Catholic missionaries in Africa: the White Fathers in the Belgian Congo 1950-1955

Catholic missionaries played an important role in the colonial scramble in Africa and the subsequent years. They served as educators and medical support for the state in many cases. The state relied on missionaries to staff schools, educate the population, and aid in the civilization of the Africans. In the Belgian Congo, Catholic missionaries - specifically the Society of Missionaries of Africa or White Fathers - played an especially important role as agents of evangelization and European civilization. The Belgian state relied heavily (and provided subsidies) on missionaries to educate the native people. Through education and medical help, missionaries fostered conversions and attempted to establish a native Church in Africa. Using mission diaries, personal correspondence, annual reports, and personal interviews (conducted in fall 2008), as well as secondary sources, I will attempt to construct a picture of the White Fathers and their experiences during the colonial period and subsequent decades, but with special focus on the years 1950-1955. I will examine the White Fathers as an institution and look at the relationships within the Society and those among the Society, the Belgian regime, and private companies. Through personal interviews with missionaries stationed in the Belgian Congo and Burundi during the 1950s, I will look at these individuals’ experiences and lives to better understand the Society as a whole and its role in imperial Africa. Though there are few secondary sources about the White Fathers in Africa, the primary sources I accessed in Rome and Brussels were very rich. While there are some drawbacks to using oral interviews as primary sources, I believe the interviews provided invaluable data about the daily lives of Catholic missionaries in the field in Congo

Magic Places: The Symbolic Construction of Sacred Space in Contemporary Goddess Rituals

This paper is based on three years anthropological fieldwork amongst women in New Zealand who belong to what is known as the "Goddess spirituality" or "feminist witchcraft" movement. These women self-identify variously as pagan, neo-pagan, feminist witch, or simply as someone involved in Goddess spirituality

How landscapes remember

This paper considers the possibility that as subject or agent, the landscape might have the potential to contain, store or transmit memories of their past, which are engaged experientially as uncanny. In a simple sense it asks why there are some landscapes – or landscape features – that are regarded as spiritually animated by different social groups, at different times. The paper focuses on the Neolithic temple site of Borġ-in-Nadur, in Southern Malta, which as well as having been a site of prehistoric ritual activity has more recently been the site of a significant devotion to the Virgin Mary, who graced the site with regular apparitions, and a focus for national and transnational Goddess pilgrimage. The paper suggests that sites such as Borġ-in-Nadur can be seen as palimpsest landscapes, in which memory is layered such that experiential engagements with them draw the past in to the present, and forwards into the future. The paper examines the intertwining of prehistoric, Catholic and Neo-pagan engagements with Borġ-in-Nadur, extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) to encompass the milieux de memoire, or memorial environments, which are themselves also context of, and for, the uncanny

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Transcendendo o tempo e o lugar no contexto da Covid-19

Durante o ano de 2020, devido às restrições relacionadas à Covid-19, as oportunidades de viagem para locais de patrimônio sagrado diminuíram drasticamente e os encontros e rituais de pagãos e xamãs passaram a ser realizados de modo online. Este artigo retoma um trabalho anterior (Rountree, 2006) para reconsiderar as relações entre tempo, lugar, imaginação e performance ritual no contexto online. Argumenta-se que, enquanto no contexto de locais de patrimônios “reais” a fronteira temporal entre o passado e o presente parece borrar ou se dissolver devido às conexões materiais e corporificadas dos pagãos com um lugar sagrado, no contexto ritual online as fronteiras de lugar borram ou se dissolvem por conta das conexões temporais síncronas com pessoas semelhantes no espaço sagrado. São explorados dois estudos de caso: as respostas daqueles que se reuniram online para testemunhar a transmissão ao vivo do Solstício de Verão de 2020 em Stonehange, feita pelo English Heritage; e as experiências de um grupo de xamãs ocidentais modernos, a maioria vivendo em Malta, cujas reuniões regulares que antes eram praticadas nas casas de seus membros, em lugares na natureza e em lugares de patrimônio sagrado, passaram a ser realizadas via plataforma Zoom no início de 2020

I/O Aware Power Shifting

Power limits on future high-performance computing (HPC) systems will constrain applications. However, HPC applications do not consume constant power over their lifetimes. Thus, applications assigned a fixed power bound may be forced to slow down during high-power computation phases, but may not consume their full power allocation during low-power I/O phases. This paper explores algorithms that leverage application semantics-phase frequency, duration and power needs-to shift unused power from applications in I/O phases to applications in computation phases, thus improving system-wide performance. We design novel techniques that include explicit staggering of applications to improve power shifting. Compared to executing without power shifting, our algorithms can improve average performance by up to 8% or improve performance of a single, high-priority application by up to 32%.No embargo.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]