Pornography

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Alliston
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Sexually Explicit Material ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Realistic Representation ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Sexually explicit images are among the oldest known representational artifacts, and yet none of these were ever understood as “pornography” until the word and concept began to emerge in Western European languages during the 19th century. At that time, it was used equally to refer to written texts and visual representations. The word has since entered into much more widespread usage, often referring to any and all sexually explicit material, more often to material that appears specifically designed “to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings” (Oxford English Dictionary). Since the popularization of internet pornography in the late 20th century, the term has even come to be applied to any image considered to emphasize the pleasure and seduction of the viewer over realistic representation (as in “food porn,” “real estate porn,” etc.). Many attempts have been made to define pornography more specifically, but little consensus has been achieved. Courts of law have generally avoided defining the word “pornography,” preferring to categorize sexually explicit or arousing representations in terms of “obscenity.” Feminist scholars have disagreed on the definition of pornography to the extent that the conflict became known as the “Porn Wars” of the last several decades of the 20th century. Sexually explicit or sexually stimulating representations can elicit powerful emotional responses that vary widely, and they are inextricable from questions of social power. Thus, the very act of defining pornography is implicated in political struggles over some of the most fundamental issues of human life: gender, sexuality, social equality, and the nature and power of representations. There remains no general or stable agreement concerning what it is, what effects it may have, or even whether it exists at all.

Matriarchal Studies

Anthropology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Alice Mann ◽  
Heide Goettner-Abendroth
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Culture Shock ◽  
Peace Building ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Gender Egalitarianism ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
Egalitarian Society ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Evidence of matriarchy had always existed in Western chronicles, albeit scattered or hidden amid other ethnographic tidbits, all of them filtered heavily through the androcentric lens of Christian missionaries or European travelers. Most of these old European sources were either puzzled or horrified by women-led cultures, having had nothing to attach them to but scary stories from Herodotus about the ferocious Amazons as “men-slayers” or the Christian theological depictions of sinful Eve, resulting in the “burning times” (witch hunts). Moving out from Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, especially into Africa and the Americas, home to many matriarchal cultures, was very unsettling to the patriarchal paradigm of Europe. Until quite recently, this culture shock combined with colonialism to ensure that scholarship on matriarchy was crafted exclusively by elite, Western scholars, nearly all of them male and coming from nothing remotely resembling a matriarchal culture. Scholars in the 19th century were all infiltrated by the unilinear, universal evolution theory, as a part of European American colonialism, sporting racist and sexist roots. These disabilities distorted comprehension of the matriarchal form of society, allowing Western scholars either to dismiss it outright as a fantasy or to portray it crudely, as a wicked, Amazonian domination of men. This background left enduring marks on the scholarship around matriarchy until new interest was piqued among German and American scholars in the 19th century, moving thought from the Amazonian conception to the definition of matriarchy as a “mother right.” These scholars remained mired, however, in the racist and sexist premises of European colonialism, well into the 20th century. As colonial Eurocentrism lifted in the mid- to late 20th century, scholars from non-Western, matriarchal cultures worldwide began chiming in on the conversation, in order to revamp old ideas together with Western female scholars. The “maternal values” in matriarchal studies do not indicate Western sentimentalism, but principles formulated by Indigenous, matriarchal societies themselves, in their sayings (e.g., Minangkabau) and in their social rules (e.g., Iroquois), based on the prototype of Mother Nature, as conceptualized in mythology, proverbs, songs, etc. Collating all the evidence of non-Western and Western 21st-century scholarship, matriarchy is here defined as mother-centered societies, based on maternal values: equality, consensus finding, gift giving, and peace building by negotiations. Gift economies, defined by modern matriarchal studies as a transitive relation in closed communities, is a core concept of all matriarchies. The result is a gender-egalitarian society, in which each gender has its own sphere of power and action. All these societies are characterized by matrilinearity, matrilocality, and women as keepers of the land and distributors of food, based on a structured gift economy. As derived from inductive studies of singular matriarchal societies and in collaboration with Indigenous scholars writing on their own communities, the current definition of matriarchy is a mother-centered, gender-egalitarian society that practices the gift economy. Modern matriarchal studies primarily assesses the patterns of those cultures, past and present, in their unique displays of gender egalitarianism and generally social egalitarianism.

scholarly journals Мансийские исследования: от истоков к современности

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 743-765
Author(s):  
Natalia A. Koshelyuk ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Online Research ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Language Research ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
First Time

Introduction. The article reviews background studies on the Mansi language and its dialects performed by European and Russian (Soviet) linguists. Goals. The paper seeks to provide a comprehensive historical description of Mansi language research. Methods. The descriptive and comparative-historical methods have been employed thereto. Results. The work arranges the studies chronologically — from earliest research activities to contemporary ones — highlighting most essential achievements. Mansi is one of the least studied languages with earliest written accounts dating to the 16th-17th centuries. The earliest Mansi dictionaries were compiled by explorers and missionaries (I. Kuroedov, S. Cherkalov, P. S. Pallas, etc.) in the 18th century. In the 19th century, the Mansi language officially became a subject of scientific research, and expeditions by Finnish and Hungarian linguists (Antal Reguly, August Engelbrekt Ahlqvist, Bernát Munkácsi, Artturi Kannisto) proved the first field studies. In the 20th century, quite a number of European scientists have contributed to Mansi language research, namely: W. Steinitz, L. Honti, K. F. Кarjalainen, M. Bakró-Nagy, K. Rédei, M. Szilasi, and others. In Russia, the first Mansi studies were initiated by Soviet scholars in the 1930s (V. Chernetsov, A. Balandin). Studies in spoken Mansi evolved into a national Cyrillic alphabet, and for the first time ever there were published comprehensive works dealing with Mansi studies, textbooks on Mansi phonetics, morphology, and grammar. Experimental phonetic explorations emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century resulting in new Mansi dictionaries (A. Sainakhova, T. FrankKamenetskaya, E. Rombandeeva, and others). Mansi studies in the 21st century in Russia and Europe have reached a brand new level: there appeared online research laboratories and linguistic platforms which make it possible to further investigate the Mansi language and verify up-to-date materials.

Abortion and Infanticide

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Public Defense ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century ◽  
The 19Th Century

The history of infanticide and abortion in Latin America has garnered increasing attention in the past two decades. Particularities of topic and temporal focus characterize this work and shape this bibliography’s geographic organization. Mexico possesses the most developed scholarship in both the colonial and modern periods. There, tracing of the persistence of pre-Conquest Indigenous medical knowledge and the endurance of paraprofessional obstetrical practitioners through the colonial era and into the 19th century features prominently and echoes some of the scholarship examining European midwives’ administration of plant-based abortifacients in the medieval and Early Modern eras. This topic plays a role, but a much less prominent one in scholarship on Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. Scholars of Brazil, the Caribbean, and circum-Caribbean have focused in particular on the issue of enslaved mothers’ commission of infanticide and abortion on their own children in the 18th and 19th centuries, a particularly fraught issue in the context of the abolition of the slave trade. A central assumption in much scholarship on the 19th-century professionalization (and masculinization) of obstetrical medicine is that the marginalization of midwives entailed a reduction in women’s access to abortion, although this position has been challenged in some recent scholarship on 19th-century Mexico in particular. The examination of the ways that the new republics perceived the crimes of infanticide and abortion in their legal codes, judicial processes, and in community attitudes is a central focus of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship. Scholars have remarked upon the considerable uniformity across all regions of a paucity of denunciations or convictions in the first half of the 19th century and the rise of criminal trials for both crimes in its last three decades. This change coincided (although no one has argued been provoked by) many countries’ issuance of national penal codes in the 1870s and 1880s. This intensification of persecution also coincided with the Catholic church’s articulation of an explicit condemnation of abortion (Pius IX’s 1869 bull Apostolicae Sedis), although demonstrating the concrete implications of this decree to the Latin American setting remains a task yet to be undertaken. Historians of both abortion and infanticide have also concentrated on defendant motives and defenses in criminal investigations. While some highlight defendants’ economic desperation, most scholars argue that the public defense of female sexual honor was a crucial motivator, which courts understood as a legitimate concern in 19th- and even mid-20th-century trials. Scholarship on 20th-century infanticide and abortion history continues to concentrate on fluctuations in attitudes toward honor, gender, and the family as influences on criminal codes and especially judicial sentencing for both acts, and toward the late 20th century on feminist efforts to decriminalize abortion that have met with varied success across countries.

scholarly journals The Holy See and the Global Environmental Movements

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Lai ◽  
Cecilia Tortajada
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Holy See ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Social Teachings

Laudato Si has garnered acclaim from world leaders and actors who support care for the environment. The encyclical has received praise for its ability to communicate the Church’s environmental views to the secular world. Yet the views of the Holy See in global environmental issues prior to Laudato Si have received inadequate attention. We conduct a historical review of the Holy See’s involvement in United Nations environmental efforts from the mid-20th Century to the present day. This reflects much of the work done in the late 20th Century by local dioceses all over the world. In doing so, we draw from the Holy See’s record of apostolic letters and speeches penned by Popes and various Church officials in the 20th Century, which we draw from the Vatican archives and libraries. We show that a clear critique of industrial pollution first emerged in the official addresses and letters penned by Pope Paul VI in the early 1960s. We also show that the Holy See has joined the global community on the pursuit of sustainable development that promotes human dignity, and the right to development and to a healthy environment for all, mainly the poorest populations. We argue that Laudato Si is better thought of as a culmination of the Catholic Church’s social teachings, which state that concern for the environment means respect for human life and dignity, promotion of the common good and the virtue of solidarity, and exercising responsibility to the poor and vulnerable. These are principles that align closely with the secular discourse on sustainable development.

scholarly journals The damaging character of shallow 20th century earthquakes in the Hainaut coal area (Belgium)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Camelbeeck ◽  
Koen Van Noten ◽  
Thomas Lecocq ◽  
Marc Hendrickx
Keyword(s):  
Ground Motion ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Focal Depth ◽  
Seismic Events ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Small Magnitude ◽  
Close Link ◽  
Epicentral Intensity ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Shallow, light to moderate magnitude earthquakes in stable continental regions can have a damaging impact on vulnerable surface constructions. In the coal area of the Hainaut province in Belgium, a century of shallow seismic activity occurred from the end of the 19th century until the late 20th century. This seismicity is the second largest source of seismic hazard in northwestern Europe, after the Lower Rhine Embayment. The present study synthesises the impact and damage caused by this unique shallow seismicity. Reviewing intensity data provided in official macroseismic surveys held by the Royal Observatory of Belgium, press reports, and contemporary scientific studies resulted in a complete macroseismic intensity dataset. The strong shaking of five seismic events with moment magnitudes Mw around 4.0, which occurred on 3 June 1911, 3 April 1949, 15 December 1965, 16 January 1966, and 28 March 1967, locally caused widespread moderate damage to buildings corresponding to maximum intensity VII in the EMS-98 scale. For 28 earthquakes, detailed macroseismic maps were created. Our study highlights the capability of shallow, small-magnitude earthquakes to generate damage. Subsequently, using the Hainaut intensity dataset, we modelled a new Hainaut intensity attenuation law and created relationships linking magnitude, epicentral intensity and focal depth. Using these relationships, we estimated the location and magnitude of pre-1985 earthquakes that occurred prior to deployment of the modern digital Belgian seismic network. Estimated focal depths allowed discriminating between two different types of earthquakes. Some events were very shallow, only a few hundred metres deep, suggesting a close link to mining activities. Other earthquakes, including the largest and most damaging events, occurred at depths greater than 2 km but no deeper than 6 km, which would exclude a direct relationship with mining, but yet still might imply a triggering causality. This work results in a new updated earthquake catalogue including 123 seismic events. Our attenuation modelling moreover suggests that current hazard maps overestimated ground motion levels in the Hainaut area due to the use of inadequate ground motion prediction equations. Our Hainaut attenuation model is hence useful to evaluate the potential impact of current and future, e.g. geothermal energy, projects in the Hainaut area and other regions with a similar geological configuration.

Latin American Jewish Literature

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
The 19Th Century

Jewish writing in Latin America is a centuries-old tradition dating back to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. During the colonial period, it manifested itself among crypto-Jews who hid their religious identity for fear of being persecuted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Assimilation mostly decimated this chapter, which is often seen as connected with Sephardic literature after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. New waves of Jews arrived in the last third of the 19th century from two geographic locations: the Ottoman Empire (this wave is described as Levantine and its languages as Ladino, French, Spanish, and Arabic) and eastern Europe (or Ashkenazi with Yiddish, German, and central European tongues). Jewish life thrived in Latin America throughout the 20th century. The largest, most artistically productive communities were in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico, and smaller ones existed in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Guatemala, Panama, and Uruguay. Identity as a theme permeates everything written by Latin American Jewish writers. Central issues defining this literary tradition are immigration, anti-Semitism, World War II, Zionism, and the Middle Eastern conflict. The Jewish literary tradition in Latin America has undergone crossovers as a result of translations, global marketing, and the polyglot nature of several of its practitioners. This field of study is still in its infancy. Some important studies on Latin American Jewish history, either continental in scope or by country, appeared in the late 20th century and serve as context for the analysis. The literature has received less attention (some periods, such as the 19th century, are entirely forgotten), although, as this article attests, things are changing. The foundation for daring, in-depth literary explorations as well as interdisciplinary analysis is already in place. When possible this article showcases available monographs, although important research material remains scattered in periodicals and edited volumes.

Malacca Creole Portuguese in the 19th century

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan N. Baxter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract Earlier linguistic research suggested that Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP) had existed without diglossia with Portuguese ever since the Dutch conquest of Portuguese Malacca in 1642, yet it had experienced some contact with Portuguese in the 19th and 20th centuries. The present study adds significantly to this discussion. It considers a range of information from sociohistorical studies and archival sources (including linguistic data) relating to the Dutch (1642–1795, 1818–1823) and early British (1795–1818, 1823–1884) colonial periods. For the Dutch period, it is seen that contact with other Creole Portuguese communities is likely to have persisted for some time. Most significant, however, is the finding that 19th century texts in Portuguese and creole Portuguese, recently identified in archival sources in London and Graz, show that Portuguese continued to be part of the Malacca sociolinguistic setting until the early British period, and that missionary Indo-Portuguese also had a presence at that time. It is concluded that, rather than presenting a narrow lectal range akin to that of the MCP community in the late 20th century, the creole lectal grid in the 19th century was more complex, and included dimensions of a continuum in a diglossic relationship with Portuguese.

Lexical borrowing of the second half of the 19th century in the letters of I. S. Turgenev

2021 ◽  
pp. 177-191
Author(s):  
Yu. G. Zakharova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
Important Place ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Word Selection ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Colloquial Speech ◽  
The Russian Language

The paper discusses lexical borrowings from the Western European languages in Russian in the second half of the 19th century in the letters of I. S. Turgenev. The definition of the term “borrowing” is given. The criteria determining the entry of a foreign language unit into the lexical system of the Russian language are specified. The word’s being widely represented in various dictionaries is considered as one of the important criteria to determine the foreign lan-guage word’s common usage. The entry dating of foreign words in the Russian language is specified in letters and other sources. The processes of semantic adaptation of borrowings in the Russian language of the 19th century are analyzed: narrowing, expansion of the meaning and scope of the word usage, complication of the semantic structure, appearance of meanings typical of colloquial speech or having individual authorial character, connotation change. This study allowed considering the letters of I. S. Turgenev as a valuable source for compiling et-ymological dictionaries of the Russian language since the borrowed vocabulary is not fully re-flected in them. The author believes that the material of the letters of I. S. Turgenev should be reflected in the Dictionary of the Russian language of the 19th century. With instability and the dynamics of units being the principle of word selection in the dictionary, borrowed vo-cabulary will take an important place as an significant part of the neology of this era.

Pidgin as the style in Russian prose of Harbin (“Gamblers” by P.V. Shkurkin)

2020 ◽  
pp. 70-76
Author(s):  
Lin Guanqiong ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
Border Zone ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Far Eastern

The article presents a linguopoetic analysis of ethnographic short stories which compiled the cycle “Gamblers” (1926) by the Russian writer of the Harbin emigration P.V. Shkurkin. The Far Eastern Russian-Chinese pidgin is one of the brightest and richest pidgin branches of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, widespread in the cultural and commercial exchanges. As a sinologist, Shkurkin actively used pidginized vocabulary instead of Russian equivalent words and phrases in “Gamblers”. The subject of this study is the Far Eastern Russian-Chinese pidgin in “Gamblers” as the characteristic of the ethnoculture of the Chinese-Russian border zone. The work also researches the vocabulary that reflected the impressions of Chinese about Russians. Shkurkin’s narrative style is characterized by the combination of pidgin and Chinese phraseological units. In addition, the author of “Gamblers” resorted to vocabulary of European languages which is specific to the Chinese population of the 1910–1920s. It is shown that in the Shkurkin’s short stories the language image is created. It is proved that pidgin is relevant to ethnographic prose, the image of the speech culture of the Chinese and Russian emigrants. The motivated use of pidgin by Shkurkin in the combination with other narrative lexical tricks contributed to the creation of a real appearance of China in the first decades of the 20th century.

Vernacular Languages and Dialects

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Moyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Questione Della Lingua ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Impact

Written vernaculars increased enormously in use during the Renaissance. They also became objects of scholarship and debate. While modern linguistics looks back to the 19th century for its professional origins, Renaissance humanists began to develop systematic approaches to language study much earlier. Accordingly, some modern scholars have focused upon the languages, others on the era’s writings about language. One approach to the subject is diachronic, dealing with change over time. Synchronic change across region or social rank has attracted new attention with recent interest in questions of power, rank, and social control. The rapid development of computers has improved the ability to use large bodies of surviving sources, producing historical grammars, lexicons, dialect mappings, and other results. Most such projects are centered on a single European language. For many European languages, the Renaissance saw the rise of the modern literary language. Each developed a canon of writers; thus the study of languages overlaps with that of the literature, including the impact these writers had on their language. Renaissance writers also wrote about language, comparing vernaculars with Latin, and composed and written language with spoken and spontaneous. They debated how to set normative and aesthetic standards. The Italian term for these disputes, questione della lingua, often appears in the scholarship on other languages as well. Interests in colonial expansion; in the history of the book; in power and its exercise; and in gender distinctions have all led to a series of new approaches. Earlier portrayals of the development of vernaculars as progressive and egalitarian, parts of nationalist or romanticized narratives of modernization, is giving way to an appreciation of the losses and more complex issues at stake in the gradual move away from Latin. Some research focuses on medieval continuities: preaching and sermon-writing, popular drama, religious devotion, and many genres connected with lived religion. The rise of political states led to more records and more vernacular record-keeping, as well as matters of linguistic standardization and its ties to political and social power.

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