This thesis explores eating habits among seven second-generation immigrants born, raised and living in Scania, southern Sweden. It does so by using a thematic analysis of data gathered through semi-structured interviews. The theoretical framework combines Douglas’ symbolism, Bandura’s social learning theory and acculturation models. The results show that interviewees maintain memories from childhood and emotions attached to eating habits; parents play an important role in shaping the individuals’ habits as well as their successful assimilation of the majority traditions. Moreover, there is a general preference for social eating rather than eating alone, and a strong connection between traditional food and cultural belonging. Differences in eating habits were recognized as reasons of discrimination and feelings of alienation. However, thanks to their parent’s influence, interviewees negotiate the different cultural realities they live in. The findings contribute to research in the sociology of food and eating and can be employed in policy development.

The history of African Independent Churches (AICs) in Southern Africa goes back for more than a hundred years. They have proliferated geographically and demographically in Africa more than the mainline churches could ever have imagined. They have grown to be as widespread and as influential as the African mainline churches. The reason for this growth is that the AICs are the churches of African indigenous people. They are launched by Africans from a background of an African traditional and cultural frame of reference. The most significant reason is that the founders of these churches are not Westerners, but Africans. Western missionaries find it difficult to understand the AICs from their perspective. Thus the Western churches describe the AICs as sectarian, separatist, syncretist, nativitist, and so on. Nevertheless, some scholars are attempting to view the AICs in positive ways. The fact that these two different churches have never acknowledged each other as true churches is a big challenge for Christian missions in Namibia. Each group has been viewing and judging the other party through suspicious eyes from their own perspective, each driving the other to block the channel of reconciliation before the presence of God. With the aim of solving this problem, this thesis attempts to answer the following questions about the AICs in Namibia: • What are the reasons that the AICs in Namibia have been seceded from mission churches? • What are the activities in civil society in which the AICs in Namibia are currently involved? • Do the AICs engage in any activities which go against the Word of God? • What causes other churches to be suspicious of the AICs? • What level of enculturation is inherent to the AICs in Namibia? In other words, what is the relationship between the liturgies of the AIC and African traditional religion and African culture? • What makes the AICs in Namibia regard themselves as a church? Would it be possible for the AICs and the mainline churches in Namibia to cooperate in Christian missionary work? • What is a possible Korean missionary perspective on this particular situation? This will be dealt throughout this thesis from a Korean missionary missional perspective. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Science of Religion and Missiology / PhD / Unrestricted

Melounek, R.: Clothing as a cultural artifact and its current use in Art lectures at Primary Education [Thesis] Prague 2013 - Charles University, Faculty of Education, Department of Art Education, 113 p. Theoretic part of thesis deals with finding the mutual relations between the history of the 20th century clothing with wiew on combination of clothes, rituals and art. Didactic part offers a preview of current social rituals, through children's artistic perception, of which we may experience in life and personally reflect. In the practical section, through creation of a unique garment, thesis examine the possibilitie of understanding of clothing as a work of art and it's dual usage.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis explores the ways in which migrant labour infrastructure and the related operating practices of the South African colonial administration impacted on workers in and from the colonial north-central part of Namibia, formerly known as Ovamboland. This study stretches from the Union of South Africa’s occupation of the region in 1915 up to 1954 when the last Native Commissioner for Ovamboland completed his term of office and a new administrative phase began. Infrastructure refers to the essential facilities that an institution or communities install to use in order to connect or communicate.4 Vigne defines infrastructure as the mode of connections between techniques, practices, social values, cultures, economies and politics.5 This dissertation deals with two types of infrastructures.

No description available.

The journey towards healing and transformation in Africa is a continual process, which calls all sectors of society to continually commit towards creating avenues of healing. Rituals have been identified and introduced as a guiding framework for the study as they are widely accepted as a strategy to provide healing and transformation. The study assumes that these rituals can be used as vehicles to tell our stories in order to recreate a community of hope. As such the study has attempted to establish this relationship and assess if these rituals of atonement can be used creatively by the church to bring healing and transformation. In order to elucidate the inherent similarities between biblical and African concepts of atonement the study used theological and exegetical tools to analyse these concepts. The study established that the rituals of the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16 have certain similarities with some African rituals of atonement and reconciliation. The Leviticus rituals of atonement provide deep ethical and theological foundations that can positively inform the work of reconciliation in our social, economic, religious and political scene in Africa. The study then concludes that a constructive use of the Bible and the concept of atonement in the Old Testament will benefit Africa in its endeavour to bring about reconciliation. However, in the background lies the assumption that the relationship between Africa and the Bible is not an innocent one. It is then recommended that our approach towards the Bible embraces and treats with sensitivity the fact that the same Bible has been used previously in Africa to shape ideologies like apartheid and liberation ideologies and as well as demonising some of the traditional African cultures and religious expressions. Nevertheless, both the biblical and African views of life indicate that the primary goal of rituals is a community of peace, friendship, purity and creative harmony. In view of the resemblances between the Day of Atonement rituals and the African rituals that have been explored we can safely use the Bible in order to contribute to the continual work of reconciliation in Southern Africa. / Dissertation (MA (Biblical and Religious Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Biblical and Religious Studies / Unrestricted

Distansarbete är ett arbetssätt som har blivit alltmer populärt. Tillsammans med teknikens framgång har det blivit alltmer tillgängligt för företag att arbeta utanför den traditionella arbetsplatsen. Det ökade distansarbetet kan leda till kulturella förändringar inom en organisation som leder till mer ansvar för ledaren att bibehålla organisationskulturen. Syftet med denna kvalitativa studie är att få insikt kring hur ledare använder organisationskultur för att styra organisationer både på fysiska arbetsplatser och vid distansarbete. Ledare använder organisationskultur för att få anställda att uppnå organisationens mål samt gemensamma värderingar. Studien presenterar ritualer, artefakter och kulturstyrning som tre variabler inom organisationskulturen som ledare och organisationerna använder sig utav. Studien har genomförts med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer med fem organisationer. De fem organisationer som analyserats är inom bank, statligt ägt företag, ideell organisation, social omsorg och redovisningsbyrå. Alla organisationer använder sig utav en tydlig organisationskultur men har olika strategier samt tillvägagångssätt kring hur de arbetar mot organisationskulturen. De alla arbetar med tydliga strategier för att få sina anställda att arbeta mot samt uppnå organisationens gemensamma mål och värderingar. En likhet som finns inom organisationerna är att de alla har tydliga målsättningar, arbetar mot gemensamma värderingar, utfärdar ritualer, använder sig utav artefakter och arbetar med kommunikationsteknologier. Det som skiljer dem åt är att företaget inom bank, social omsorg och redovisningsbyrån arbetar mer med värderingar. Utöver det arbetar dessa tre företag mer med tydliga ritualer som de genomför tillsammans med sina anställda. En annan skillnad är att artefakterna ser olika ut hos alla organisationerna där vissa artefakter är mer synliga än andra som exempelvis arbetskläder. Ledarna inom organisationerna använder sig utav organisationskultur som ett styrmedel och har olika tillvägagångssätt samt strategier för att nå dit. Slutsatsen som kan dras är att alla fem organisationer arbetar mot en tydlig organisationskultur, där de använder sig av strategier, kommunikation samt uppföljning för att få sina anställda att uppnå organisationens gemensamma mål och värderingar. Ledarna använder sig utav ritualer, artefakter och kulturstyrning för att uppnå organisationskultur, detsamma gäller vid distansarbete. Alla organisationer har implementerat information och kommunikationsteknologier för att upprätthålla organisationskulturen under distansarbete. Däremot har organisationen inom social omsorg och redovisningsbyrån lyckats upprätthålla organisationskulturen bäst under distansarbete. Banken, det statliga företaget och den ideella organisationen har arbetat med att upprätthålla kulturen vid distansarbete men utmaningar som tillgänglighet och delaktighet har försvårat processen. / Teleworking is a way of working that has become increasingly popular. Along with the success of technology, it has become increasingly accessible for companies to work outside the traditional workplace. The increased telework can lead to cultural changes within an organization that lead to more responsibility for the leader to maintain the organizational culture. The purpose of this qualitative study is to gain insight into how leaders use organizational culture to control organizations both in physical workplaces and in teleworking. Leaders use organizational culture to get employees to achieve the organization's goals and common values. The study presents rituals, artifacts and cultural management as three variables within the organizational culture that leaders and organizations use. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with five companies. The five companies analyzed are a bank, a state-owned company, a non-profit organization, a company within social care and an accounting firm. All companies use an organizational culture but have different strategies and approaches to how they work towards the organizational culture. They all work with clear strategies to get their employees to work towards and achieve the organization's goals and common values. A similarity that exists within the companies is that they all have clear goals, work towards common values, use rituals, artifacts and work with communication technologies. What sets them apart is that the company in banking, social care and the accounting firm works more with values. In addition, these three companies work more with rituals that they perform together with their employees. Another difference is that the artifacts look different in all companies where some artifacts are more visible than others such as work clothes. The leaders within the organizations use organizational culture as a tool and have different approaches and strategies to get there. The conclusion that can be drawn is that all five companies work towards an organizational culture, where they use strategies, communication and follow-up to get their employees to achieve the organization's goals and common values. The leaders use rituals, artifacts and culture management to achieve organizational culture. All organizations have implemented information and communication technologies to maintain the organizational culture during teleworking. The company in social care and the accounting firm has managed to maintain the organizational culture best during telework. The bank, the state-owned company and the non-profit organization have worked to maintain the culture through teleworking, but challenges such as accessibility and participation have made the process more difficult.

Under the new Vision 2030 national transformation plan, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia seeks to increase number of annual pilgrims from eight million to thirty million. If oil has certain limits, then pilgrimage is framed as lasting “forever.” But this exuberant claim of “forever” belies a more subtle transformation unfolding at the level of knowledge, technology, and hospitality as Mecca and its crowds are made and re-made into a resource for a national economy. This dissertation examines the Saudi state’s efforts to manage, and ultimately intensify and optimize Mecca’s pilgrimage through new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics, and secular hospitality. I demonstrate how these new forms of knowledge production operate in tension with older and decidedly more Islamic ways of knowing, managing, and belonging in the holy city. Instead of approaching religious knowledge and secular knowledge as discrete spheres, my research explores their entanglements and aporias across a range of techno-political practices: navigation, hospitality, urban planning, systems thinking, crowd management, and optimization. Ultimately, I explore how in this moment of ritual intensity, the cosmopolitan logics of the holy city come to be blunted.

This paper journeys through skin and touch as a form of storytelling and ritualistic bodily expression. It investigates how these elements and actions with the body can support humans in forging deeper connections and function as a catalyst for care. This work builds on theories of slow design, ritual design and Body-Mind Centering. It studies embodied research within design and shares insights gained through experiential and explorative practices. Further it looks at the human nature bond within female bodies as a a way to strengthen women and dismantle patriarchal structures. To conclude it explores how a booklet can be a medium for guiding women into their own bodies and invoking care with the self, other humans and more than human others.

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis was to investigate how communities can be formed online. By applying Randall Collins theory of Interaction Ritual Chains to live chats in the Just Chatting and esport categories on Twitch.tv, we aimed to explore how communities on the website are established through interaction rituals. By identifying and mapping them we hoped to not only find differences between streams and their live chats, but also to find universal rituals that can be applied to chats across Twith.tv as a whole. As our method, we used a digital ethnographic approach, often referred to as netnography, where the data later was processed by using a qualitative data analysis. This study found several interaction rituals in live chats on Twitch.tv, where communities met with mutual focus. Channel specific emotes, jargons and internal references acted as barriers to entry as well as methods of confirming shared moods. The study also found that while esport streams were dominated by expressive rituals, Just-Chatting streams were defined by conversing rituals that invited users to two-way communication.