The expression "blends" is often used to refer to a type of data where, very visibly, two or more inputs are partially mapped onto each other and selectively projected to a new mental space in which novel structure can emerge (Fauconnier and Turner 1994, 1998, 2002). Famous examples of such blends are The Buddhist Monk, Regatta, Nixon in France, Complex Numbers, The Image Club. As it turns out,...

By the early twentieth century, Britain and all of its Atlantic colonies prohibited the “pretended” use of supernatural powers or rituals such as fortunetelling, obeah, sorcery, and witchcraft. Legislators and others policymakers throughout the Anglophone Atlantic justified these proscriptions using similar narratives; they described occult practitioners as charlatans and vagabonds. Metropolita...

Two central characteristics of Catholicism in Southwest Germany were clericalism and communalism. Clericalism meant, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that German Catholics demanded that priests, especially resident priests, perform and sanctify church rituals. Communalism meant that village communes played a central role in the supervision of the rural clergy and in the o...

Becoming a professional who embodies certain dispositions is known as identity formation. Little research has explored what intentions educators hold for student identity formation or how such intentions influence their teaching. Nine faculty members (all female) in an occupation-centered curriculum were interviewed and observed over 8 weeks. Data were analyzed primarily through narrative writi...

The difficulties with interfaith dialogue are linked, at least in part, to the lack of ritual forms (consisting of rules, ceremonial idioms, liturgy, and repertoires of action) designed to unite and integrate the meta-group formed by the various religious communities. By means of ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina the author studied the mechanisms with which, under particular...

of the Editor. The authors were invited specifically to critique, or use as a stimulus, an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine (June 20, 1999). The article, entitled "The Color of Suspicion" and authored by Jeffrey Goldberg, was an analysis of the practice that has come to be commonly known as racial profiling, articulated by Goldberg as "the stopping and searching of blacks be...

Social norms are communally agreed upon, morally significant behavioral standards that are, at least in part, responsible for uniquely human forms of cooperation and social organization. This article summarizes evidence demonstrating that ritual and ritualized behaviors are essential to the transmission and reinforcement of social norms. Ritualized behaviors reliably signal an intentional menta...

This paper explores the notions of the subtle body and how it has given shape and life to birth rituals and notions in the Dai tradition.

Three patients with gangrene of the penis after Xhosa ritual tribal circumcision are reported. A review of complications which may follow circumcision is given.