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    Some Interpretations
    Reuter, T (Joshua Nash, 2023)
    Debates on representational bias in the discipline of anthropology have focused on partialities arising from the subjectivity of individual researchers and from specific historical patterns of unequal relations between the societies in which ethnographers live and those they study. There are thus two layers to this debate, with bias operating both at an individual and a collective level. In the first case, biased representations of other ethnic groups and their cultures can arise from the personal subjectivity of individual researchers. In the second, ethnography is compromised as a collective enterprise by unequal historical and contemporary power relations between the societies concerned. An associated legitimisation crisis still lingers because a satisfying solution to the two sides of the subjectivity problem continues to elude us.
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    Imagination, Science and Education: How to liberate ourselves from the prison of rationality
    Reuter, T (Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva, 2023)
    Achieving Human Security For All (HS4A) is a process that depends on our ability to imagine a future state that is different to present conditions, under which HS4A remains elusive. Only a very few eminent thinkers have recognised, however, that imagination is its own unique and important noetic or cognitive function independent of rationality, giving us access to an ontological sphere that otherwise remains closed to us. Meanwhile, for rationalist science philosophy, which has dominated our education systems since the Enlightenment period, imagination has long been understood as nothing but a preoccupation with the unreal, the mythic, the marvellous, the fictive, and fanciful—entertaining perhaps, but of no serious consequence. In this paper, I argue that rationalist modernism, along with a mass education system designed in keeping with this modernist ‘spirit of the times’, has led to our collective imprisonment within the real, the concrete, and robbed us of the capacity to reflect and transform ourselves and our relationship to the world and each other. This state of affairs will ensure humanity’s rapid demise given the mounting security challenges we now face, that is, unless we can reinstate the faculty of imagination within scientific epistemology and in education, and thus escape our entrapment.
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    Why Social Justice is the Most Effective Means of Disaster Impact Mitigation: Lessons from the Pandemic
    Reuter, T (Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, 2023)
    The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the impact of a systemic crisis depends very much on the prevailing level of inequality in the society concerned. This paper shows how the affordability of food was reduced dramatically for millions of people due to income loss in the wake of the pandemic, and the consequences this had. An analysis of the political economy of crisis then illustrates how economic inequality acts as a massive amplifier of disaster impacts on disadvantaged individuals and populations. Environmental degradation, across a broad spectrum from climate change to biodiversity loss, acts similarly as an impact amplifier in this and most other crises. Economically disadvantaged people are more immediately exposed to the impact of ecological degradation or may be forced to disregard the need for nature protection, which means the two factors are also mutually reinforcing. Inequality literally kills people, the more so in this century of worsening multidimensional crises. The paper argues that inequality on this scale is not just immoral but undermines human security, even for relatively privileged population groups, as well as threatening the stability of international relations. Addressing inequality, and especially inequitable policies in the food producing rural sector which acted as a major safety net for the poor during lockdowns, is thus the best pathway to mitigate future crises and their impact on food security.
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    Anthropological Perspectives on Covid-19
    Vučinić Nešković, V ; Reuter, T ; Patnaik, S (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, 2023)
    The Covid-19 pandemic has been a highly disruptive global crisis, touching nearly all aspects of human existence and changing many policy assumptions in transnational perspectives. Anthropologists witnessed these impacts first hand across many countries, while mainstream media reports focused primarily on the spread of the disease, public health measures and the impact on economic life in western countries. Other dimensions of the pandemic such as the emergence of new socialities and inequalities, social disarticulation, the changing role of fam-ily and kinship and the transformed domestic and professional spaces mediated through technology, especially in developing countries, were largely ignored.
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    Restoring the Place of Imagination in Education: How to escape the trap of rationality-based realism
    Reuter, T (Index Copernicus, 2022-06-30)
    Henri Corbin accorded the imagination its own unique and important noetic or cognitive function, giving us access to an ontological sphere that without imagination remains closed and forbidden to us. Meanwhile, for rationalist science philosophy, as Corbin notes, the imagination has long been understood as nothing but the unreal, the mythic, the marvellous, the fictive and fanciful. In this paper I argue that rationalist modernism, along with mass education in keeping with this modernist ‘spirit of the times’ has led to a collective imprisonment within the real, the concrete, and robbed us of the capacity to reflect and transform ourselves and our relationship to the world. This state of affairs will ensure humanity’s rapid demise given the challenges we now face, that is, unless we can reinstate the faculty of imagination within scientific epistemology and in education, and thus escape our entrapment.
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    The role of sustainability knowledge-action platforms in advancing multi-stakeholder engagement on sustainability
    Bream McIntosh, O ; Burnett, A ; Feldman, I ; Lamphere, JA ; Reuter, TA ; Vital, E (Cambridge University Press, 2023-10-16)
    Within the last decade, online sustainability knowledge-action platforms have proliferated. We surveyed 198 sustainability-oriented sites and conducted a review of 41 knowledge-action platforms, which we define as digital tools that advance sustainability through organized activities and knowledge dissemination. We analyzed platform structure and functionality through a systematic coding process based on key issues identified in three bodies of literature: (a) the emergence of digital platforms, (b) the localization of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), and (c) the importance of multi-level governance to sustainability action. While online collaborative tools offer an array of resources, our analysis indicates that they struggle to provide context-sensitivity and higher-level analysis of the trade-offs and synergies between sustainability actions. SDG localization adds another layer of complexity where multi-level governance, actor, and institutional priorities may generate tensions as well as opportunities for intra- and cross-sectoral alignment. On the basis of our analysis, we advocate for the development of integrative open-source and dynamic global online data management tools that would enable the monitoring of progress and facilitate peer-to-peer exchange of ideas and experience among local government, community, and business stakeholders. We argue that by showcasing and exemplifying local actions, an integrative platform that leverages existing content from multiple extant platforms through effective data interoperability can provide additional functionality and significantly empower local actors to accelerate local to global actions, while also complex system change.
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    SDG localization: finding the middle ground to top-down and bottom-up approaches with the help of digital networking
    Reuter, TA (Taylor & Francis Group, 2023-12-08)
    A growing literature on localization of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflects persistent tensions between a generic and aspirational global sustainability agenda and the challenges that local actors face in implementing these goals under very specific local conditions. Contributors to this extant literature have struggled to resolve this tension, in part because they have not recognized that a potential solution to the problem of local diversity is inherent within emerging networks of local actors themselves. This Brief Report proposes an empowerment of local sustainability actor networks with the help of a digital infrastructure for worldwide peer exchange. It advocates for a process of global empirical data aggregation on local sustainable solutions knowledge that would fully complement the top-down agenda of the SDGs.
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    Is ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias
    Reuter, T (University of Indonesia, Faculty of Humanities, 2014-01-01)
    Research by anthropologists engaged with the Comparative Austronesia Project (Australian National University) has amassed an enormous data set for ethnological comparison between the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies, a language group to which nearly all Indonesian societies also belong. Comparative analysis reveals that ancestor veneration is a key-shared feature among Austronesian religious cosmologies; a feature that also resonates strongly with the ancestor-focused religions characteristic of East Asia. Characteristically, the religions of Austronesian-speaking societies focus on the core idea of a sacred time and place of ancestral origin and the continuous flow of life that is issuing forth from this source. Present-day individuals connect with the place and time of origin though ritual acts of retracing a historical path of migration to its source. What can this seemingly exotic notion of a flow of life reveal about the human condition writ large? Is it merely a curiosity of the ethnographic record of this region, a traditional religious insight forgotten even by many of the people whose traditional religion this is, but who have come under the influence of so-called world religions? Or is there something of great importance to be learnt from the Austronesian approach to life? Such questions have remained unasked until now, I argue, because a systematic cosmological bias within western thought has largely prevented us from taking Ancestor Religion and other forms of “traditional knowledge” seriously as an alternative truth claim. While I have discussed elsewhere the significance of Ancestor Religion in reference to my own research in highland Bali, I will attempt in this paper to remove this bias by its roots. I do so by contrasting two modes of thought: the “incremental dualism” of precedence characteristic of Austronesian cultures and their Ancestor Religions, and the “transcendental dualism” of mind and matter that has been a central theme within the cultural history of Western European thought. I argue for a deeper appreciation of Ancestor Religion as the oldest and most pervasive of all world religions.
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    Gods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis
    Reuter, TA (INCAA, 2013)
    Questions concerning the relative importance to Indian civilisation of the Brahmana-dominated model of religious status hierarchy and the royal model of divine kingship and associated hierarchies of state power have been referred to as ‘the central conundrum of Indian social ideology’. These two models of hierarchy nonetheless derive from a broader Indian worldview and both shape, and are shaped by, the existential realities of Indian social life and of life in general. They represent an attempt to respond to a ‘central conundrum’ of human sociality – how to differentiate between the members of a society in terms of status – and a central dilemma of human existence – how to be at once engaged with the world and elevated beyond the ordinary conditions of embodied existence. This paper endeavours to achieve a more unified perspective on Indian kingship and Brahmanism by exploring their relation to the world of social action, and action more generally. Indian civilisation has struggled for millennia with the fundamental existential conflicts of ‘being in the world.’ Hence what is to be gained from unravelling the products of this struggle is not only a better understanding of Indian culture alone but of human experience in general.
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    Aktualne ulohy akademii a Akademie
    Reuter, T ; Momir, D ; Engelbrecht, J (Intercedu, 2022)
    The present article is written as an issue paper on academies for the GL-211 Project. It traces activities of academies and their associations in the present information-rich society. The state-of-the-art of the academic world is briefly described. This permits to focus on general trends in knowledge management in general and the role of academies. The successful strategies and interdependencies form the framework of activities, where one should also understand the possible obstacles. The impact of these activities together with ideas for more social responsibility and cooperation are examined. The unique position of World Academy of Arts and Sciences in organising a network for social progress is underlined.