Building and expanding on the first edition, the second edition of Food, National Identity and Nationalism continues to explore a much-neglected area study: the relationship between food and nationalism. With a preface written by Michaela DeSoucey and using a wide range of case studies, it demonstrates that food and nationalism is an important area to study, and that the food-nationalism axis provides a useful prism through which to explore and analyse the world around us, from the everyday to the global, and the ways in which it affects us. The second edition includes a number of new case studies, including the demise and resurrection of pie as a 'national dish' in post-Brexit Britain; the use of netnography; the role of diasporas in maintaining and reinventing national food; the gastrodiplomatic potential of the New Nordic Cuisine; the potential of veganism to transcend nationalism; and the relationship between gastronationalism and populism.

This book presents an historical and sociological account of the Italian mafia-type organisation known as the 'ndrangheta. It draws together diverse perspectives on the various 'ndrangheta clans and their behavioural models, focusing specifically on their organisational skills, their bonds with Calabrian society and Calabrian communities around the world, their mobility, and their characterisation as poly-crime organisations. The authors demonstrate that 'ndrangheta clans have an innovative way of being and doing mafia work through a dense network of relationships both in the 'upperworld' and in the 'underworld', a particularly acute sense of business, a reputation built on the protection of blood and family ties, and, last but not least, a symbiotic relationship and camouflage within Calabrian society. By focusing on both the structures and the activities of the clans and with findings based on judicial documents, this book explores why the 'ndrangheta is today labeled as "the most powerful Italian mafia". It will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of organised crime and sociology.

Religion's persistent and new visibility in political life has prompted a significant global debate. One of this debate's key features concerns the nature and impact of secularization. This collection of essays draws together leading sociologists, historians, philosophers of religion, and political theorists in order to provide a broad and up-to-date account of religion after secularization. Contributors explore the meaning and conceptual legacies of religion, as well as the unique features of the Australian case such as religion as it relates to law, education, gender, media, and radical political movements. Intervening in the current debate, this book provides summative accounts of the historical, cultural, and legal interactions that have informed Australia's relationship to religion and secularization. Contributors critically analyze and engage with secular political theory concerning the public sphere, while also dissecting deliberative politics and democratic practices. This book propels the debate over religion's place in public life in new directions and promotes urgently needed public understanding.

This book explores the ways in which religion is observed, performed, and organised in skateboard culture. Drawing on scholarship from the sociology of religion and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports, this work combines ethnographic research with media analysis to argue that the rituals of skateboarding provide participants with a rich cultural canvas for emotional and spiritual engagement. Paul O'Connor contends that religious identification in skateboarding is set to increase as participants pursue ways to both control and engage meaningfully with an activity that has become an increasingly mainstream and institutionalised sport. Religion is explored through the themes of myth, celebrity, iconography, pilgrimage, evangelism, cults, and self-help.

Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a multi-billion pound diet industry. Yet, when we question if our bathroom scales can really tell us about our health, we start to ask just why and how fat holds such fascination. In this book, Jayne Raisborough explores interpretations of fat bodies from Palaeolithic Europe to Poverty Porn TV to argue that fat's materiality makes it ripe for stigmatising associations. However, especially in a social context that presents health as a matter of choice, fat also emerges as an ideal redemptive substance to be pummelled and starved into submission. This book presents a 'fat sensibility' to demonstrate how fat is helping us all become responsibilised healthy-citizens. It asks just what self are we being asked to diet ourselves into?

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.

While the field of football studies has produced an abundance of literature on professional, top-league football, there is little research output to do with the non-top level football. This book explores the relationship between the top and lower leagues, laying open the drastic schisms that exist between the different levels. The study links the developments at the top level of English and German football in the past 30 years to transformational processes in lower league football. Illustrating how the hegemonic status of top football weighs hard on the spheres below, it depicts how it also serves as a blueprint for lower league football clubs' strategies in coping with a threefold dilemma of institutional legitimacy that shows itself in economic, cultural and social dimensions. Taking the different club structures in both national contexts as a starting point, it portrays both the efficacy of institutional frameworks and how these can be challenged from below. This research will be of interest to students and scholars across football studies, sports studies, the sociology of sport, and organisation studies.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been "discovered" by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.

This book is about multiculturalism, broadly defined as the recognition, respect and accommodation of cultural differences. Teo proposes a framework of multicultural denizenship that includes group-specific rights and intercultural dialogue, by problematising three issues: a) the unacknowledged misrecognition of non-citizens within the scholarship of multiculturalism; b) uncritical treatment of citizens and non-citizens as binary categories and; c) problematic parcelling of group-specific rights with citizenship rights. Drawing on the case of Singapore as an illustrative example, where temporary labour migrants are culturally stereotyped, socioeconomically disenfranchised and denied access to rights accorded only to citizens, Teo argues that understandings of multiculturalism need to be expanded and adjusted to include a fluidity of identities, spectrum of rights and shared experiences of marginalisation among citizens and non-citizens. Civic Multiculturalism in Singapore will be of interest to students and scholars of multiculturalism, critical citizenship studies, migration studies, political theory and postcolonial studies.

This book provides a critical feminist analysis of the Korean Protestant Right's gendered politics. Specifically, the volume explores the Protestant Right's responses and reactions to the presumed weakening of hegemonic masculinity in Korea's post-hypermasculine developmentalism context. Nami Kim examines three phenomena: Father School (an evangelical men's manhood and fatherhood restoration movement), the anti-LGBT movement, and Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism. Although these three phenomena may look unrelated, Kim asserts that they represent the Protestant Right's distinct yet interrelated ways of engaging the contested hegemonic masculinity in Korean society. The contestation over hegemonic masculinity is a common thread that runs through and connects these three phenomena. The ways in which the Protestant Right has engaged the contested hegemonic masculinity have been in relation to "others," such as women, sexual minorities, gender nonconforming people, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

This book examines the effects of faith schools on social cohesion and inter-ethnic relations. Faith schools constitute approximately one third of all state-maintained schools and two fifths of the independent schools in England. Nevertheless, they have historically been, and remain, controversial. In the current social climate, questions have been raised about the ability of faith schools to promote Community Cohesion and, included within that, their ability to promote tolerance. This book explores one aspect of the debate by examining the effect that faith schools have on their students' attitudes of tolerance. As well as asking what differences exist between students in faith and non-faith schools, it also looks at which aspects of the schools might be affecting the students and their attitudes towards different minorities. The book is a must-read for students and researchers in the fields of education and religious studies, as well as anyone with an interest in the place of faith schools in a modern multicultural society.

Mount Athos has been exercising its magnetic attraction on monks and pilgrims for over a thousand years. As the papers collected in this volume show (many of them delivered at a conference convened in Helsinki in 2006 to mark the opening of an exhibition of treasures of Mount Athos), monks have been drawn to its forests, cliffs, and caves in search of tranquillity and the inspiring teaching of charismatic elders since the ninth century. Through the Hesychastic renewal which began on Athos in the late Middle Ages the Holy Mountain acquired unprecedented importance throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Russia and rapidly extended its spiritual influence from the Mediterranean to the White Sea. Many of the papers are concerned with aspects of pilgrimage to Athos and the effect that a visit to the Mountain has on pilgrims' lives. Today the magnetism has lost none of its force and, despite threats to its environment and its unique way of life, Athos continues to operate as a spiritual powerhouse offering refreshment to all who turn to it.

The South Asian diaspora is a diverse group who settled in different parts of the world, often concentrated in developed countries. There is an emerging trend of re-engagement of the diaspora in the South Asian region. Entrepreneurs in Japan and Singapore as well as the Malaysian Indian diaspora are involved in South India making the region a lucrative space for capital, talent and ideas. This volume expands into diasporic communities such as the Nepali community in Singapore and their contribution to their home economy through remittances. Beyond economics, the contributors explore how transnational politics overlap with religious ideologies amongst Pakistanis in United Kingdom and the Sathya Sai Baba movement which contributes to diasporic identity building in host countries. They also explore media and culture: in the last decade Bollywood films have portrayed life in the diaspora, and have featured the diaspora and Non Resident Indians (NRI) as fully formed stock characters and protagonists. The process of diaspora re-engagement has tremendous development implications for South Asian countries, both individually and for their regional integration.

Terrorism has become an everyday reality in most contemporary societies. In a context of heightened fear can juries be trusted to remain impartial when confronted by defendants charged with terrorism? Do they scrutinize prosecution cases carefully, or does emotion trump reason once the spectre of terrorism is invoked? This book examines these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The authors look at the how jurors in terrorism trials are likely to respond to gruesome evidence, including beheading videos. The 'CSI effect' is examined as a possible response to forensic evidence, and jurors with different learning preferences are compared. Virtual interactive environments, built like computer games, may be created to provide animated reconstructions of the prosecution or defence case. This book reports on how to create such presentations, culminating in the analysis of a live simulated trial using interactive visual displays followed by jury deliberations. The team of international, transdisciplinary experts draw conclusions of global legal and political significance, and contribute to the growing scholarship on comparative counter-terrorism law. The book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners of law, criminal justice, forensic science and psychology.

How can one live by impossible ideals and values? The Jains of India are a flourishing and prosperous community, but their religion is focused on the teaching and example of ascetic renouncers, whose austere regime is actually dedicated to ending worldly life and often culminates in a fast to death. This book draws upon a detailed study of an urban Jain community in Jaipur, north-west India, to offer the fullest account yet given of Jain religious belief and practice. It shows how renunciation and asceticism play a central part in the life of a thriving business community, and how world-renunciation combines for Jain families with the pursuit of worldly happiness. The book is in five parts. Part I introduces the vivid mythology and doctrine of Jainism, and the traditions of Jain renouncers. Part II discusses the relations of Jains with other groups in Indian society, the politics of leadership on Jain communities, and the history, character, and composition of the Jain community in Jaipur. Part III contains detailed analyses of lay ascetic practices such as fasting and confession, traditions of imagery and iconography, and key religious ideas, such as the paradoxical doctrine of 'non-violence' (ahimsa). These are shown to turn on complex conceptions of the body and contrasting moral topographies of self. Part IV concerns relations between lay Jains and renouncers, and draws on recent writing on exchange and value to analyse the pivotal place of alms-giving in the Jain religion. Part V describes some of the closest connections between riches and renunciation, and shows how the pan-Indian festival of Diwali is adapted to distinctively Jain values and concerns.

This book provides qualitative analyses of intercultural sense making in a variety of institutional contexts. It relies on the assumption that in an increasingly culturally diverse world, individuals often enter contexts that have communal, historically determined and stable sets of values, norms and expected identities, with little cultural compass to find their bearings in them. The book goes beyond interpreting differences in people's ethnic or linguistic roots and discusses instead people's interpretive efforts to navigate different sociocultural situations. The contributors examine such situations in educational, organizational, medical and community settings and look at how participants with different levels of sociocultural competences (such as, migrant patients, migrant adult learners, children) try to cope with institutional constraints and expectations, how they understand symbols, practices and identities in institutional contexts, and how their creative adjustments come to light. This book provides insights from the fields of psychology, education, anthropology and linguistics, and is for a wide readership interested in cultural meaning-making.

This book discusses one of the most noticeable and significant transformations in China over the past three decades is the rapid and massive urbanization of the country, which has brought shifts in political culture of Chinese urbanites. This book is a systematic and empirical study of political culture in urban China. The book covers various aspects of political culture such as political regime support, political interest, democratic values, political trust, and environmental attitudes and sub-political culture of Chinese urban Christians. This book will be of immense value to urban scholars, sinologists, and those wishing to get a closer look at the issues that affect the political future of a rising world power.

"Spiritual Fitness Training in Valor" is a bold spiritually-directed training guide that helps us to shift from a crisis to Christ. In his second volume of Crisis intervention/"Christ-is Intervention," the author/psychologist expands his spiritual balance training program to include a series of spiritual strength, weight, resistance and cardio-aerobic exercises. Dr. Cosenza shows us how to use "weights of prevailing" in crises. We learn how to handle life's pressures through spiritual resistance training. Finally, we encouraged to walk in our completeness in Christ through spiritual cardio-aerobic techniques. This unique spiritual fitness program in courage and resilience has major applications for crisis intervention by spiritual leaders, mental health professionals, teachers of pastoral counseling, health fitness trainers, and loyal followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who wants to help others.

The current refugee crisis sweeping Europe, and much of the world, closely intersects with largely neglected questions of religion. Moving beyond discussions of religious differences, what can we learn about the interaction between religion and migration? Do faith-based organisations play a role within the refugee regime? How do religious traditions and perspectives challenge and inform current practices and policies towards refugees? This volume gathers together expertise from academics and practitioners, as well as migrant voices, in order to investigate these interconnections. It shows that reconsidering our understanding and approaches to both could generate creative alternative responses to the growing global migration crisis. Beginning with a discussion of the secular/religious divide - and how it shapes dominant policy practices and counter approaches to displacement and migration - the book then goes on to explore and deconstruct the dominant discourse of the Muslim refugee as a threat to the secular/Christian West. The discussion continues with an exploration of Christian and Islamic traditions of hospitality, showing how they challenge current practices of securitization of migration, and concludes with an investigation of the largely unexplored relation between gender, religion and migration. Bringing together leading and emerging voices from across academia and practice, in the fields of International Relations, migration studies, philosophy, religious studies and gender studies, this volume offers a unique take on one of the most pressing global problems of our time.

Sociology addresses challenging social issues and seeks new ways to understand them. However, much sociological terminology suffers from multiple, vague, or uncertain meanings. This is true of many of the central terms that sociologists use, such as 'power', 'ideology', 'culture', 'social class', and even 'society'. The result is that the conclusions reached by sociological investigations are frequently subject to discrepant interpretations, and their validity is difficult to assess. The chapters in this book address several of the key terms employed by sociologists, examining the concepts associated with them in depth - from both an historical and an analytical perspective. The aim is not to develop an entirely new framework but rather to document the various meanings associated with these terms, and to suggest ways in which they could be refined or developed for the purposes of sociological analysis. Since the concepts addressed are of wide relevance, Troubling Sociological Concepts will be of interest and use to researchers and students across the social sciences.

Exploring mediated time, this book contemplates how far (and in what ways) media and time are intertwined from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical angles. It builds from theoretical discussions concerning the question of mediation and the normative framing of time (especially acceleration) and works its way through questions of time for/of one's own, resisting temporalities, polychronicity, in-between-time, simultaneity and other time concepts. It further examines specific time frames, imaginations of a media future and the past, questions of online journalism and multitasking or liveness. Bringing together authors from diverse backgrounds, this collection presents a rich combination of milestone articles, new empirical research, enriching theoretical work and interviews with leading researchers to bridge sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies in one of the first book-length publications on the emerging field of media and time.

"Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion" examines the shifting boundary between religion and the public sphere in Europe and the Middle East. Asking what the 'new visibility of religion' means and challenging simplistic notions of living in a 'post-secular' age, the chapters explore how religion is contested and renegotiated in the public sphere - or rather, in different publics - and the effects of these struggles on society, state and religion itself. Whereas religion arguably never went away in the USA, the re-emergence of public religion is a European phenomenon. "Is God Back?" provides timely case studies from Europe, as well as extending to the Middle East, where fledgling democracies are struggling to create models of governance that stem from the European secular model, but which need to be able to accommodate a much more public form of religiosity. Discussions include the new visibility of neo-Pagan and Native Faith groups in Europe, Evangelical Christians and Church teaching on sexuality in the UK, and Islamic social Movements in the Arab world. Drawing from empirical and theoretical research on religion and national identity, religion and media, church-state relationships, and religion and welfare, "Is God Back?" is a rich source for students and scholars interested in the changing face of public religion in the modern world, including those studying the sociology of religion, social policy, and theology.

This volume includes a wide range of papers that explore individual and institutional aspects of religion from a social-science perspective. The special section has articles related to the practice of prayer, and includes studies from the USA, Europe, and the Middle East. The general papers include studies on coping strategies, God representations, spirituality versus religion, self-control in a Muslim context, and faith-based organizations in Cambodia. Together these papers form a valuable collection indicating the depth and vibrancy of research in these fields.

This book provides a ground breaking interdisciplinary study of the Catholic Church in Taiwan, focusing on the post 1949 Civil War in China through to the present day, and discusses the role played by the Catholic Church in contemporary Taiwanese society. It considers the situation of the Catholic church of Taiwan during the Japanese Occupation, Taiwan-Vatican Relations from 1949 onwards and triangular Relations among the Vatican, Taiwan and China during Tsai Ing-wen's Administration. Written from a wide range of perspectives, from history and international relations to literature, philosophy, and education, this volume offers an important perspective on the birth and development of the Catholic Church in Taiwan, contributing a key work to religious studies in the Greater China Region.

This book outlines and systematises findings from a growing body of research that examines the different rationales, dimensions and dynamics of risk-taking in current societies; providing insight into the different motivations and social roots of risk-taking to advance scholarly debates and improve social regulation. Conceptually, the book goes beyond common approaches which problematise socially undesirable risk-taking, or highlight the alluring character of risk-taking. Instead, it follows a broadly interpretivist approach and engages in examining motives, control, routinisation, reflexivity, skills, resources, the role of identity in risk-taking and how these are rooted in and framed by different social forces. Zinn draws on qualitative studies from different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, feminism, class analysis, theory of practice and discourse analysis among others, to outline key distinctions and concepts central to the understanding of risk-taking. It will be a key resource for everyone who is concerned with the understanding and management of risk-taking in all kinds of social domains, such as immigration, youth, leisure sports, crime, health, finance, and social policy.