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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU – magazine on urbanism #10 – HOLY URBANISM
The one thing that all religions on our planet have in common is their distinction between the holy and the profane. All religions appear to be organized as systems of beliefs with distinctive practices and all have built structures in relation to things holy. And those distinctive practices and structures have always shaped our cities in a profound way. …. Go to MONU’s website to find out more.
Though PRISM is published by the University Scholars Programme, the call for papers is open to all NUS undergraduates with ISM or term research papers that are too good to be left languishing in your thumbdrive. Submissions will be peer reviewed. The editorial board is made up of two faculty members, Paul Nerney and me, and six USP students. You can read the first issue, published in April this year, in the Central Library, here.
This is a phrase that is applied by Weberian scholars (e.g. Eisenstadt) to contemporary non-Western states to signify the “corruption” or “augmentation”, depending whether one wants to emphasize the negative or positive implications, of modern bureaucratic rational-legalism by patrimonialism.
The latter term, as used by Max Weber, refers to the type of rule that is based on patriarchy, that is, the rule of the father in the family. In other words, the patriarchal form of authority is projected beyond the family into the political and symbolic regimes of society at large. It is not the patriarchal family writ large, but the “scaling up” of the patriarchal family. In contrast to the rational-legal authority exercised by modern bureaucracy, patrimonialism is based on traditional authority and does not distinguish between the personal and public patrimony (personal estate) of the ruler and the state. Historical examples of patrimonialism include European principalities and monarchies of the feudal past, and the Chinese and Ottoman Empires.
The watercooler became a cult symbol in the 1990s. It is, of course, a wholly American phenomenon, given that nation’s predilection for bottled water and banter. So how did I know? Through an episode of Seinfeld, of course. The very object and Americanisms aside, the watercooler is a symbol (or signifier?) of the post-industrial workplace with its cubicle partitions, work segmentation and specialization, and computer-mediated communications: the transformation of white-collar clerical work into assembly-line information management and knowledge production. Is something similar happening in academia?
In a book review in the latest Journal of Asian Studies, David Chandler writes…
“Phrases such as ‘the alienating and hegemonic order of the post modern imaginary’s simulacrum,’ for example, or ‘plural, nonpurist, nonessentialist, but more hybrid and globally embedded (Southeast) Asian agencies,’ picked at random from the text, are, to coin a phrase, postcomprehensible.”
Haha. ROTFLOL. What a great word!
Note to graduate students (and all of us really): Be postmodern, poststructural or whatever you want. But please, please try not to be postcomprehensible. Go for clear, simple language whenever possible!
FYI: Scary thing is, I do kinda know what the phrases quoted above mean (though, the ‘post modern imaginary’s simulacrum’ is beyond me… just smoke and mirrors?). Moreover, I don’t mean to be casting stones from within the glass house of my own far-from-jargon-free writing. But Chandler’s caution to avoid postcomprehensibility is a point well taken.
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