Search

Miguel Antonio Caro is known as one of the most lucid conservative thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His antiliberal thinking came to define what it meant to be a Catholic man of letters in Colombia and beyond. Today, he is mostly remembered for his work on linguistics, Latin translations, and the 1886 Colombian Constitution. However, Caro was also the most recalcitrant defender of paper money of his time. In press articles, he developed what can be described as a Hispanic Catholic theory of monetary signs. While he is often portrayed as an anti-modern ideologist, the financial dimensions of his writings reveal a very different picture. Vindicating a Spanish tradition of currency debasement that went back to Alfonso the Wise, the Colombian ultramontane conciliated his traditionalism with capitalism's global accumulation drive by equating paper money with God's infinite gift: the divine grace. He hence proposed a Catholic view of capitalist modernity that rejected the "evils" of utilitarianism but embraced Colombia's agro-exporter economic model as part of God's providential design. In his political-religious project, money is thus imagined as a key tool of the Christian oikonomia , that is, God's government of earthly affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This (recently republished) book presents an anthropological study of the Scottish fishing community residing in Ferryden and the impacts of their wider social setting. Jane Nadel-Klein, the author, has eloquently woven together her twenty-five years of anthropological studies with a wide body of literature and disciplines spanning many decades, incorporating a breadth of material culture that illuminates topics and brings the themes of the book alive. The narrative takes the reader through time, studying the origins of fishing in the Scottish economy through to the processes of modernisation and globalisation that marginalised fishing-folk and ultimately ended their way of life in Ferryden. The intention of this publication was to bring the voices of fishing-folk to a wider public, such as academics, policy-makers, and those generally interested in fishing culture, rural and heritage studies. To her credit, Nadel-Klein manages to do that in a way that is accessible to all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India" by Nicholas Hoover Wilson explores the history of the East India Company (EIC) and its impact on India. The book highlights the EIC's trade monopoly, which generated wealth for its merchants and allowed the Company to exert control over India. The author argues that the EIC's history is marked by accusations of corruption, which reflect a broader struggle over the meaning of corruption in modern Britain. The book examines how different conceptions of corruption shaped the EIC's transformation into a new kind of organization with a new relationship with the British state. Overall, "Modernity's Corruption" provides valuable insights into the EIC's role in shaping the modern world. [Extracted from the article]

In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of rural purity, a marker of Chinese civilization, and more recently, a national intangible cultural heritage. This article analyzes paper-cuts not merely as a cultural practice but as a medium of articulation through which Chinese urban intellectuals have understood the countryside and traditions at specific historical moments. It also explores paper-cuts as a cultural medium through which urban elites have expressed their visions of the nation’s path to modernity and women’s liberation. During the Yan’an period (1937–1947), paper-cuts served as a Communist marker to distinguish an “art form of healthiness and honesty” from urban decadence under Nationalist rule. Since the 1980s, however, the art and practices of paper-cutting have come to share new discursive spaces: as the site of recovery of a lost Chinese civilization, an urban nostalgia for vanishing rural ritual practices, and most recently, a discourse of capital, profit, and personal success. By analyzing the shifting meanings assigned to paper-cuts, this article explores the relationship among the state, culture, and capital as it has been actively manufactured and negotiated through this folk practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the Chinese customary ritual of burning paper money to commemorate the dead ancestors challenges the nature-culture dichotomy. The paper argues that the practice of burning paper money reflects a Chinese cosmology that is not based on a dichotomy between the living and the dead, instead, the dead is often mobilized to exert influential power over the living. The paper money that people use in such rituals are active actors that participates in people's social, cultural and economic life. The paper also investigates how the conflict between government policy and traditional practice demonstrates that the modernists' efforts to mobilize modern dichotomies have failed to triumph over the entanglement among networks of the living and the dead, the human and the spirit, the object and the subject, nature, culture, and super-nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in 1947, the house of Pucci is best known for its iconic prints. Yet even before the Puccimania of the Swinging Sixties, commercial sewing patterns were an important part of Pucci's popular reception. Over the course of almost two decades, Emilio Pucci licensed his fashion designs with American pattern companies including the McCall Corporation and the Vogue Pattern Service, the independent offshoot of Vogue magazine. This preliminary overview documents how Pucci's work was represented and marketed to home dressmakers during this period (1956–73). A look at vintage Pucci patterns in context shows how this designer licensing intersects not only with trends in luxury sportswear and textile development but also changing ideas of leisure, modernity, and Italian fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, which is part of a larger book project, reflects my interest in rethinking concepts of Black modernity and speculating on its possible manifestations in different forms at different historical moments. Specifically, I posit the emergence of an urban Black modernity in US northern cities during the antebellum era. I begin by mapping a literary history of urban modernity in periodical culture over a span of 150 years. I examine its origins in Richard Steele's Tatler (1709–11) and Joseph Addison and Steele's Spectator (1711–12), which detail the rise of modern London and its new middle-class subjects, whose conspicuous consumption demanded the regulation of taste, deemed a crucial marker of modernity. This urban modernity is then reconfigured across the Atlantic in New York, specifically in Washington Irving's Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent (1802) and Salmagundi (1807–08), which anatomize the behaviors of New York's social elite. I then elucidate how a group of Black New York correspondents to Frederick Douglass' Paper (1852–55)—notably James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, and Philip Bell—take up and repurpose such representations of urban modernity to define the taste of the city's Black urbanites and meet their intellectual, social, and political needs at mid-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetic and hagiographical works of early modern north Indian saints constitute a rich case study for understanding the relationship among changes in language, material practices of writing, and ideologies of writing. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the commitment of the vernacular language of bhāṣā to writing had the effect of reconfiguring practices and ideologies of writing, posing a serious challenge to the epistemic and cultural privilege formerly accorded to writing in the literary, intellectual, and religious traditions contained in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. Although unable to completely escape the conceptual structures of a postliterate society, these supposedly illiterate, subaltern poet‐saints were able to undermine systems of religious and intellectual authority by questioning the ontological status and epistemic utility of written language and by divesting writing of its aura. They did so by emphasizing the materiality and banality of writing and by characterizing inscription as just another form of worldly labor. Such readings of the saints' poetic works are made possible precisely by their authorial personas as subaltern, illiterate figures, and these personas are in turn established not in the poetry itself but in the hagiographical works that narrativize these saints' lives. Importantly, these hagiographies reflect a concern with historicizing both the saints' utterances and the material processes through which those utterances came to be written down. Perhaps paradoxically, it is this concern with historicity that enables the tradition to establish the transcendent nature of the saints' speech and thought, and to enable those in the present to recreate the transformative speech acts that the hagiographies describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including "Kwasi Wiredu's conception of personhood"; "modernity and democracy in Ethiopia", and "decolonization in African philosophy".

This paper addresses the concept of aestheticism in the African sociocultural space, with particular emphasis on how anthropological objects serve as symbolic reflections of localized beauty. These objects reflect the qualities of beauty within African society. What is the difference between the Western concept of aesthetics and that of the African? The seeming divide between these two concepts of beauty and how artists trained in Western countries try to approach this issue in contemporary artistic dialogues is the focus of this discourse. As a matter of fact, the Heideggerian notion of aesthetics seems to capture and conceptualize the pure understanding of beauty within the description of the African domain, particularly the Nigerian. Using the phenomenological theories of Martin Heidegger to explicate aesthetics from an African viewpoint, this paper examines the works of two Nigerian contemporary artists, Jelili Atiku and Olaku Abiodun, in regards to locating and appropriating their materials as the meaning of aesthetic in the African cultural context, and re-enacted in modern performances and paintings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the work of two Indian sociologists who defined the contours of sociology in India in the immediate post-independence decades, M. N. Srinivas and A. R. Desai. It argues that their scholarship can be linked to sociology's legacy as anthropology in India and its embeddedness in the episteme of colonial modernity. It contends that Srinivas's methodology, the field view, attempted to make a break with earlier methods, such as book view. However, his three concepts, that of dominant caste, Sanskritization and Westernization were perceived as civilizational attributes and which had organized social change in India. A. R. Desai, a Marxist historical sociologist, made an incisive critique of capitalist exploitation and elaborated the material conditions that led to peasant and working-class revolts. However, his sociology could not unravel the caste-class linkages that organized the Indian 'social' which was embedded in Indian nationalism. This paper suggests that a definitive understanding of modernity emerges in Indian sociology in the late 70s when the feminist, dalit and tribal movements interrogated the material basis of contemporary India's developmentalism and its capitalist and exploitative character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have presented the Buddhayana Movement as a diverse and localized form of Indonesian Buddhism, which was facilitated by the cooperation of transnational Buddhist networks. This paper raises two questions: (1) what were the impacts of Theravada Buddhism that facilitated the rise of Buddhayana? and (2) when Theravada became a symbol of authentic Buddhism and its identity could satisfy the state rather during assimilation policy, how did Buddhayana members balance the needs of the Chinese patrons and of the government? Based upon documentary methods combined with in-depth interviews, the data collected are analyzed through the concepts of transnationalism and the discourse of modern Buddhism. This paper proposes that (1) the birth of Buddhayana in the 1960s was facilitated not only by transnational relations, but also by the discourse of modern Buddhism, which led to an emphasis on Theravada Buddhism. Therefore, even though Buddhayana claimed to be open to Mahayana and Vajrayana as well, its official doctrines and ritual performances presented in public tend to be Theravada in character. (2) The politics of discrimination against the Chinese Indonesians helped to marginalize Mahayana Buddhism, a tradition that its image links to the Chinese culture. In consequence, Mahayana tended to play a role in the daily practices of the Chinese in their houses and klenteng, meanwhile Theravada in terms of philosophical teachings and huge rituals was chosen to be presented in the public sphere in accordance with the state’s needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Introduction to the Special Issue on moving post-socialist publics aims to lay out how existing mobility politics and discourses in the region under scrutiny are intertwined with historical, socialist-era mobility practices, and infrastructures. Mobility paths and policies are imbued with a contested understanding of socialist legacies as well as capitalist realities. The Special Issue explores how transport options and choices confront citizens with social diversity, transformations of social norms, institutions and routines, values, concepts, and traditions. Valuable lessons can be learnt in terms of critical mobility geographies beyond the region as post-socialist transformations address justice and changing social norms and understandings of state roles. A decolonial inspiration that challenges existing readings of the formerly socialist region and transgresses the analytical "Othering" of its transition experience can be traced throughout the papers. Instead of arguing whether or not post-socialism is still a valid analytical framework, authors see the region as marked by multiple experiences of modernity and coloniality. In the former Soviet peripheries, urban mobility shapes socio-spatial contentions, making visible multiple and conflicting narratives of modernity and coloniality, tracing flows and dependencies at different scales, and taking into account complex constellations of actors, cultures, and materialities. The post-socialist lens is meant to critically scrutinize continuities and changes, providing particular interpretations for contemporary issues: mobile post-socialist publics are thus a turn away from what was before but in a context in which a strong relation to the past is embedded in several continuities in institutions, materialities, and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout human history, people have always produced waste, but during the last century, this has shown explosive growth. Globally, a combination of rising incomes, urbanization, the development of new, cheap materials, and changing lifestyles have driven the growth of products that were designed to be used for only limited periods of time producing a totally unprecedented amount and variety of waste. However, this development has not affected all people in similar ways. Waste has been a marker of unprecedented but unbalanced efficiency, wealth and power, and conflict. Five articles address waste as a function of conflicts in areas in various places in Europe and Asia. Collectively, these papers shed an unusual light on the twentieth century world through a collection of cases, in which conflicts have tended to exacerbate challenges of waste, either by increasing the quantity of weapons and their (often toxic) remains, or by creating contexts in which the confrontation with adversaries often relegated environmental, social and health-related consideration to the backstage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the War in Ukraine is promoting and accelerating the Westernization of the region's higher education. The paper employs Mignolo's (2011) geopolitics of knowledge as the theoretical framework to illustrate how internationalization promotes the adoption of Western/English liberal education and how the War in Ukraine is speeding up the process. Using focus groups, I capture conversations with local graduate students in Kazakhstan to demonstrate that Western education is acquired to 1) accelerate the de-Russification of Kazakhstan by moving away from the former imperial power, 2) use English to undermine the Russian language and cement Kazakhstan's independence from Russia, 3) acquire internationally recognized English credentials for global/Western competitiveness and modernity. The participants in this study framed their decision to pursue university graduate studies as freedom from the Soviet system, de-Russification, and modern development, underscoring the high value that some graduate students have for an English credential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the World Religion Paradigm (WRP) dominating religious studies, advocating for a decolonial approach that focuses on diverse and often marginalized religious expressions. The approach that prioritizes world religions over the rich diversity of religious expressions in multiple modernities turns out to be insufficient and biased. Through theoretical research, this paper explores the implications of multiple modernities for the religious landscape. Drawing on Eisenstadt's theory of multiple modernities, the analysis critiques linear notions of modernization and secularization, and it highlights the complex interplay between religious centers and peripheries. It develops a critical examination of how the theory of the Axial Age, by prioritizing elites and centers in the historical genesis of world religions, generates a preconception that overlooks the religious and spiritual productivity of the peripheries, which persists within current interpretative frameworks. To emphasize the dynamic between center and periphery as a key factor in understanding religious diversity, the text proposes some theoretical theses. By embracing a diversity paradigm and decolonizing frameworks, this paper offers a more inclusive understanding of religious phenomena, contributing to a broader discourse on religion and spirituality beyond Eurocentric perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture is an essential component of Indigenous public spaces. However, a gap in knowledge exists regarding cultural influences on Indigenous public spaces in Africa. This paper, therefore, explores the impact of cultural worldviews on the landscape and functionality of Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo squares in Nigeria. It also assesses the contemporary state of the Nigerian squares. The paper employs mixed methods, including a systematic review of literature, observations, interviews, and photographic recordings, to shed light on the strengths and deficiencies of the Indigenous squares. Findings revealed that while Indigenous public spaces cater to the socio-cultural needs of different ethnic groups, they do not fully meet modern needs and expectations, especially concerning safety and comfort. This paper advocates for the fusion of Indigenous landscape practices with contemporary approaches to foster harmonious synergy between tradition and modernity and enhance public space utilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I follow trails of the auto/biographical turn in the field of gender and science, particularly focusing on women mathematicians' epistolary narratives. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of «automathographies», tracing women mathematicians' historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that letters are important auto/biographical documents in illuminating women's epistemological and intellectual involvement in the making of scientific knowledge, which included the development of mathematical sciences, but was also expanded in the wider cultural formations of the European modernity. In doing so, I deploy the notion of «epistolary sensibility» as a methodological and epistemological approach to archival research with women mathematicians' letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nature of Soviet consumption and technological development through the history of milk and milk packaging between the 1950s and 1970s. Based on published and archival materials, the paper focuses on the role that milk played in Soviet nutrition and the role that packaging played in Soviet consumption. The article also examines the modernization of technology for making packaging as well as technology transfer from the West. It concludes that, as in many Western countries, both the Soviet state and Soviet specialists saw it as important to increase the consumption of milk after the war, but the meaning of milk changed. Milk, a basic staple for nutrition, became a matter of science and specialists sought to explain its positive effects. In addition, due to the development of the paper and chemical industries, new forms of milk packaging, more practical in their uses, were introduced in the West. Soviet leaders and specialists saw the new packaging as a desirable feature of modernity, but were unsuccessful in launching domestic technologies for manufacturing such packaging. While experimenting with domestic technology, Soviet producers also received foreign equipment for making milk packaging. Nevertheless, the capacity of such foreign equipment was not enough to satisfy growing demand and the consumption of "modern packaging" remained lower than in the West until the introduction of capitalism and, with it, foreign companies into the Russian market in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying colonialism as the "dispossessor of Sámi futures," the research on which this paper draws investigates the role of Sámi creative expressions in decolonizing/indigenizing Sápmi and imagining possible futures through a decolonial framework encompassing decolonizing methodologies and critical arts-based research. The artistic practices of Sámi artists Elina Waage Mikalsen and Joar Nango were discussed through in-depth conversations held with them and in light of decolonizing theories seeking to de-link artistic expressions from the "colonizing gaze of authenticity" fostered by Western modernity and coloniality. Furthermore, the paper argues for considering decolonization and indigenization as complex and interlaced processes, part of a global-local spectrum. While Sámi creative expressions are political in a transformative and healing way, they can foster the creation of Sámi-owned spaces, where to discuss both local and cosmopolitical concerns while considering Sámi sovereignty as the right to pursue Sámi's self-determined futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigeneity is usually framed as modernity's Other. It is a narrative that confrines indigenous peoples to a place of deprived marginality or exotic romanticism. This perception is especially prevalent in mainstream visual representation of Indigenous people. In this photographic series, I seek to challenge the dichotomy between tradition and modernity by overlapping seemingly disparate elements such as traditional textiles and modern architecture. I started this exploration by mimicking early 19th century ethnological photography and current neoliberal multiculturalist imagery. In both cases, I use my own body, as an Indigenous woman of Aymara origin, to explore the mechanisms through which historical heritage operates simultaneously as emancipatory resistance and neocolonial oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the so-called metallist theory of money gave way to functionalism in early modernity. Theoretical metallism held that something, in order to perform the role of money, must bear some intrinsic value. Functionalism, on the contrary, endorsed a social ontology of money claiming that anything could perform that role as long as it was accepted as a means of payment. The paper argues that the early modern discovery of the so-called quantity theory of money played a key role in this transition, since this was the idea to question the inherent valueproofness of commodity money for the first time in history. According to our claim, commodity money was gradually replaced by fiat currencies after the former was no longer was regarded as more valueproof than the latter, and this theoretical struggle is clearly documented by Hume's and Smith's respective remarks on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I recently attended an international conference on planning in Africa. Here, it was suggested that the colonial era was over and that planners are already well-versed in decolonising theories and practices. Such suggestions came from Northern and Southern scholars alike. By means of this article, I hope to disrupt this privileged position by introducing the idea of resistant texts which are most often found in endogenous systems of knowledge production. I then explain how decoloniality – which calls for an epistemic de-linking from Western knowledges – might assists planners in seeing resistant texts before attempting to arrive at anti-colonial interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on the burial culture of the Isoko and Urhobo people of Delta state, especially from 1990 to 2020, and the aspect of the burial culture as it pertains to returning the body of a woman at death back to her natal home for burial. With the wave of globalization came a number of changes in the burial culture of the Isoko and Urhobo people of Delta state. This paper aims at examining the changes and the continuity in an aspect of the burial culture of the Isoko and Urhobo people of Delta State. It critically examines the practice of returning the body of a deceased woman back to her natal home for burial. This practice has over the years been questioned, interrogated and called for scrutiny by both the Isoko and Urhobo people and some of their neigbours. The work argues that social factors have introduced continuous changes in the Isoko and Urhobo culture with regards to their funeral rites and the burial culture of the people have been greatly affected. This practice have been perceived as one which promotes patriarchal dominance. The work adopts the analytical method, using both primary and secondary sources of data in interrogating the practice of returning the body of a deceased woman back to her natal home for burial rather than burying her in her husband's home and maintains that if this practice is not properly handled, it could affect inter-group relations. The paper therefore concludes that this practice is posing as a serious threat to a peaceful and harmonious inter-group relationship among families that are involved in inter-tribal marriage. It recommends that the Isoko and Urhobo people should rehabilitate properly to blend with modernity in this aspect of their culture while preserving some others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various scholars have noticed the increase of competition in the last decades and its essential role in contemporary social life. Their studies show the great variety of fields affected and are valuable contributions to understanding this process. However, they also represent a wide range of different conceptualizations and understandings of what exactly the increase of competition is and which aspects of social life it affects. Thus, to allow for a better understanding of this process and the commonalities and differences between the approaches that examine it, this paper presents a framework to grasp different dimensions of competitization, that is, the increase of competition in different social fields. Drawing on the basic elements of competition and the literature on the increase of competition, it discusses four dimensions of competitization: competitization by scarcity, by mechanism, by imaginary and by agency. Three main examples are used to demonstrate these dimensions: competitization in academia, market competitization and competitization in the form of rankings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DRZEWIECKA, Ewelina. Cyrillo-Methodian Anniversaries in the Context of Socialism (Ideological Functions, National Uses, and Research Perspectives). The aim of the paper is to address the phenomenon of anniversary in regard to the cultural conditions that are typical of the period of socialism in South-East Europe. The focus is on a jubilee discourse that was generated for the purposes of state commemorations of SS. Cyril and Methodius, i.e. the inventors of the first Slavic alphabet and literacy. The starting point is the case of People's Republic of Bulgaria (1946 - 1990), which is perceived as both an example of rewriting the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition under the local conditions of Communist ideology, and a meaningful manifestation of the "culture of jubilee". The paper discusses the continuity of cultural matrix within the Bulgarian modernity despite the distinct semantic shifts in the Cyrillo-Methodian narrative and suggests a great potential of investigating the phenomena with regard to the past that is shared/contested in terms of different national ideologies. It is suggested that a "contrastive grammar" of competing jubilee discourses and practices would be a promising way of interpreting the Bulgarian-Macedonian confrontations and struggles for primacy that emerged during socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Faculty of Letters / Trakya Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Trakya University, Faculty of Letters and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Francis Picabia's Bobinage (Bobbin, Winding or Coil) is a pencil and ink work produced on gouache-painted paper between 1921–1922. The free-floating forms in this piece appear, at first glance, to be studies in geometric abstraction. Yet, they, and the work's title, make both semiotic and real-world references. The admixture of perspectives is notable, for it retains traces of the Cubist visual language that motivated Picabia and his peers as well as the imagery of the early twentieth-century technical diagrams that, as has been demonstrated by scholars, inspired his work. Examining Coil and other of Picabia's artworks in tandem with the scholarship that has investigated these influences, this article explores the artist's engagement with the very issue of representation. Through this investigation, this paper considers the ways in which Picabia's work alludes to gender in a manner that privileges masculinity yet calls attention to the destabilizing effects of modernity—and modern representations—on notions about gender and, even, what it means to be human. Contextualized thusly, Coil represents not an abstract divergence but rather a continuation of the artist's technical, gender, and, one could say, even cyborg investigations, revealing his engagement with new and innovative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and depicting modern experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores four-century-old "all-male" kabuki theatre of Japan as the site of logics, mechanisms, and operations of onnagata's gender performance. The term onnagata signifies actors performing women's roles in kabuki, and since the first two and a half centuries of kabuki history overlapped with the time when women were legally expelled from performance activities, male onnagata mostly developed and established the artistry and traditions of onnagata acting. Women resumed kabuki performance when it was still illegal, but that did not cancel this fact. The present article studies kabuki in this historical context in order to investigate how dynamically genders are taking shape on the kabuki stage and off. To that end, this paper uses "cultivation" (a training methodology called shugyô) as a key point of investigation, while paying special attention to female onnagata as a main subject of examination. Cultivation is the training methodology of weight that has long been used and systematized in many circles engaged in activities established in premodern times, such as Buddhism, martial arts, and performing arts, and constitutes a blanket regime for these wide-ranging areas. Cultivation is to obtain and internalize second nature to the extent that it could function as if it were natural, the process of which takes place through two stages: (1) repetitive, long-lasting, personal, and somatic training in, e.g., posture, movements, and the like, and (2) internalization of said technique as second nature. That this cultivation process is congruous with the concept of performativity in contemporary critical theory suggests that an analysis of how female kabuki actors go through cultivation in order to internalize kabuki body grammar, including gender related code can contribute not only to kabuki studies but also to gender studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an introduction to a special issue of the journal "Histories" on the topic of "Images of Nature." The issue originated from a conference on "Nature" at the University of Geneva in 2022 and aims to explore the historical development and changing perceptions of nature. The call for papers focused on the impact of religion, science, and environmentalism. The selected papers cover various time periods and themes, including late medieval/early modern scholarship, the transition to modernity, western alternatives, and global outreach. The document also discusses the dissemination and popularization of the concept of "nature" and its translation into different languages and cultures. The article within the document explores the historical development of the concept of 'nature' in European academic circles, discussing the influence of physicians and theologians in shaping the understanding of nature, the emergence of the nature-culture dualism and its connection to power relations, evolving ideas about souls and their attribution to different beings, and the challenges of achieving balance and understanding diverse perspectives in historical research. [Extracted from the article]

This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of 'plasmas' – 'charged' sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been marked differences between many urban youths and the older generation in practising Islam in Bangladesh. In the contemporary expression of Islam, many urban youths in Bangladesh adopt an approach where they are inclined to explain various Islamic discourses in a modernistic way through adopting an Islamic code of life. Simultaneously negating the traditional idea of the incompatibility of Islam with modernity is also an essential phenomenon in this discourse. 'Self-conscious sense of collective identity' and the concept of belonging to a global Islamic community is motivating many of these contemporary urban youths in Bangladesh to search for the 'pure' form of Islamic practices. These new manifestations eventually affect their urban social sphere while they either reject many traditional Islamic norms or adopt 'more authentic' Islamic norms. Thus, this qualitative paper argues that the expression of Islam among many urban youths has to be seen as an adaptive strategy in an ongoing struggle to make sense of Islamic life in a more complex, modern and Westernised world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to demystify the antagonistic relationship between modernity and tradition as construed by Ashis Nandy. As a prominent voice in postcolonial scholarship, Nandy saw modernity as a colonial conception of rights, self, and society. Nandy's critique of modernity laid the grounds for several projects that rejected the modern consensus for its colonial origins. Juxtaposing Nandy's reiteration of early anti-modern nationalist thought with a multi-dimensional reading of colonial modernity in contemporary Ambedkarite scholarship, this paper explores the ambivalences of negotiating modern liberalism in a postcolonial order of hierarchical group identities. Despite the close imbrication of modernity with the imperial centre, Ambedkarite scholarship demonstrated how B.R. Ambedkar, synthesized a middle ground, where he incorporated the promise of modernity to liberate the 'individual' without dismissing the 'communal' collective self, construed by traditions. While postcolonial scholarship is heterogeneous, following Nandy, huge postcolonial melancholia has conflated modernity with coloniality. How do we rethink postcolonial theory from its current culturalist posturing to (re)claim the emancipatory potential of both modernity and tradition? Could it be that Nandy's anxiety and discomfort with modernity fail to 'contemporise theory'? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to provide some clues and red threads through the magisterial work of Eric Santner. The first part takes the point of departure in his book on Schreber (My Own Private Germany) and tries to lay down a basic narrative that subtends most of Santner's work and can be encapsulated by "the secret history of modernity." This narrative is briefly spelled out through the relationship of Schreber the father (the "surplus father" as the continuation of the enlightenment), Doctor Flechsig (the seminal representative of the modern university discourse), and Schreber the son, the embodiment of the symptom of the progress of modernity. The second part of the paper scrutinizes three interrelated concepts proposed by Santner, too muchness, the surplus of immanence, and manatheism, which provide conceptual tools to address the break of modernity. The three concepts are brought into relation with the historical placement of psychoanalysis in modernity, the dialectic of "what remains" and the emergence of the new, and finally with the nature of the exception pertaining to the notion of the surplus. The last part, "the punning of reason," examines Santner's frequent use of puns ("puncepts") as a conceptual strategy to deal with the paradoxes of universality. Punning is taken not as an addition or embellishment but as a poignant way to propose a new status of universality, related to what Lacan named lalangue. The three different perspectives try to show the different ways by which Santner's work addresses the core conundrums of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the evolutionary process of moving from traditional styles to pioneering directions in the opera genre. This phenomenon expressed itself in a mixture of styles and forms of language, in the integration of different types of artistic means of expression. Another issue would be related to the nature of the lyrical tradition, its need for preservation and continuity, and the extent to which innovation is tolerated in opera to ensure that artistic works do not cross genre boundaries. It is a new phenomenon for contemporary actors and audiences, the one present in the theater today. By examining the evolution of the art of opera, it was possible to identify the general pattern of development of innovative opera and to argue that artistic integration is the source of diversity on stage and the basis of innovation in opera production. For this purpose, a cultural-historical and historical-artistic approach was used. The academic novelty of the study consists, first of all, in the complex analysis of the sources related to the translation of metalanguage in lyrical art, and secondly, the incorporation of these sources in the academic circulation as important and significant for the recognition of the reform of the opera genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]