A Garland of Songs for a Nation of Singers: An Episode in the History of Russia, the Herderian Tradition and the Rise of Baltic Nationalism

2005 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin C. Karnes

Analysis of the contents of Jānis Cimze's harmonized folksong collection A Garland of Songs (1872) and the cultural context in which it was published reveals its musical portrait of an emergent Latvian nation to be a synthetic construct. Drawing upon aspects of the German nationalist choral movement, the quasi-Herderian work of Baltic German folklorists and new opportunities for cultural expression afforded by mid-century Russian imperial reforms, Cimze's work inspired heated and increasingly xenophobic debate among his contemporary Latvians about the destiny of their community in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Cohen

The ArgumentThe study of pain in a historical context requires a consideration of the cultural context in which pain is sensed and expressed. This paper examines attitudes toward physical pain in the later Middle Ages in Europe from several standpoints: theology, law, and medicine. During the later Middle Ages attitudes toward pain shifted from rejection and a demand for impassivity as a mark of status to a conscious attempt to sense, express, and inflict as much pain as possible. Pain became a positive force, a useful tool for reaching a variety of truths. While this attitude stemmed from the religious wish to identify with Christ's passion, it permeated and affected all spheres of cultural expression and investigation. Late permeated and affected all spheres of cultural expression and investigation. Late medieval medicine accepted pain, trying to relieve it only when it became dangerous to the patient. Given the existence of analgesic medicines at the time, this attitude is comprehensible only within the cultural context of the period.


Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002216782098214
Author(s):  
Tami Gavron

This article describes the significance of an art-based psychosocial intervention with a group of 9 head kindergarten teachers in Japan after the 2011 tsunami, as co-constructed by Japanese therapists and an Israeli arts therapist. Six core themes emerged from the analysis of a group case study: (1) mutual playfulness and joy, (2) rejuvenation and regaining control, (3) containment of a multiplicity of feelings, (4) encouragement of verbal sharing, (5) mutual closeness and support, and (6) the need to support cultural expression. These findings suggest that art making can enable coping with the aftermath of natural disasters. The co-construction underscores the value of integrating the local Japanese culture when implementing Western arts therapy approaches. It is suggested that art-based psychosocial interventions can elicit and nurture coping and resilience in a specific cultural context and that the arts and creativity can serve as a powerful humanistic form of posttraumatic care.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-176
Author(s):  
Arianna D’Ottone Rambach
Keyword(s):  

Abstract This article (re-)considers a unique Qurʾān manuscript (MS London, SOAS, 12217) in ciphered characters (Ar. al-taʿmiya), reminiscent of the ring letters of the Graeco-Egyptian tradition (Brillenbuchstaben). The case of this Qurʾān manuscript offers an opportunity to decode (Ar. istikhrāj al-muʿammà) a cryptographed text, to date and localize a very special Quranic codex, and to investigate the history of the collections it passed through, as well as the religious and cultural context of its production. Lastly, it examines the relations between Islam and magic—with which cryptography is often associated.


1998 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-283
Author(s):  
Martin E. Marty

This article is based upon an address to the Conference on Christianity and Literature at the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in Toronto on 29 December 1997. The invitation asked me to comment on the public/private distinction that I make as Director of the Public Religion Project and to accent the “cultural context,” which fits my History of Culture faculty assignment and three decades of writing Context, a newsletter relating religion to culture. I was to inform it theologically, which a divinity professor is supposed to be able to do, and to show some curiosity about the literary theme, as my decades-long stint as literary editor at The Christian Century should poise me to do. Under it all my limiting job description matches a badge provided me at a conference in Tübingen, where the hosts handed out identifications marked “Theologian of History,” “Theological Historian,” and “Historical Theologian.” Mine read simply, “Historical Historian.”—MEM


Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Mihnea Bâlici

Fracturism proved to be the “spearhead” of the 2000 generation. The first and by far the most radical literary group formed after 1989, this promotion became the cultural expression of a difficult context in the post-revolutionary history of Romania. The aim of this study is to analyze the origin, the function and the effects of the Fracturist ideas proposed by Marius Ianuș and Dumitru Crudu in 1998. Most literary interpretations failed to capture the specificity of this promotion. This is due to the fact that the aesthetic program was never a priority for the Fracturists. It can be emphasized that Fracturism appeared in a specific set of historical, political, social, institutional and cultural circumstances. The present analysis aims to clarify the complex links between the difficult post-communist transition, the crisis of the Romanian literary field and the ostentatious literary expression of the new authors. In this regard, a certain performative dimension of fracturism can be theorized: the poets and prose writers of the new millennium will militate against a distressing social reality by changing the very role of the contemporary author.


Popular Music ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW BANNISTER

Indie alternative rock in the 1980s is often presented as authentically autonomous, produced in local scenes, uncaptured by ideology, free of commercial pressures, but also of high culture elitism. In claiming that the music is avant-garde, postmodern and subversive, such accounts simplify indie's historical, social and cultural context. Indie did not simply arise organically out of developing postpunk music networks, but was shaped by media, and was not just collective, but also stratified, hierarchical and traditional. Canon (articulated through practices of archivalism and connoisseurship) is a key means of stratification within indie scenes, produced by and serving particular social and cultural needs for dominant social groups (journalists, scenemakers, tastemakers, etc.). These groups and individuals were mainly masculine, and thus gender in indie scenes is an important means for deconstructing the discourse of indie independence. I suggest re-envisioning indie as a history of record collectors, emphasising the importance of rock ‘tradition’, of male rock ‘intellectuals’, second-hand record shops, and of an alternative canon as a form of pedagogy. I also consider such activities as models of rational organisation and points of symbolic identification.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.


Author(s):  
Mubaidi Sulaeman

Based on the normative thought of Islamic fundamentalism who have textual tendencies and what they are in applying the arguments of theIslamic law, often ignoring the history of the emergence of a obligation provision, one of which is the law concerning muslimah hijab obligation.Therefore, Islamic fundamentalizm, hijab is obligated, even obligatory to cover its face and palms. Whereas for historians, the generalization of hijaborder against every muslimah is wrong because the hijab is cultural expression that owned by people outside the Arab peninsula and pre-Islam. So that hijab is historically not entitled to be claimed as a culture bornof Islamic alone.


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