This essay describes the phases of funeral rituals between the Syrian/Assyrian, and compares the homeland with Sweden. It describes the stage of rituals according to Victor Turner schema of separation, margin or limin, and aggregation. The rituals religious significance agrees with Clifford Geertz?s theory about the importance of religious beliefs for the human being.

In public libraries there seems to be an unspoken consensus on what literary quality is. At the same time librarians are always eager to express the opinion that quality lies in the eye of the beholder. Quality is, it is said, something that you don t have to define. But at the same time it s up to everyone to decide what quality means to them. What I have been missing from the discussion in libraries about literary quality is a theoretical awareness about what it means to divide literature into higher and lower spheres.

Sekularisering fortsätter att drabba kyrkan i både öst och väst. Uppsatsen behandlar sekulariseringsteorier utifrån ett bibliskt perspektiv. Hypotesen är att Jesus Kristus är kyrkan som kropp. Detta kyrkobegrepp har förändrats. Även budskapet och pedagogiken har påverkats.Fältarbete har genomförts i både Egypten och i Sverige.

This paper explores the theoretical and practical uses and limitations of battle-field archaeology. The author aims to paint a big picture of the subject of exca-vating, understanding and theorising about historical battlefields done every day by archaeologists. Its approach places much weight on a quantity of examples rather than exploring specific excavations in every detail, in an effort to give the reader an understanding about how battlefield archaeology works. It stresses the need for battlefield archaeology as a way of obtaining and securing impor-tant archaeological and historical information before it is lost to science. The author tries to evaluate the subject in a critical and pragmatic fashion in order to establish a clear understanding about the facts of battlefield archaeology..

In the pilot study for a biography, some of the methodological and/or theoretical problems facing the anthropologist and biographer are discussed.The empirical section is based on a number of interviews I made with my grandmother over the period 1995-2001. I have come across inconsistencies in the material when rendering a historical event. Furthermore, the material makes me reflect on how the biographer or anthropologist is able to handle or interpret that she and the subject/informant has a different attitude to metaphors and how the metaphors can change over time, space and interpretation.The essay begins with a summary review of some of the central social and behavioural scientific theories that can be related to the individual and the biography.There then follows an in-depth discussion based on Paul Ricoeur's philosophy that says that your identity is created in relation to how you look at your history and future at the present time. Identities are created in an interaction between the field we are currently in, the cultural capital that includes gestures, mannerisms, symbols, our language and the area of interpretation the field allows in the culture. Consequently, the biography is also a representation that is created in time and space and between the subject and the person rendering the subject.The biography or ethnography is transient and is of necessity a historiography.Ricoeur talks about the living metaphor.

This Master?s thesis concerns the public librarian?s professional identity. The complexity of the mandates of the public librarian, and the public library, raises questions on how librarians understand their professional identities. The empirical material consists of qualitative in-depth interviews with librarians. Two theoretical approaches are used in the analysis of the material with a focus on the public librarians? knowledge and professional role.

Happiness is often considered our ultimate goal in life. This essay explores the political im- plications of this view, through the critique of happiness found in the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Sara Ahmed. Ahmed and Beauvoir consider happiness to be harmful as a po- litical goal, since it tends to diminish dimensions of power and conflict in favor of harmony, and is not compatible with a political philosophy based on freedom or liberation. Happiness is often confused with the ethical Good, but this essay argues that happiness does not ne- cessarily entail good things. Indeed, happiness can be used to justify oppression and unjust political systems..

Civil disobedience constitutes an interesting ethical phenomena in the democraticstate since the people performing it consciously brakes laws and norms in societyfor purposes they themselves judge to be morally good and just. This thesisexamines whether the phenomena of civil disobedience is justifiable in ademocratic society.In this study civil disobedience is analyzed on two levels. First the problem isanalyzed on a theoretical level in relative to the three, by us established, values:respect for the law, the will of the majority and equality. Second, civildisobedience is analyzed on a more practical level where we test our theoreticalline of argument with the help of two example groups who engages in civildisobedience. The justification of civil disobedience is also analyzed through twoethical perspectives on acting, deontology and consequentialism.Our conclusion is that civil disobedience is justifiable on a theoretical level inrelative to the values we discuss.

Place is on the one hand a commonsense everyday word with diversely connotative meanings, and on the other a contested concept with different interpretations across a broad range of academic disciplines and discourses. This thesis researches theories of place and their implications for the theory and design practice of landscape architecture. Responding to problems of insufficient theoretical grounding and inconsistent use of the concept of place within the discipline presently, it argues the need for a theory of place better articulated in relation to landscape architecture. It seeks to contribute to such theory formation by drawing on ideas from related disciplines ? tracing diverse understandings of place beyond the commonsense meanings of the word and into the deeper reaches of place theory as tools to explain physical, social and spiritual aspects of the environment, and human relationships with it.

In this Bachelor thesis I explore sound and room as elements in design of user interfaces, both theoretical and practical in a specific application domain, to identify some of the advantages and disadvantage associated with these elements. As application domain I studied email clients and their usage at home amongst students at Blekinge Institute of Technology. In the study I found an activity, which seems to be highly distributed in the physical room where the user is located. The activity was notification of email and could take place in an arbitrary location of the home. I then augmented this activity with ideas from my theoretical assumption about room and sound.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine the activity at the library and preschool at Kristineberg (a part of the town of Borås) and its underlying approach. How do the activities agree with the ideological attitudes of the 1970s? To answer these questions I have carried out a case study based on qualitative interviews. The theoretical background includes ideas of the library, the community center and the cultural activity at the library.

Ethical competence is an important precondition when people are to respond to moral problem situations as efficiently as possible. In these situations it is not easy to make choices and decisions, especially when many stakeholders are involved with various opinions and interests.The purpose of this thesis was to generate a web-based support tool to train and promote ethical competence of the users of this tool.We first created a theoretical basis by studying the major theories of ethics in general and ethical competence in particular. The importance of ethical competence and its main subject, namely, the autonomy in the theoretical part described and specified. In addition has the practical ethical reflection over morality preferred and characterized to the classical ethical passivity over morality. We have also preferred and characterized the autonomous thinking to the heteronomous one.Based on the theoretical base a prototype tool to support the training of ethical competence was designed and developed.

This thesis aims to investigate how the interests of women are handled in political parties whose opinion programs are based on class interests. The essay constructs a theoretical framework, which shows that the descriptive representation of women is a prerequisite for their subjective interests being represented, however not a guarantee.By studying how the Social Democratic party deals with the demands from the Women's federation, the empirical material sheds light on the theoretical discussion. The study's methodological foundation consists of an ideology critical textual analysis, which focuses on the debate on the design of parental allowance that took place within the party during 2005. During the party's congress the women's federation advocated a proposition for increased individualization of the parental allowance, however the party did not accept it. The analysis confirms the theoretical argumentation that descriptive representation is not a guarantee for the representation of women's interests.

In recent years, the demands for effectiveness and evidence in social work have increased in all work areas, including that of healthcare. This has sparked the discussion on concepts such as practical- and theoretical knowledge and their respective roles in social work. In the light of this, the purpose of this candidate thesis is to investigate healthcare social workers understanding of practical- and theoretical knowledge in the working process as well as their respective influence and importance. This candidate thesis is based on three interviews with social workers from different departments in Norrlands Universitetssjukhus in Umeå, Sweden. To provide range to the thesis, the interviewees were chosen from a purposeful sampling.

Vilken grundläggande idé utgår vi ifrån när vi talar om förnuft och rationalitet och vilka konsekvenser får detta för synen på individen, individen i samhället samt individen i datasystemet? Uppsaten belyser problematik rörande den icke-situerade individen, vilken inte är en individ utan snarare en skenbar produkt utav homogena värderingar. .