The interpretive approach to religious education : challenging Thompson's interpretation

In a recent book chapter, Matthew Thompson makes some criticisms of my work, including the interpretive approach to religious education and the research and activity of Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. Against the background of a discussion of religious education in the public sphere, my response challenges Thompson’s account, commenting on his own position in relation to dialogical approaches to religious education. The article rehearses my long held view that the ideal form of religious education in fully state funded schools of a liberal democracy should be ‘secular’ but not ‘secularist’; there should be no implication of an axiomatic secular humanist interpretation of religions

My mother or father: person, metaperson, and transcendence in ethnographic theory

How do humans, who are materially composed biological constructs, come to transcend, that is, to see themselves as present in the world? This paper sustains that, in order to understand transcendence in personhood, we have to see the latter as a product of dividual not individual participation, as initially proposed by Lévy-Bruhl and recently developed by a number of phenomenologically inspired cognitive scientists. Personal ontogeny is what explains the relation between essence and existence in the case of metapersons (ghosts, deities, ancestors, some animals, etc.). In order to explore this problem, I discuss a minor occurrence that took place in my presence without my noticing it at the time when I was visiting an Afro-Brazilian temple compound in coastal Bahia (NE Brazil) in July 2011

Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance

Anthropologists engaged inpost-colonial studies are increasingly adoptingan historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain morean extractive than an ethnographic one.Documents are thus still invokedpiecemeal to confirm the colonial invention ofcertain practices or to underscore culturalclaims, silent. Yet such mining of the content of government commissions,reports, and other archival sources rarely paysattention to their peculiar placement and form .Scholars need to move fromarchive-as-source to archive-as-subject. Thisarticle, using document production in the DutchEast Indies as an illustration, argues thatscholars should view archives not as sites ofknowledge retrieval, but of knowledgeproduction, as monuments of states as well assites of state ethnography. This requires asustained engagement with archives as culturalagents of ``fact'' production, of taxonomies inthe making, and of state authority. What constitutes thearchive, what form it takes, and what systemsof classification and epistemology signal atspecific times are (and reflect) critical featuresof colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of thelate nineteenth-century imperial state, arepository of codified beliefs that clustered(and bore witness to) connections betweensecrecy, the law, and power.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41825/1/10502_2004_Article_5096461.pd

Introduction

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67161/2/10.1177_0308275X9301300401.pd

The Nuer

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