Disciplinar boundaries in the sociological examination of modes of human symbioses

Today, researches conducted within the discipline of sociology seems to have a relatively analogous vison on the quality of being of human nature and collective existence and, as a consequence, on social reality. In this paper, we will try to show that the concept of social reality is far from being universally valid as a generalization of human coexistences at the macro level, and that the understanding of the object of sociology require adressing the totality of the modes of human symbioses, many of them posessing collective qualities currently outside the scope of social sciences. The proposed solution is the reconstruction of the disciplinary characteristics of sociology in terms of an imaginative narrative, where theological explications of society belongs to the same narrative category as mainstream frame of analyses bound by a modernist ontology and epistemology

A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook: Thinking History through Things

For how long can history, as it is conceived in ‘the West’, continue to attach itself to an exhausted humanism, where ‘man’ is central and all the natural and inanimate objects surrounding humans (and linked intimately to human activity) are relegated to the function of support act?This essay argues from anthropological theory that there are fundamentally different sorts of relationships that humans can entertain with non-humans, and that these relationships can have a magical force. When a monument is placed at the spot where an explorer first touched the land, does this impart a contiguous magic? On the other hand, where the stuff of history seems animated, and spreading out without clear connection to impart some small part of the aura to a doll representing the historical figure, are we not dealing with a sympathetic, contagious magic? This essay will experiment with these nonrepresentational forms of energy as they are transferred in domains associated with the figure of Lt. James Cook.What, then, is Cook when he is displaced from ‘western’ history and spread around cultures like a virus? How precarious or robust, then, are the historical certainties associated with Cook-monumentalised Kurnell and its place in time as ‘the birthplace of modern Australia’

The Mune in pre-colonial Borno

The account of Borno's war with Mandara thus recounted above, at least from the point of view of the Mandara Chronicler, and all the other accounts I have given above clearly portray to us the essence of the Mune in that oppression and/or a war of caprice is not enjoined. And the war against Mandara was clearly a war of caprice, as Mandara had clearly recanted on its recalcitrance, when threatened. The essence of the Chronicle itself, however, is that we are here seeing, from accounts of an eye-witness, the portrayal of a polity whose language principles and practice of diplomacy, in war and in peace, are not less developed than any we have seen in the states of Euro-Germanic experience, of comparable times. The basis of this well ordered art is essentially the Mune, even though in its universalist form we may wish to assign it to the Book and the Sunna of Islam. Why not then, should we not regard the Mune as the constitution of the pre-colonial Borno State? Munen - ba (not in the Mune), for the Sayfawa ruler is certainly more binding than most modern constitutions had been binding on leaders of present-day African States

Mad Men: The Relationship between Psychology and Religion in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen

After watching an episode from the first season of Mad Men, that cleverly juxtaposed the Catholic Sacrament of Confession and a session with a psychologist, I wondered: are religion and psychology really all that different? After reading Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel The Chosen, I began to think that the perceived differences between these two disciplines were superficial. Psychology and religion both provide people with a valuable way of understanding their relationship to the world around them, in spite of the apparent differences between them. By examining Sigmund Freud and William James’ attitudes toward both religion and psychology and applying these attitudes to the characters in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, it will be clear how similar these two disciplines are. [excerpt