The face of development aid: volunteers and their hosts in southern Israel

The current scholarship on development aid has asserted that a “transformation” of development, one that “puts people first”, is presently taking place in the particular form of volunteer aid. In southern Israel, this claim is evident in recent attempts to “strengthen” depressed “development town” communities through a movement that combines Zionist settlement with the volunteer aid of university students. Based on ethnographic work in the development town of Yeruham, this article problematises this claim by investigating the daily encounter of volunteers with members of their multiply marginalised host community. It challenges such claims of “transformation” and exposes the complex social reality of what it means to “develop” and “empower” a population routinely framed as disadvantaged and targeted for aid.     

Divided Loyalties,Empowered Citizenship? Muslims in Britain

Fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, is embedded in stereotypical assumptions and pronouncements regarding selected customs and, above all, the inherently fanatical, violent and irrational tendencies of Muslim leaders and their followers. The further point of such discourses is the claim that these alien qualities and attributes have come to be implanted in the Western body itself, no longer simply confined to its 'bloody boundaries', to cite Huntington, but extending within and across them. A substantial Muslim diasporic presence has emerged in Europe and the West, and even some Western liberals, who pride themselves on their enlightened tolerance, appear concerned about the capacity of this culturally alien presence, as they see it, to integrate'. Such doubts surfaced especially during the Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, both of which seemed to expose the chasm between so-called Western 'values' and Islamic ones. In denying the validity of this antagonistic vision according to which Muslim minorities are intrinsically antithetical to Western democractic practices, the aim of the present paper is twofold: first, to highlight the rise of an alternative contemporary debate about the rights and obligations of Muslims as minorities in the West which is currently animating Muslim and Western scholars, clerics and activists; and second, to argue that Muslim diasporic transnational mobilisation, including even the conflicts surrounding the Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, have been key moments in the development of a Muslim British civic consciousness and capacity for active citizenship. Far from revealing ambiguous loyalties or unbridgeable cultural chasms, British Muslim transnational loyalties have challenged the national polity, I argue, to explore new forms of multiculturalism and to work for new global human rights causes. At the same time such mobilisations have been part of the learning process of becoming a politically effective diaspora. In the long run, then, the Muslim diasporic presence in Britain is a potentially enriching one, and particularly so as the state moves to becoming a post-national, multicultural polity.     

Beyond division: Women,pilgrimage and nation building in South Asian Sufism

Unlike other religious movements, Sufi orders rarely preach ideologies of either nationalism or religious nationalism. Sufi annual pilgrimages and festivals are open and inclusive: they cut across provincial and even national borders. They gather followers traversing vast distances across the entire country to the order's centre. This feature of movement in and across space, and of gendered, ethnic, regional and caste mixing, the paper argues, creates networks of devotees criss-crossing Pakistan, connecting villages, workplaces and large organisations. Pilgrims come together in amity, and in doing so create the grounds for nation building. Women take an active part in these pilgrimages and celebrations, and visit the lodge as supplicants seeking help for a variety of afflictions. In connecting people and spaces across the whole of Pakistan, rich and poor, men and women, Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans, Baluchis and Muhajirs, Sufi orders thus reach out beyond the local to create the performative and embodied experience of moral relations between strangers, arguably the essential pre-condition and grounds of nationhood, without explicitly articulating ideologies of nationalism or of a global ummah.     

Fair use of works of art in children's games

The aim of this article is to examine the legal possibilities available to creators of children's games, enhancing art education. It focuses on the type of games that enrich the learning experience by means of works of visual, verbal or musical art. I do not deal with the technology of the digital age, but examine the educational art game as a ‘derived game’, containing the original work of art (as a component of the game), and discuss in depth the issue of the use of works of art, integrated in children's games. The situation in this sphere is murky. In the toy shops there are no games providing enrichment in the understanding of art, and shops in art galleries have only a few games with reproductions of pictures in those galleries. The subject is particularly important in view of the fact that children are not exposed to works of art contributing to their cognitive development and critical perspective, and when they do see works of art, they are usually behind some barrier and not easily accessible. The complex situation created by strict copyright laws deters the planners and producers of games and makes such games expensive. As a result, we as a society, fail to exploit a powerful experiential means to enrich the cultural world of the younger generation. This article examines the possibilities of establishing a right of fair use of reproductions of works of art in children's games.