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The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the meanings, rituals, and the celebration context related to Holy Feasts and New Year, to determine consumption patterns of female consumers during these occasions and compare the results for urban and rural areas.

A qualitative research technique was followed and in‐depth interviews were chosen as data‐collection method. A total of 60 in‐depth interviews were held with females in urban and rural areas of Turkey and the respondents were selected according to Family Life Cycle (FLC) categories. Data were analyzed through content analysis.

The findings indicate that six meanings were associated with Holy Feasts and New Year. All meanings except for those which are neutral or negative are more intensely observed for Holy Feasts. Besides, rigidly ritualized Holy Feast celebrations were observed in rural areas whereas these consumers do not have deep inspirations to celebrate New Year. Urban consumers display westernized rituals specifically for New Year and it is also seen that consumption patterns differ for urban and rural consumers.

The generalization of findings is limited to the selected urban and rural areas. The second limitation lies in the fact that this exploratory study also makes a preliminary attempt to develop a deeper understanding for only two specific occasions.

The study has significant implications as to how the investigation of transformation and reinterpretation of meanings, rituals and consumption patterns offers an opportunity to identify the marketing strategies without disregarding the differences and similarities between urban and rural areas in the case of sacred and non‐sacred occasions which may also be a reference to analyze the secular‐religious tensions.

Assessing the changing natures of both sacred and Christian oriented non‐sacred occasions in Turkey as a hybrid society, emphasizing the similarities and differences in urban and rural areas and generating suggestions for marketing practitioners by analyzing the consumption tendencies constitute the originality of this study.

This chapter explores institution as a religious phenomenon. Institutional logics are organized around relatively stable congeries of objects, subjects, and practices. Institutional substances, the most general object of an institutional field, are immanent in the practices that organize an institutional field, values never exhausted by those practices, and practices premised on a practical belief in that substance. Like religion, an institution's practices are ontologically rational, that is, tied to a substance indexed by the conjunction of a practice and a name. Institutional substances are not loosely coupled, ceremonial, legitimating exteriors, but unquestioned, constitutive interiors, the sacred core of each field, unobservable, but socially real.

This chapter will argue that the representation of mental illness in The Archers is unrepresentative in a number of ways. Sufferers of long-term mental health problems are not portrayed in the programme and mental illness is often used as a narrative device, leading to a bias towards circumstantial, single-episode mental ill health storylines. This chapter will also cover the portrayal of Helen Archer’s mental health during and after suffering emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, arguing that it suffers from a number of shortcomings.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize and empirically investigate the formation of consumer’s consumption ritual experiences and discourses associated with Feast of Sacrifice.

The authors have approached the data from assemblage theory perspective. By use of ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews, seven themes are uncovered and discussed: meaning of Qurban, preparation of the ritual, Qurban choice, meat, Qurban ritual, marketplace and framing of discourses.

This study provides a theoretical development in which it depicts that assemblage theory can be used in the context of religious rituals such as the Feast of Sacrifice. This suggests that parts forming the social phenomena include different meanings and functions in different assemblages to the ritual, which has a structure with a particular process, roles and content scenario. This implies that even the most structured social phenomena as religious rituals can be accepted as social assemblage where every individual experiences his/her own ritual with the parts that have ever-changing material and expressive roles.

This study will contribute to the literature on religious rituals and practices through viewing ritual as an assemblage including material and expressive features as well as human and non-human actors. Besides, this study aims to find out whether there is a constant consumer and the concept of ritual by focusing on buying experiences of consumer in Feast of Sacrifice in Turkey.

Do these reference requests sound familiar? “I need to know what has happened on this day in history. Can you help me?” Or, “I'm doing a paper on Thornton Wilder. He was born on 17 April. Can you tell me who else was born on that day?” Or, “Are any national or regional anniversaries coming up next Friday?” These questions call for a special type of reference work—a book of days. A book of days (or day book) lists important events that have occurred on each day of the year throughout history, and is arranged by month and day. These works often include not only historical, cultural, and literary events, but also the dates of the births and deaths of notable people, commemorative days of saints, and special anniversaries. A book of days, for example, can reveal that historians Will and Ariel Durant were married in New York City Hall on Halloween in 1913, or that Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway were born on the same day in 1899 (21 July). This article will review some of the more useful books of days that are often found in reference collections—works that are uniquely suited to answer questions about each day of the year.

Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss various aspects of the development of the places of apparitions and miraculous images, motives and behavioral characteristics of pilgrims coming to the miraculous places of the Virgin Mary in Lithuania.

The paper reviews literature about miraculous events and presents miraculous places in Lithuania (apparition places of the Virgin Mary and sites of miraculous images). Various classifications are applied. Pilgrims ' motivation and behavioral aspects are analyzed based on the quantitative survey.

The research showed that the main motives of religious pilgrims visiting miraculous places were asking for God’s grace, health, expressing gratitude to Jesus or Virgin Mary as well as spiritual quest and renewal. These places attract pilgrims who want to solve different problems in their life or to recover from illnesses. Religious pilgrimage has different forms and rituals, and constitutes different models of the specific behavior. During the journey, pilgrims perform various religious practices such as praying, singing hymns, kissing the relics, etc. The grouping of devotional rituals performed during the pilgrimage and at the destination place is presented.

The paper is important to the researchers of pilgrimage and religious tourism. For the first time, miraculous places of Lithuania are analyzed in the broader international context. Classifications of the miraculous sites indicate various aspects of the development of these places. Motives and behavioral characteristics of pilgrims enable to better understand the multidimensional reality of religious pilgrimage.

This study aims to investigate the Hijri calendar effect in Borsa Istanbul (BIST) precious metal market and foreign exchange market (Dollar and Euro market) of Turkey.

The data of BIST gold market index and foreign exchange market are used for the period of 4 March 2003-30 September 2016 (1 Muharram 1424 – 28 Dhu al-Hijja 1437) in the study. These data are analyzed by using the dummy variable regression model and Kruskal–Wallis (KW) test.

The results of the regression models and KW test indicate that there is a Ramadan effect in the gold market and after-Ramadan effect in the Euro market. On the other hand, the Hijri month effect does not exist in the Dollar market.

This is the first paper that investigates the Hijri calendar effect in gold and foreign exchange markets of Turkey other than the stock market.