Dangerous love in mythical narratives and formula tales

The theme of love has long been neglected in studies on African myths. The often-heard explanation is that African myths and folktales do not tell stories about love because they primarily express social interests and obligations while love – intended as both emotional imperative and biological drive – is an individual need and feeling. This latter definition relies on a very specific understanding of ‘love’: the Romantic love of 19th century European novels. This paper argues that when love means attraction, affection, passion, and necessity, it turns up as liaisons dangereuses in many African narratives. Love becomes a driving force that generates gender constructions by reinforcing the unity of the couple or by fuelling the struggle between partners.In the case of Kabyle narratives (Algeria),¹ conceptualisations of love as well as the relationships between myths and folktales are explored by analyzing formula tales² and the only known collection of Kabyle Berber myths: those collected by Leo Frobenius, ethnologist and historian of religion, at the beginning of the 20th century and published in the first volume of his Volksmärchen der Kabylen in 1921.The discussion of the relationship between Kabyle myths and folktales touches upon a well-known interpretative problem in the study of religion: the articulation of myth and ritual with history as communities respond to sweeping social, political, and religious changes, such as the coming of Islam, colonization, decolonization, and globalization.     

An Antiseptic Religion: Discovering A Hybridity on the Flux of Hygiene and Christianity

An antiseptic religion is a form of Protestant Christianity that was shaped in the context of colonization in Korea. This term was coined to explain a religious hybrid that was produced by the intermingling of American Evangelical Protestant Christianity, the concept of hygiene (germ theory) and indigenous Korean religiosity. This research deals with a historical process of making ‘a medicalized religion’ in Asia from a perspective of postcolonialism. Most of the early American Protestant missionaries in Korea were medical doctors who were influenced by the Germ theory of illness and considered Western medicine as an efficient tool to evangelize the country. As a result of their mission, a religious culture which emphasized washing away sins from the soul as analogous to washing away germs from the body was born. In addition, the Korean people developed a very unique form of public bathing ritual centered in the development of public baths to alleviate anxiety and to destabilize the solid strategies of the Japanese and the Americans, the two major colonial powers in Korea’s history in the late 19th century.

Avoiding Colonizer Positions in the Therapy Room: Some Ideas About the Challenges of Dealing with the Dialectic of Misery and Resources in Families

Some authors have argued that certain acts of family therapists—despite their best intentions—may represent a form of colonizing the family. When acting as a colonizer, a therapist is understood as becoming overly responsible for the family and focusing too strongly on change. In so doing, the therapist disrespects the family's pace, and neglects their own resources for change. This paper aims to highlight the need for therapists to be hypersensitive both to the resources of families entering therapy as well as to the impact of prevailing ideologies on their own positioning in the session. The kind of sensitivity advocated here is dialectical in the sense that every family is understood as having potentials promoting dynamism, happiness, and well-being as well as potentials contributing to stagnation, unhappiness, and misery. In this article, using illustrations from clinical practice, we present some ideas for resisting the tendency by the therapist to assume a colonizing position as a professional solver of problems for families. Our main aim here is to redirect the therapist toward connecting with the family's suffering, as well as with the resource repertoire it has developed for navigating and negotiating its way through life.     

Witches,Charlatans, and Old Wives: Critical Perspectives on History of Women’s Indigenous Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Although women have been central to cultural healing practices historically, their participation in the production of indigenous knowledge remains marginal. This contribution traces the history of indigenous healing traditions among women, both in Western and non-Western cultures. Specific attention is given to the history of patriarchal oppression, including witch-trials and the branding of non-Western indigenous healers as witches during European colonization. Utilizing a feminist post-colonial lens, this work seeks to examine how the history of persecution, oppression, and gendered violence has shaped attitudes toward indigenous practices by women as well as women’s own engagement in indigenous ways of healing and knowing.     

How Do Our Values Inform Ethical Research? A Narrative of Recognizing Colonizing Practices

How do you reconcile tensions between ethical research practice, personal values, and disciplinary values? This article focuses on an ethical challenge involving the engagement of rural Indigenous community members that emerged during my PhD fieldwork. The narrative illustrates the necessity to engage in critical reflexive research practice, a process which saw me respond to my own feelings of “wrong” and “right,” contemplate a distinction between procedural ethics and virtue ethics in community‐based research, explore colonizing research practices, and endeavor to reconcile an instance where the values of community psychology appeared in contest. The “voice” in this narrative is that of the first author; the dual authorship reflects the ongoing collaboration between both authors. When this ethical issue came about, our relationship was one of “student” and “supervisor”; we are now colleagues and friends.     

Habermas,lifelong learning and citizenship education

Citizenship and its education is again gaining importance in many countries. This paper uses England as its primary example to develop a Habermasian perspective on this issue. The statutory requirements for citizenship education in England imply that significant attention be given to the moral and social development of the learner over time, to the active engagement of the learner in community and to the knowledge skills and understanding necessary for political action. This paper sets out a theoretical framework that offers a perspective on learning suitable for these far-reaching aims. We argue that schools need to shift from the currently dominant discourse of accountability to incorporate a discourse of care in order to make room for an effective and appropriate pedagogy for citizenship. Habermas’s social theory gives us a theoretical framework that properly locates schools within the lifeworld as part of civil society. Schools should therefore attend to hermeneutical and emancipatory concerns, not only to strategic interests. We put these in the context of Habermas’s social theory to paint an alternative vision learning for citizenship education which is based in developing the dispositions, values and attitudes necessary for lifelong learning with a view to developing ongoing communicative action.

Response

The theme of love has long been neglected in studies on African myths. The often-heard explanation is that African myths and folktales do not tell stories about love because they primarily express social interests and obligations while love ‐ intended as both emotional imperative and biological drive ‐ is an individual need and feeling. This latter definition relies on a very specific understanding of ‘love’: the Romantic love of 19th century European novels. This paper argues that when love means attraction, affection, passion, and necessity, it turns up as liaisons dangereuses in many African narratives. Love becomes a driving force that generates gender constructions by reinforcing the unity of the couple or by fuelling the struggle between partners. In the case of Kabyle narratives (Algeria),1 conceptualisations of love as well as the relationships between myths and folktales are explored by analyzing formula tales2 and the only known collection of Kabyle Berber myths: those collected by Leo Frobenius, ethnologist and historian of religion, at the beginning of the 20th century and published in the first volume of his Volksmarchen der Kabylen in 1921. The discussion of the relationship between Kabyle myths and folktales touches upon a well-known interpretative problem in the study of religion: the articulation of myth and ritual with history as communities respond to sweeping social, political, and religious changes, such as the coming of Islam, colonization, decolonization, and globalization.