Non-theist Quakers' MD psychiatry ~ in all ~200 countries and their main languages at WUaS?
Hi Nontheist Friends, Nontheist Quakers, Friends, All,
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In addition to Board-certified MD psychiatry in all 200 countries, online, I'd include, research-wise esp. ~
Lacanian psychoanalysis online
evolutionary biology-informed psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/Jacques%20Lacan%20MD
Primatology - ie primates - and Great Ape, and other species, research for human psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/primates
John Money Ph.D. "Concepts of Determinism" informed psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Money%20PhD
with talk therapy, all online, and eventually with avatar bots :)
And Asylum, e.g. Friends' Hospital, potentially even better in a virtual Harbin Hot Springs-informed (synthesizing Harbin's thinking about well being and mental health too) ~ https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/virtual%20Harbin
As well as meditation-focused - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/meditation - regarding the relaxation response (even as a Non-theistically Friendly & scientifically measurable approach) - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/relaxation%20response - with parallels to sitting in Quaker Silent Meeting esp ...
And music, too - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/music - eg why do JS Bach, Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead - much from the 1960s and '70s - seem to create well-being creativity and productivity when working at the computer, or doing things around home? ...
and caring & nurturing-oriented especially ... https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/care :)
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but find this focus on India by Harvard perhaps germane here -
Harvard Professor S.V. Subramanian offers an on-the-ground perspective as COVID-19 surges in India
Harvard Professor S.V. Subramanian offers an on-the-ground perspective as COVID-19 surges in India https://t.co/ui8PGWjiIT
— Harvard University (@Harvard) May 16, 2021
https://twitter.com/Harvard/
Here's a Duke Professor of Physics on Quakerism and Unitarianism - https://webhome.phy.duke.
DOI:10.7208/chicago/
This chapter discusses Lacan's Seminar XX as a theorization, in terms of psychoanalysis's emphasis on sexual difference, of Bataille's account of the deep divide within Christian mysticism. Bataille's work raises the question of how mysticism can be the site of both the desire to be everything; to escape the particularity, limitations, and constraints of the body; and of the recognition that one is not everything, of embodied subjectivity in all of its pleasurable and painful effects. For Lacan, this doubleness is rooted in the nature of human language as both bodily and irreducible to the materiality of the body, and in the nature of human subjectivity as embodied and yet always also split from the body. Lacan's work also opens the possibility of undermining that same set of associations, for he insists that the goal of psychoanalysis is to refuse the claims to mastery and wholeness on which male-dominant culture, society, and their unconscious rest.
Keywords: Lacan, Seminar XX, Christian mysticism, male-dominant culture, materiality
in
Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History$ Users Without A Subscription Are Not Able To See The Full Content.
Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History
Amy Hollywood
Print publication date: 2002
Print ISBN-13: 9780226349510
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226349466.
- Open Access
- Published: 28 April 2016
Conversion and the Real: The (Im)Possibility of Testimonial Representation
Pastoral Psychology 65, 555
1308 Accesses
1 Altmetric
Abstract
Although the spiritual vibration of conversion can be felt (by the curious outsider) through what conversion performers say in their testimonial discourse, what transforms the convert ‘on stage’ into a ‘new being’ and what is ‘the real’ (le réel) in conversion performance remain unclear. An important question in this connection is, What is ‘real’ in a conversion representation, both with respect to the convert’s interaction with the audience and to the construction of social reality? Following Lacan’s tripartite register of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, in this essay I argue that through testimonial discourse converts construct social reality as an answer to the impossibility of ‘the real’ in their performative discursive practice. In the first part, I question the constructed nature of testimonial representations—as well as some academic knowledge production that has governed conversion research in the last few decades—and how these representations encourage ‘outsiders’ to read the narrative repertoire as a negation or mirroring ‘the real’ of the conversion experience. In the second part, I apply Roland Barthes’ analytic reflections on photography to conversion research, especially the notions of the studium (the common ground of cultural meanings) and the punctum (a personal experience that inspires private meaning). This brings me to a number of theorists (mostly never used in the field of religious conversion)—Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Slavoj Žižek—who are important to the perspective that is developed in this essay.
Let’s get down, to the underground spiritual game.
—Fela Kuti, “Teacher don’t teach me nonsense”
Introduction
Triggered and supported by my research on the role of conversion testimonial among recovering drug addicts, my work over the past several years in these critical endeavors has been specifically focused on the validity, reliability, objectivity, and other methodological challenges in the empirical study of religious conversion (Sremac 2013, 2014; Sremac and Ganzevoort 2013a, b). In this essay, I want to continue in this manner, focusing on Lacanian notions of the real in conversion phenomena and the (im)possibility of its testimonial representation. My use of the term ‘testimony’ comes from Ricoeur’s (1979) work on the hermeneutics of testimony, in which testimony is understood not only as cognitive assent but also as a narrative dialogue with the narrator’s audience and the divine (see Sremac 2014). The narrative capacity of conversion testimony—particularly since it belongs to the representative sphere—is directed towards an audience with the aim of persuasion. Stromberg (2014) argues that reframing a life story through a testimonial account is “a powerful means of persuading oneself and others that a genuine transformation has taken place” (p. 125). Testimony is a central ‘technique of the self’ (Marshall 2009) and the principal mode of creating a new identity and collective belonging. Conversion experience, regardless of its narrative configuration, must be ritually transformed and animated in order to contextualize the power of spiritual transformation. This ritual employment of conversion testimony requires transformation, consecration, or animation by the audience; it conveys experience, which can only be fully understood by those who have already gone through the same experience. Conversion testimonies, as they are retold orally and composed as autobiographies, become the paradigms by which converts interpret their lives and spiritual transformations (Rambo 1993, p. 158). In this sense, conversion testimony functions as a mechanism of reinforcement and commitment. It is a radical re-examination of one’s own life in the form of public-representation.
Following Lacan’s tripartite register of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, I argue that through testimonial discourse religious subjects construct social reality as an answer to the impossibility of the ‘real’ in their performative discursive practice. The testimonial order belongs to the imaginary register as a performative and imaginary frame, for example, the way the convert presents her or his spiritual transformation through testimonial performances and through identification (a mimetic movement) with others. The public aspect of this imaginary identification is perhaps a newly inscribed religious identity constructed through the gaze of others (Austin-Broos 2003, p. 2). Testimony is formed in the discourse of the other that becomes manifest in a public testimonial narrative (the communal-discursive construction of the ‘imagined self’). The symbolic order is the space of language and narratives and is passed through the filter of religious community; it is somewhat reminiscent of Stromberg’s (1993) ‘canonical language’. The symbolic order is considered to be the formative order of the convert; it is the ‘sujet en proces’ (Kristeva 1998) within which ‘canonical language’ can open itself to the sacred, the mystical, and the sublime. The symbolic order creates the narrative and culture in which the subject can express itself as a specific subject with its own identity.
The real, I argue, is to be taken not merely as something extra-imaginary but as a principal register that shapes the subject’s sense of reality and, at the same time, introduces the ‘constitutive lack’ that rotates conversion experience—the impossibility of the symbolic register to capture the fullness of a conversion lived experience in its deepest essentials and its totality. The real is, thus, ‘realized’ via the power of language that belongs to the symbolic and imaginary order as an attempt to represent the real. It is a supplement or the fulfillment of the lost or absent object. The testimonial repertoire is characterized by lack, dispersal, shattering, and a constant search for the missing or absent Other. It is the movement of spiritual desire that mobilizes this testimonial quest. This means that the real is the absent Other around which desire keeps rotating in movement, in action; the absence opens the space and potential for exposure to the real that can never be fully reached or reachable in itself. The real is the order, which cannot be articulated and represented in testimonial talk; at the same time, it infuses every aspect of the convert’s religious life. In a way, the real is inherent contradiction in the sense that it does not exist; it is “a hole in the symbolic order, but it is nevertheless described as a source of contingency” (Pirskanen 2008, p. 5).
The religious subject is (trans)formed in imaginary testimonial identifications with the other and experiences conversion through (canonical) language in relationship to the (symbolic) Other, but the real is the ‘constitutive lack’, the basis of both the cause and object of spiritual desire. These three orders of conversion cannot be entirely separated but rather are fundamentally interwoven. As I shall discuss, in testimony the real, imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.
Beyond the narrative-constructivist framework
Many social scientists today would agree that there is no such thing as ‘the conversion’, even though they believe it is possible to capture ‘the real’ of conversion and thus to show what conversion really is. Conversion was earlier understood in terms of an inner psychological transformation relative to a supernatural agency or to a change in sociocultural commitment and more recently as a political and ideological representation. Dealing with spiritual transformation is a tricky business; it is not an easy task. As Heirich (1977) points out, converts have developed arguments about the nature of the divine-human encounter, whereas social scientists have proposed a variety of social and psychological explanations of it (p. 653). Rambo (1993) expresses this doubt when he writes that “it is difficult to understand, predict, and control that which is generally invisible to the outsider, mysterious and sacred to the insider” (p. 24). In other words, it is not possible to access the core experience of conversion—the ‘real’ conversion. The words ‘predict’ and ‘control’ in Rambo’s quotation are particularly problematic since the conversion representation belongs to the subjective (often mystical) dimension of ‘truth telling’. These are destabilized categories that can barely be ‘predicted’, ‘controlled’ or ‘fixed’. In other words, the researcher is not in full control and cannot fully master or dominate the conversion experience. Converts usually argue that their experiences are opposed to academic knowledge production and only partially and obliquely accessible to scientific investigation. This can also be understood as converts’ “politics of authentication” (van de Port 2011, p. 16).
Yamane (2000), in his article “Narrative and Religious Experience”, addresses the current methodological difficulties with studies of religious experience, arguing that when we study the religious experience of the individual we cannot study ‘experiencing’, which is to say the religious experience in real time and space. Therefore, we must study retrospective linguistic representations of religious experience, including conversion. Yamane (2000) makes a clear distinction between experiencing and an experience: “While experiencing is a constant temporal flow from the standpoint of an individual and therefore cannot be directly studied, an experience is the intersubjective articulation of experience. . . . One cannot experience and reflect on experience at the same time” (p. 174). The articulation of an experience is temporally distanced from the experiencing itself because “all subjective meaning is constituted in retrospect through reflection, rather than in present moment of the lived experience” (p. 175). The interpretation and representation is therefore part of the experience in that any experience contains interpretative elements; it is an interpretative perception. What is presented is always some collection of the lived experience, or more precisely it is made up of the retrospective ‘interpretation-of-
The conversion narrative is the testimonial account of an interpreted experience of spiritual transformation; the experience comes down through a testimony (the imaginary frame), and the testimony is transmitted to the audience on the symbolic level or what Stromberg (1993) rather neatly calls a ‘canonical language’. The symbolic are the various representations and narrative codes that structure the testimonial apparatus. In this way, the conversion narrative is not the ‘real’ experience of spiritual transformation itself but a representation and articulation of the experience as it is stored in the memory of the convert. Therefore, an understanding of a conversion experience is possible only on the level of its narrative and symbolic interpretation. This requires critical narrative investigation of testimonial reliability (see Bruce 2006; Sremac 2013, 2014). However, with Staples and Mauss (1987, p. 138), I hold that conversion is fundamentally a subjective phenomenon (‘conversion-according-to-the-
Because of these methodological problems, conversion theorists have shifted their focus from ‘real’ conversion experiences to the narrative performance of account-giving. For example, current psychological and sociological literature devoted to the phenomenon of conversion has moved away from the causes and consequences of conversion and the stages of the conversion process, which have occupied most researchers’ attention for the last 40 years, to the more recent narrative-social-
Narrative conversion researchers consider conversion testimonies primarily as speech acts and analyze their structural/formal, rhetorical/symbolic features, and connection with the wider sociocultural context, including the specific religious tradition of the convert (Buckser and Glazier 2003; Giordian 2009; Gooren 2010; Harpham 1988; Hindmarsh 2014; Jindra 2014; Leone 2004, 2010; Marzouki and Roy 2013; Stromberg 1993, 2014; Zock 2006). The narrative-social-
Narrative conversion investigations primarily understand conversion as a linguistic construction of self-performance whose focus is on interiority enacting, or the process of “giving an account of oneself” (Butler 2005). For example, Snow and Machalek (1984), Staples and Mauss (1987), Leone (2004), and Stromberg (1993) focus on the ‘lived experience’. Acknowledging a close connection between the conversion testimony and the biographical experience, they describe the socio-psychological functions that conversion testimonies fulfill in the biography of the converted person (Zock 2006, pp. 55–56) and underscore the socially constructed and communal character of conversion accounts. Staples and Mauss (1987), drawing on the work of Snow and Machalek (1984), argue that biographical reorganization is the marker and the only true indicator of conversion, which involves a change in one’s ‘universe of discourse’. Testimony means that a person’s communicative use of language (words, metaphors, symbolic interactions) undergoes a radical change as a result of the conversion experience in order to make sense of the self and the world (Staples and Mauss 1987, p. 135). Staples and Mauss (1987) take a functional approach to language and argue that a conversion narrative is not a reflection of some underlying change of consciousness but a tool to achieve self and communal transformation. They view conversion as a process that is “fundamentally one of self-transformation”. This “self-transformation is achieved primarily through language; [and] the convert plays an active role in his or her own self-transformation” (p. 146).
Stromberg (1993) follows Staples and Mauss’s approach to conversion. In Language and Self-Transformation, he provides a sophisticated and insightful analysis of the language and rhetorical techniques used by converts in their testimonial accounts. Stromberg starts with the assumption that conversion accounts are not a reliable source of information about the history of past events and experiences. The change efficacy of the conversion is not restricted to the original event.3 Stro
Similarly, Hutchison (1963) argues that religious language is characterized as symbolic or expressive language used for “the purpose of total life orientation” (p. 13). The symbolic language serves as a link between a believer’s deep emotional concerns and the larger community. Stromberg’s (1993) main concerns are how the symbol system (social symbolic reality) used within a particular tradition can give the convert a sense of self-transformation and how self-understanding is socially constructed in the discursive communities of which the convert is a part. The discursive community also provides an outlet for the expression of the convert’s ‘transformative or redemptive self’, and it creates a discursively mediated environment in which a new model of narrative production emerges. As such, the communal discourse plays an important role in what I would like to call the ‘autobiographical remix of life’ and in narrative identity empowerment. The discursive environment makes it possible for converts to reinvent themselves through the production of new narrative identities. There arises a new rhetoric of conversion, implying and combining codes, symbols, and metaphors that specify well-established testimonial linguistic coordinates that manifest in the symbolic space.
Stromberg attempts to explain these transformative effects of conversion by building upon two root distinctions. First, he distinguishes between the referential and the constitutive functions of language as a component part of human communicative behavior. Stromberg argues that when converts share their testimonies they use a type of speech (‘meta-language’) that always comprises both the referential and the constitutive forms of communications.
Secondly, Stromberg distinguishes between two further subclasses of communicative behavior relative to conversion narratives: canonical and meta
To sum up thus far, conversion testimony as a ‘transformative practice of self’ is linked to the discursive communities that provide a subculture for understanding and explaining one’s ‘real’ experience and spiritual transformation. Testimony involves a willingness to have one’s life formed and transformed in and through the practices and patterns of canonical language. These patterns are immediate, localized, and authorized in the communal narratives and other religious symbols that enable converts to interpret their own experience. Communal discursive styles and regulations serve as guidelines that influence how a new experience is interpreted and significantly affect the interpretation of any other experience. The developed conversion testimonies must be embedded in, and constructed out of, a convert’s particular faith community and its formalized practices—that is, the specific grammar of faith and the pattern of its well-formed assemblage of belief and value system (Sremac 2014). Canonical language is transmitted and shared, it involves converts in particular symbolic coordinates, and it plays a central role in (trans)forming the converting subject. It reflects the convert’s ability to make use of established genre and discursive regimes in order to configure and constitute his or her life in culturally and religiously recognizable and acceptable patterns. In short, religious subjects gradually bring the lived experience of their lives into a resemblance of the core story of their faith community.
Following this theoretical framework, it is not entirely clear to whose reality or ‘reality’ the conversion testifies. Do testimonies constitute the reality of the transformative event itself? Who motivates the possibility of testimonial speech from the converted person? Is it possible to affirm the ‘real’ in the conversion phenomenon while allowing that such an affirmation can take place only through social and linguistic relationships? Should priority be given to the elusive and mysterious experience in the conversion phenomenon or to the social process? Can we reduce conversion ‘reality’ to speech embedded merely in relations and practices? Is conversion nothing more than a human construct? Is it simply the product of the personal relationships within a faith community, which has significant implications for the way in which converts form and organize their experiences and testimonies but possesses no intrinsic ‘ontological weight’ (Latour 2005)?
Conversion theorists have been concerned with the interplay between the linguistic practices of converts, but in their work there is a tendency to become preoccupied with the discursive details of variations in linguistic styles, semantic regimes, or faith grammar in a way that largely ignores other aspects of religious world-making embedded in lived experience. The conversion speech is never entirely comprehended by linguistic ‘grammar’. Drives, affects, fantasies, dreams, ecstasies, the sense and the nonsense (the absurdity) of conversion, hopes, desires, the unconscious, sensations, moods, and performative bodily actions are trans- and extra-linguistic experiences that constantly erupt into the symbolic/linguistic and the material4 order. Van de Port (2011) argues against the ‘discursive colonization’ of academic production, holding that constructivism, like other ‘isms’, is merely a different attempt to “uphold the truth of a vision against the constant intrusions of the Real; different designs to provide a particular world view with a sense of the real; different attempts to keep the-rest-of-what-is at bay to thus safeguard a particular reality definition—or invoke it to upgrade the persuasiveness, depth, credibility of that particular world view with a sense of a sacred ‘beyond’” (p. 29).
The reality of conversion, even though it is given in linguistic categories that belong to the symbolic register, cannot be reduced to a discursive statement of certainty. Converts use established discursive modes and regulations of conversion that help them to experience a spiritual transformation of reality—and that also seduce them into a particular relation with the signifying work of the ‘real’. In other words, converts can disorient themselves in the symbolic space through “modes of speech that have an impersonal nature” (Butler 2005, p. 52). The symbolic space is constructed through a mimetic activity, and the very possibility of discursive agency is delivered by the canonical language. Hindmarsh (2014), building on a Marxist conceptual framework (particularly Althusser’s notion of ‘interpellation’), shows how (conversion) language can be inscribed to people as interpellated by the dominant ideologies of cultural, political, or religious institutions. He argues that the narrative—or testimony in this context—becomes “not the expression of an individual point of view, but a site that registers the push and pull of social values as embodied in institutions and power structures” (p. 350). But the question is, What if the convert never really chooses this signifying grammar of faith? This signifying performance can indeed ‘alter symbolic reality’ by “transforming retroactively the signifying network which determines the symbolic significance of the ‘facts’. But here, signifying work ‘falls into the Real’, as if language could change extra-linguistic facts” (Žižek 2005, pp. 130–131). Beyond the shadow of reality, the conversion event points to the encounter with the sublime; the revelatory event as a dramatic reordering of the convert’s horizon of meaning. The real exists only in contradiction to reality, and it resembles the limits of language and presentation in general. This is precisely the most problematic aspect in academic knowledge production of the conversion experience and the convert’s public representation of it. I would like to challenge this rather limited constructivist understanding of conversion by adopting the Lacanian perspective of the real and problematizing the distinction between construction and the real experience in conversion scholarship.
“The gods belong to the field of the real”: Conversion and the quest for the real
Lacan (1981, p. 45).
According to Lacan, the real is the unknown that exists at the limit of the socio-symbolic universe (socially constructed representations), and it is a permanent strain with it. The real is the cause and effect of social reality, but it also undermines that reality. It occurs prior to symbolization and articulation, prior to the ‘materialization’ of the symbolic order (Žižek 2005, p. 192). In the Lacanian triad, the real is opposed to both the imaginary and the symbolic. The real is “the impossible” because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic, and impossible to achieve (Lacan 1999). The real is something beyond comprehension in which language collapses. In short, the real cannot be summarized and totalized. For Žižek (
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As a follow up, am glad Quakers have a very long historical approach to conflict in the Middle East, even if NtFs - nontheistic Friends/Quakers are young
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NtFs, nontheistic Quakers, UQs, All,
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https://www.thesamba.com/vw/
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Little Red Yogis re UU LRY - Liberal Religious Youth - is a reference to the transcendentalist thinking perhaps
Ma, I wanna say Little Red Yogis re UU LRY is a reference to transcendentalist thinking ever since the Emersons et al. in 1st 1/2 1800s ... and R could be left of the aisle types (re British Isles and France origins:), little could be modest or humble ... and religious ... somehow open to connecting socially in positive ways (unity word origins in Unitarians, & Universalists, and bonding or yoga-ing - from yoke word - in Yoga) ... Am wondering now where the Bhagavad Gita - that great Hindu text 🙂 - goes with the word and idea of Yoga:)? Heard about the idea of Little Red Yogis from Kevin Bell, brother of Diane Bell, a Reed student too, who owned the Brooklyn Street House and collective, and kind of a commune too ... where I lived on and off for some years in the early 1980s 🙂 Love, Scott
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Yakima Nation Cultural Center WA, Columbia River Gorge OR, Reed College Cherry Blossoms, Carla's House :)
— george church (@geochurch) May 13, 2021
Congratulations Rob and Lydia. Great pic! The two of you haven’t changed a bit. Here’s to many more years. https://t.co/olIYmYAhbu
— Robert Harrington (@HeartBobH) May 16, 2021
48 yrs ago yesterday. Modified hippie wedding--dress made from curtain cloth. Stylish bow tie. Headed for Myrtle Beach. pic.twitter.com/VaPPaYtILq
— Robert M Califf (@califf001) May 16, 2021
https://youtu.be/t3M1hRpSa6E
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Tu, May 18, 2021
Dear Ma, Dick, Ed, Matt, All,
Desiderata
GO PLACIDLY amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
By Max Ehrmann © 1927
Original text
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psittacula
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-ringed_parakeet
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