In her very interesting paper Margaretha documents an important part of recent Norwegian cultural history, i.e. how the portrayal of Muslim women in media has moved through different phases which all have contributed to the othering of Muslims in general, and Muslim women in particular. According to Margaretha,
“Culture” and “religion”: the use of concepts as tools in a debate
During the last decades, there has been an explosion in the interest in the relationship between religion and ecology. Rots himself mentions the initiative at Harvard University. Of its ten “Religions of the World and Ecology” conferences, nine have produced books; the only one that did not was the conference on Shinto and ecology. Other initiatives could have been mentioned. A two-volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature has been edited by Prof. Bron Taylor who also runs a Ph.D. programme on the theme in Florida. Journals like Environmental Values, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion are also focusing on the issue. Much of the literature claims that there is a lot of ecological wisdom particularly in Asian and Native American religions. The claimed ecological value of sacred groves in Japan (and India) is typical in this respect. It is therefore refreshing that the author challenges this view, and in doing so he has my full sympathy.
Recently, a group of scholars from the Biodiversity Institute at Oxford University started a new research project. The aim of their project is to produce a map of ‘religious forests and sacred sites’ all over the world, by ‘scientifically measur[ing] the coverage of religious and sacred land’ (Oxford University 2011). The project rests on the assumption that ‘[m]any of these ‘religious forests’ and sacred sites contain some of the richest biodiversity in the world, including some of the highest numbers of threatened species’ (ibid.).
In his blog entry, as well as the public lecture on which the blog entry is based, Ian Reader has raised some important questions regarding contemporary developments in Japanese religions. Following his thesis that Buddhism in Japan (and, by extension, religion in general) is in decline, he argues that Buddhist institutions have had to come up with inventive new strategies to attract visitors and raise funds. They have done so by framing their pilgrimage as ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, while carefully evading concepts such as ‘religion’ and ‘faith’. Thus, he suggests, they have dissociated pilgrimage practices from their traditional ‘religious’ aspects. For instance, temples and travel agencies have organised public exhibitions in secular spaces such as department stores and airports, and the famous 88-temple pilgrimage of Shikoku has applied for UNESCO world heritage status (following the example of Santiago de Compostela). Reader interprets these developments as part of a process of secularisation and commodification, leading to the “transformation of the pilgrimage into a heritage-oriented tourist and consumer event”.