Evolving Connections
Beyond Words: Resilience in eSwatini
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robin Root
Medical anthropological research on HIV/AIDS builds on over a century of reporting how oral-based cultures ritualize death and dying. Arguably, however, it is the anthropology of religion that has most richly probed the deeper significances of suffering to theorize how communities “live” and transform religious texts under duress amidst entrenched inequalities and insurmountable losses. Suffering, and by extension resilience, as articulated by pastors in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) is profoundly marked by local culture and the politics of global health that intersect in the eloquence of religious leaders to describe their roles and experiences in Eswatini, site of the world’s highest HIV and TB rates that, in concert with other perilous processes, suppress life expectancy at an estimated 59 years. The scale of suffering wrought by the epidemic, but also the resilient responses, challenges the global health frameworks by which death and dying are represented absent religion. Analysis of over a decade of field research and interviews with 38 Swazi pastors yields a little-explored insight: pastors, in their daily ministering to the afflicted and who are themselves at times sufferers, often speak against the discursive disarticulation that death, both social and physical, inflicts. Pastors of diverse Christian traditions articulate a navigable way of living and, through repentance, a better life in the beyond. In the end, many pastors have helped to erase the invisibility experienced by People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in a riddled place where HIV is epidemiologically ubiquitous but about which few speak.
The Relative Centrality of Life Domains among Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi), Traditionalist and Secular Women: The Israeli Case View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Moshe Sharabi, Avi Kay
This is the first study of importance of life-domains among women in the ultra-Orthodox community: the fastest growing population in Israel. This population exhibits a unique occupational pattern in which women are the primary economic actors. As women are transitioning into more central occupational and economic players throughout the world, this research has both theoretical and practical implications. 567 employed Jewish Israeli women (309 secular, 138 traditional and 120 ultra-Orthodox) completed a survey about relative importance of life domains. Responses were analyzed via mean-comparison tests, ANOVA and regression analysis. The findings revels that unexpectedly, religiosity was associated with higher work centrality. Work centrality was highest among ultra-Orthodox women, and family centrality lowest. Centrality of religion increased and centrality of leisure decreased with religiosity. No differences emerged regarding centrality of community. This study closes gaps in research examining the impact of religion and of gender on work attitudes. It does so among women in the fastest growing population of Israel, that exhibit a unique occupational pattern that can contribute to both theoreticians and policy planners regarding implications of the transition of women to more central economic roles. The data point to changes in the attitudes of ultra-Orthodox women toward life-domains. Those changes and the increased presence of these women at the workplace challenge both organizational and community leaders to reexamine how to best react to and benefit from the above.
Orthodox Jewish Weddings in the 21st Century – Ritual vs. Reality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julia Schwartzmann
The Jewish wedding is a religious ceremony that is an important part of Jewish religious life. Although the commandment to “take a wife” appears in the Torah, its description there is so sketchy that most of the nuptial ritual was established by the sages of the Oral Law and put in writing sometime toward the end of the 2nd century CE. However, it is obvious that the wedding ceremony of the sages bears only a distant resemblance to the one practiced today. During the almost 15 centuries that passed between the days of the sages and the crystallization of the wedding ceremony in the 16th century it underwent a long process of ritualization of customs: a process in which popular customs gradually acquire the status of sacred religious commandments. It is especially fascinating that during this process the orthodox wedding ceremony has absorbed numerous customs practiced by other monotheistic religion and turned them into integral parts of the orthodox wedding ceremony. The only feature of the Jewish orthodox wedding that has remained unchanged since biblical times is the total passivity of the bride and other women present at the wedding ceremony. However, during the last thirty years the orthodox wedding ceremony has been constantly challenged by its secular participants and by religious feminists. In this study I show how the impact of modernity in general, and feminism in particular, has gradually changed the apparently unchangeable Jewish orthodox wedding.
