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Abstract

Abstract – There are numerous hypotheses regarding human acting in the social and the natural sciences. Among them we find Gary Becker’s economical approach that functionalizes personal benefit in an assessment that especially weighs non-monetary costs against yields. In this article, Becker’s explanatory scheme will be applied to scientists who concern themselves with parapsychological / anomalistic phenomena – in both an open-minded, research-oriented way and with dogmatically hostile inclinations. It will be shown that the knowledge aspirations of scientific work sometimes will be repressed, if and when an individual is tendentially dominated by personal creeds and material constraints.

Keywords: Survival hypothesis – parapsychology – deception – ignorance – preferences – utility/benefits

Abstract

Abstract – Activities of members of the philosophical Vienna Circle in parapsychological investigations during the first half of the 1920s are discussed, as are their environment, the pseudo-exposure of Rudi Schneider, and Hans Thirring’s, the Vienna physicist’s, experiments with the Schneider brothers from Braunau am Inn.

Keywords: Vienna Circle – Institute for Physics at Vienna University – Julius Wagner-Jauregg – Hans Hahn – Countess Wassilko-Serecki – Rudi Schneider – Willy Schneider – Ubald Tartaruga – Hans Thirring – Eleonore Zugun

Abstract

Abstract – The central element of the Afro-Brazilian candomblé-religion is the belief in the possibility of incorporations of non-human entities in human mediums. The questioning of the authenticity of such incorporations in particular cases is a strong topos not only from outside, but as well from inside the religious scene. Using ethnographic material collected during various field-research campaigns, a survey of contemporary innerreligious discussions will be given and discussed in comparison (interreligious) to conceptions of incorporation in other mediumistic fields in Brazil (viz. umbanda and kardecism). Finally a connection to André Droogers considerations concerning ‘play’ and ‘power’ as terms of a ‘ludic’ way of doing religious studies will be sketched.

Keywords: candomblé – mediumship – André Droogers – incorporation – kardecism – umbanda

Abstract

Abstract – In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (events of the body that happen in social settings but are only identified as religious in those social settings when they afford, or make available, an interpretation that makes sense in that setting); and striking anomalous events. We demonstrate that local cultural practices shift the pattern of spiritual experiences, even those such as sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences that might be imagined in some ways as culture free, but that the more the spiritual experience is constrained by a specific physiology, the more the frequency of the event will be constrained by an individual’s vulnerability to those experiences. We will call this the “cultural kindling” of spiritual experience.

Keywords: Culture – phenomenology – spiritual experience

Abstract

Abstract – The term “indigo children” which is familiar in the esoteric and new age scene is understood as a characterisation of children who distinguish themselves – according to the proponents of this concept – by specific characteristics and talents. As strong the response to this phenomenon has been, firstly in the USA and then internationally too, as little it became a topic of serious (scientific) publications. For a long period, easily accessible information on “indigo children” was only available from religious or ideological organisations like advice centres for sects, ideological issues and world-view questions as well as from skeptics. This chapter gives an overview on genesis as well as the common interpretations of the phenomenon from an ideologically neutral perspective. The overview is based on a few scientific studies of the concept of “indigo children”. Starting from this I will take a look on further forms and strategies of specialisation (of children) with regard to its social acceptance. Furthermore, I will provide a few critical thoughts about the issue of (inappropriate) pathologisation and its relation to esoteric patterns of making meaning.

Keywords: Indigo children – aura – esotericism – pathologisation – Ritalin – ADD/ADHD – specialness – empowered childhood – behavioral problems

Abstract

Abstract – For the time period from 1946 to this day, this paper documents the establishing and continual distribution of a “single-culprit legend” in the Federal Republic of Germany. This legend has the purpose to relieve the National Socialists of the charge of having set fire to the Berlin Reichstag 1933 themselves. The initiators of this legend were former Gestapo members who wanted to relieve themselves after the end of WW2 and who were supported by other former Nazis. 

Keywords: Weimar Constitution – NSDAP – Reichstag Fire – Gestapo – denazification – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – Der Spiegel – Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf – Rudolf Diels – Walter Zirpins – Fritz Tobias – Rudolf Augstein – Hans Mommsen – Sven Felix Kellerhoff – Norbert Lammert