Closing the week 35 – Featuring the politics of food, fasting and feasting
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Featuring the politics of food, fasting and feasting
tabsir.net » The Politics of Ramadan
Religion and politics have always been intertwined, even though some rituals would seem to be above the fray. Consider the fasting month of Ramadan, which has just ended. The Islamic hijra calendar is lunar with arbitrary 30-day months for a lunation which is not exactly 30 days. So determining when a month begins is linked to the sight of the new moon. Before the age of mechanical clocks it was also necessary to fix dawn by observation of the sunrise and decide at what point it was possible to say the sun had risen. In the early days of Islam the timing of Ramadan and the prayer times was based on visible signs. Scholars devised scientific and folk scientific means of telling time, but the basic premise is that a pious individual must make the call.
Foreigners and Their Food : David M. Freidenreich – University of California Press
Foreigners and Their Food explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize “us” and “them” through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. David M. Freidenreich analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the “other.” Freidenreich illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and he demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes pathbreaking contributions to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.
Is Eid Tuesday or Wednesday? – India Real Time – WSJ
The confusion about Eid-ul-Fitr, the day Muslims break their month-long Ramadan fast, is on again.
Ramadan 2011 – Alan Taylor – In Focus – The Atlantic
Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, began earlier this month with the sighting of the new moon. Throughout this ninth month on the Islamic calendar, devout Muslims must abstain from food, drink, and sex from dawn until sunset. The fast, one of the five pillars of Islam, is seen as a time for spiritual reflection, prayers, and charity. After sunset, Muslims traditionally break the fast by eating three dates, performing the Maghrib prayer, and sitting down to Iftar, the main evening meal, where communities and families gather together. Collected below are images of Muslims around the world observing Ramadan this year. [42 photos]
When Is Eid? Muslims Can’t Seem To Agree : The Two-Way : NPR
Today is Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Except that it isn’t.
Today, many Muslims in the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are celebrating Eid. Meanwhile, many Muslims in Indonesia, South Africa, India and Oman are not celebrating Eid until Wednesday.
Eid ul-Fitr marks end of violent Ramadan in Syria – CSMonitor.com
Eid ul-Fitr is normally a festive time, but Syrian citizens say seven were killed today by security forces. The regime faces EU oil sanctions by week’s end and weakening support at home.
Singapore’s Curry Solidarity · Global Voices
An Indian family in Singapore has agreed not to cook curry when their newly arrived neighbors from China are at home after the latter complained to authorities about the smell of curry. To show solidarity to all Singaporeans who love curry, which is after all a national dish, a “Cook A Pot of Curry Day” event was organized last Sunday, August 21. The Facebook page of the event had a confirmed attendance of more than 60,000. Below are some online reactions.
Video – Breaking News Videos from CNN.com
The duo that last year visited 30 U.S. mosques in 30 days is now visiting 20 mosques in 20 days during Ramadan.
Guestview: Ritual slaughter ban reflects fights over food and faith in the Netherlands | FaithWorld
In the recent Dutch debates about ritual slaughter, food has become a field where people battle over political, religious, economic, social and animal welfare issues. I do not think it is that speculative to say that the Animal Party has profitted from three major developments in Dutch society.
Guernica / Nicola Twilley: The Politics of Our Changing Foodscape
Nicola Twilley: Food is a political issue because politicians, and, indeed, our whole system of government, play such a large role in shaping what we do or don’t eat. For example, the government literally feeds a vast number of Americans (there were a record 45.75 million food stamp recipients last month) through its food assistance programs, and it feeds them with commodities it has purchased in bulk—purchases that are in themselves designed to support and stabilize prices for particular crops and industrial processes. Marion Nestle is a great person to read on how public health programs such as nutrition labeling or dietary guidance are shaped by our political system, including the undue influence of corporate lobbyists. It’s interesting to look at how dietary guidance, for example, shifts by country, for political as well as cultural reasons. The government plays a huge role in agricultural research (look at the influence of the extension programs at universities across America), environmental regulation, food safety (including guidelines around genetic modification and nanotechnology), and the economic landscape within which food production occurs. It is government policy on monopolies that allows four companies to dominate America’s meat supply, for example. Given that food is a health, environmental, infrastructural, economic, and technological issue, government investment, policy, and regulation ends up being one of the largest forces shaping the contemporary foodscape.
Religion and politics
Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith – NYTimes.com
Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively. Michele Bachmann was asked during the Iowa G.O.P. debate what she meant when she said the Bible obliged her to “be submissive” to her husband, and there was an audible wave of boos — for the question, not the answer. There is a sense, encouraged by the candidates, that what goes on between a candidate and his or her God is a sensitive, even privileged domain, except when it is useful for mobilizing the religious base and prying open their wallets.
New York Times Editor Bill Keller’s Religious Test for Presidential Candidates – The Daily Beast
Do religious conservatives operate far outside the American mainstream and pose a serious threat to our pluralistic democracy?
USC Knight Chair in Media and Religion
The New York Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller struck a nerve when his weekly column in the Times Magazine called for journalists to pay “closer attention” to what the GOP’s candidates for president “say about their faith and what they have said in the past that they may have decided to play down in the quest for mainstream respectability.”
Political theology and political existentialism « The Immanent Frame
Kahn’s book is fascinating, insightful, and a delight to read. But it is many things. Although its arguments are set forth in a largely holistic fashion, one can distinguish at least three distinct aims: 1) a more or less faithful and analytic reconstruction of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 work, Political Theology; 2) a meditation on the applicability of Schmitt’s political-theological insights to specific features of contemporary American political-legal practice; and 3) a bold proposal, only loosely grounded in Schmittian textual evidence, that argues for political theology as the indispensable framework for grasping the character of politics in the modern world. The first of these aims helps to explain why the book owes its title and its chapter-by-chapter architectonic to Schmitt’s original work. The second explains why Kahn not infrequently departs from the task of reconstruction by offering illustrations drawn from contemporary American law and politics. The third leads us to Kahn’s most provocative conclusion, that there is something distinctive about modern politics qua politics that can only be understood if we remain alive to the theological sources that animate this dimension of our experience. Unlike some of the other commentators, my training and interests do not lie in the sphere of contemporary politics, and most certainly not American politics. I will therefore refrain from offering any challenge to Kahn’s reconstructive or illustrative purposes and will focus my attention chiefly on the third and final strand of the book.
Oxford University Press: The Myth of Religious Violence:
The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category ‘religion’ has been constructed in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of political power. Cavanaugh draws on this scholarship to examine how timeless and transcultural categories of ‘religion and ‘the secular’ are used in arguments that religion causes violence. He argues three points: 1) There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion. What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of political configurations of power; 2) Such a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion as non-rational and prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of Western society; 3) This myth can be and is used to legitimate neo-colonial violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.
A suspension of (dis)belief « The Immanent Frame
Most academic discussions in political science and international relations presuppose a fixed definition of the secular and the religious and proceed from there. Most realist, liberal, English school, feminist, and historical-materialist approaches treat religion as either private by prior assumption or a cultural relic to be handled by anthropologists. Even constructivists, known for their attention to historical contingency and social identity, have paid scant attention to the politics of secularism and religion, focusing instead on the interaction of preexisting state units to explain how international norms influence state interests and identity or looking at the social construction of states and the state system with religion left out of the picture.
Encounter – 12 June 2011 – Islam and the Arab Spring
As old regimes are torn down and new constitutions established in North Africa and the Middle East, how will these majority Muslim countries handle the challenges of liberal democracy and secularism?
Salafists boycott Egypt’s constitutional principles meetings – Politics – Egypt – Ahram Online
The Salafist Call (Al-Dawa Al-Salafya) and Nour Party release a statement explaining their boycott of yesterday’s constitution meeting called by Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister Ali El-Selmi
Is there a crisis of secularism in Western Europe? « The Immanent Frame
Even quite sober academics speak of “a contemporary crisis of secularism,” claiming that “today, political secularisms are in crisis in almost every corner of the globe.” Olivier Roy, in an analysis focused on France, writes of “The Crisis of the Secular State,” and Rajeev Bhargava of the “crisis of secular states in Europe.” Yet this is quite a misleading view of what is happening in Western Europe.
Arab Uprisings
Ex-Jihadists in the New Libya – By Omar Ashour | The Middle East Channel
Abd al-Hakim Belhaj, the commander of Tripoli’s Military Council who spearheaded the attack on Muammar al-Qaddafi’s compound at Bab al-Aziziya, is raising red flags in the West. Belhaj, whom I met and interviewed in March 2010 in Tripoli along with Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, is better known in the jihadi world as “Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq.” He is the former commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a jihad organization with historical links to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Egyptian al-Jihad organization. Does his prominent role mean that jihadists are set to exploit the fall of Qaddafi’s regime?
For many Middle East specialists, this remarkable record of regime stability in the face of numerous challenges demanded their attention and an explanation. I am one of those specialists. In the pages of this magazine in 2005 (“Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?” September/ October 2005), I argued that the United States should not encourage democracy in the Arab world because Washington’s authoritarian Arab allies represented stable bets for the future. On that count, I was spectacularly wrong. I also predicted that democratic Arab governments would prove much less likely to cooperate with U.S. foreign policy goals in the region. This remains an open question. Although most of my colleagues expressed more support for U.S. efforts to encourage Arab political reform, I was hardly alone in my skepticism about the prospect of full-fledged democratic change in the face of these seemingly unshakable authoritarian regimes.
The murder of black men in the aftermath of the rebellion speaks of a society deeply divided for decades by Muammar Gaddafi
Egypt approves founding of Karama and Asala parties | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today’s News from Egypt
The Asala Party is the second approved Salafi party, after the Nour Party. It was founded by Adel Abdel Maqsood Afify, Ihab Mohamed Ali Sheeha and Mohamed Ibrahim Abdel Fattah Sultan.
Egyptian Salafi says Mubarak trial un-Islamic Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)
The Egyptian Salafi preacher responsible for the sensational fatwa condoning the killing of potential presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei has surfaced again. This time however, Sheikh Mahmud Amir, has issues a fatwa rejecting the legal persecution of former President Hosni Mubarak, saying that Mubarak’s actions were authorized by Shariaa law.
The Politics of Royal Pluralism in Jordan
While the people have demanded the fall of their regimes in streets and squares across the Arab world this year, those regimes have offered a persistent, if predictable, reply: “the people just aren’t ready for us to go yet.” This accusation of unpreparedness has taken a few different forms in different contexts: “The people are too sectarian” (Bahrain and Syria); “too tribal” (Libya and Yemen); “too Islamist” (Egypt, Libya, Syria); “too underdeveloped,” “too radical” “too violent,” “too weak and defenseless,” et cetera. In every case, the people are portrayed as inept and a threat to themselves. Meanwhile, regimes clinging to power in the face of mass protests portend that the only solution to this unpreparedness is their steady hand ferrying their societies into the harbor of democratic governance (eventually).
Awe and history in the Arab revolts
In their ongoing revolts against police states and overly centralised autocratic governments, ordinary Arab men and women are compressing into a single moment their equivalent of perhaps the two most outstanding global historical movements of the past 300 years or so: the democratic revolutions that engulfed the world from their starting points in France and the United States in the late 18th Century; and the global decolonisation movement that swept much of the Third World in the mid-20th Century.
The Middle Ground between Technology and Revolutions – Technology Review
Social media didn’t cause the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but it did achieve unique visibility.
In Egypt, the Lure of Leaving – NYTimes.com
The first time I met Ayman, he insisted on picking me up in his shiny black Chevrolet sedan outside the King of Shrimp, a popular fish restaurant in the Cairo neighborhood of Shobra. It was April, and he had just returned from Berlin, where he attended a conference on tourism (“the world’s biggest”) for his job. A brand new “I Love Berlin” key chain dangled from his rearview mirror. Also dangling was a small metallic cross, along with “I Love London” and, of course, “I Love New York.” As a procurement manager at a multinational company, he travels a great deal. “I have a busy passport,” he told me during that first meeting, handing me his overfull visa pages to inspect.
Human rights irony for the US and Arab world – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
Ten years after September 11th, human rights flounder in the United States but flourish in the Middle East.
Qaddafi’s Fall Rivets Yemen – By Tom Finn | Foreign Policy
But in Yemen, the poorest and youngest country in the Arab world, tens of thousands were also tuning in to soak up the drama unfolding in North Africa. It was the downfall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in early February that first set Yemen’s protest movement ablaze, sending thousands of young men spilling into the capital’s dusty streets to face the rubber bullets and water cannons of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime.
Yusra Tekbali: Libyan Women Active Force In Revolution
Many of the Libyan women we interviewed tried to change society from within, but were repeatedly bogged down by the lack of bureaucracy and corruption in the law, saying the regime’s tight restrictions and constant interference were a constant threat. As Salha, a former employee in the oil and gas sector put it, corrupt officials and unpredictable laws meant “your business, your life, everything you work for can be here one day and gone the next.” On the other end of the spectrum, I met with Gaddafi supporters, such as the head of Tripoli’s Women’s Council and the commander of the Women’s Military Academy.
Radicalization and counter-radicalization
Kosovan Albanian admits killing two US airmen in Frankfurt terror attack | World news | The Guardian
Arid Uka, 21, tells court he was influenced by online Islamist propaganda before shootings at airport in March
University staff asked to inform on ‘vulnerable’ Muslim students | Education | The Guardian
Lecturers and student unions express disquiet over new anti-terror guidance on depressed and isolated students
Abraham H. Foxman: The Day Hate Became Everyone’s Problem
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were a national and personal tragedy. It was one of the darkest days in the history of America. Many of us knew people who died that day at the World Trade Center.
But it was also a day of resolve.
US Muslims find selves target of monitoring, abuse – Boston.com
More than half of Muslim-Americans in a new poll say government antiterrorism policies single them out for increased surveillance and monitoring, and many report increased cases of name-calling, threats, and harassment by airport security, law enforcement officers and others.
Still, most Muslim-Americans say they are satisfied with life in the United States and rate their communities highly.
New York becomes the Occupied Territories – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
As the US security state grows and civil rights and liberties erode, Osama bin Laden gets the last laugh.
New report maps the roots of Islamophobia – Islam – Salon.com
In a 140-page report released Friday, researchers at the Center for American Progress have traced the origins of rising Islamophobia in the United States to what they call a “small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and grassroots organizing.”
The report features profiles of some figures — blogger and activist Pamela Geller and think tank denizen Frank Gaffney — who will be familiar to regular Salon readers. It names Gaffney and four others as the leading “misinformation experts” who generate anti-Muslim talking points that spread in the media: Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence (who is also the architect of the anti-Shariah movement); Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch; and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
After right-wingers freaked out about a report detailing the rise in right-wing extremism, Homeland Security effectively dismantled a unit tasked with tracking it.
Guernica / Russ Baker: Who—And What—Are Behind The “Official History” Of The Bin Laden Raid?
When you look closely, nothing seems right about what will surely become the accepted account of the raid that nailed America’s enemy number one. And then things get even weirder…
Here is propaganda so blatant and smiley gross that it deserves a place alongside the insidious emulation of Lenin by the Soviets and idolization of dictators the world over. The cover image is an interesting spin on the separation of church and state in our land of the free: here we see the tattered American flag flying above a cross illuminated by a beam of light from above, at the feet of which lie a firefighter’s helmet and police hat. To label the libel in this colorfully designed “Kid’s Book of Freedom” a “Graphic Coloring Novel” strikes me as a misspelling; is it not more aptly named a “Pornographic Coloring Novel,” to be rated so for the sensational violence mongering rather than any out-of-place showing of body parts?
Misc.
Immigration law: No offence | The Economist
THE American Immigration Lawyers Association just released a report detailing what happens when criminal-law enforcement agents—ie, the police—enforce civil-immigration law. It looked at 127 cases from 24 states and Washington, DC in which clients of immigration lawyers were stopped, questioned or arrested by police for minor offences that resulted in the commencement of deportation proceedings. So it is a small sample, and not necessarily a representative one: most of these cases involved immigrants represented by or able to speak to counsel; there are plenty of others who were unable to contact an attorney before removal, and so represent themselves pro se during the removal process. It makes for dispiriting reading.
A question on affect « The Immanent Frame
I have a question about affect, the current it-word for cultural studies and critical theory. Roughly, “affect” gets at a kind of interactive, embodied experience that functions outside of meaning, rationality and intention. It is a capacity, intensity, or resonance of the body that acts autonomously from the subject. Affect is at work in inexplicable fads, social buzz, or even the mundane act of blushing. We can translate blushing into an emotion in a linguistic and psychological system—shame, attraction, anxiety—but the translation necessarily loses the very interactive, embodied, asignifying thing that makes affect such a fruitful and provocative topic. So, then, what does it mean to write about affect?
In German, there are two words—three even. Enthusiasmus, like the English enthusiasm, is rooted in the Greek “en theos,” to have the god within, to be inspired by god or the gods. But Enthusiasmus was inadequate to contain the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther’s rage against those who purported to receive direct divine inspiration. For them, he coined the term Schwärmer, from the verb schwärmen, to swarm, as in the swarming of bees. The Schwärmer were those, like the so-called Zwickau prophets, Nicholas Storch, Thomas Drechsel, and Marcus Thomas Stübner, who claimed to have direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, or Thomas Müntzer, who insisted that direct revelation and prophecy continued to occur in history. For Müntzer religious radicalism and political radicalism went hand in hand; the new prophecies and apocalyptic revelations he proclaimed called for the re-ordering of society, and not just of the church. In denouncing Müntzer, the Zwickau prophets, and others as Schwärmer, Luther rejected not only claims to continuing revelation, but also the forms of religious and political agitation to which he believed such claims gave rise. To be a Schwärmer, most often translated as enthusiast or fanatic, was to be ungovernable by either human or God.
Cultural Relativism 2011 – DSK, Guinea, Anthropology 101
When I first flagged the op-ed by anthropologist Mike McGovern, “Before You Judge, Stand in Her Shoes,” I also included comments from parenthropologist who wrote, “I fear that Mike McGovern’s point, in his op-ed, will be lost on too many Americans who feel that there are too many immigrants, legal and especially illegal, in ‘their’ country.” But it’s worse. In “Don’t walk a mile in her shoes” Robert Fulford uses McGovern’s article to attack anthropology and the idea of cultural relativism (thanks to anthropologyworks for the update).
James Mollison’s Photos of Children’s Bedrooms Are a Commentary on Class and Poverty – NYTimes.com
Mr. Mollison’s new book, “Where Children Sleep,” had its origins in a project undertaken for a children’s charity several years ago. As he considered how to represent needy children around the world, he wanted to avoid the common devices: pleading eyes, toothless smiles. When he visualized his own childhood, he realized that his bedroom said a lot about what sort of life he led. So he set out to find others.
Dutch
Kafirs en Zeloten: geschiedenisfantasieën met Martin Bosma – GeenCommentaar
Maar wie waren die piraten nou eigenlijk? Bosma heeft het over ‘drijfjachten van moslims’ – alsof het zou gaan om religieus gemotiveerde zeloten, maniakken die voor eigen zielenheil in het wilde weg random christelijke dorpen ontvolkten omdat Allah nou eenmaal groot is en God niet. Niets is minder waar. Het is zoals Bill Clinton zei: it’s the economy, stupid. Het was handel. Keiharde handel. Mensenhandel. Foute boel. Maar: handel. En waar handel is, daar is Dietschen bloed niet ver weg. Een bekend en berucht piratenleider was Symen Danzeker – Simon de Danser. En wat te denken van Suleyman Reis, ook wel bekend als Dirk de Veenboer, en Murat Reis, geboren Jan Janszoon. Britten waren er ook, overigens. John Ward is ‘n bekende. En Lipari werd veroverd door een Ottomaans-Franse alliantie. Dus dat hele ‘moslims-tegen-christenen’ verhaal van Bosma is vierkant geleuter. Veel van de ‘islamitische’ piraten waren uiteindelijk Europeanen – en ze waren lang niet allemaal bekeerd tot de islam. Het ligt veel pragmatischer: in Europa kon je christenen niet als slaven verkopen. In de Arabische wereld daarentegen wel. Daar lag de verkoop van Moslims weer ietsje lastiger. Zo ziet u maar, die Arabieren lijken meer op Europeanen dan we geneigd zijn te denken.
Antwerpen wil moslims uit garagemoskeeën – Religie – TROUW
De 42 kleine moskeeën van Antwerpen moeten plaatsmaken voor een paar grote. Wethouder Monica De Coninck (SP.A) ziet moslims graag vertrekken uit hun achterkamers en garages.
Hoogleraar Jean Tillie: etnische en religieuze organisaties goed voor democratie
Religieuze en etnische gemeenschappen bedreigen de democratie niet, maar bevorderen die juist. Etnische en religieuze organisaties dragen bij aan democratie. Binnen deze organisaties vindt zelfreflectie plaats en worden burgerlijke vaardigheden ontwikkeld. Cruciaal voor dit democratisch proces is wel dat gemeenschappen niet geïsoleerd raken en ‘zwakke verbanden’ hebben met andere gemeenschappen. Het kabinet morrelt echter aan deze verbanden door in wij-zij-tegenstellingen te spreken. Daarmee ondermijnt het de democratie.”
Dat verklaarde Jean Tillie, hoogleraar en adjunct-directeur van het Instituut voor Migratie en Etnische Studies van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, die als coreferent optrad tijdens de Anton de Kom-lezing in het Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam. De lezing werd dit jaar gegeven door voormalig minister Ab Klink en is een jaarlijks initiatief van Art.1 en het Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam. Met de lezing willen de organisatoren aandacht vragen voor de strijd tegen intolerantie en discriminatie in heden en verleden.
Arabische Lente? – GeenCommentaar
Hoe zit het nu met die zo bejubelde Arabische Lente, is een win-win situatie wel mogelijk? Die vraag van een van mijn trouwe reageerders laat zich goed beantwoorden door een gerenommeerd politiek commentator uit het Midden-Oosten: Rami Khouri. Over het belang van historische analogieën om de ontwikkelingen in het Midden-Oosten op waarde te kunnen schatten. En waarom de westerse term ‘Arabische Lente’ de lading niet dekt.
Boerkaverbod is het product van een paternalistische overheid
Boerka’s verbannen maakt de samenleving niet veiliger, bevordert het samen leven niet, en helpt ook niet tegen de onderdrukking van moslima’s. Emancipatie is beter.
4 september: Suikerfeest voor vrouwen en kinderen : Nieuwemoskee
Op 4 september organiseert Al Nisa een actieve, inspirerende en gezellige workshop voor de vrouwen en een feestje voor kinderen. De bijeenkomst start om 13.00 uur met een inloop vanaf 12.30 uur. Vervolgens zullen we met de Ramadan in ons achterhoofd in een interactieve workshop onder leiding van Al Nisa bestuurslid Sandra Doevendans op zoek gaan naar wie we echt zijn. Neem iets mee wat belangrijk voor u is.
Sociale Vraagstukken » Etnische diversiteit versterkt sociale banden
Autochtonen die in regio’s wonen met een hoge etnische diversiteit blijken wel degelijk goede informele contacten met andere autochtonen te onderhouden, anders dan de Amerikaanse socioloog Robert Putnam vond. Voorwaarde is dat men geen etnische dreiging ervaart.
X, Y, zzzz: een pleidooi tegen generaties | DeJaap
Het begrip ‘generatie’ wordt – zoals dat gaat met tot de verbeelding sprekende begrippen als ‘authenticiteit’, ‘interactiviteit’ en ‘duurzaamheid’ – alom misbruikt. Misschien komt deze ellende wel door Pepsi. In de jaren ’80 hield zij jongeren voor dat zij “the next generation” waren. Die jongeren gingen dat geloven. Mensen geboren in de jaren ’60 en ’70 wilden zich graag onderscheiden van die groep voor hen, de babyboom generatie. Ze kwamen bekend te staan als generatie X – de babybusters. Hiermee was het hek van de dam en wilde iedere generatie een eigen label.