Ethno Religious Identification And Intergroup Contact Avoidance

Ethno-religious Identification and Intergroup Contact Avoidance

This study focuses on the latent aspects of an ethno-religious conflict, describing why and how people avoid contact with 'out-groups.' Their contact avoidance is largely based on the notion of power. The book shows how contact avoidance towards out-groups is related to people's ethno-religious identification. This is explained by various factors, such as a perceived group threat, out-group distrust, fundamentalism, quantity of contact, and direct experiences of violence. Finally, the book illustrates how education, mass media, and the history of conflict are related with intergroup contact avoidance. (Series: Nijmegen Studies in Development and Cultural Change (NICCOS) - Vol. 50) [Subject: Religious Studies, Christianity, Islamic Studies, Asian Studies]

Ethno-religious identification and intergroup contact avoidance

"This is our belief around here"

This study analyzes ritual and domestic water use in a rural and an urban community in West Java, Indonesia. This is an area where water quantity and quality is a problem. The focus is on people who live at the edge of Citarum River, one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Most people there are Muslim. What is the relation between people's perceptions of pollution (of Upper Citarum River) and purification (in Islamic teaching) and their practices of water use. It studies the perceptions of pollution and purification of Sundanese Muslims in West Java and the effects of those perceptions on practices of domestic and ritual water use. Making a discourse analysis of local narratives the study argues that most people don't see pollution as problematic. For them it has become normal. They make a distinction between clean water (in medical sense) and pure water (in ritual sense).