Mind Cure

Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (302) ◽  
pp. 828-849
Author(s):  
Tom White

Abstract This article examines when and how the ‘Defective’ version of the Book of Sir John Mandeville came to be called ‘defective’. It describes the use of this name by Sir George F. Warner in an edition produced in 1889 for the elite bibliographic society the Roxburghe Club. Drawing on recent work in disability studies, it argues that the philological use of ‘defective’ be read in conjunction with its broader use in the elaboration of hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Far from a neutral descriptor, ‘defective’ provides a compelling example of the imbrication of medieval studies, imperialism, and Social Darwinist principles in the late nineteenth century. The article closes with the call not only to rename the ‘Defective’ version the ‘Common’ version, but also for a broader reappraisal of this apparently discrete version of Mandeville’s Book. However, it also argues that amid the increasing marketization of higher education and the concomitant insecurity of academic labour, digital editing does not provide a straightforward answer to the question of how best to map and display the complex textual history of Mandeville’s Book.


Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.


Author(s):  
Panagiotis Delis

Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine the functionality of impoliteness strategies as rhetorical devices employed by acclaimed African American and White hip-hop artists. It focuses on the social and artistic function of the key discursive element of hip-hop, namely aggressive language. The data for this paper comprise songs of US African American and White performers retrieved from the November 2017 ‘TOP100 Chart’ for international releases on Spotify.com. A cursory look at the sub-corpora (Black male/ Black female/ White male/ White female artists’ sub-corpus) revealed the prominence of the ‘use taboo words’ impoliteness strategy. The analysis of impoliteness instantiations by considering race and gender as determining factors in the lyrics selection process unveiled that both male groups use impoliteness strategies more frequently than female groups. It is also suggested that Black male and White female singers employ impoliteness to resist oppression, offer a counter-narrative about their own experience and self (re)presentation and reinforce in group solidarity.


2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
MIKE CHOPRA-GANT

This article examines the construction of gender and race in the television series The Shield (FX 2002–). The article argues that while The Shield seems to offer an ostensibly progressive vision of a multi-cultural society in which race and gender represent no barrier to the possession of legitimate authority, the series premises the possibility of such access to power on the continuing possession of “real” power by a paternalistic white, male figure, thus presenting a regressive conservative vision of gender and race relations in contemporary US society.


1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Damon Centola ◽  
Douglas Guilbeault ◽  
Urmimala Sarkar ◽  
Elaine Khoong ◽  
Jingwen Zhang

AbstractBias in clinical practice, in particular in relation to race and gender, is a persistent cause of healthcare disparities. We investigated the potential of a peer-network approach to reduce bias in medical treatment decisions within an experimental setting. We created “egalitarian” information exchange networks among practicing clinicians who provided recommendations for the clinical management of patient scenarios, presented via standardized patient videos of actors portraying patients with cardiac chest pain. The videos, which were standardized for relevant clinical factors, presented either a white male actor or Black female actor of similar age, wearing the same attire and in the same clinical setting, portraying a patient with clinically significant chest pain symptoms. We found significant disparities in the treatment recommendations given to the white male patient-actor and Black female patient-actor, which when translated into real clinical scenarios would result in the Black female patient being significantly more likely to receive unsafe undertreatment, rather than the guideline-recommended treatment. In the experimental control group, clinicians who were asked to independently reflect on the standardized patient videos did not show any significant reduction in bias. However, clinicians who exchanged real-time information in structured peer networks significantly improved their clinical accuracy and showed no bias in their final recommendations. The findings indicate that clinician network interventions might be used in healthcare settings to reduce significant disparities in patient treatment.


2019 ◽  
pp. 134-138
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell

After her death, Jane James faded into obscurity until the late twentieth century, when she gained new fame. Mormons used her story to reimagine their church as racially diverse and Joseph Smith as racially egalitarian. For historians of American religion and others, James’s story gives the history of Mormonism from below and shows the limits of Mormonism’s democratizing impulse. It illustrates the variety of Mormon religious experience and shows the limits of focusing on temple rituals and priesthood. James’s Mormonism differed from that of other Latter-day Saints and thus illustrates how race and gender shaped ways of being Mormon. James also shaped Mormon history in subtle but crucial ways. Her presence in present-day LDS discourses suggests that she has finally achieved what she worked so hard for during her life: Mormons of all races now hold her in “honourable remembrance,” as her second patriarchal blessing promised her.


Author(s):  
Amy C. Chambers

Women scientists are often seen as anomalous exceptions in the fictional (and indeed real) world of white, male dominated scientific research. Even in the supposedly race and gender blind future of Star Trek, a black woman science specialist is considered revolutionary. Science and technology are a backdrop for the Star Trek universe. The theory and practice that gives the narrative a spectacular speculative frame is often perceived as neutral (or at least benevolent) as Starfleet explores the universe. Star Trek idealises science and the scientist, and throughout much of its history the science future it imagines has been distinctly white and male. This chapter argues that Star Trek has historically given women the space to be scientists, but Discovery goes further than previous entries into the canon by taking a black woman scientist from the margin to the centre of the story and offering a future when neither race nor gender present a barrier.


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