A umbanda e a glocalização

This paper interrogates a particular globalizing academic move: the appropriation of Afro-Brazilian religion by the academic study of religion in North America as a paradigmatic form of cultural mixture. Specifically, I ask what difference would it make if Umbanda were the key example of Brazilian cultural hybridity, rather than Candomblé serving as a more universal example of religious syncretism. I elaborate the concept of hybridity of refraction, according to which the ritual and doctrinal spectrum of Umbandas refracts the spectrum of social tensions in Brazilian society. Referring to recent theories of globalization, I argue that Umbanda’s internal variation manifests a variety of strategic appropriations by its practitioners of national and transnational concepts. This view reaffirms the contextualized autonomy of these religious agents, and it leads us to emphasize national aspects of religious glocalization, rather than transnational aspects of religious globalization

Ritual Theory and Attitudes to Agency in Brazilian Spirit Possession

This is the post-refereed, pre-print version: "The institute employing the author may post the post-refereed, but pre-print version of that article free of charge on its website. The post-refereed, pre-print version means the version which contains all adaptations made after peer reviewing (upon acceptance). The publisher’s lay-out must not be used." The post-print version (as published) is available on my personal website: http://stevenengler.ca/?page_id=590This article works with theory of ritual in order to begin addressing a series of questions raised by Brazilian spirit possession rituals (in Kardecism and Umbanda). Four contributions to theory of ritual highlight relevant conceptual issues: Humphrey and Laidlaw on non-intentionality; Bloch on deference; Houseman and Severi on social relations; and Kapferer on virtuality. Strawson’s philosophical distinction between objective and reactive attitudes toward intentionality is used to make a case (i) that certain formal aspects of ritual (indexicals) serve to (ii) mark culturally variable attitudes to agency within rituals, which are related to, but fundamentally distinct from, non-ritual attitudes to agency

Dāna (Dádiva) em religiões do Sul da Ásia: Pressuposições e o lugar de teorias

This paper analyzes three influential studies of dāna (‘giving’ or ‘charity’) in South Asian religious traditions. After clarifying anthropological and sociological theories of the gift, it argues that a reliance on these ideas has distorted attempts by these and other scholars of religion to make sense of dāna, and of related South Asian social relations and religious motivations. It concludes by underlining the need for the ongoing reflexive refinement of the categories and concepts used by scholars of religio

Potential technology directions of molecular metals

Journal ArticleIn the past decade, anisotropic molecular conductors have been found which possess unusual electrical, optical, magnetic, and in some cases mechanical properties. Exploiting these properties for specific devices is inevitable, and a number of diverse applications of molecular metals have been reported over the past few years

Davidsonian semantic theory and cognitive science of religion

This article investigates the extent to which the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and Donald Davidson’s semantic holism (DSH) harmonize. We first characterize CSR, philosophical semantics (and more specifically DSH). We then note a prima facie tension between CSR and DSH’s view of First-Person Authority (that we know what is meant when we speak in a way that we do not when others speak). If CSR is correct that the causes of religious belief are located in cognitive processes in the mind/brain, then religious insiders might have no idea what they are talking about: only the scholar of CSR would have a chance of knowing what they ‘really’ mean. The article argues that the resolution to this problem is to take seriously DSH’s rejection of semantic bifurcation, specifically rejecting the idea that religious and non-religious language can be sharply distinguished. We conclude by supporting the following claims: (i) common cognitive neural/psychological processes are explanatorily relevant in proposed meaning-theories for any discourse, and (ii) those processes need semantic supplementation with reference to external and naturalistic factors (biological, cultural, environmental etc.)

Weaving a Faster Tor: A Multi-Threaded Relay Architecture for Improved Throughput

The Tor anonymity network has millions of daily users and thousands of volunteer-run relays, but growing it further has several research and deployment challenges. One such challenge is supporting the increase in bandwidth required by additional users joining the network. While simply adding more Tor relays to the network would increase the total available bandwidth, it requires that Tor's directory documents grow to accommodate these new relays, which in turn increases the burden on Tor clients who must download these large documents. These large directory documents are problematic for people using Tor on mobile devices or who have limited Internet access. Previous approaches to scale the Tor network require significant network-level architectural changes. In order to increase the total available network bandwidth without needing to grow Tor's directory documents or change the network architecture, this work replaces Tor's existing relay architecture with a new multi-threaded architecture. This new architecture is designed to improve the throughput of individual relays that have available network capacity and access to a multi-core processor, and parallelizes Tor's network routing and circuit handling to offload these computationally expensive operations on additional threads. As Tor's current relay architecture is unsuitable for this type of multi-threading, we examine the obstacles in adapting relays to our new multi-threaded architecture. We built an implementation of a subset of this new design on top of the standard Tor code base to demonstrate the potential throughput improvements of this architecture. Under experimental conditions, we show that the multi-threaded implementation quadruples the relay's throughput compared to the standard Tor relay implementation when using four cores of an Intel Xeon server, and triples the relay's throughput when using a $50 Raspberry Pi single-board computer

The devil's poor and the invisible city charity, order and agency in early modern England

This dissertation examines the discourses and practices of charity and poor relief in early modern England in order to characterize changing views of the relation between the individual and the basis of social order. The first part proposes a genealogy of idleness, drawing on Weber's analysis of Protestant worldly asceticism, which posits the rationalization of the conduct of life, and on Foucault's analysis of governmentality, which posits the converging governance of populations and individual conduct in the emerging early modern state. The second part considers charity as a set of transactional relations and examines changing views of the link between social boundaries and order. It then examines the increasing use of 'idleness' as a criterion distinguishing deserving and undeserving poor and traces the obverse of this process: a new emphasis on the formation of industrious habits as a means of fostering the prosperity and order of the nation. The third part argues first that puritan views of the use of time brought the invisible city into the world: a methodical conduct of life marked inclusion among the godly, linking individual agency to God's transcendent order. It then argues that this rationalization of activity through constant attention to time converged with attempts to reform and govern conduct in poor relief practices of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ethical and temporal antecedence of the heavenly city was replaced by the antecedence of the state, whose efforts to reform the character of the poor constituted a new governance of conduct. Emerging processes of governmentality were premised on this consonance of self-interested individual activity and the maintenance of social order

Teoria semântica davidsoniana e ciência cognitiva da religião

This article investigates the extent to which the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and Donald Davidson’s semantic holism (DSH) harmonize. We first characterize CSR, philosophical semantics (and more specifically DSH). We then note a prima facie tension between CSR and DSH’s view of First-Person Authority (that we know what is meant when we speak in a way that we do not when others speak). If CSR is correct that the causes of religious belief are located in cognitive processes in the mind/brain, then religious insiders might have no idea what they are talking about: only the scholar of CSR would have a chance of knowing what they ‘really’ mean. The article argues that the resolution to this problem is to take seriously DSH’s rejection of semantic bifurcation, specifically rejecting the idea that religious and non-religious language can be sharply distinguished. We conclude by supporting the following claims: (i) common cognitive neural/psychological processes are explanatorily relevant in proposed meaning-theories for any discourse, and (ii) those processes need semantic supplementation with reference to external and naturalistic factors (biological, cultural, environmental etc.).Keywords: cognitive science of religion, cognitive theory, holism, semantics, philosophy of language, religious studies, theory of religion.Este artigo investiga o quanto a ciência cognitiva da religião (CCR) e o holismo semântico de Donald Davidson (HSD) se harmonizam. Primeiro caracterizamos a CCR, a semântica filosófica (e mais especificamente o HSD). Notamos, então, uma tensão prima facie entre a CCR e a visão do HSD sobre a Autoridade da Primeira Pessoa (que sabemos o que significa quando falamos de uma forma que não fazemos quando os outros falam). Se a CCR estiver correta em afirmar que as causas da crença religiosa estão localizadas nos processos cognitivos da mente/cérebro, então os membros de dentro da religião podem não ter ideia do que estão falando: somente o acadêmico da CCR teria a chance de saber o que eles realmente querem dizer. O artigo argumenta que a resolução para este problema é levar a sério a rejeição do HSD à bifurcação semântica, rejeitando especificamente a ideia de que as linguagens religiosa e não-religiosa podem ser nitidamente distinguidas. Concluímos com as seguintes afirmações: (i) processos neurais/psicológicos cognitivos comuns são explicitamente relevantes em teorias de significado propostas para qualquer discurso, e (ii) esses processos precisam de suplementação semântica com referência a fatores externos e naturalistas (biológicos, culturais, ambientais, etc.). Palavras-chave: ciência cognitiva da religião, teoria cognitiva, holismo, semântica, filosofia da linguagem, ciências da religião, teoria da religião