No abstract

Desire-based research provides people and communities the opportunity to share their dreams and hopes for a better future. However, conflicting desires are difficult to reconcile. We suggest that sociological research to understand conflicting desires is required to support reconciliation work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. Our contribution begins by identifying much of current and past sociological research about Indigenous people and communities as damaged-centered, that is, identifying problems and obstacles in the hope that the knowledge will lead to change. This model of social change is flawed. We believe that most Canadians desire justice for Indigenous peoples while at the same time desiring land and access to resources, desires that deny that justice. How we as a society reconcile these desires will determine the extent to which true justice for Indigenous peoples will be achieved. We propose a sociology of the reconciliation of conflicting desires and suggest some practical ways that this type of research could move forward.

In the Sufi Ibn `Arabi’s mystical discourse, a performative “language of unsaying” is generated from the tensions and paradoxes that arise from the attempt to articulate the ineffable nature of a transcendent divine. However, such forms of language also occur in his attempts to articulate the elusive nature of the barzakh, an intermediate property of all existent things and beings. His use of language invokes not only issues of ineffability arising from a transcendent object, but also the dynamic relation between the ineffable and the intermediate. The analytical concept of “vagueness” helps to clarify such concepts as the barzakh by showing how these symbols are, relatively speaking, “precise” representations. Such a linguistic, philosophical knot is built into the mystical, pedagogical tradition of Ibn `Arabi’s Sufism, necessitating a distinction between how contemporary analytical philosophers and Sufi thinkers like him think about vagueness, while also emphasizing the sophisticated understanding of language at the heart of his Sufism.

In the Sufi Ibn `Arabi’s mystical discourse, a performative “language of unsaying” is generated from the tensions and paradoxes that arise from the attempt to articulate the ineffable nature of a transcendent divine. However, such forms of language also occur in his attempts to articulate the elusive nature of the barzakh, an intermediate property of all existent things and beings. His use of language invokes not only issues of ineffability arising from a transcendent object, but also the dynamic relation between the ineffable and the intermediate. The analytical concept of “vagueness” helps to clarify such concepts as the barzakh by showing how these symbols are, relatively speaking, “precise” representations. Such a linguistic, philosophical knot is built into the mystical, pedagogical tradition of Ibn `Arabi’s Sufism, necessitating a distinction between how contemporary analytical philosophers and Sufi thinkers like him think about vagueness, while also emphasizing the sophisticated understanding of language at the heart of his Sufism.