Historical Representations and Recent Changes

Author(s):  
Jürgen Schaflechner

Chapter 3 introduces the tradition of ritual journeys and sacred geographies in South Asia, then hones in on a detailed history of the grueling and elaborate pilgrimage attached to the shrine of Hinglaj. Before the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway the journey to the Goddess’s remote abode in the desert of Balochistan frequently presented a lethally dangerous undertaking for her devotees, the hardships of which have been described by many sources in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Sindhi, and Urdu. This chapter draws heavily from original sources, including travelogues and novels, which are supplanted with local oral histories in order to weave a historical tapestry that displays the rich array of practices and beliefs surrounding the pilgrimage and how they have changed over time. The comparative analysis demonstrates how certain motifs, such as austerity (Skt. tapasyā), remain important themes within the whole Hinglaj genre even in modern times while others have been lost in the contemporary era.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (11-1) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Dmitry Rakovsky

The main purpose of this article is to study the role of the Russian Museum in the formation of the historical consciousness of Russian society. In this context, the author examines the history of the creation of the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III and its pre-revolutionary collections that became the basis of this famous museum collection (in particular, the composition of the museum’s expositions for 1898 and 1915). Within the framework of the methodology proposed by the author, the works of art presented in the museum’s halls were selected and distributed according to the historical eras that they reflect, and a comparative analysis of changes in the composition of the expositions was also carried out. This approach made it possible to identify the most frequently encountered historical heroes, to consider the representation of their images in the museum’s expositions, and also to provide a systemic reconstruction of historical representations broadcast in its halls.


2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (S1) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Noah Riseman

Abstract Did you know that a Bathurst Islander captured the first Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil? Or that a crucifix saved the life of a crashed American pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria? These are excerpts from the rich array of oral histories of Aboriginal participation in World War II. This paper presents “highlights” from Yolngu oral histories of World War II in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Using these stories, the paper begins to explore some of the following questions: Why did Yolngu participate in the war effort? How did Yolngu see their role in relation to white Australia? In what ways did Yolngu contribute to the security of Australia? How integral was Yolngu assistance to defence of Australia? Although the answers to these questions are not finite, this paper aims to survey some of the Yolngu history of World War II.


Multilingua ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mieke Vandenbroucke

AbstractThis paper focuses on how different historical stages of socio-economic development in Brussels are played out on the ground over time in one particular inner-city neighbourhood, the Quartier Dansaert. In particular, I document the history of this neighbourhood and how urban change and gentrification have impacted the outlook of multilingualism and the development of multilingual discourses and language hierarchies in its material and semiotic landscape over time. By using the rich history of multilingualism in the Quartier Dansaert as a case-study, I argue in favour of more historically-sensitive and longitudinal approaches to social and, in particular, linguistic change as played out in urban landscape.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Beswick

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Please check back later for the full article. Histories of South Sudan are rare. Indeed a pre-colonial history of what is actually, geographically, the world’s largest swamp (South Sudan) is challenging and at present impossible without the use of oral histories, along with a very few archaeological and linguistic studies. Only two scholarly accounts lend information about the obscure history of this region of Africa. Oral histories suggest that the very earliest inhabitants of South Sudan were a mound-building folk known to the Dinka as the Luel, and to archaeologists as the Turkwel. Sometime after the later Middle Ages and the fall of the 11th-century Christian kingdom of Alwa, the Western Nilotic Dinka claim to have migrated with their cattle into South Sudan from the Gezira because of fear of slave raiders. The Dinka claim to have found Bari, on the East Bank of the Nile, a historical point that is corroborated by Bari oral histories. Some decades later, the Dinka crossed the Nile following the rich soils that were most favorable to their favorite agricultural food, kec. Over time they penetrated deeply into the western swamps of Southern Sudan. Sometime around the 15th century, another Nilotic people, now known as the Shilluk, thrust northwards beyond the depths of the South Sudanese swamps, settling approximately at the junction of the Nile and the Sobat rivers. Oral histories claim the Shilluk were led to this homeland by a great leader, Nyikang, the first in a long line of kings. The last great ethnic groups to migrate into what is now the boundary of modern South Sudan were the non-Nilotic Azande. Of interest is that all of these ethnic groups were slave-holding cultures and, with the exception of the Azande, were agro-pastoralists. The Bari were prominent iron-making specialists, as were the highly martial Azande. All of these cultures had social hierarchies, and migration is a connecting theme among the larger societies; none of the present cultures of South Sudan appear to have originated in South Sudan except the Nilotic Luo. By the late 17th century, with the fall of Sultan Sanusi of the Central African Republic, numbers of non-Nilotic peoples fled into various western regions of South Sudan. Additionally, with the fall of the Islamic sultanate of Sinnar and the coming of the Turco-Egyptians in the early 19th century, much of South Sudan had been historically peopled by the Nilotic Luo, whose progeny appeared to have evolved into numerous ethnic groups of South Sudan; groups that would now include the Shilluk-Luo, the Nuer, the Atuot, Anyuak, and various Luo communities that now exist under various names.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark McClish

AbstractThe legal treatises of ancient India, called Dharmaśāstras, are often read as records of the initial emergence of law from religion in South Asia. The Dharmaśāstras teach the dharma, or “sacred duty,” of different members of society. It is one of the dharmas of the king to adjudicate disputes that come before his courts, and it is widely accepted that a need to articulate the king's dharma led the composers of the Dharmaśāstras over time to fashion rules for state courts, a body of law called vyavahāra. Scholars such as Henry Sumner Maine and Max Weber saw in the Dharmaśāstras evidence of the disentanglement and rationalization of law, respectively. A close examination of our sources, however, shows that the law of royal courts emerged not within the Dharmaśāstra tradition, but within an adjacent and decidedly more secular tradition of statecraft. It was gradually absorbed into Dharmaśāstra texts, where it was reconfigured as sacred duty and its historical origins were obscured. This article argues that the early history of state law in India is best described, therefore, not as a transition from dharma to law, but as a transition from law to dharma.


2017 ◽  
pp. 40-54
Author(s):  
Karolina Drozdowska

The aim of this text is to conduct a comparative analysis of two versions of the same text: The Bird Lovers by Jens Bjørneboe. During my stay at Odin Teatret in August and September 2016, I came across a version of the play’s manuscript from 1964, which I have compared to the play’s final version printed two years later. Jens Bjørneboe’s collaboration with Eugenio Barba and the history of Ornitofilene, the first play staged by the theatre, play a very significant role in the article. I try to place the changes made to the text in a historical context, showing how a Grotowski-inspired play can influence a Brecht-inspired play and also how and why the text developed over time.


1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giles Constable

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.


1969 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holden Furber

A large number of us who are here today in 1969 remember the early beginnings of our organization. I remember particularly a small gathering of one of our earlier incarnations in John Fairbank's livingroom discussing our problems, when we were so small that Wilma Fairbank could send out the postcard notices of meetings without any secretarial help. We are now old enough to have acquired traditions, one of which is the rotation of the presidency from China to South East Asia to Japan to South Asia and then round again. By a fortunate chance the turn of South Asia falls this year on the centenary of the birth of the greatest of South Asians of modern times. Another of our traditions is that the president should deliver an address on a topic close to his own special interest—in my case the history of modern India. I am, however, going to deviate somewhat from that practice this afternoon. In closing, I shall make some suggestions which I hope all of us will keep in mind in this new era of Asian history which is now upon us.


Author(s):  
A. Dikarev

This article contains the detailed comparative analysis of Russian and Chinese participation in the economic development of one of the most important African countries. The article highlights the history of credits and loans, foreign direct investments to Angola, dynamics of Russian and Chines trade turnover in the 21-st century. Main projects of Russia-Angola economic co-operation, activities of the biggest Chinese companies in Angola are in the scope of this research. Main economic interest of both powers – China and Russia – is to obtain access to the rich energy and mineral resources of Angola. However, any numerical indices of Russian and Chinese involvement into Angolan economics show that Russia cannot compete with China in this respect. Incomparable scale of trade turnover and economic cooperation make the hypotheses about possible “rivalry” between Russia and China in this region groundless. In spite of the fact that China has reduced loans volumes to Angola recently, the trade between the two countries shows increasing trend. For the time being Russia seems competitive to China in military cooperation with Angola though falls behind in humanitarian sphere.


Kavkaz-forum ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Э.С. Парастаева

Вопрос изучения имени личного представляет очень большой интерес как для науки, так и для общества в целом. Вся совокупность имен личных (и шире – собственных) относится, как известно, к той части лексической системы языка, исследования которой представляют огромную ценность. В научном языкознании для изучения имени определена отдельная отрасль – ономастика. Деэтимологизация ономастических единиц является важнымне только для языкознания, но и для различных отраслей знания, в частности, для исторической науки в деле изучения древнейшей истории народов (реконструкции архаичных социальных систем, верований, религий, быта), мест их расселения в различные периоды. В настоящей статье нами рассмотрены имена людей – антропонимы в социально-историческом аспекте нового и новейшего времени, времени тотальной глобализации и демократизации. Исторически сложившаяся система наименования людей уходит в глубокую древность, но она не была консервативна и с течением времени, со сменой эпох, постепенно менялась. Когда-то закрытые национальные именные системы (именники), под влиянием все более усиливающихся социальных и культурных взаимодействий народов мира, медленно, но верно «сдавали свои позиции». Началось активное взаимозаимствование личных имен среди различных по этнической принадлежности групп. В современных национальных именных системах вполне мирно уживаются исконные и заимствованные (чужестранные) имена. В то же время между ними наблюдается некий антагонизм, вызванный к жизни понятием исконности/неисконности, который, в свою очередь, основан на значении слова (апеллятива), из которого произошло имя. Есть имена пришлые (заимствованные), которые на чужой почве принимающего языка получают облик, соответствующий нормам последнего. Транснациональными именами, по нашему мнению, следует считать ономастические единицы, не знающие этнических и государственных преград, легко преодолевающие географические барьеры. Именно они служат одним из действенных инструментов глобализации. The question of studying the personal name is of very great interest both for the researchers and for the society as a whole. The entire set of personal (and more broadly - proper) names refers to that part of the lexical system of any language, the research of which is of great value. In linguistics a separate branch is defined for the study of a name - onomastics. De-etymologization of onomastic units is important not only for linguistics, but also for various branches of knowledge, in particular, for historical science in the study of the ancient history of peoples (reconstruction of archaic social systems, beliefs, religions, everyday life), places of their settlement in different periods. In this article, we examined the names of persons - anthroponyms in the socio-historical aspect of the new and modern times, the time of total globalization and democratization. The historically established system of naming people goes back to antiquity, but it was not conservative and gradually changed over time, with the change of eras. Once closed national nominal systems (names), under the influence of ever-increasing social and cultural interactions of the peoples of the world, slowly but surely "gave up their positions." An active inter-borrowing of personal names began among groups of different ethnicity. In modern national naming systems, primordial and borrowed (foreign) names coexist quite peacefully. At the same time, there is a certain antagonism between them, brought to life by the concept of originality / non-originality, which, in turn, is based on the meaning of the word (appellative) from which the name originated. There are new names (borrowed), which, on the basis of the foreign soil of the receiving language, acquire an appearance that corresponds to the norms of the latter. In our opinion, transnational names should be considered onomastic units that do not know ethnic and state barriers, easily overcome geographic barriers. They serve as one of the most effective tools for globalization.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document