Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T19:20:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Carolina Chizzolini Alves.pdf: 11558279 bytes, checksum: cd623a65eec9ca5df0e2639eab694153 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-05-23 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The aim of the present research is to examine the relations established between corporeality and Wicca the modern witchcraft. Such relations can be explored due to a new imaginary of the body, originated from the western society history, with the advent of Modernity, and still developed nowadays. This new imaginary goes a long way toward new religious movements known as The New Age. The so-called New Age represents a sort of fertile ground upon which new religions, from a tradition-based perspective, have steadily strengthened and established in the western part of the world, combining oriental symbols, mixing beliefs freely and promoting creativity among their followers. This is the case of Wicca, which is presented as old witchcraft merging into everyday urban elements. Wicca is closely related to a religion of corporeality because, in the same way as a New Age moviment, the body is viewed as the core of practice, and a means of social transformation Wicca aims at. Ecological, psychological and corporeal transformation, making its followers´ bodies a magical extension of nature / Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar as relações tecidas entre Corporeidade e Wicca a bruxaria moderna. Entendemos que tais relações são possíveis devido à construção de um novo imaginário do corpo, advindo da história da sociedade ocidental, na chegada da modernidade e desenvolvido em nossos dias. Este novo imaginário se constrói e se legitima no espaço dos Novos Movimentos Religiosos que chamamos de Nova Era. Este espaço, a Nova Era, é o lugar promissor de desenvolvimento das novas religiões que, com uma roupagem antiga, se fortaleceram e se estabeleceram no Ocidente combinando símbolos orientais, mesclando crenças com muita liberdade e promovendo a criatividade de seus adeptos. Este é o caso da Wicca, que se apresenta como uma antiga arte de bruxaria e hoje é praticada adaptando-se confortavelmente aos elementos urbanos do cotidiano. Falar de Wicca é falar de uma religião de corporeidade porque, assim como uma religião de Nova Era, o corpo está no centro das práticas e é instrumento para a realização da transformação social que a Wicca pretende alcançar. Transformação ecológica, psicológica e corporal, fazendo do corpo de seus adeptos e adeptas uma extensão mágica da natureza

I am investigating a New Age spiritual movement called the Law of Attraction that has been the source of recent media attention due to the recent publication of a self-help book called The Secret. The book investigates this phenomenon, which is a theory that takes positive thinking to the extreme. The theory states that reality can be literally manifested through one's thoughts. I am interested in this trend because it supports consumerist values, entrepreneurship, and self-actualization while using socialist rhetoric to promote capitalist values. I am also interested in the implications that this rhetoric holds for women and marginalized groups. I will investigate how the theory draws on quotes from spiritual leaders, famous scientists, and revered world figures and abstracts their meanings by placing them in a paradigm for their own use. I will also look at how they use the authority of science and an appeal to traditionally Christian language to promote blind faith in this principle. I will look at how this movement positions consumerism and consumption as a means of self-actualization and spiritual salvation and analyze how the theory lends itself to the ideals of capitalism. Finally, I will emphasize how the Law of Attraction disregards women and marginalized groups by ignoring systemic restrains by focusing only on the power of the individual with a blatant disregard for social institutions and systems. This project will be a textual rhetorical analysis that will incorporate an ethnographic study, textual analysis, and a critical theoretical approach to theory. The goal of this project is to interrogate a contemporary self-help and New Age spiritual movement that is symptomatic of the contemporary preoccupation with self-actualization and the discourse of positive-thinking.

Since Montesquie's incisive differentiation of the principal forms of governance and their components, the rate at which theories of governance have been proposed has exponenetially grown now when we have a plethora of different theories on the best way to govern, lead and /or manage. Anyone interested in this topic is confronted with many conflicting schools of thought, from Weber's theory of the 'iron cage' to Wheatley's new-age concept of leadership. This seeming maze of different theories can be seen merely as different perspectives on the overall embracing concept of governance which is essentially the holistic conception and explanation of differentiated purposive human systems - about paradigms and systems that have their inception in and are limited by, human mind. The core challenge, then, is to put some order and rationale into the understanding of this 'many-headed ' concept of governance. This thesis meets this challenge by mapping out a cognitive framework that is capable of embracing and ordering all the multitudinous differentiated conceptions of human governance experienced at the different levels of society. In essence, this thesis reformulates the concept of organizational governance in terms of the metaphor of the human mind. The cognitive model of governance are embraced by the different organizations in different circumstances and why this is appropriate and necessary, how and why governance changes over time, and how it is important to institute processes of inquiry, dialogue and reflection in order to know and choose more consciously. As a consequence of using the mind metaphor to analyse governance in Western society, the key conclusion is that there has been a substantial shift or evolution in thinking from a mangerialist mindset to the more abstract politicist mindset. This fundamental shift in mindset is pervasive and influences the perspectives taken at many levels in the human governance systems. / Doctor of Philosophy (Management)

<p>En jämförelse mellan New Age och kristendom som visar likheter och skillnader, samt en prövning efter en religionsdefinition.</p>

Several popular cultural movements emphasizing indigenous spirituality have arisen in the United States and Europe within the past thirty years. Spiritual discourses attributed to Native Americans, among other groups, are borrowed by Euro-Americans in search of alternatives to dominant ideologies. In such a circumstance, Native Americans become part of a constructed and colonized homogenous category of indigenous people, considered by Euro-Americans as naturally close to the earth and essentially spiritual. The so-called New Age movement has, within it, several sub-movements, which are particularly noted for their emphasis on perceived Native American spiritualism. The Red Cedar Circle, made up primarily of white Americans, focuses on the Si.si.wiss Medicine of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and can be described as falling under the definitional heading of the New Age. The suppression and transformation of the heterogeneous reality of indigenous societies by the imaginings of the Euro-American dominant, has many ethical implications, as does cultural appropriation in a situation of major power differentials. Native communities are becoming increasingly outspoken in their opposition to the practice of Indian, or pseudo-Indian, religions by non-Natives. Many consider such practices to be morally suspect. Both Native and non-Native social critics feel that New Age practitioners involved in appropriated and popularized versions of indigenous religions, are interpreting and using aspects of traditionally subjugated cultures to meet their own needs. What may appear to be a harmless search for enlightenment by Europeans and Euro-Americans might have very real negative consequences for actual Native American lives. This study is based on participant observation of the Corvallis, Oregon Red Cedar Circle, and interviews with its members from June of 1991 to April of 1994. Analysis of data from New Age literature was also conducted, as well as an historical overview of the 'Nobel Savage' myth in Western cultures. Interviews with members of the local Native American community were carried out for feedback on how a given population of Native Americans perceives the Euro-American practice of Native spirituality. The data supports the supposition that cultural borrowing, or appropriation, is both a cause of, and a reaction to, the instability of cultural identity in late twentieth-century America. / Graduation date: 1995

En jämförelse mellan New Age och kristendom som visar likheter och skillnader, samt en prövning efter en religionsdefinition.

Uppsatsen har för avsikt att undersöka hur den nypaganistiska, och i första hand nordamerikanska, rörelsen Church of All Worlds reagerar mot förändring och institutionalisering. För att förstå institutionaliseringsprocessens bakomliggande krafter och identifiera dess konsekvenser, är det övergripande syftet med uppsatsen att utifrån en fallstudie av Church of All Worlds undersöka hur organisationen under sina verksamhetsår förändrats i fråga om (1) förhållande till samhället, (2) ideologi, (3) organisatorisk struktur och (4) ledarskap. Utgångspunkten är att betrakta rörelsen som dels religiös och spirituell, dels organisatorisk och ekonomisk, varför uppsatsen lutar sin teoribildning mot både religions- och samhällsvetenskapen och mot organisationsteorin. Som samhälleliga samt organisatoriska faktorer till Church of All Worlds institutionalisering finner vi den postmoderna motreaktionen mot industrisamhällets missförhållanden samt kritiken mot existensen av den objektiva sanningen. Institutionaliseringens följder är emellertid att rörelsen slutligen upptas som en del av det sen-moderna samhällssystemet. Förändringen märks i första hand då rörelsen under 80-talet förvandlas till en ekonomiskt intresserad organisation med tjänstehierarkier och reglerat ansvar som påföljder. Den byråkratiska arbetsordningen urlakar inte bara rörelsens ideologi, utan tvingar också den nu demokratiskt tillsatte ledaren till radikala åtgärder för att återfå sin makt, något som når sin kulmen i en konflikt med ledarens sorti som yttersta konsekvens.

Yoga is an increasingly visible and versatile commodity in the United States health market. Though its origins stretch to pre-Vedic India and its traditional religious purpose is linked to Hinduism, it is evident that yoga has undergone much change since its transmission to U.S. culture. In its popular, widespread incarnation in the United States, yoga is not usually learned at the feet of a guru, but at exercise centers and gyms. These secular locales of yoga's practice help define the "yoga phenomenon" in contemporary America. This phenomenon has resulted in yoga's wide acceptance and high visibility in American popular culture --- especially within the "cultic milieu" as it is expressed in the "spiritual marketplace" and "therapeutic culture." Yoga's apparent transformation from an explicitly Hindu religious practice to one located in cultural environments that appear non-religious on the surface (such as gyms or therapeutic regimens) is a topic of interest in religious studies. Of even greater interest to religious studies, however, is the argument put forward by some scholars that these non-religious environments are actually profoundly religious in character and suggest that yoga's apparent transformation is a manifestation of a new type of religious experience within the United States. This thesis is interested in the various questions surrounding this apparent transformation. The central question here is what happens to yoga in U.S. culture? More specifically, what is yoga's religious status in the context of contemporary U.S. culture and religion, and what forms does yoga take within various environments t hat are devoid of explicit Hindu connections? To engage these questions, this thesis will analyze yoga's religious status in the context of the theories of secularization and the cultic milieu as put forth by Steve Bruce, as well as the concepts of the spiritual marketplace and therapeutic culture as presented by Wade Clark Roof. Data culled from various sources and independent research will also be used in understanding yoga in contemporary U.S. popular religion and culture.

It was expected that by the end of the twentieth-century, due to human achievement and technology, religion would be a mere fading memory in the minds and the history books of modernized western people. This has been expressed through the secularization thesis, which describes a “disenchantment” of western culture. Over the last ten years, however, there has been a growing movement seeking to re-enchant this culture by exploring and reconsidering religion, myth and spirituality. One of the most powerful expressions of this is popularly referred to as the New Age Movement. This thesis looks at the relationship between New Age and secularization theory, examining the reasons for an apparent turn away from secularization. By using Jacques Ellul’s interpretation of the history of the sacred, this thesis proposes that far from being a time of secularization, modernism ushered in an era where the sacred canopy of Christianity was replaced by a new sacred expression in the form of science and technology. In recent years, however, the perceived failure of modernism has generated a search for a new set of sacred expressions in western society. New Age and postmodernism are vehicles which people are using to initiate this search. Currently both phenomena are looking to three sources in order to recover meaning and control over life: the past and the distant, nature and the self. The theoretical challenge New Age and postmodernism represents to the secularization thesis is made concrete in the geography of the New Age Movement. This thesis makes a physical connection between the New Age and areas of gentrification, which contradicts the assumptions of the secularization thesis by proving that an area which should be highly secularized is in fact a place of spiritual exploration.

The intent of this thesis is to explore the various ways in which acupuncturists trained in Quebec interpret and use the term qi in their practice as healers. It argues that these choices are influenced by the implicit connection between complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and New Age spirituality. As Asian medical systems such as Chinese medicine carve out a niche within the dominant biomedical health-care system, there is a simultaneous desire to present its medical system as scientifically coherent within the biomedical context and a desire to cater to the New Age orientalist fascination with "traditional" Asian medicine and what is perceived as its inherent spiritual qualities. This study concludes that although Quebecois acupuncturists are well-versed in the historical interpretations of the term qi, as well as its medical applications, there is nevertheless a tendency for these practitioners to understand qi as a part of the framework of their own personal spirituality and the relation of that spirituality to their work as healers. Moreover, it is shown that this tendency is strongly informed by the interface of New Age notions concerning healing and the CAM movement. By situating the study within the cultural milieu of Quebec, the specific religio-historical background of this locale and its effects on these practitioners is also taken into consideration.