Elizabeth Burns Coleman

Religious Tolerance, Education and the Curriculum

The creation of a secular education system was one of the great social experiments designed to break down religious intolerance within society. One element of this design was administrative, involving the creation of non-denominational schools, and another element involved a centralised curriculum. In this collection of essays, political philosophers, lawyers, sociologists, theologians and educators explore the role of state schools in promoting tolerance within 21st century multicultural, religiously pluralistic societies. How may different models of liberalism in the secular state have different out-comes in relation to religious tolerance in the education system? Does a state education system have a role in teaching values such as tolerance, and if so, how is this best achieved? How are epistemology and truth connected with tolerance? How does the ideal of a ‘value free’ secular education mask the values that the secular state teaches? The essays are written from both theoretical and practical perspectives and engage with each other directly to address one of the signifi cant issues of our day. This is the fourth volume arising from a series of conferences on the theme of ‘Negotiating the Sacred’. Previous volumes have included /Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society; Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts; and Medicine, Religion and the Body.

CULTURAL PROPERTY AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

This essay engages in the political debate about the relationship between material culture and collective identity. Cultural possessions are seen as intrinsically linked to a nation or indigenous group’s identity. In 1976, a UNESCO panel formulated the principle that “cultural property is a basic element of a people’s identity.” In 1982, the then chairperson of UNESCO’s Inter-governmental Committee for the Return or Restitution of Cultural Property described the loss of cultural property in terms of the “loss of being.” However, the creative mixing or creolisation of culture and the active invention of traditions has produced a move by anthropologists away from the concept of a cultural group. Consequently, some anthropologists have taken claims by indigenous people and national groups that the possession of material culture is essential to their identity as rhetorical “sound bites” made in a contest of postcolonial power relations. This essay considers the strength of Richard Handler’s argument that social groups and cultural property are the product of current interpretations and not objective things that have identity over time. He takes claims by indigenous and national groups about the relationship between cultural property and identity to be literally false. If this is true, the claims fail to generate a moral argument. The essay therefore shows that the argument is unsound.

The facts and fictions of religion: make believe on Avatar Forums

Abstract Recent scholars of religion have begun to explore the relationship between religion and fiction. Within this context, Johan Huizinga’s theory of religion as make believe or play has received considerable attention. James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) has inspired behaviour that can be thought of as religious, despite the film’s clear foundations in fiction. Scholarship on fan communities has debated whether such groups can be considered religions. This article develops Huizinga’s account using Kendall Walton’s theory of make believe. Walton’s theory enables the interpretation of fiction into overlapping games of make believe in fan communities. The conversational threads on Avatar Forums show how norms of discourse that preclude disagreement allow the frames of reality and fiction to blur. These norms of discourse provide a means of understanding the process by which media myths can become the basis of fiction-based value structures within the cultic milieu. However, the theory also presents significant problems for theorists of religion in terms of the structure of religious belief and religious experience.

Art and Ethical Criticism

Rather than enjoying a fine PDF behind a mug of coffee in the afternoon, then again they juggled next some harmful virus inside their computer. art and ethical criticism is clear in our digital library an online access to it is set as public for that reason you can download it instantly. Our digital library saves in merged countries, allowing you to get the most less latency era to download any of our books as soon as this one. Merely said, the art and ethical criticism is universally compatible with any devices to read.

Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories

Howard Morphy is indisputably an intellectual leader in the anthropology of art. For over 40 years he has been engaged in debates about aesthetics as a cross-cultural concept against others in his own discipline, as well as in the promotion of Aboriginal art as ‘art’. And he has ‘won’ (along with others). Major galleries now hold extensive collections of Aboriginal art and exhibit Aboriginal artists. Yet, to some extent, this win has been pragmatic rather than conceptual as a result of dogmas about the ‘otherness’ of Indigenous societies and the sense that their art is not ‘art in the sense we understand it’. Although accepted as art, the history of Aboriginal paintings remains largely absent from ‘Australian art history’. This book addresses questions about how anthropologists and other theorists should conceptualise a cross-cultural theory of art, how we should understand the historical process of Aboriginal art’s acceptance as art and how we may move beyond a Western essentialised appreciation of Aboriginal art as ‘timeless ethnographic artefact’ through the inclusion of it within discourses of art history. The book begins by discussing the limitations of the frameworks used within art history and anthropology, both as explanation of why they have failed to recognise Aboriginal art as art and as a way of opening up questions about what kind of conceptual tools are required to overcome these limitations. Morphy is an aesthetic realist; he thinks a ‘family resemblance concept’ of art should be accepted within anthropological debates and argues that the institutional account of fine art can only be a subset of a broader cross-cultural account. While denying that art has an essence, Morphy argues that some objects properly belong in an art gallery rather than being ‘metamorphosed’ or deemed to be art from within the arts institution. This sets his theory apart from other recent accounts of Aboriginal fine art (such as Fred Myer’s 2002 Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal Fine Art, which is based on an institutional account of art’s place within the gallery). In one respect, the book is illnamed because an Aboriginal artwork is not an object that has become art through a process of institutional acceptance; the institutional acceptance is, Morphy thinks,