The cultural construction of Italy in Albania and vice versa: migration dynamics, strategies of resistance and politics of mutual self-definition across colonialism and post-colonialism

Modern Italy ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Mai

SummaryThis article analyses the shifting ways in which Italy has been strategically represented in Albania during the different key passages of the latter's relatively recent history as a sovereign independent state. As a parallel narrative, the article also examines the way Albania has been equally strategically represented in Italy before and during the two periods in which Italy has been militarily involved in Albania, and the way this has been consistent with an attempt to elaborate and sustain a politically strategic definition of Italian identity and culture. The history of the asymmetrical relationship between Albania and Italy is deeply embedded in the social, cultural and political environments that are on the two shores of the Adriatic Sea. The cultural construction of Albania in Italy and vice versa of Italy in Albania should be linked to seemingly independent instances of domestic reforms. The dynamics of projective identification or dis-identification stemming from these instances should be seen as intertwined within two parallel processes of mutual definition encompassing both the colonial and the postcolonial relations between and within the two countries.

Author(s):  
Steven J. R. Ellis

Tabernae were ubiquitous among all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections, and in numbers not known by any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city—indeed in the very definition of urbanization—is a point too often under-appreciated in Roman studies, or at best assumed. The Roman Retail Revolution is a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop. With a focus on food and drink outlets, and with a critical analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources, Ellis challenges many of the conventional ideas about the place of retailing in the Roman city. A new framework is forwarded, for example, to understand the motivations behind urban investment in tabernae. Their historical development is also unraveled to identify three major waves—or, revolutions—in the shaping of retail landscapes. Two new bodies of evidence underpin the volume. The first is generated from the University of Cincinnati’s recent archaeological excavations into a Pompeian neighborhood of close to twenty shop-fronts. The second comes from a field survey of the retail landscapes of more than a hundred cities from across the Roman world. The richness of this information, combined with an interdisciplinary approach to the lives of the Roman sub-elite, results in a refreshingly original look at the history of retailing and urbanism in the Roman world.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Costas Gaganakis

<p>This article attempts to chart the “paradigm shift” from social history, dominant until the early 1980s, to new cultural history and the various interpretive trends it engendered in the 1990s and 2000s. The privileged field of investigation is the history of the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its urban aspect. The discussion starts with the publication of Bernd Moeller’s pivotal <em>Reichsstadt und Reformation </em>in the early 1960s – which paved the way for the triumphant invasion of social history in a field previously dominated by ecclesiastical or political historians, and profoundly imbued with doctrinal prerogatives – and culminates in the critical presentation of interpretive trends that appear to dominate in the 2010s, particularly the view and investigation of the Reformation as communication process.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 17-25
Author(s):  
Mohammad Hashim Kamali

In addition to a concise review of the meaning and definition of shariah, the chapter introduces the sources of shariah, including the two main types of revealed and rational sources and their subdivisions. The history of shariah (“the way to the watering place,” or “the path to correct guidance, salvation, and relief”) is occupied with scholastic developments and the embodiment of what became known as fiqh, which consists mainly of the practical rules of Islamic law that regulate the daily lives of Muslims. Shariah is a broad concept that is not confined to legal rules but comprises the totality of guidance that God Most High has revealed to humankind, pertaining to the dogma of Islam, its moral values, and its practical legal rules.


Author(s):  
Frédérique de Vignemont ◽  
Andrea Serino ◽  
Hong Yu Wong ◽  
Alessandro Farnè

Research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that we process the space surrounding our body in a specific way, both for protecting our body from immediate danger and for interacting with the environment. This research has direct implications for philosophical issues as diverse as self-location, sensorimotor theories of perception, and affective perception. This chapter briefly describes the overall directions that some of these discussions might take. But, beforehand, it is important to fully grasp what the notion of peripersonal space involves. One of the most difficult questions that the field has had to face these past 30 years is to define peripersonal space. Although it bears some relations to the social notion of personal space, to the sensorimotor notion of reaching space and to the spatial notion of egocentric space, there is something unique about peripersonal space and the special way we represent it. One of the main challenges is thus to offer a satisfactory definition of peripersonal space that is specific enough to account for its peculiar spatial, multisensory, plastic, and motor properties. Emphasis can be put on perception or on action, but also on impact prediction or defence preparation. However, each new definition brings with it new methods to experimentally investigate peripersonal space. There is then the risk of losing the unity of the notion of peripersonal space within this multiplicity of conceptions and methods. This chapter offers an overview of the key notions in the field, the way they have been operationalized, and the questions they leave open.


2003 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Jeolás

Este artigo, baseado em pesquisa sobre o imaginário da aids entre jovens, busca compreender a noção de risco como uma categoria sociocultural, cujos significados se acumulam nos conceitos de várias áreas do conhecimento e nos usos de senso comum. O perigo, o mal e o infortúnio sempre foram moralizados e politizados nas diversas culturas humanas e a história da aids não poderia ser diferente. Os simbolismos culturais sobre contágio, doenças transmitidas pelo sexo e pelo sangue e os valores atuais da sexualidade, incluindo as relações de gênero, estão presentes na forma como os jovens representam o risco do HIV. Além disso, não se pode desconsiderar a ambivalência que os riscos assumem atualmente para os jovens: alguns negados e afastados, outros aceitos e valorizados. No caso da aids, a busca pela vertigem e pelo êxtase, componentes do sexo e das drogas, distancia o discurso dos jovens sobre risco do discurso preventivo, baseado na racionalidade do comportamento individual, assumindo valores distintos ligados a experiências cotidianas. Youngsters and the imagery of AIDS: notes for the social construction of risk This article, based on research about the imagery of AIDS among youth, aims to understand the notion of risk as a social-cultural category, whose meanings are piled upon concepts of several areas of both knowledge and common sense usages. Danger, evil and misfortune have always been moralized and politicized in the different human cultures and it could not be different in the history of aids. Cultural symbolism about infection, sexually and blood transmitted diseases, as well as sexuality’s current values, including here gender relations, are present in the way the youth represents HIV´s risks. Besides, the ambivalence these risks assume for the youth nowadays cannot be disregarded: some are denied and put aside, others are accepted and valorized. In the case of AIDS, the search for vertigo and ecstasy, components of sex and drugs, distances the youth’s discourse about risk from the preventive discourse, based on the rationality of individual behavior, assuming distinct values linked to everyday experiences.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 434-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin C. Alkin ◽  
Jean A. King

The second article in this series on the history of evaluation use has three sections. The first and longest develops a functional definition of the term use, noting that a thorough definition of evaluation use includes the initial stimulus (i.e., evaluation findings or process), the user, the way people use the information, the aspect of the program considered, and the purpose. It then defines evaluation use’s unethical companion, misuse, detailing the distinction between the two. The second section briefly discusses a broadened concept of evaluation impact that expands to include evaluation influence. Finally, the third section summarizes the factors that research has shown to be related to evaluation use.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-200
Author(s):  
Wiseman Bittner

In this paper I am going to do three things: First, identify several themes in contemporary Chinese art that show its essentially social nature and its robust materialism. Second, suggest a way that contemporary art in China is post-modern in the way that Western art is and claim, moreover, that as different as the themes and recent history of this art are from contemporary Western art, the works satisfy a definition of art constructed by Arthur Danto. Finally, in a coda, I present the work of a woman artist that is unlike most recent Chinese and Western art. It positions itself at the far reaches of what art in China is and what Danto's definition allows at the same time that it suggests both the interiority of the practice of art and one way of being a woman.


Author(s):  
Marina G. Volnistaya ◽  
Eka D. Korkiya ◽  
Agamali K. Mamеdov

The history of science in any of its transformations and metamorphoses is, in fact, a search for and definition of the truth. As an example, I. Kant’s famous four questions start with the question «What can I know?». Thus, the search for truth as a subject of research has been a dominating force throughout human history. Of course, sociology as a social meta-science is also involved in this topic. A simple assertion of the existence of three concepts of truth, namely accordance, agreement and advantage, does not fully answer the prerequisites of contemporary discourse. The present article analyses a new discourse on the study of truth in contemporary science. We give a brief retrospective analysis of the main fields of truth interpretation. At the same time, these directions are not just listed but linked into the general outline of contemporary epistemology. Of course, a greater bias is made towards the sciences of the social and humanitarian profile. That, however, does not exclude the necessary portion of the data of natural science research. In the article these data are not used as demonstrations, but as independent meta-scientific research. We give various examples of the complementarity of different branches of science. In particular, we show the scope and relative limitation of such concepts as correspondence theory, evolutionary epistemology, socio-humanitarian cybernetics, adaptationism and neo-adaptationism. A significant place in the article is occupied by the problem of truth in artistic creation. We also give sustainable conclusions about the polyphonicity of truth and its flickering character.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Gerda De Villiers

This chapter examined the concept of ‘Ecodomy’ – life in its fullness – as it unfolds in the Book of Ruth. The book is dated to the post-exilic period in the history of Israel, and is read as narrative critique against the Moabite paragraph in Deuteronomy 23:3–5, and against the way that this text is interpreted and implemented in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, the protagonists in the narrative, become paradigmatic of the situation in post-exilic Israel. Their stories, dealing with loss and the actions they take in order to heal the brokenness become indicative for the post-exilic community. As the narrative plot develops, the chapter aims to indicate how ‘life in its emptiness’ is changed into ‘life in its fullness’ by the courage and creative initiative of individuals, even if it meant overstepping boundaries and challenging the social conventions of the time. Against the exclusivist policy of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Book of Ruth argues that foreigners may be included in the community of YHWH and that their solidarity with Israel is to the benefit of all the people. The point that the chapter wishes to make, is that life in its fullness cannot be taken for granted, but requires effort.


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonya Hunt

INTRODUCTION: The meaning and purpose of social work has always been debated within the social work profession. The profession dreams of contributing towards a better, fairer, civil society locally and internationally. This article explores the professionalisation of social work in Aotearoa New Zealand. This exploration has been undertaken as background for an ongoing research project.METHOD: A critical consideration of the different theoretical and historical dimensions and interests at work that impacted on the journey of professionalisation of social work in this country has been undertaken based on a review of literature. Part one of the article outlines a definition of social work, and different concepts and approaches to professionalisation. Part two of the article contextualises the different approaches to professionalisation within Aotearoa New Zealand, from early forms of welfare pre-colonisation up until the early 1990s.CONCLUSION: The literature and trends discussed serve to both document the history of professionalisation of social work in Aotearoa New Zealand and as background to an ongoing critical research project which aims to uncover interests at work and interrogate the legitimacy of those interests, while enabling the voices of key actors from the time to surface, be explored, and be recorded.


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