19 research outputs found
Bridging Two Worlds
The rise of China and India could be the most important political development of the twenty-first century. What will the foreign policies of China and India look like in the future? What should they look like? And what can each country learn from the other? Bridging Two Worlds gathers a coterie of experts in the field, analyzing profound political thinkers from these ancient regions whose theories of interstate relations set the terms for the debates today. This volume is the first work of its kind and is essential reading for anyone interested in the growth of China and India and what it means for the rest of the world.
âThis brilliant volume shines a light on the two great civilizations that will once again drive world history. No volume could be more timely, more relevant, and more needed than this one.â â KISHORE MAHBUBANI, Distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute, NUS, and author of The Asian 21st Century
âWith the recently elevated economic and political power of China and the great potential of India in the twenty-first century, interdisciplinary dialogue and engagement such as is found in this book is necessary for contemporary debates in political theory and international relations.â â KUIYI SHEN, Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism, University of California, San Diego
A Buddha Land in This World
In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama GudĆ, Senoâo GirĆ, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a âradical Buddhismâ seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism asks whether it is possible to develop a philosophy that is simultaneously naturalist, anti-capitalist, Buddhist, and consistent. Rather than a study of radical Buddhism, then, this book is an attempt to radicalize it.
The foundations of this âradicalized radical Buddhismâ are provided by a realist interpretation of YogÄcÄra, elucidated and elaborated with some help from thinkers in the broader Tiantai/Tendai tradition and American philosophers Donald Davidson and W.V.O. Quine. A key implication of this foundation is that only this world and only this life are real, from which it follows that if Buddhism aims to alleviate suffering, it has to do so in this world and in this life. Twentieth-century radical Buddhists (as well as some engaged Buddhists) came to a similar conclusion, often expressed in their aim to realize âa Buddha land in this world.â
Building on this foundation, but also on MahÄyÄna moral philosophy, this book argues for an ethics and social philosophy based on a definition of evil as that what is or should be expected to cause death or suffering. On that ground, capitalism should be rejected indeed, but utopianism must be treated with caution as well, which raises questions about what it means â from a radicalized radical Buddhist perspective â to aim for a Buddha land in this world
Strategies Used by IT Project Managers to Integrate ICTs in the Eastern Caribbean
Current practices used to guide information and communication technology (ICT) projects in the Caribbean and developing countries lead to high project failure rates. Project managers must adopt new innovative approaches for transformation towards a 21st-century information society and sustainable digital economies. Grounded in the technology acceptance model (TAM), the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore strategies information technology (IT) project managers use to implement IT frameworks designed to guide Caribbean ICT integration. Data were collected from face to face interviews and company documents and analyzed using coding, thematic analysis, and methodological triangulation. The participants were 12 IT project managers in 2 Eastern Caribbean countries. Thematic analysis was used to analyze, report patterns, and to identify emerging themes in the data. The themes that emerged were (1) management of organizational structure, (2) implementing a government wide area network to facilitate the innovations of an ICT-enabled services industry, business, and education, and (3) ICT integration budget, buy-in, and challenges. A key recommendation is that IT project managers develop an IT implementation framework that aligns with an IT project management methodology by incorporating project management body of knowledge remedial measures to achieve defined project objectives. The implications for positive social change include the potential to share knowledge and dramatically lower barriers to starting a business, creating e-commerce, innovation, and online e-learning opportunities for empowering citizens and improving their socio-economic position
Good Gambling: Meaning and Moral Economy in Late-Socialist Laos
Anthropologists have long pointed out the intensity with which people sort economic practices into moralized types based on the practicesâ purported aims such as gift-giving, âdeep play,â and guanxi. Yet more than a century after Malinowski first pitched his tent in the Trobriand Islands and some nine decades after Mauss proposed his theory of the gift, we still know little about how people invoke these types in interaction and why they find them so compelling. In this dissertation, I explore the moral and pragmatic life of economic types in Luang Prabang, Laos and challenge the epistemological life of similar types in anthropology. I argue that understanding moral economy is fundamentally a semiotic problem. That is, moral economic types can only be understood if we study the communicative acts in which they are made manifest. With close attention to these acts, I show that any answer to the classic ethical question of âHow one should liveâ (Williams 2006) is inevitably entangled with another question: âHow is one living?â
In Laos, since the 1975 socialist revolution, typifying economic conduct has been a national project. As the late-socialist state adopts once-banned forms of economy, it reframes these practices using the moral categories of its socialist past: the lottery has become âpro-development,â capitalistic business has become a vehicle for the eventual attainment of âsocialism,â and gambling, in certain forms, has become âgood.â Although I touch on a broad range of empirical economic and social practicesâtheft at a funeral, lottery buying and selling, paying for food at a barâI focus empirically on conduct that seems to blur moral types of economy and combine conflicting aims and logics, like generosity and greed, friendship and estrangement, socialism and capitalism. Most centrally, I reflect on the moral and pragmatic dimensions of a contrast that gamblers on the French colonial game called pĂ©tanque make between âgambling for moneyâ (lin5 kin3 ngen2) and âgambling for beerâ (lin5 kin3 bia3).
Using materials from more than fifteen months of fieldwork in the rapidly developing city of Luang Prabang, I disentangle the variety of reflexive forms people use to invoke these moral economic types, including implicit and explicit typifications of conduct as well as generic propositions about the types as kinds. I show that close attention to these forms reveals their allure and multifunctional utility: they are not just conceptual categories for reflecting on the world but also clusters of semiotic resources people use to make ethical and pragmatic claims about others as well as themselves. While anthropologists have been wary of âideal typesâ in recent years because they âdistortâ practice, I show that by attending to the heterogeneous ways people use types, we can better understand the reflexive dimensions of âordinary ethicsâ and the methodological and epistemological muddles that arise when scholars try to disentangle communication from action.PHDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144095/1/zuckermc_1.pd
The study of Wai Phra Kao Wat in Bangkok, Thailand
The study presents a new form of pilgrimage introduced by Thai authorities and involving visiting to nine temples (Wai Phra Kao Wat) in Bangkok. I will focus on four main aspects of this phenomenon. Firstly, the study will describe the dynamic application of the practice (Wai Phra Kao Wat) including the forms of devotion, the designation of temples by authorities, the pilgrimsâ experience, and the role played by local âcommunitiesâ (chumchon). Secondly, the study will consider this pilgrimage as a case study with which to explore how Thai cultural phenomena provide multiple avenues for Thai people to reflect on their perception of the relation between Buddhism (Theravada Buddhism in particular) and the state. Thirdly, the study explores the contribution of ânewâ performances of religiosity in popular Buddhism into shaping modern economy and rhetorical politics. Lastly, the study will provide the significance of Wai Phra Kao Wat that could shed light on important contemporary Thai cultural phenomena such as the emergence of âpilgrimage tourismâ on socio-cultural and economic changes and the relationship between ritual practice and Thai citizenship. The ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviewing are mainly employed throughout the fieldwork. I conclude that Buddhism in contemporary Thailand becomes an instrument to negotiate identities and meanings at the level of governance. Wai Phra Kao Wat, a state-oriented campaign, has been then utilised to enhance Thai capitalâs venture into the global economy as well as to establish regime legitimacy with the inculcation of nation, religion, and monarchy
Healing through culturally embedded practice: an investigation of counsellorsâ and clientsâ experiences of Buddhist Counselling in Thailand
This thesis is concerned with an exploration of counsellorsâ and clientsâ lived experiences of
Buddhist Counselling, an indigenous Buddhist-based counselling approach in Thailand. Over
the past decade, Buddhist Counselling has received a growing interest from Thai counselling
trainees and practitioners, and it has also expanded to serve Thai people in various settings.
Research on Buddhist Counselling is very limited and most of the existing studies in the
field have focused on measuring the effectiveness of the approach. While these studies have
consistently indicated the positive effects of Buddhist Counselling on psychological
improvement across several population groups, the significant questions of how Buddhist
Counselling brings about such outcome and how it is experienced are still largely
unanswered. Moreover, existing research is concentrated much more on clientsâ views than
counsellorsâ views, although counsellorsâ views of their counselling practice can also serve as
a knowledge base of the field. This thesis thus sets out to contribute to rectifying this
omission by exploring Buddhist Counselling from the perspectives of both counsellors and
clients.
The thesis is based on two qualitative studies. The first study addressed Buddhist
Counselling from the perspective of five counsellors through a focus group and semi-structured
interviews. The second study explored Buddhist Counselling from the perspective
of three clients, using two semi-structured interviews with each of them. All data received
were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).
The study reveals counsellorsâ and clientsâ overall positive experience of engaging in
Buddhist Counselling. Central to the accounts of the counsellors are the following
perceptions: that their practice of Buddhist Counselling is culturally congruent with the
existing values and beliefs of both themselves and their clients; that their personal and
professional congruence is key to their therapeutic efficacy; and that they enhance such
congruence through their application of Buddhist ideas and practices in their daily lives. Key
to the clientsâ accounts is their emphasis on the significant roles of the counsellorsâ Buddhist
ideas and personal qualities, and of their religious practices in facilitating healing and change.
Key shared findings from both studies reveal that the participantsâ accounts of their cultural
background and their experiences of Buddhist Counselling are intertwined. Adopting
hermeneutics to address this intertwinement, I reveal the cultural and moral dimensions
underlying the practice of Buddhist Counselling. Based on such revelation, I suggest that
Buddhist Counselling in particular, as well as psychotherapy in general, should be better
understood as a historically situated, culturally bound, and morally constituted activity of
people who are concerned with improving the quality of their lives and their community,
rather than the transcultural and merely relational work of morally-neutral practitioners
The Metaphysics of Diversity and Authenticity: A Comparative Reading of Taylor and Gandhi on Holistic Identity
Thesis advisor: Arthur MadiganThe human self and society in general have always been in transition and transformation. Our senses of ourselves and of our society are in dialectical relation with our sense of whether or to what degree we feel part of important dimensions such as religion and politics, which are both an expression of our identity and factors that may sometimes change our identity. In modern western society it seems that identity has shifted from what Charles Taylor calls "embeddedness" in religion to a mode of life where religion is, to a great extent, expected to be a personal matter and even a personal choice. This is not impossible to understand, and historical work shows us that there are important continuities between the modern reason that rejects religion and the religion that it rejects. In this complicated process there is no mistaking the emergence of a democratic politics that rests to a significant degree on the rational project of modernity. We might even say that the success of that politics is one of the most important signs of the success of modern reason. In any case, we see in the west the development of a political system that has made society increasingly secular and religion increasingly private. This is not the case everywhere in the world. In may other places outside the "west" religion and its expressions are more public and individuals consider religion as a significant factor in defining their self-identity. In these places, many people are found expressing and promoting an identity that they consider meaningful in a world that is not fundamentally defined--or only defined--by the sort of secular political system that restricts religious beliefs and practices to the private domain. In these places, there is somewhat less difficulty with the sort of dilemma that we find in many liberal secular parts of the modern west, where even public expressions of religious beliefs are protested or challenged even though the right to such expressions are constitutionally guaranteed for all citizens. The dialectics of religion and politics and their importance in defining human self-identity is the central domain for my research, though I need many detours into other cultural factors in order to substantiate my claims. Bouncing back and forth between western and eastern religious, philosophical, and political perspectives, I finally found some points of contacts in Charles Taylor and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. They became my focus of this research. Still, I felt it necessary to offer a preliminary account of secularism, as our present context, in order to set the background of my exploration of the works and, in some important respects, the lives of Taylor and Gandhi. Hence, my first chapter is an overview of the sources of secularism in the West and in India. The second chapter deals with the Taylorian understanding of diversity, authenticity, and holistic identity. My third chapter is on Gandhi's understanding of diversity, authenticity, and holistic identity. My fourth and final chapter brings to light my own sense of our prospects for an integral understanding of religion, politics, and self-identity within the contexts of post-religious, post-secular, and post-metaphysical thinking. While claims for secular humanism and secular politics have always been somewhat convincing to me, I was not sure why religion should be necessarily so `problematic' for such a program. In fact, the pathologies of both reason and religion have become more explicit to us today. Secularism seems to repeat the exclusivism of the anti-secular stance of some religions by becoming anti-religious itself. Indeed, among secularists and even atheists there is a general trend to consider religions as intrinsically "anti-humanistic" in nature. It is true that secular humanism has sometimes helped religions to explore how deeply "humanistic" they are at heart, in their revelations and traditions. So perhaps, it is possible to have comprehensive frames and theories of humanism and secularism from within the boundaries of religions themselves without negating or diminishing either the spiritual or the secular. A dialogue between Taylor and Gandhi can be useful for us today especially as pointers toward such a humanistic approach to self, religion and politics. This dialogue between these western and the eastern thinkers can enlarge, enrich, and enlighten each other. What we then see, on the one hand, is the limit of a purely secular politics that is lacking a proper metaphysical foundation to guarantee the religious needs of humanity; and on the other hand, we also see the hesitation and struggle of religions to accommodate the demands of secularism. In both cases, we have reason to hope for a new `metaphysics of diversity and authenticity' which in turn might validate a role for religion, and perhaps also the ethical principles that it yields. Still, this is an incomplete and inconclusive dialectic and in that sense only a contribution to ongoing debate. I thank for your attention to my narrative and my proposals. Let me conclude now, so that I can listen to your stories, because you too help me to define myself.Thesis (PhD) â Boston College, 2013.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy