HOT-HOT News Item sent to the Thuppahiya by Nandasiri Jasentuliyana in USA
Article 8(2)(a)(i): Wilful killing
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Israel’s targeting of the “Shaban family home, killing all six members, two parents and their children”.[4]
Category Archives: psychological urges
Two Reviews in 2010 of Copeman’s Book on Blood Donations in India
https://sacrificialdevotionnetwork.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/jacob-copeman_veins-of-devotion/
ONE …. REVIEW OF Jacob Copeman: Veins of Devotion: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, 233 pp)………….by Ron Barrett of Macalester College …. Taken from the American Ethnologist May 2010, vol. 37/2, pp. 380-81.
Recent years have seen an emerging literature on the sociopolitical dynamics of human tissue exchange. Most of these studies are of a critical nature, focusing on the exploitative aspects of organ trade and other high-profile controversies. Yet few studies have closely examined the apparently mundane forms of biological exchange and the remarkable contexts in which these everyday activities can occur. Jacob Copeman addresses this important gap with Veins of Devotion, a well-researched ethnography about the contributions of several North Indian devotional movements to voluntary blood donation campaigns. Critical in the classical sense, this volume traces the flows of blood, spirit, and power through expanding domains of kinship, asceticism, nationalism, purification, and gift exchange in the urban heart of neoliberal India.
Filed under British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, charitable outreach, cultural transmission, economic processes, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian religions, Indian traditions, landscape wondrous, life stories, medical puzzles, psychological urges, religiosity, self-reflexivity, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes
Deciphering Patriotic Devotion: The Japanese in the 1940s & the Lankan Tamil People For the LTTE
Michael Roberts reproducing an article presented in a popular website during the final stages in Eelam War IV in 2008/09 within the context TODAY of a horrendous war-situation in Palestine and its environs — the website being GROUNDVIEWS: …………….. https://groundviews.org/2009/04/21/ltte-and-tamil-people-i-preamble/ ….. This article was just the first essay in a four-part enterprise.**
“LTTE and Tamil people, I: preamble,” http://www.groundviews.org, 21 April 2009.
This set of essays on “LTTE and Tamil People” submitted to Groundviews is a sequel to the four articles on “Suicidal Political Action” reproduced in http://www.transcurrents.com from 2 April onwards. Both sets of essays are interconnected and involve a measure of repetition because they are set out as separate articles. All of them are a product of a comparative survey that I embarked on about five years ago: namely, reviewing the cultural ingredients which have motivated the projects of the jihadists (holy warriors) and mujahideen (fighters for cause) on the one hand and, on the other, the 
Filed under accountability, atrocities, centre-periphery relations, Eelam, ethnicity, governance, heritage, human rights, island economy, landscape wondrous, legal issues, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, military strategy, nationalism, Pacific Ocean issues, patriotism, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, psychological urges, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, trauma, unusual people
An Inspiring Sri Lankan Anthropologist: Gananath Obeysekere
Laleen Jayamanne & Nammika Raby, in The Island, February 2025
“People were nourished by stories….” (Kathandarawalinne minissu jeewathwune) Gananath
“Man does not live by bread alone” Matthew 4:4
Dimuthu Saman Wettasinghe’s film Gananath Obeyesekere: In Search of Buddhist Conscienceopens with a bravura tracking shot moving past trees, water, a splash of saffron robes. These sunlit images are enfolded in a non-religious, rather melancholy male choral chant, but soon the singular voice of Professor Gananath Obeyesekere cuts through with a kind of Dionysian intensity. He tells us a story about Gauthama Buddha, as the camera encircles, at speed, what turns out to be the Kandy Lake. His tale is about a devastating war waged by the king of Kosla against the Sakya kingdom but of the Buddha’s unshakable belief that if folk get together and discuss matters in good faith (call it diplomacy), all wars could be averted. This carefully and deeply researched, imaginative, ‘Educational Film’ of 142 minutes, with its exhilaratingly dense overture and its subtle montage, is a loving tribute to an exemplary Lankan scholar/teacher and his life work (of some 70 years) as an internationally renowned Anthropologist.
The film shows Gananath’s empathetic ability to pay careful ethnographic attention to a variety of gendered states of mental distress and trauma and their traditional ritualised ecstatic expressions, especially with regard to women, well before some feminist scholars in the West began to be interested in the topic of ‘Women and Madness’ from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory became methodologically important for Feminist Film Theory, which I used in my doctoral thesis on ‘Female Representation in the Lankan cinema’.
Filed under art & allure bewitching, Buddhism, caste issues, centre-periphery relations, communal relations, cultural transmission, economic processes, education, ethnicity, female empowerment, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian traditions, landscape wondrous, language policies, legal issues, life stories, literary achievements, modernity & modernization, nationalism, patriotism, performance, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, psychological urges, religiosity, religious nationalism, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, social justice, sri lankan society, teaching profession, the imaginary and the real, theatre world, travelogue, unusual people, vengeance, world events & processes, zealotry
Vale = An Appreciation of Professor Padmasiri De Silva
Revd Mahinda Deegalle from London, in The Island 15 December 2024
The year 2024 is rapidly drawing to a close. This year marks the personal losses of many helpful academics, monks, family members, and friends. I place this brief note of appreciation here to pay tribute to the late Professor Padmasiri de Silva (1933–2024), one of my teachers at the University of Peradeniya in the 1980s, who was just about to celebrate his 92nd birthday on January 18, 2025 with the publication of his most recent contribution The Moral Psychology of Buddhism, which is currently under preparation for publication posthumously in Melbourne.
Filed under accountability, ancient civilisations, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, education, ethnicity, heritage, life stories, meditations, nationalism, patriotism, politIcal discourse, psychological urges, self-reflexivity, social justice, sri lankan society, trauma, world events & processes
That Middle Finger Gesture: “Up Yours”….
The Wikipedia Reading
The middle finger, long finger, second finger,[1][2] third finger,[3] toll finger or tall man is the third digit of the human hand, located between the index finger and the ring finger. It is typically the longest digit. In anatomy, it is also called the third finger, digitus medius, digitus tertius or digitus III.
Why the US is no longer the indispensable nation …
Theodore K …. with the underlining in red imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
On 25 May 2024, President Biden gave a speech to new graduates at West Point to prepare them for war. It was a delusional speech in which Biden attempted to assert the right of the US to control the world under the guise of meaningless platitudes such as the US is the “indispensable nation”, “the world’s only superpower”,”and “the leading democracy in the world”. All the evidence of US security, defence and foreign policy over the past 32 years shows these claims are false. Biden fails to recognize the reality of a changing world – a world that has moved on since 1994. US hegemony is declining. We now live in a multipolar world when the emphasis is on international democratization. The US has inflicted terrible damage to the world, especially over the past three decades due to the Neocons.
President Joe Biden delivers the commencement address for the U.S. Military Academy class of 2024, Saturday, May 25, 2024, in West Point, New York.
(Official White House Photo by Erin Scott)
Filed under accountability, american imperialism, centre-periphery relations, China and Chinese influences, disparagement, economic processes, ethnicity, governance, historical interpretation, life stories, Middle Eastern Politics, military strategy, politIcal discourse, power politics, psychological urges, self-reflexivity, truth as casualty of war, war reportage, world events & processes, World War Three?, zealotry
Totalitarianism Defined …. With Hitler as the Epitome of the Phenomenon
Richard Koenigsberg and the LSS, aka Library of Social Science, located in New York
Totalitarianism: the psychopathology is the identification, refusal or inability to conceive of a self in separation from society; of a self that does not exist in a symbiotic tie to the nation. “Symbiosis” is not an “infantile phase of development,” rather It’s the ground of our being the fantasy we are connected to something “out there” (and cell phones represent the apotheosis of merger of self with society).
GERMANY – MAY: Adolf Hitler, winner of the Prussian and Bavarian elections, giving a speech, in May 1928, in Germany…Photo by Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.
Listen to Hitler: “Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it; your life is bound up with the life of your whole people; the nation is not merely the root of your strength, it is the root of your very life.”
Filed under accountability, atrocities, chauvinism, disparagement, ethnicity, fundamentalism, historical interpretation, Hitler, life stories, nationalism, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, psychological urges, racism, racist thinking, self-reflexivity, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, violence of language, world events & processes, zealotry
Trump Following Hitler’s Playbook
Howard Bloom, Richard Koenigsberg & Chad Dougatz, at …. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/audio/HBloom_Universe_022_Trump_as_Hitler
Just before the 2016 election, Richard Koenigsberg, Howard Bloom and Chad Dougatz presented this prophetic broadcast, which predicted everything occurring today.
Journalists, innocent Americans, having never experienced a phenomenon like Trump, could hardly have imagined what they were about to encounter.
Filed under accountability, anti-racism, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, disparagement, ethnicity, Fascism, fundamentalism, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, nationalism, performance, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, psychological urges, self-reflexivity, unusual people, vengeance, violence of language, world events & processes
A List of Israeli War Crimes in Palestine
This LISTING of Israeli War Crimes in Palestine by Yanis Varafoukis — clearly Greek in identity — was sent to me by Manel Fonseka in Colombo.
War crimes – Grave breaches of the Wilful killings of the 1949 Geneva Conventions
Filed under accountability, arab regimes, atrocities, centre-periphery relations, disparagement, ethnicity, Fascism, fundamentalism, historical interpretation, law of armed conflict, legal issues, life stories, Middle Eastern Politics, military strategy, Palestine, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, psychological urges, racist thinking, security, self-reflexivity, slanted reportage, the imaginary and the real, trauma, unusual people, vengeance, war crimes, world events & processes, zealotry
