Suchergebnisse

Drawing on original fieldwork, this book develops a fresh methodological approach to the study of Indigenous understandings of disease as possession, and looks at healing rituals in different South Asian cultural contexts.

Youth participatory action research is a process that is particularly relevant for health-related topics. YA4‑H! Youth Advocates for Health: Youth Participatory Action Research is a resource that youth development professionals can use to guide a group through such a project. The 124-page curriculum is based on key principles of youth development and youth participatory action research. It has 7 sections, each with activities built on the same template that includes the time needed, materials, and facilitator tips, which contributes to ease of use. Youth development professionals can feel confident knowing that the curriculum is research based and addresses adolescents' developmental needs.

The article investigates the last 20 years of Italian politics through the philosophy of Vasugupta's Śiva-sūtra and Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle.

Alf Hiltebeitel, Dharma. Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 768 pp. £45.00. ISBN 9780195394238 (hardback).

Tracy Pintchman and Rita D. Sherma (eds), Woman and Goddess in Hinduism: Reinterpretations and Re-envisionings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ix + 243 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780230113695 (hardback).

David N. Lorenzen and Adrián Muñoz (eds), Yogi Heroes. Histories and Legends of the Naths. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011. xviii + 228 pp. $75.00. ISBN 9781438438917 (hardback). $24.95. ISBN 9781438438900 (paperback).

Sitala ('the Cold One'), a mother goddess worshipped in Northern India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, is traditionally represented as a beautiful young lady riding a donkey. But the ass is a rather marginal character in both oral narratives and devotional/auspicious literature. Unlike the majority of divine mounts in classic and popular Hinduism, the animal has no proper name and is speechless. Vernacular and Sanskrit literatures do not indulge in descriptions, nor do they mention its gender. In brief, the donkey is an annihilated mythological character. In this article I will discuss the ass as a living symbol of illness. My analysis will examine narratives in Sanskrit and vernacular (Hindi, Bhojpuri and Bengali) texts where the ass is associated with goddesses of death, disease and misfortune. By reflecting on several years of fieldwork in India, I will then confute past and present readings of Sitala as a 'smallpox goddess' and will explore the role of the ass as a metonym for illness. So rather than being disease per se, Sitala is a controlling deity, a performance symbolically rendered through riding the ass. Besides shedding new light on the worship of an extremely popular goddess, this article eventually reflects on the origin of mechanisms of cultural blame and pollution originated at the convergence of the praxis and social behaviour of human and non-human animals (as well as other-than-human persons) in Northern India.

Spirit Possession and Trance. New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Bettina Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. x + 246pp. ISBN: 978-0-826435-74-3 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-441108-28-9 (pbk). £65.00/£24.99.

Technological innovations are crucial for addressing the challenges of expanding and operating the electricity grid posed by the ongoing transformation of the energy system and the integration of renewable energy sources in particular. A multitude of technologies are already available, however reshaping the grid goes beyond technological development and is strongly interlinked with broader economic, social, environmental, and political aspects. From this perspective, an integrated energy policy and the coordination of efforts both at the national and European level will be of key importance for the future grid.

Although camping has been a successful 4-H delivery method, we believed a more intentional approach that viewed camp counseling as a job would allow teen camp counselors to connect skills they were learning with those needed for workforce success. Eighteen Ohio counties participated in a pilot project to test the implementation of this work-based learning approach. 4-H youth development professionals added specific workforce-related topics and made minor changes in their camp counselor training. In addition, they used a performance appraisal process consisting of teens' self-assessment and supervisor assessment. Focus groups were conducted to gain implementation data. Although there were some challenges, this approach took relatively little additional effort, and there were benefits for both counselors and professionals. This intentional approach could be applied to other youth programs.