Like many Taiwanese teenage girls, Lee You-fang likes to sing pop songs and play with her pet dog, but she has an unusual job: working with the bones of the dead.
For five years, 19-year-old Lee has honed her craft as a “bone collector,” assisting her father in an ancient funerary rite that involves collecting, cleaning and arranging human skeletons for reburial.
She began working full-time after graduating from high school last year, following in the footsteps of her great-grandfather who started the family business eight decades ago.
Bone collecting is linked to a belief that the feng shui of ancestral graves will affect the lives of the descendants and that a reburial can help turn around luck in difficult times.
Dedicated to the women who have graced the pages of history, from ancient to modern times.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
The Bone Collector
The Sisterhood of Avalon
The sisterhood, a Celtic tradition, is exclusive to women in which followers honour five goddesses who each represent a station in a cycle of healing.
The sisterhood is about “gathering the tools for self-empowerment,’’ said Lazic, a holistic therapist in private practice, who meditates several times a week and journeys to Avalon in her mind twice a month.
Pagan faiths, often described as earth-based religions, adhere to ritual practices and follow different mythologies including Celtic, Norse and ancient Greek traditions.
Some follow the phases the moon, celebrating equinoxes and solstices. They practice in groups, alone or today more commonly on the internet in covens, circles or hearths.
Common forms of paganism include Wicca and witchcraft. Paganism was a label European Christians gave to villagers who followed traditional folk practices outside the mainstream religions.
The Sisterhood of Avalon is a mix of Arthurian legend, folklore, stories passed on from the druids and goddess spirituality. It’s not known if Avalon really existed but its followers believe the spiritual energy of ancient times remains alive today.
Within history, Avalon is a place with pagan and Christian roots. According to Arthurian legend, a mortally wounded King Arthur was healed on Avalon and the island is his final resting place.
Legend also has it that Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus’ uncle, returned to Glastonbury after the death of Jesus to establish the first Christian church in the British Isles. It is said that Joseph brought Jesus with him on trips to the British Isles.
The Lady Chapel in Glastonbury is dedicated to Jesus’ mother Mary and still exists today. The tower of Saint Michael, that stands on Glastonbury Tor, is the remains of the second church built there in the 15th century.
Indian Brides Victims of Fake Grooms
An investigative team from the Calgary Herald travelled to India recently to report that, in the province of Punjab alone, it is conservatively estimated that over 30,000 young women, some as young as 16 to18, have been defrauded and abandoned by fraudulent grooms from Canada.
The exploitation of these young women is never a one-man operation; typically it involves a whole kinship network. The Herald reported that abandoned brides now constitute an epidemic and concluded that they are victims of “organized crime”
Fraudulent grooms make stringent demands of enormous dowries, proof of a woman’s youth and virginal status, and a swift passage from agreement to marriage. Then, shortly after the wedding ceremony and a brief honeymoon, the fraudulent grooms beat a hasty exit from India back to Canada, dowry in hand.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960)
Flamboyant, bold and outrageous were Zora Neale Hurston’s writings, as was her life. As the diva of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was the most prolific black woman writer of her times and a brilliant chronicler of African American life.
A literary ancestor of the contemporary canon of African American women’s writings like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, etc., Hurston helped to create the art of black women’s narrative voices.
Hurston’s genius for storytelling and drama derived from depicting the lives of her subjects in the poetic cadence of black idiom, and her art form won her critical acclaim in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hurston’s explorations of black female characters, her analysis of women’s concerns, and their romantic quest for personal wholeness and female autonomy influenced a generation of writers.
The Discovery of Jeanne Baret
TO hide her identity from the men around her, she docked her hair, bound her breasts so tightly she could hardly breathe and gritted her teeth against starvation and seasickness for 18 months at sea.
For all these trials, the passage of nearly 250 years has relegated Jeanne Baret's story to a curious historical footnote: in the mid-18th century, on an expedition ship led by famous French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Baret hid her gender and became the first woman known to circumnavigate the globe.
Until recently, that was where Baret's place in history began and ended. But in her second book, British academic Glynis Ridley scoured fragments of historical evidence to uncover a deeper tale: one of a poor but brilliant French herb-woman who, working alongside the prominent man she loved, left a lasting mark on modern botany.
The book: The Discovery of Jeanne Baret - A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe by Glynis Ridley
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Shari`ah Laws and Women
Continue reading the article by Jasser Auda.Women issues are the real test for the current Islamic reform. The reason is that groundless and unfair differentiation between men and women is deeply embedded in many popular opinions that we inherited from the eras of decline of the Islamic civilization.
Women Falsely Punished For WWII Collaboration
Veteran Polish film director Feliks Falk has said that many women were punished unjustly for charges of collaboration with Nazi Germans during World War II.
Falk discussed the theme in Kielce on Saturday at a special screening of his latest film, Joanna. The movie won two of the top awards at last year's Polish Film Festival in Gdynia.
Joanna tells the story of a Cracovian woman whose husband was interned by the Germans in a POW camp for officers. One day she meets a Jewish child in a church, and decides to take her in. However, Joanna is shortly denounced by her fellow countrymen. Her fate seems sealed, but a German officer gives her the chance of survival, if she is prepared to collaborate with him.
“The parents and neighbours who accused the heroine of hiding a Jew were not bad,” the director reflected. “They were simply terrified.”
“The decision to hide Jews was a difficult one,” Falk continued. “Joanna conquered that fear.”
The film went on general release in Poland before Christmas. Joanna is not based on a specific historical case, but explores the dilemmas of many Poles during German occupation. The penalty in Poland for hiding Jews was death, a sentence that was invariably meted out to the entire family.
Big Dig - Boston's Infamous Brothel
Boston’s infamous Big Dig construction project, which rerouted the city’s central artery, unearthed a trove of archaeological treasures in a 19th-century brothel’s outhouse. Buried there were items of importance to the women who made their living outside the margins of polite society: hairbrushes, medicines, and vaginal syringes used for self-medicating and cleaning.
Now, a team of archaeology students from BU is studying these artifacts to find out what they reveal about how the residents of one Boston brothel lived. The building, long since torn down, existed on Endicott Street, near Boston’s North End, just two blocks from what was then the city’s red light district. The team hopes that by studying the more than 3,000 artifacts recovered from the outhouse and using old city records, they can gain insight into the day-to-day lives of prostitutes believed to have lived at the property between 1852 and 1883.
Progressive reformers wrote of brothels as dens of iniquity, vice, depravity, and filth, “but yet in this site we see a very high concern for personal health and hygiene,” Beaudry says. “This is understandable given the inevitable side effects of the sex trade, which is conception, disease, that sort of thing. These findings are the reverse of shocking; they show that these women were making a living as best they could.”
Penny Feiwel - International Brigade in Spain
Penny Feiwel was the last of the British women who served as volunteers on the side of the Spanish Republic during the civil war of 1936-39.
She was one of about 75 women from Britain who joined the International Brigades following the military coup launched by Francisco Franco and other generals with backing from Hitler and Mussolini. Like Feiwel, known in Spain by her maiden name of Phelps, most of them were nurses and worked in makeshift frontline hospitals in conditions of great hardship and danger. Phelps herself suffered serious injuries in a bombing raid that put an end to her service in Spain.
In 1992 she published her memoir, English Penny, under the pen-name Penny Fyvel. In 2009, she and a small group of surviving International Brigade veterans attended a ceremony at the Spanish embassy in London to be awarded Spanish citizenship. Ambassador Carles Casajuana told them: "Your efforts were not in vain. Your ideals are part of the foundations of our democracy in Spain today."
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