Dwelling on the Borders: Self. Text and World

In spite of secularist predictions, religion on a global scale has not gone away and shows little sign of dimnishing. Within the context of the renewal of interest in religion and the assertion of religion in the public realm, I seek in this article to explore the ways in which the self has been (and continues to be) formed in religious traditions. Drawing on substantive examples from my work on textual traditions in India and Europe, the article argues that 'religious reading' is central to the formation of religious traditions and the formation of the religious person, and that this has an impact upon discourse in the public realm. The process of religious reading itself occurs in a borderland between text and world and between self and world. Through 'religious reading', or more precisely textual reception, we can understand the ways in which forms of inwardness are constructed in tradition-specific ways and such inwardness too has an impact on public discourse. I therefore attempt to examine three traditional borderlands - between inwardness and externality, between text and world, and between private religion and public governance - in the light of religious reading

Optimal division of data for neural network models in water resources applications

The way that available data are divided into training, testing, and validation subsets can have a significant influence on the performance of an artificial neural network (ANN). Despite numerous studies, no systematic approach has been developed for the optimal division of data for ANN models. This paper presents two methodologies for dividing data into representative subsets, namely, a genetic algorithm (GA) and a self-organizing map (SOM). These two methods are compared with the conventional approach commonly used in the literature, which involves an arbitrary division of the data. A case study is presented in which ANN models developed using each data division technique are used to forecast salinity in the River Murray at Murray Bridge (South Australia) 14 days in advance. When tested on a validation data set from July 1992 to March 1998, the models developed using the GA and SOM data division techniques resulted in a reduction in RMS error of 24.2% and 9.9%, respectively, over the conventional data division method. It was found that a SOM could be used to diagnose why an ANN model has performed poorly, given that the poor performance is primarily related to the data themselves and not the choice of the ANN's parameters or architecture.Gavin J. Bowden, Holger R. Maier and Graeme C. Dand

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

Being Tamil, being Hindu:Tamil migrants’ negotiations of the absence of Tamil Hindu spaces in the West Midlands and South West of England

This paper considers the religious practices of Tamil Hindus who have settled in the West Midlands and South West of England in order to explore how devotees of a specific ethno-regional Hindu tradition with a well-established UK infrastructure in the site of its adherents’ population density adapt their religious practices in settlement areas which lack this infrastructure. Unlike the majority of the UK Tamil population who live in the London area, the participants in this study did not have ready access to an ethno-religious infrastructure of Tamil-orientated temples and public rituals. The paper examines two means by which this absence was addressed as well as the intersections and negotiations of religion and ethnicity these entailed: firstly, Tamil Hindus’ attendance of temples in their local area which are orientated towards a broadly imagined Hindu constituency or which cater to a non-Tamil ethno-linguistic or sectarian community; and, secondly, through the ‘DIY’ performance of ethnicised Hindu ritual in non-institutional settings

Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

This paper sets out two main arguments. In part one, a description of the adherents of the various intellectual disciplines and religious faiths in premodern India is given, each having developed distinct and different imagined bodies; for example, the body described in Tantric circles had little or nothing in common with the body described in medical circles. In part two, an account is given of the encounter between Ayurvedic anatomy and early colonial European anatomy which led initially to attempts at synthesis; these gave way to an abandonment of the syncretist vision of the body and the acceptance of an epistemological suspension of judgment, in which radically different body conceptualizations are simultaneously held in unacknowledged cognitive dissonance

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Véronique Boullier et Gilles Tarabout (sous la dir. de) : Image du corps dans le monde hindou

Flood Gavin. Véronique Boullier et Gilles Tarabout (sous la dir. de) : Image du corps dans le monde hindou. In: Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient. Tome 90-91, 2003. pp. 500-502

Śākta-Śaiva Meditation as Expanded Awareness in Medieval Kashmir

Contemplative traditions focused on Śiva and the Goddess developed during the medieval or post-Gupta period in Kashmir, although not limited to that region. In this paper I present textual accounts of a kind of meditation and its accompanying doctrine geared towards liberation conceptualized as an expanded awareness described in Śākta-Śaiva scriptures. This Śākta-Śaiva tradition has scriptural authority in revealed texts and its vision is articulated in the philosophical discourse of the Śākta-Śaiva philosophers, Abhinavagupta and Kṣemarāja. It is the Śākta-Śaiva idea of meditation as the realization of an innate purity of awareness which is also an expanded awareness that I wish to examine