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ItemRestoring the Place of Imagination in Education: How to escape the trap of rationality-based realism(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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ItemIs ancestor veneration the most universal of all world religions? A critique of modernist cosmological bias(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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ItemNo Preview AvailableGods on Earth: Immanence and Transcendence in Indian Ideology and Praxis(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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ItemNo Preview AvailableAktualne ulohy akademii a Akademie(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.
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ItemRegaining Lost Ground: A Social Movement for Sustainable Food Systems in Java, Indonesia(OpenEdition, 2019)Since the 1960s, Indonesia has industrialised agriculture, following the model promoted by the global bio-tech research complex and development agencies. Alternative approaches favoured by local grassroots organisations and NGOs include solutions grounded in moral economic systems of communal solidarity, small-scale production, local knowledge and the localisation of distribution and consumption networks. To illustrate the viability of such alternatives, we explore new Indonesian farmers’ movements that seek to produce high-yield, high-quality low-cost food using ecologically responsible food production methods and ‘symbiotic cooperation’ strategies founded upon a moral economy ethos. Our case studies contribute to a model for a worldwide transition to socially and ecologically sustainable regional food systems.
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ItemCivil Society and Youth Leadership for Transformation(Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva, 2020)This discussion paper looks at the current historical momentum and potential future development of civil society and youth leadership for a systemic transformation to a sustainable new civilization. It identifies emerging challenges, obstacles, and some of the innovative new leadership strategies that have been developed to overcome them. Civil society is central in the process of transformation in a dual sense: As the target of transformation — it is civil society at large together with governments and the private sector that must shift to sustainable practices in our daily lives, — and as an instigator of change—individuals, informal networks or organized groups of citizens specifically dedicated to promoting this transformation. This boundary between recipients and agents in society is fluid, as more and more people take action or join organized efforts to elicit a purposeful transformation.
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ItemCurrent Tasks of Academies and Academia(Risk Institute Trieste, 2020)The present article is written as an issue paper on academies for the GL-21 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 WAAS in organizing a network for social progress is underlined.
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ItemImagining a future civilization: a new utopianism founded in the here and now(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-01-01)Are we able to imagine and create a new civilization, a better world, in a collective act of imagination and will? Active imagination is in essence a process of reflection on possible futures that already lie dormant within the present, and a decision to pursue the most desirable option. Active imagination thus may be expected to increase the probability that a positive, chosen future will actually become manifest reality. Evidently, however, the extent of our ‘futuring’ ability is limited. We therefore need to ask, what causes these constraints and how can they be overcome? Drawing on some recent literature in the tradition of Perennial Philosophy, this paper argues that more conscious ‘futuring’ is indeed possible under certain conditions. It examines the obstacles to be overcome and the preconditions that would need to be met in order to enable us consciously to imagine and create a just and sustainable future civilization.
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ItemEndangered Food Systems: Agriculture, Nutrition and Cultural Heritage in Bali, Indonesia(Universitas Islam Indonesia (Islamic University of Indonesia), 2022)The long-established, traditional food systems maintained by indigenous and local communities in developing countries have witnessed rapid changes in production, trade, and consumption patterns in recent decades. These changes tend to be detrimental to ecological and human health. The central highlands and northeastern coast of the island of Bali, Indonesia, are illustrative examples of such a regional food system, with centuries of documented history and subject to a longitudinal ethnographic study by the author. This paper describes the recent decline in local biodiversity, ecological sustainability, social resilience, nutrition, and food security in this food system in the wake of agricultural ‘modernization.’ Greater attention to the culturally modulated dimensions of food systems, it is argued, will contribute to creating a rural development model for (re-)creating moral economies that support ecologically and socially responsible food systems.
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ItemThe Fragmented Self: Cross-cultural Difference, Conflict and the Lessons of Ethnographic Experience(Frobenius Institute, 2006)