Suchergebnisse

En este artículo se discuten las condiciones psicosociales y psicoreligiosas que han permitido la irrupción de un grupo político en la vida social y política costarricense a partir del año 2018. Esto se hace sin dejar de examinar los escenarios psicosociales que se abren a partir de la irrupción de un grupo político inusual, hasta ahora, en la sociedad costarricense. Se hace una lectura analítica e interpretativa tratando de añadir argumentos a favor de la hipótesis de la desigualdad. Para discutir dicha hipótesis se siguen las ideas de reconocimiento de los movimientos religiosos libres, la inclusión del otro y la articulación subjetiva y socioafectiva que puede ser promovida por una democracia incitativa. La incitación se opondría a la autocomplacencia institucional que ignora a los grupos más desfavorecidos por la desigualdad.

The plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar has drawn considerable international attention in recent years but a solution to the crisis remains elusive. This article gathers pertinent research from key books on Myanmar's politics and society published during the last five years and synthesizes their contributions to our understanding of the issue. It argues that the picture emerging from these works highlights how legal infrastructure for dealing with mass violence fails to deal adequately with the realities of an illiberal state. It further shows how the conflict's religious dimension - amplified through public discourse - obscures a competition between historically oppressed peoples to be heard. Rather than a conflict between Buddhists and Muslims, the nested dynamics of Rakhine State's regional politics shaped a situation where minorities turn on other minorities. This critical reading of the issue thus implies that international intervention in the form of labeling victims to save and perpetrators to sanction would likely be unproductive (JCSA/GIGA)

Despite a long tradition of studies in ancient Mediterranean economic history, a significant lack of studies can be noted in connection with pre-Roman Italy, by which I mean especially the central area of the Italian peninsula between the 8th BCE and the "Romanization". The tight and profound relation of this area with wide sectors of the Mediterranean world (Phoenicians, Greeks, Iberian area…) and Rome is well known. In particular the Etruscans played a crucial political and commercial role in the Mediterranean setting at least in the Archaic period and the Italic world, with the later phenomenon of the mercatores, contributed to the globalized Mediterranean commercial network of the Hellenistic age. Rome itself, at least in its formative period and down to the beginning of the Republic, must be considered embedded in this network. In pre-Roman Italy sanctuaries and sacred areas are places in which alongside religious practices some fundamental political and economic functions are located, too. The ways in which such sanctuaries became places of storage and use of public goods are in part for us unknown. The process must be probably related to the emergence of the abstract concept of value that, not by chance, also in the Greek world has been connected to the development of the social urban form and to the emergence in particular of the regime of the votive offerings that, introducing the notion of quantitative value, sanctioned the distance with the qualitative expression of value, typical of the previous social organization. As far as the pre-Roman world is concerned we can perceive through the archaeological data the end of the process, in which the so-called religio votiva must be read (as it has been) on the one hand as a religious practice, but on the other hand it is undoubtedly a mean to improve the economic resources of the sanctuaries and consequently of the community itself through a passage of wealth from the private sphere to the public one. Unfortunately a large quantity of these offerings is irremediably lost because made of perishable materials or archaeologically represented by objects of apparently scarce value. But there is still a huge amount of data found in Etruscan and Italic sanctuaries that clearly speak of the function of deposit and management of great quantities of goods by local communities and whose informative potential has been definitely underestimated in scholarship. In particular I am referring to the well-known practice of offering metals in different forms (aes rude, coins, bronze statues and more in general metal objects, …). On these theoretical bases my paper aims to investigate the so-called religio votiva with an economic approach and to analyze the quantitative value of the votive offerings. To reach this goal, I will tackle especially a meaningful study case, a class of material widely investigated in previous researches but with a non-economic approach: the small votive bronzes. Representing both divinities and offerers, they have definitely played a major role in the votive practice both in Tyrrhenian and Adriatic regions between the 7th and the 1st c. BCE (i.e. both in a genuinely pre-Roman period and in a "Romanized" moment). These bronzes are often of poor quality and extremely repetitive, but they are definitely interesting as far as religious, cultural, artisanal and economic considerations are concerned. It is necessary to remember that these objects are made of metal and in particular of the same metal – bronze – that the majority of the most ancient coins in use in central Italy was made of. It is therefore evident that small votive bronzes did hold an intrinsic value and that the massive presence of them in a sanctuary represented a consistent deposit of metal. A direct consequence of these considerations is the fact that a detailed study of these artifacts, based on an accurate analysis that exploits both artisanal aspects and specific set of data concerning dimension and weight, could give us the possibility to shed light on a set of relevant economic aspects of pre-Roman and early "Romanized" Italy.

While most interpretations of Terrence Malick's 2011The Tree of Life concentrate on the film's theological resonances, I focus here onThe Tree of Life's political vision. I locate this vision in the fraught relationship between two influential strands of American religio-political thought, Augustinianism and Emersonianism.The Tree of Life's theological concerns are undoubtedly Augustinian, yet it takes up a similar radical politics as what Emerson did in his best-known essays. The result, I argue, is a cinema of religio-political possibility with important implications for a potential rapproachment between religionists (namely evangelical Christians) and secularists, particularly on the topic of environmental conservation and sustainability.