Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Adapting And Validating A Survey To Assess Host Communities Support For Migration, Jhon G. Botello, Katherine Palacio, Erika Frydenlund, Humberto Llinás, Jose Padilla

VMASC Publications

Migration presents challenges to receiving communities, as it tests their ability to respond to unexpected expenditures and social stresses. Evaluating the local impact of rapid and substantial migration flows is difficult due to the absence of a validated instrument for assessing community support for migration. Our study adapted and validated a Support for Migration Assessment survey (SMA) based on Social Exchange Theory (SET). The validation of the SMA contributes in two significant ways. First, it establishes an instrument that enables the assessment of support for migration (SFM) by considering community-level factors: trust in institutions (TII), overall community satisfaction (OCS), and …

Agnosticism And Atheism As Amoralism And Anti-Ideological Sociopolitical Paradigm In The Balkans, Specifically In Bosnia And Herzegovina, Faruk Hadžić

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The study investigates whether atheism in B&H is treated, a priori, as amoralism and how this affects plural civic space. If religion is privileged, is it a politically dictated value system or pure ideology? Besides in-depth critical literature review, the author refers to a number of structural interviews focusing on both groups (theists and agnostic atheists) as a direct indicator of variability. The B&H Constitution obstructs the creation of a plural civic identity, hypostasizes the collective political mentality, and stigmatizes atheism and agnosticism in everyday life. Spiritual usurpation has moved into the realm of identity. The ideological ethnonationalism has metastasized …

The "Uncontacted" As Third Infamy, George Mentore

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This paper principally addresses the "problem" of anthropological thinking, that is, on how and why it remains with us and not with the peoples who do not subscribe to our contested regimes of truth. From my research on the topic, it appears we have not achieved any substantial moral progress on the question of exposure to indigenous otherness since the first European "contact." This failure is primarily due to our hardheaded rationalist refusal to accept our inability to access the felt reality of the Other directly. Or, better still, of the failure of our language to obtain the shared reality …

Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples Of Amazonia Are Ambivalent About Eating Meat, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Originally written for a conference on meat attended by farmers, anthropologists, people involved in cultural affairs, and other members of the public, and seeking to avoid emphasis on cultural difference, this paper explores common ground between Euro-American and Amerindian ambivalence about meat consumption. Meat-eating raises two shared concerns: an intuitive recognition of the resemblances between humans and animals and an uncomfortable awareness that human life often depends on the death and destruction of other living beings. I suggest that, behind some obvious cultural differences, Amazonian shamanic and ritual procedures aimed at the de-subjectification of meat share points in common with …

Why Such Constriction Of The Moral Sphere? The Importance Of Social Coordination In Croatia’S Ethnic Conflict, Michael Arthur Moncrieff

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Scholars have described ethnic violence in great length and detail. Many of the social and

psychological causal mechanisms that facilitate the rapid mobilization of ethnic groups and the eventual violence that can ensue are less understood. Morality typically eases cooperative interactions between members of a community by establishing rules that help to restrain self- interested actions that may be harmful to others. It is well documented that during periods of increasing ethnic conflict once intimate neighbors, colleagues, and friends can be recruited to take part in violence against each other solely on account of declared ethnic differences. In such circumstances, …

Exploring Perceptions Of Goodness Among The Malaysian And Chinese University Students: A Focus Group Study, Madiha Hashmi, Moniza Waheed, Ezhar Tamam, Steven E. Krauss Dr., Abdul Muati Ahmad

The Qualitative Report

The notion of goodness is implicitly central to the discourse relating to person perception. To date, no empirical research has focused solely upon understanding the notion of goodness and how it’s perceived and discerned in others. Utilizing focus group interviews, this paper explores how people perceive and interpret goodness in collectivist cultures of Malaysia and China. Findings revealed that Malaysian and Chinese participants had somewhat similar notions about goodness. “Concern for others’ welfare” was found to have the most resonance across the two nationalities as a key element in discerning goodness in others. Another category emerging from the findings was …

Moral Issues In The Recent History Of The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Ivelina Nikolova

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Over the past centuries Bulgarian people experienced severe religious and ethnic threats due to which they have developed defense mechanisms and a strong sense of sympathy for persecuted ethnic and social groups. In recent history, this reflex was manifested most clearly in the behavior of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in defense of the Bulgarian Jews. At the same time two other events, however, reveal its controversial image that caused it a severe damage. In recent years, many Bulgarians are seeking the moral dimensions of these phenomena that influence the spirituality and morality of the younger generations.

Freedom Of Conscience As Religious And Moral Freedom, Michael J. Perry

Faculty Articles

In another essay being published contemporaneously with this one, I have explained that as the concept "human right" is understood both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in all the various international human rights treaties that have followed in the Universal Declaration's wake, a right is a human right if the rationale for establishing and protecting the right-for example, as a treaty-based right-is, in part, that conduct that violates the right violates the imperative, articulated in Article i of the Universal Declaration, to "act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood." Each of the human rights …

The Moral International Sphere As A New "Civic Virtue", Claudia Heiss

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Liberal political theory, the predominant paradigm at least since the 1970s, rules out as oppressive the imposition of any substantive notion of a "good way of life" and proposes instead a neutral conception where each individual should have the right to pursue his or her own preferred project of life. This opposition of an ancient "virtue" and a modern "freedom" seems challenged by current debates about morality and the responsibility to protect innocent civilians from massive crimes. The moral outrage of the international community may be interpreted as a signal of a perhaps minimal notion of civic virtue, which translates …

Rules Of Engagement: Seeking Moral And Legal Sufficiency In The 21st Century, Tanner Williams

Global Tides

Modern conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be unlike any other conflict in history. United States and Coalition forces are faced with an insurgent enemy that defies all pre-established Laws of Armed Combat. As we transition from a wartime operations to a peacekeeping environment, it is important to reflect upon the moral and legal struggles that our soldiers face in the line of duty. Certainly, it cannot be easy to distinguish between lawful or unlawful combatants and innocent civilians in a war that lacks a clearly defined enemy. As a result, it is necessary to examine our rules …

Tapping The Wisdom Of Our Ancestors: An Attempt To Recast Vodou And Morality Through The Voice Of Mama Lola And Karen Mccarthy Brown, Claudine Michel

Trotter Review

In this essay, I demonstrate that morality is culture-specific and contextual. To illustrate this point, I focus on Vodou, a religion that has been almost entirely misrepresented in the West, foremost because of its African origins, and that is perceived as having no legitimate basis for morality. I attempt to interpret morality in Vodou by presenting a model of ethics construction based on the true meaning of the religion rather than on the exotica of its myths and ritualizing. My analysis is based on the fact that Haitians seem to have turned to their ancestral religion and to their African …