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 Free Download An Ethnographic Account of Reiki Practice in Britain By Dori-Michelle Beeler 2016 | 225 Pages | ISBN: 1443899526 | PDF | 1 MB An Ethnographic Account of Reiki Practice in Britain is the result of 14 months of ethnographic research. This study, while filling a gap in the qualitative literature on Reiki practice, contributes an ethnographic portrayal of a particular group's construction of well-being. Contributing to medical anthropology, the research findings demonstrate culturally situated ideas and practices related to health wherein the intersubjective nature of healing is a constitutive element for well-being. The distinctions of this are specific to culture and environment, broadening how spirituality and well-being are conceptualized anthropologically. In addition, this book offers a framework for the commoditization of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), a process where products become a simple commodity. For Reiki practice, this results in spirituality being out of place in the healthcare market. The book will be of interest to academics interested in CAM research and Reiki practitioners alike.  Free Download An Ethics of Reading : Interpretative Strategies for Contemporary Multicultural American Literature By Sandra Cox 2015 | 220 Pages | ISBN: 1443881015 | PDF | 1 MB An Ethics of Reading considers how writers of contemporary American fiction represent collective identities by producing literature that bears witness to cultural traumas. With chapters focused on important American novelists including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz, the book works to situate novels that explore ethnic identity in conversation with one another. From those intertextual conversations, it draws conclusions about how fiction functions as testimony and the ways that readers might work to ethically respond to the testimonial features of the prose. The book's investigations of distinct cultural traumas are broad, ranging from analyses of African American novels that treat slavery to Native American novels that portray land and child theft to Dominican and Haitian American accounts of US-backed hegemony in the Caribbean diaspora. Ultimately, the central claim of the book - that some works of contemporary American fiction function both didactically and aesthetically as cultural markers around which ethnic identities might be negotiated by writers and readers - becomes a kind of call to action for literary studies in the early 21st century, encouraging an ideological and pragmatic shift in how contemporary literature is read, analysed and discussed. By suggesting specific strategies for considering ethnicity in a radically diasporic American context, the book calls for critical engagement that is also concerned with the ethics of interpretive praxis, which, it suggests, might be a mechanism for building coalitions for social justice within, around, and through literature.  Free Download An Ethical Literary Criticism of Han Suyin's Autobiography (Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Approaches to Chinese Literature) by Florence Kuek English | April 15, 2025 | ISBN: 1032739541 | 130 pages | PDF | 2.38 Mb Han Suyin (1916/1917-2012) became a household name when Love is A Many-Splendored Thing, the Hollywood rendition of her novel won several awards in 1956. The study of Han Suyin went out of fashion for a while, but it has recently been revitalised, especially in Singapore and Malaysia. Kuek pays attention to The Crippled Tree autobiographical series, delineating her two-track narrative of her family saga against the backdrop of 20th century China.  Free Download An Empire of the East: Travels In Indonesia by Norman Lewis English | October 6, 2014 | ISBN: 1780601026 | 280 pages | PDF | 2.64 Mb Norman Lewis was eighty-three years old when he embarked on a series of three arduous journeys into the most contentious corners of Indonesia: unearthing rain forest and aboriginal decimation, massacres and, perhaps most chilling of all, copper mining on a scale that brings the film Avatar to mind - but this time the bad guys triumph. He presents himself as a picture of innocence, reporting only what he sees, but using his well-honed tools of irony, humor, and restraint, he points a finger directly at the country's ruling generals.  Free Download An Edgy Realism : Film Theoretical Encounters with Dogma 95, New French Extremity, and the Shaky-Cam Horror Film By Jerome Schaefer 2015 | 171 Pages | ISBN: 1443880175 | PDF | 1 MB Similar to the way in which the new waves of the 1960s and 1970s had been characterized by new forms of cinematic realism, cinema since the turn of the millennium has pointed into the direction of a new, edgy realism. Art film movements such as Dogma 95 and the New French Extremity, as well as shaky-cam horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, provide evidence of the fact that the proliferation of the digital since the 1990s has profoundly changed not only contemporary media culture and the social role of film, as seen, for example, in the case of amateur film and the phenomenon of mobile reporting and its distribution via YouTube and the like, but also notions of realism and authenticity. As modern film theory has struggled to keep pace with the developments of contemporary cinema, this book draws on actor-network theory and its material-semiotic mindset to allow a thorough understanding of the innovative character of cinema at the turn of the millennium. It is argued that the ongoing digitization has finally allowed cinema to return to a material-semiotic mode of perception; one side of this being the 'spectacle' of the blockbuster, while the other side might best be described as an edgy realism: the realism of 'material-semiotic relationality'.  Free Download An Auditor's Guide to Auditing Financial Statements in the UK by Steve Collings English | August 29, 2024 | ISBN: 1526527480 | 712 pages | MOBI | 14 Mb Written by an experienced auditor this practical guide will help auditors plan their procedures in accordance with current auditing standards and other forms of regulation. 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Free Download American Unitarianism and the Protestant Dilemma : The Conundrum of Biblical Authority By Lydia Willsky-Ciollo 2015 | 307 Pages | ISBN: 0739188925 | EPUB | 1 MB American Unitarians were not onlookers to the drama of Protestantism in the nineteenth century, but active participants in its central conundrum: biblical authority. Unitarians sought what other Protestants sought, which was to establish the Bible as the primary authority, only to find that the task was not so simple as they had hoped. This book revisits the story of nineteenth century American Unitarianism, proposing that Unitarianism was founded and shaped by the twin hopes of maintaining biblical authority and committing to total free inquiry. This story fits into the larger narrative of Protestantism, which, this book argues, has been defined by a deep devotion to the singular authority of the Bible (sola scriptura) and, conversely, a troubling ambivalence as to how such authority should function. How, in other words, can a book serve as a source of authority?This work traces the greater narrative of biblical authority in Protestantism through the story of four main Unitarian figures: William Ellery Channing, Andrews Norton, Theodore Parker, and Frederic Henry Hedge. All four individuals played a central role, at different times, in shaping Unitarianism, and in determining how exactly religious authority functioned in their nascent denomination. Besides these central figures, the book goes both backward, examining the evolution of biblical authority from the late medieval period in Europe to the early nineteenth century in America, and forward, exploring the period of Unitarian experimentation of religious authority in the late nineteenth century. The book also brings the book firmly into the present, exploring how questions about the Bible and religious authority are being answered today by contemporary Unitarian Universalists. Overall, this book aims to bring the American Unitarians firmly back into the historical and historiographical conversation, not as outliers, but as religious people deeply committed to solving the Protestant dilemma of religious authority.  Free Download American Trivia: What We All Should Know About U.S. History, Culture & Geography by Richard Lederer, Caroline McCullagh English | February 1, 2012 | ISBN: 1423622774 | 144 pages | PDF | 5.12 Mb Go beyond baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie!  Free Download American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Andrew Preston English | May 1, 2019 | ISBN: 0199899398 | 168 pages | MOBI | 2.09 Mb For better or worse-be it militarily, politically, economically, technologically, or culturally-Americans have had a profound role in shaping the wider world beyond them. 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