale of industrial development was such as to create some of the most congested and unsavoury living conditions in Europe, with practical solutions to the attendant social problems initially unco‐ordinated and piecemeal. Over time, however, there emerged a cohesive, influential and predominantly middle‐class reform movement which attempted to stem what they perceived as the moral as well as material disintegration of urban society. Guided by an ideology strongly underpinned by evangelical Protestantism, the reformers consciously depicted slum children as the poignant symbol of innocence corrupted, and argued that regeneration should focus, above all, on reclaiming the health and moral welfare of the young. This article will illustrate the varieties of rhetoric and imagery that were used to considerable effect in the reformers’ quest to create a purer environment in Scottish cities, in the belief that children ‐‐ as the future ‐‐ held the crucial key to success.

Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester Paul Ilie Janet Pérez and Stephen Miller , eds. Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Boulder: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1989. 196 pp. $40.00. Best sellers and postmodern fiction rarely originate in the same author, but Spain's eighty-year old Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, born into the same generation as Nobel Prize winner Cela, indeed successfully mixes conventional realism with metafictional fantasy. However, Torrente's career follows no linear sequence. The fifteen critical essays in this collection suggest that his penchant for parody, together with an abiding interest in myth, reveal themselves early and continue into maturity while alternating with such realistic novels as the trilogy Los gozos y las sombras. Torrente circumnavigates the straight course of contemporary narrative history from the Joycean intellectual hero (Javier Marino 1943) to the science fiction and/or serious spy novel of Hawkes, Pynchon, Burgess, Calvino, and Fowles (Quizá nos lleve el viento al infinito, 1984, studied in this collection by Kathleen Glenn). Torrente's long-term narrative diversity, no less than his affinities with international currents, stands out in this collection of fifteen essays. Janet Pérez summarizes the main points of each essay in a panoramic Introduction. Stephen Miller and she divide the collection into three groups: studies of individual works, of techniques and themes common to several novels, and of Torrente's literary theory. Despite these distinctions, the studies coincide in enough concerns to produce a connecting axis of critical problems inherent in most of Torrente's fiction. The most recurring observations involve his ironic and self-conscious humor, his metafictional subversions, political demythifications, and preoccupations with multiple-narrative personalities. Torrente's lesser-known works share prominence in this book with the more popular ones. The 1951 novel La princesa durmiente va a la escuela comes under a [End Page 639] speech-act analysis by Leo Hickey and reveals its echoes of Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote by virtue of "floutings of the Consistency maxim." The worrisome issue of Torrente's youthful alliance with right-wing movements surfaces in other early works that thematize fascist ideology, except that they apply mythological vehicles parodically in order to elude censorship, as Margarita Benitez shows for Ifigenia and El retorno de Ulises. Further light on Torrente's opinions emerges from an interview with Francisca and Stephen Miller, published here. Torrente's fiction's political underside is exposed by Frieda Blackwell's comprehensive view of literature-within literature. Despite his ludic postmodernism, the fiction-history relationship is reversible, as Lynne Overesch-Maister shows. Torrente complicates his intellectual task by his fiction's proteic dimensions, notably the metafictional characters in novels like Fragmentos de apocalipsis, described by David Herzberger, and the multiplication of narrative personality in Yo no soy yo, evidently, described by Carmen Becerra. Nevertheless, whether it is a quest for purity in a miracle play, as presented by Robert Nugent, or a conflict of good and evil in the apocalyptic terms described by Amparo Pérez Gutiérrez, Torrente lends himself to the formalist and intertextualist approaches of Santiago López Torres, Jaime Carbajo Romero, and Genaro Pérez. Ultimately one turns for guidance to Torrente's historiographical and artistic concepts, here represented by his aesthetic of grotesque reality, explained by Angel Loureiro, by the compendium identified by Janet Pérez in La rosa de los vientos, and, finally, by the "Apuntes literarios" studied by Miller. Paul Ilie University of Southern California Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation

The Quest for Purity: Dynamics of Puritan Movements.

The Quest for Purity: Dynamics of Puritan Movements.