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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

The aim of this paper is to examine how a society such as Cambodia’s, which has undergone massive trauma, might heal and, in particular, whether traditional healers can help With the healing. The paper draws upon a participant observation of more than 1,100 healers carried out over 12 years in order to reveal how various forms of traditional healing instill illness and suffering With meaning and how the Khmer Rouge manipulated and reconstructed local explanatory models of illness to reflect their fundamentalist ideology. It describes the fate of traditional healers under Pol Pot and examines the cultural meanings assigned to mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases (including AIDS) and malaria by both traditional healers and Khmer Rouge cadres. As Pol Pot showed, the dismantling of systems that provide social justice is most effectively done by those Who know the culture. This paper asks whether the retooling of social justice might also be most effectively handled by the traditional harbingers of cultural meaning, namely, the healers. The challenge posed by the ‘outbreak of peace’ matches the one that accompanied war. In Cambodia, it encompasses alarming new incarnations of trauma as AIDS sweeps the country, parents traffic daughters, children Shoot parents, lovers hurl acid and youths descend into Ecstasy. ‬

The field of international psychosocial response to disaster and massive violence has much to contribute to an understanding of the social impact of the September 1 terrorist attacks and subsequent events in New York City. The author presents lessons learned from his experience in Kosovo and other international contexts that have been applied to promoting collective recovery in the his own Ground Zero community in lower Manhattan. Programs that promote healing in trauma-affected communities may contain a number of themes. First, they bring people together to promote positive connections as a foundation for social support, education and access to existing resources. Second, these programs can provide opportunities for people to organize their experience and emotions and tell their stories in ways that can be affirmed by the community. Third, these programs can facilitate conversations, which shift the focus from stressful experiences and haunting memories to affirmation of strengths, problem-solving and positive visions of the future. And, fourth, people can come together to reaffirm their connection to nature, spirit, the seasons, holidays and other events, which are life-affirming and growth-promoting. One of the challenges faced has been the shifting of the dominant discourse of institutions and funders from one that focuses primarily upon a medicalized view of psychological trauma to one that recognizes and enhances the inherent strengths and resilience of individuals, families, communities and cultures to recover from such events.‬

Sorcery in Sri Lanka is entirely about human suffering and issues of personal injustice, which are viewed in terms of cosmological/mythological conceptions of the state and its transition from a pre-Buddhist to a Buddhist socio-political order. This paper argues that personal injustices and self-perceptions of individuals as victims are grasped through conceptions of sorcery as a failure in the moral order of state and society. Sorcery discourses in Sri Lanka are concerned with the remoralization of social processes. This is particularly true in the contemporary circumstances of globalization and nationalism. The paper presents information on the emergence of innovative sorcery shrines (thoroughgoing inventions of colonialism and post-coloniality) in the mainly urban contexts of contemporary Sri Lanka. One critical implication of the argument that is presented here is that contemporary political developments have crented a moral crisis in the order of the Sinhala Buddhist state. Paradoxically, the emergence of new forms of sorcerous activities- and the persistence of long-term ones dire intended to bring the state and its agents and agencies (which are seen as being at the root of personal distress, injustice and suffering) back within an encompassing moral order in which injustice is ultimately redressed and suffering and overcome.‬

The concept of umma is an important element of historical, as well as contemporary, discourse on Islam. This paper provides an overview of the development and evolution of the concept of umma and its usage in Islamic discourse to explain the current social, political and economic conditions of the Muslim world. It reports findings about umma consciousness among Muslims in Southeast Asia, South and Central Asia and the Middle East, examining the impact of globalization on the Islamic umma and how it is shaping the emerging struggle between ‘hybridity’ and ‘authenticity’ among Muslims and Islamic movements. The paper concludes with some observations on the risks and challenges of this struggle and its sociological implications for the future of the Islamic umma and the world.‬

The spread of the COVID-19 virus affected countries all over the world and led them to impose different measures to combat the pandemic. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was one of the countries affected by the virus; hence, the Government of Jordan imposed strict curfew measures to fight the pandemic. Accordingly, this article intends to examine how much public support the Jordanian government’s decisions and policies, particularly concerning the imposition or the suggestion of imposing strict curfew measures gained from the Jordanian citizens via invoking content analysis to examine citizens’ comments extracted from an official Jordanian media channel. The results showed that at the beginning of the crisis, the majority of citizens demonstrated support for the government’s strict curfew. However, this changed a year after, mainly for economic reasons.

Religion is often perceived as a system of answers to environmental phenomena. When it comes to crises, religious communities tend to behave according to their beliefs and inherited values. Religions and religious actors are expected to comfort believers by giving them answers to painful events, as well as providing them with different variations of support. Therefore, the current Coronavirus pandemic challenges the two largest religions in the world, Christianity and Islam, in primarily two different ways. The following essay intends to compare past and present Christian and Muslim reactions to pandemics; the first part will illustrate the contemporary interventions of the COVID-19 virus; the second half will discuss past pandemics (e.g., Bubonic Plague).‬

This essay tries to answer the question “who is the person behind the mask?” by analyzing the most relevant cultural, political and religious aspects of mask-usage from a Christian perspective in preparation for the post-pandemic reality. The short review of the Greek and Christian cultural heritage concerning masks is followed by a critical phenomenological analysis on some effects of the current pandemic that accelerated the social and cultural processes already lurking underneath the surface. I will discuss six dimensions in which obligatory mask usage has transformed social relations: the notion of health based on separation, the body as a suspicious entity, the new division between private and public, the virtualisation of relationships, other-perception and finally, mask usage as a symbol of solidarity. Pleading for the use of charitable imagination in order to rediscover the person behind the mask, I argue for a tradition-based resistance against impersonal, virtualized and disembodied relations in the Covid-era.‬

This article analyzes colonial medical practices as secular theodicies that helped Shape social injustice in South Africa and suggests that European delineations of disease were integral to the country’s colonization. It starts by demarcating conceptions of Africa as the ‘diseased continent,’ arguing that this trope was informed by a dominant medical paradigm that localized threats to European health in Africa’s climate and topography. In the second section, I argue that the birth of bacteriology in the 1880s created new public health concerns that situated disease in extra-corporal spaces. In the race-conscious colonies, these public health spaces were inserted between European and African social bodies, presenting African pathology as a dominant threat to public health. In the final section, I argue that medical discourse in the interwar era increasingly focused upon African culture as the source of disease and enveloped Africans in medical discourses on the peculiarities of the African mind. The European medical cartography ofAfrica and Africans thus emerges as a strategy of distinction, which provided a precedent for racial segregation.‬

This paper attempts to identify some of the many aspects of poverty in Lebanon and the structural conditions that underlie them. It presents relevant findings from two ethnographic research projects led by the author in rural and urban areas of the country. Data collected using qualitative methods, such as interviews and observations of groups and individuals, has been subjected to thematic analysis, which reveals the presence of two major poverty-related themes in both of the communities studied: economic hardship and the inadequate marketing of local agricultural produce; and poor access to the health services and education available to more affluent sectors of the population. The paper indicates that the root causes of poverty and its manifestations in Lebanon are structural in nature and are the consequences of an interplay of factors at many levels. At the national level, the lack of a development policy and of appropriate regulation of foreign labour, in addition to regional political and economic conditions have exacerbated social inequality in Lebanon’s low-income and war-affected areas.

Beginning in 1990, Mongolia, a former Client State of what was then the Soviet Union, undertook sweeping free market reforms under terms prescribed by Western development institutions. Principal among these were reforms to Mongolia’s Soviet-style health system. This paper reports the results of a research project designed to explore the consequences of these health sector reforms from the perspective of Mongolians living in urban and rural communities. Drawing upon interviews With householders, observations, medical records and illness histories (as reported by patients), I argue that the effective implementation of health reform has been compromised by the development of a private, primary care model in which physicians are largely unable to provide appropriate treatment for even the most common of ailments. Because of laws in the national health insurance system and the uncritical development of a private sector of health care, poor Mongolians have limited access to secondary and tertiary care. I conclude by arguing that the valorization of market mechanisms by international development institutions and NGOs results in a conflation of distributional efficiency With medical and public health efficacy. This has resulted in a system of attenuated primary health care for the poor and vulnerable. Even when modified by government concerns for justice and equity, the global/ Western push for privatization in Mongolia has primarily done what it has done elsewhere: produced poor medicine for poor people.