Stephen Bigger

Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Young People’s Fiction.

This article explores the extent to which stories for young people encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency. Our discussion is informed by the work of Paul Ricoeur (on hermeneutics and narrative), John Dewey (on primacy of experience) and John Macmurray (on personal agency in society). We understand fiction reading about place as hermeneutical, that is, interpreting understanding by combining what is read with what is experienced. We investigate this view through examples of four children’s writers: Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We draw attention to notions of critical dialogue and active democratic citizenship. With a focus on the educational potential of this material for environmental discussions that lead to deeper understandings of place and environment, we examine whether the examples consistently encourage the belief that young people can become agents for change. We also consider whether the concept of heroic resister might encourage young people to overcome peer pressure and peer cultures that marginalize environmental activism. We conclude by recommending the focused discussion of fiction to promote environmental learning; and for writers to engage more with themes of environmental responsibility and agency.

Muslim women’s views on dress code and the hijaab: some issues for education

Recent French and Turkish bans on Muslim women wearing Islamic head coverings in schools, colleges and universities starts this discussion of religious discrimination and the value of inter‐religious open dialogue in which neither side holds entrenched positions. The paper links dialogue with the ethnographic methodology and uses this to examine the varied attitudes of Muslim women towards their dress code. It locates this issue in the critical educational concern for equity and argues for dialogue to inform educational provision to help the next generation tackle global insecurities.

Victor Turner, liminality, and cultural performance

edited by Graham St. John, New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008, ix + 358 pp., £47.50 (hardback), ISBN 978‐1845454623 Victor Witter Turner (1920–1983), working with his wife Edith Turner, was ...

Review Article: Anthropology and the Biblical Exile

Over the past three decades there have been a few attempts to use social anthropology to explore the Old Testament (OT) and interdisciplinary studies of this sort are now becoming more mainstream. Historical and archaeological data concerning ancient societies are necessarily limited in scope, and anthropological comparisons may offer insights into historical peoples who cannot be observed. This article discusses recent trends in post-exilic studies, in particular those appealing to anthropology.

Ricoeur and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Scott-Baumann’s topic in this book is an essential introduction to Ricoeur’s thinking over a long life; but Ricoeur’s work was vast, leaving her much work still needing to be done on his wide ranging and multi-disciplinary philosophy. I look forward to further volumes which, since his philosophical writing is dense, will help us all. I fully recommend this book. It is priced as for library purchase, and well worth ordering. For further reading, I also recommend the official Ricoeur website in French and English, http://www.fondsricoeur.fr.

Encyclopedia of religious and spiritual development

This is a large volume with around 300 entries and 130 contributors, most from the USA with Tufts University, its base, well represented by 23 contributors. The editors are child developmental psychologists. The conceptual home of the project is in applied psychology, and the Encyclopedia has been published alongside a Handbook of spiritual development in childhood and adolescence (also SAGE, edited by Roehlkepartain et al., 2006), which will be reviewed separately. ‘Spiritual development’ is taken to be ‘about becoming a whole person, someone who stands for something that defines and gives meaning to being human...There is religion without spirituality and spirituality without religion’ (p. xxiii). Religion is viewed as one route to spirituality, but not the only route. Should ‘being human’ be viewed negatively as being violent and self-centred? normally a positive interpretation is put on this sentiment. The title throws up some other curiosities. The key word is development and assumes a developmental schema: thus if a person is not religious and not spiritual his/her development has been retarded or arrested as the ‘normal’ development has not taken place—much like a child who has never developed communication skills. A child must be less spiritually developed than an adult. This assumption I find weak and needs further careful investigation. In describing what spiritual and religious development might look like on the ground, the ghost of Piaget looms large, albeit filtered through James Fowler. The wording of the title suggests a historical interpretation also, so an attempt is made to trace historical development of religions, which is rather too ambitious. Therefore some selection is to be expected. The editors say ‘our intent was not to achieve a perfectly balanced and representative sample of entries’ but ‘to help the

The potential of ‘ritual critique’ in education

This book by Richard Quantz incorporates material from a range of articles since 1988, some co-written with O’Connor and Magolda. Quantz starts with the observation that schooling in the USA, obsessed with testing, has in a brief generation become anti-intellectual and anti-democratic, which provides the context of his study on ritual in school. He plots his argument from Durkheim’s discussion of ritual solidarity as a reaction to modernism. From Marx and Weber he takes their antagonism to instrumental reasoning based on a socially-constructed model of social processes. The thesis of the book is that the character of schooling is determined by unplanned and unrecognised nonrational (‘ritual’) processes, that is, formalised symbolic performances. This is the crux of his argument in the book, claiming support from Durkheim and Goffman who sought secular rituals to explain social interactions – rituals of greetings and farewell for example, or of authority and deference. Rituals are symbolic acts, with physical manifestations and maybe words, to promote amity and status. Goffman uses the term ‘ritual’ loosely (i.e. without in depth justification) as one element of social analysis amongst many (see for convenience Lemert and Branaman 1997, 27–33, 109–27). Thus, nonrational aspects of schooling (what we once called ‘the hidden curriculum’) contain ritual acts but also a broader set of assumptions, some of which are given, taken for granted and unchallengeable. Ritual, Quantz argues, produces a status quo which is sacred, that is accepted as the true state of being, and an authoritative expectation. This is too bold a generalisation: what is sacred to a believer is more than a demand for conformity, and what can be regarded as sacred to the non-religious will be their most profound insights and values. Fortunately this is Quantz’s error of wording rather than substance. The book illustrates some negative aspects of conformity and positive aspects of nonconformity, applying both of these to school and classroom critique in ways which are helpful. Some aspects of conformity can be described as ritualistic (for example graduations and school assembly pep talks such as at Harman Elementary School [73–4]). Deferential conformity to authority

Bibliographic Short Review of: Eng, Milton, The Days of our Years: A Lexical Semantic Study Of The Life Cycle In Biblical Israel. (LHBOTS, 464; New York/London: T & T Clark International, 2011

In the gap since volume VI of this magnificent dictionary was published (see B.L. 2009, p. 230), a foretaste of the final two volumes has been available in the very useful Concise Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009). Now it is a pleasure to welcome volume VII, in anticipation of the publication of the final volume in 2012. The most distinctive contribution of DCH to Hebrew lexicography is the systematic inclusion of many words, marked with an asterisk, that are not in the Hebrew Bible. These include modern scholars’ creations like G.R. Driver’s ana, ‘break wind’ (e.g. Judg. 1.14, NEB), but also a number of well-known Hebrew words like arik, ‘necessary’, qayyam, ‘established’, and rabbi, ‘rabbi’, not in the Bible but already attested in the ancient non-biblical sources. Another valuable feature of DCH is the word-frequency statistics at the beginning of each volume. These are always interesting, not for what they tell us about the Hebrew mind, but for what they tell us about the nature of the corpus, which now includes 30 per cent non-biblical material. Thus, for example, by far the most frequent words beginning with ade are words for ‘command’ and ‘host’, with ‘righteousness’, ‘flock’ and ‘Zion’ a long way behind. As ever the bibliographies at the end of the volume are as complete and up-todate as one could wish, while the English-to-Hebrew index is a very valuable additional tool. J.F.A. SAWYERFull entry. This is a lexical study of primarily male terms for the young, mature and elderly. Female terms are subordinated within an androcentric book structure. The first chapter deals with lexicography and semantics (“the meaning of words”). This study focuses on the range of potential meanings for particular terms such as boy, child, young man, man and old man, set within the context of other semantically related terms. Terms are considered only when the context is age-related. Chapter 2 briefly sets the life cycle (including life expectancy) in the context of the ancient near east, and less understandably Greece. Chapter 3 studies terms for the young, by which is meant pre-maturity, focusing particularly on na‘ar, yeled and taph. Chapter 4 concentrates on terms for mature men, with semantic studies of ‘ish, ‘adam and geber. Chapter 5, on the aged, covers zaqen and a range of related terms and phrases. His general conclusions support to use of modern linguistics in textual study, and in particular semantic profiles and semantic domains, calling for these to be included in the methodologies of new lexicons. There is much of interest in the detail of this book; but this reviewer would have liked to see a better gender balance, and less of the superficial comparisons with other unconnected socio-historical contexts and periods, from the stone age to the Industrial Revolution.

The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (Book Review)

Its relevance for education is that the school, College or university is also a system with embedded power relationships, which can go sour. There will be bullies, power freaks, managing by sarcasm; the system needs to control such behaviour as unacceptable and to advocate positive and empowering management strategies. Pupils and students should be encouraged to be self-validating and contributing unique individuals (called individuation as opposed the the dehumanising de-individuation (p.242). They need to consider how to cope with peer and power pressure and be able to retain their inner individuality, their sense of meaning an worth, even in dehumanising systems and circumstances. This will be a challenging piece of curriculum development. The final chapter is a good starting-point – ‘Resisting Situational Influences and Celebrating Heroism’: “Heroism supports the ideals of a community and serves as an extraordinary guide, and it provides and exemplary role model for prosocial behaviour. The banality of heroism means that we are all heroes in waiting. It is a choice we may all be called upon to make at some point in time.” (p.488). This is heroism in everyday life, as a natural moral response to the unacceptable, not the unreachable elite heroes of fiction.

Review of Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology (Book Review)

This article gives a detailed assessment of the usefulness of the new Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence from Sage Publications, arguing that it is an important baseline study of current research, and that it demonstrates that every aspect of research in this field requires new research. It argues that new research into spiritual development must clearly distinguish this from religious development, and that the construction of a secular non-theocentric psychology of spiritual education is urgently required. ©Stephen Bigger 2007. An abridged form was published in the Journal of Beliefs and Values, 2008.