Fo Guang Shan Buddhism and Ethical Conversations across Borders : "Sowing Seeds of Affinity"

On the basis of a study of an international Buddhist movement, this article defines “ethical conversations across borders” – acts of ethical deliberation, evaluation or argument that take place in cognisance of multiple ethical regimes – and proposes the conditions under which they can take place. Fo Guang Shan, described in the first part of the article, is a Buddhist movement that originated in Taiwan, but which now has branches around the world. It seeks to promote the cultivation of virtue among its members and among other people with which it has contact. The teachings of Master Hsing Yun, the movement’s founder, advocate two methods through which this project can be realised, “sowing seeds of affinity” and “convenience”. The second part of the article generalises observations made in relation to Fo Guang Shan and draws the conclusion that all “ethical conversations across borders” require two things, namely, the identification of similarities or “affinities”, and an account of difference that stipulates the units between which the conversation is to be carried on

Ethics across borders

This article takes what has always been a methodological and ethical question for anthropologists (how should we relate to others?) and turns it into an ethnographic one (how do those we study think ethically across borders?). We show that, paradoxically, anthropologists’ commitment to their own forms of ethics across borders have frequently effaced alternative conceptions among the people we study, whilst the burgeoning field of the anthropology of ethics has reintroduced ideas of cultural boundedness and incommensurability into the anthropological canon. Moreover, within anthropology, a focus on either universal motivation or cultural relativism has obscured ethics across borders, which as a practice is premised on both the existence of ethical difference and the possibility of transcending it. In relation to an example taken from Evans’ work on Ahmadi Muslims in India, we develop the idea that ethics across borders depends as much on the creative production and elaboration of incommensurable differencem - a process we call “incommensuration” - as on the identification of affinities. As suggested by the collection this essay introduces, ethics across borders in this sense must be widespread, and deserves greater ethnographic attention, particularly with regard to the diverse ways in which difference and affinity are imagined.This article and the collection it introduces grew out of an interdisciplinary seminar organized by Jonathan Mair from 2012 to 2013 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, as part of a Melon Newton Research Fellowship. Articles collected here were presented at a conference convened by Mair and Evans under the title “Ethical Conversations Across Borders” in January 2014 held in Cambridge with the support of CRASSH, King’s College, Cambridge and St. John’s College, Cambridge. We would like to thank participants and contributors to the seminar and conference for their contribution to the development of the project, including Michael Banner, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Jane Heal, Caroline Humphrey, Paolo Heywood, Tim Jenkins, James Laidlaw, Michael Lempert, Hallvard Lillehammer, Patrick McKearney, and Alice Wilson. We would also like to thank Marie Lemaire and Ruth Rushworth for invaluable organizational support. Nicholas Evans’ contribution to this project is due, in part, to a generous research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) to which we also extend our thanks. Finally, we are extremely grateful to Giovanni da Col and two anonymous reviewers of this introduction for their insightful comments, and to Sean Dowdy, Andra Le-Roux Kemp, and Justin Dyer for their very significant help with its production.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from HAU via http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.01

Relationship between blood pressure values, depressive symptoms and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with cardiometabolic disease

We studied joint effect of blood pressure-BP and depression on risk of major adverse cardiovascular outcome in patients with existing cardiometabolic disease. A cohort of 35537 patients with coronary heart disease, diabetes or stroke underwent depression screening and BP was recorded concurrently. We used Cox’s proportional hazards to calculate risk of major adverse cardiovascular event-MACE (myocardial infarction/heart failure/stroke or cardiovascular death) over 4 years associated with baseline BP and depression. 11% (3939) had experienced MACE within 4 years. Patients with very high systolic BP-SBP (160-240) hazard ratio-HR 1.28 and with depression (HR 1.22) at baseline had significantly higher adjusted risk. Depression had significant interaction with SBP in risk prediction (p=0.03). Patients with combination of SBP and depression at baseline had 83% higher adjusted risk of MACE, as compared to patients with reference SBP and without depression. Patients with cardiometabolic disease and comorbid depression may benefit from closer monitoring of SBP

Relationship of depression screening in cardiometabolic disease with vascular events and mortality: findings from a large primary care cohort with 4 years follow-up

Aims: Benefits of routine depression screening for cardiometabolic disease patients remain unclear. We examined the association between depression screening and all-cause mortality and vascular events in cardiometabolic disease patients. Methods and results: 125 143 patients with cardiometabolic diseases (coronary heart disease, diabetes or previous stroke) in the UK participated in primary care chronic disease management in 2008/09, which included depression screening using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Score. 10 670 receiving depression treatment exempted, 35 537 screened, while 78 936 not screened. We studied all-cause mortality and vascular events at 4 years, by electronic data linkage of 124 414 patients (99.4%) on primary care registers to hospital discharge and mortality records and used Cox proportional hazards on matched data using propensity score. Mean age for the screened and not screened population was 69 years (standard deviation—SD 11.9) and 67 years (SD 14.3), respectively; 58% (20 658) of the screened population were men and 65.3% (22 726) were socioeconomically deprived, compared with 54.2% (42 727) and 67.4% (51 686), respectively, in the not screened population. The screened population had lower all-cause mortality (Hazard Ratio—HR 0.89) and vascular events (HR 0.85) in the matched data of N = 21 893 patients each in the screened and the unscreened groups. Conclusion: Depression screening was associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality and vascular events in patients with cardiometabolic diseases. The uptake of screening was poor for unknown reasons. Reverse causality and confounding by disease severity and quality of care are important possible limitations. Further research to determine reproducibility and explore underlying mechanisms is merited

Post-truth Eras

Review essay making an argument about the anthropology of post-truth and metacognition by drawing comparisons between the contemporary situation in Britain and the USA and Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian journalism

Post-truth anthropology

Countless commentators have announced the advent of the post-truth era, but while everyone seems to be talking about it, there is little agreement about what it really means. This article argues that anthropology can make an important and distinctive contribution to understanding post-truth by treating it ethnographically. Commonly proposed explanations for post-truth include changes in political culture, in the structure of information in the digital age and universal cognitive weaknesses that limit people's capacity for critical thought. While all these are likely important factors, they do not account for the role of culture in creating and sustaining post-truth. In fact, it is likely that culture, especially in the form of metacognition, or thought about thought, plays an important role by providing knowledge practices, techniques for allocating attention, and especially competing theories of truth. Ethnographic methods provide anthropologists with a distinctive window on post-truth cultures of metacognition

Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism

Fo Guang Shan (佛光山, Buddha’s Light Mountain), an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan, runs a regular ‘Short-Term Monastic Cultivation Retreat’, a week-long residential program designed to provide lay members with an opportunity for intensive cultivation (修養, xiuyang). Contributions to the anthropology of ethics have recently drawn sharp distinctions between ordered, systematic ethics associated especially with religious traditions, and the compromise and accommodation that result from the exigencies of everyday life. This retreat, we argue, shows instead that the experience of ethical shortcoming can be a positive instrument and aspect of religious striving. While much debate in the anthropology of ethics assumes on all sides an a priori conceptual framework that opposes ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ exigency to ordered transcendence, exigency and order in the Fo Guang Shan Retreat are instead mutually constitutive and dynamically related. And failing and being corrected are not imperfections in, but central and indeed ritually scripted elements of its ethical pedagogy

Comparison of the microbial population in rabbits and guinea pigs by next generation sequencing

<div><p>This study aimed to determine the microbial composition of faeces from two groups of caecotrophagic animals; rabbits and guinea pigs. In addition the study aimed to determine the community present in the different organs in the rabbit. DNA was extracted from seven of the organs in wild rabbits (n = 5) and from faecal samples from domesticated rabbits (n = 6) and guinea pigs (n = 6). Partial regions of the small ribosomal sub-unit were amplified by PCR and then the sequences present in each sample were determined by next generation sequencing. Differences were detected between samples from rabbit and guinea pig faeces, suggesting that there is not a microbial community common to caecotrophagic animals. Differences were also detected in the different regions of the rabbits’ digestive tracts. As with previous work, many of the organisms detected were Firmicutes or unclassified species and there was a lack of Fibrobacteres, but for the first time we observed a high number of Bacteroidetes in rabbit samples. This work re-iterates high levels of Firmicutes and unclassified species are present in the rabbit gut, together with low number of Fibrobacteres. This suggests that in the rabbit gut, organisms other than the Fibrobacteres must be responsible for fibre digestion. However observation of high numbers of Bacteroidetes suggests that this phylum may indeed have a role to play in digestion in the rabbit gut.</p></div