A Funeral as a Festival: Celebrations of Life in the Mosuo Tribe in China

This article attempts to provoke a discussion concerning the definition and nature of festivals by considering the process of Mosuo funerals in Southwest China as a festival event. The role of women and men in daily life and within the funeral ceremony is discussed – the Mosuo is a matriarchal society – as are the vernacular architectural settings which have evolved for both ritual and everyday activities. The article looks at the religious perception of death in Mosuo culture, which considers funerals as celebrations of a life cycle including birth, growing up and death; through onsite observations, it documents the process of a Mosuo funeral in relation to its physical space. Even though, unlike most other festivals, funerals occur at unpredictable times, it is argued that for the Mosuo the funeral event is also a festival

'Throughout my life I've had people walk all over me': trauma in the lives of violent men

In this article we present original qualitative data gathered during prolonged ethnographic fieldwork with violent men in deindustrialised communities in the north of England. We use the data as an empirical platform for a theoretical exploration of the symbolism and subjectivising influences of traumatic life experiences in these men’s biographies. We conclude by making the tentative suggestion that there is a complex and mediated causal link between traumatic experience and a deep subjective commitment to aggression and violence in adulthood

Clinical activity of a htert (vx-001) cancer vaccine as post-chemotherapy maintenance immunotherapy in patients with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer : final results of a randomised phase 2 clinical trial

The cancer vaccine Vx-001, which targets the universal tumour antigen TElomerase Reverse Transcriptase (TERT), can mount specific Vx-001/TERT CD8 + cytotoxic T cells; this immune response is associated with improved overall survival (OS) in patients with advanced/metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A randomised, double blind, phase 2b trial, in HLA-A*201-positive patients with metastatic, TERT-expressing NSCLC, who did not progress after first-line platinum-based chemotherapy were randomised to receive either Vx-001 or placebo. The primary endpoint of the trial was OS. Results: Two hundred and twenty-one patients were randomised and 190 (101 and 89 patients in the placebo and the Vx-001 arm, respectively) were analysed for efficacy. There was not treatment-related toxicity >grade 2. The study did not meet its primary endpoint (median OS 11.3 and 14.3 months for the placebo and the Vx-001, respectively; p = 0.86) whereas the median Time to Treatment Failure (TTF) was 3.5 and 3.6 months, respectively. Disease control for >6months was observed in 30 (33.7%) and 26 (25.7%) patients treated with Vx-001 and placebo, respectively. There was no documented objective CR or PR. Long lasting TERT-specific immune response was observed in 29.2% of vaccinated patients who experienced a significantly longer OS compared to non-responders (21.3 and 13.4 months, respectively; p = 0.004). Vx-001 could induce specific CD8 immune response but failed to meet its primary endpoint. Subsequent studies have to be focused on the identification and treatment of subgroups of patients able to mount an effective immunological response to Vx-001. Clinical trial registration: NCT0193515

Lived religion: Rethinking human nature in a neoliberal age

This article considers the relationship between philosophy of religion and an approach to the study of religion, which prioritises the experience of lived religion. Considering how individuals and communities live out their faith challenges some of the assumptions of analytic philosophers of religion regarding the position the philosopher should adopt when approaching the investigation of religion. If philosophy is understood principally as a means for analysing belief, it will have little space for an engagement with what it feels like to live out one’s faith

Motivations of non-Buddhists visiting Buddhist temples

The current study employs the leisure motivation scale to examine motivations of non- Buddhists visiting Buddhist temples. Specifically, this investigation builds on tourism literature to explore the motivations of non-Buddhists visiting Buddhist temples in Los Angeles, California. Motivations to Buddhist temples are of particular interest given the increasing popularity in the West of Eastern spiritual activities, such as yoga and meditation, as well as the exponential growth of Buddhist-themed tourism campaigns. The findings provide insights for tourism officials responsible for promoting ways to attract tourists to Buddhist temples within their respective destinations

Yoga jam: remixing Kirtan in the Art of Living

Yoga Jam are a group of musicians in the United Kingdom who are active members of the Art of Living, a transnational Hindu-derived meditation group. Yoga Jam organize events—also referred to as yoga raves and yoga remixes—that combine Hindu devotional songs (bhajans) and chants (mantras) with modern Western popular musical genres, such as soul, rock, and particularly electronic dance music. This hybrid music is often played in a clublike setting, and dancing is interspersed with yoga and meditation. Yoga jams are creative fusions of what at first sight seem to be two incompatible phenomena—modern electronic dance music culture and ancient yogic traditions. However, yoga jams make sense if the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane is challenged, and if tradition and modernity are not understood as existing in a sort of inverse relationship. This paper argues that yoga raves are authenticated through the somatic experience of the modern popular cultural phenomenon of clubbing combined with therapeutic yoga practices and validated by identifying this experience with a reimagined Vedic tradition

Locating the festival, positioning the feast: natural and calendar festivals in medieval Slovenia

The astronomical cycles and occurrences of the Sun, Moon, planets and certain star constellations were well known to prehistoric, Roman and medieval communities. Archaeoastronomy studies how ancient societies incorporated this knowledge into various aspects of past cultures. The discipline draws on modern astronomy, geodesy, physics, statistics, anthropology, ethnology and archaeology to study and interpret a wide range of source materials, from structural alignments to art, artefacts and inscriptions. This paper presents archaeoastronomical research on the orientation of Romanesque churches across the territory of modern-day Slovenia, focusing on an array of medieval festivals associated with the solstices and equinoxes. It demonstrates a profound connection between these festivals and the alignment of churches

Recycling the universe using scalar fields

We examine the behaviour of a closed oscillating universe filled with a homogeneous scalar field and find that, contrary to naive expectations, such a universe expands to larger volumes during successive expansion epochs. This intriguing behaviour introduces an arrow of time in a system which is time-reversible. The increase in the maximum size of the universe is closely related to the work done on/by the scalar field during one complete oscillatory cycle which, in turn, is related to the asymmetry in the scalar field equation of state during expansion and collapse. Our analysis shows that scalar fields with polynomial potentials $V(\phi) = \lambda \phi^q$, $q > 1$ lead to a growing oscillation amplitude for the universe: the increase in amplitude between successive oscillations is more significant for smaller values of $q$. Such behaviour allows for the effective recycling of the universe. A recycled universe can be quite old and can resolve the flatness problem. These results have strong bearing on cosmological models in which the role of dark matter is played by a scalar field. They are also relevant for chaotic inflationary models of the early universe since they demonstrate that, even if the universe fails to inflate the first time around, it will eventually do so during future oscillatory cycles. Thus, the space of initial conditions favourable for chaotic inflation increases significantly.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.