Tongues of Fire

Author(s):  
Nancy Farriss

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.

Author(s):  
Sucharita BENIWAL ◽  
Sahil MATHUR ◽  
Lesley-Ann NOEL ◽  
Cilla PEMBERTON ◽  
Suchitra BALASUBRAHMANYAN ◽  
...  

The aim of this track was to question the divide between the nature of knowledge understood as experiential in indigenous contexts and science as an objective transferable knowledge. However, these can co-exist and inform design practices within transforming social contexts. The track aimed to challenge the hegemony of dominant knowledge systems, and demonstrate co-existence. The track also hoped to make a case for other systems of knowledges and ways of knowing through examples from native communities. The track was particularly interested in, first, how innovators use indigenous and cultural systems and frameworks to manage or promote innovation and second, the role of local knowledge and culture in transforming innovation as well as the form of local practices inspired innovation. The contributions also aspired to challenge through examples, case studies, theoretical frameworks and methodologies the hegemony of dominant knowledge systems, the divides of ‘academic’ vs ‘non-academic’ and ‘traditional’ vs ‘non-traditional’.


POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Hannah Rieger

Abstract The Middle Low German Beast Epic Reynke de Vos (1498) is about two legal proceedings against the fox Reynke, who is charged by the other animals with the tricks he played on them. When he is sentenced to death, Reynke defends himself by delivering speeches that are constructed as described in ancient rhetoric. Part of those speeches is Reynke’s lie about his treasure, which he would give to the lion if he pardoned him. Reynke describes three pieces of jewellery as part of this made-up possession, one of which is a mirror. When Reynke describes it, he also tells Aesopic fables that are carved into its wooden frame. His fictional artefact, especially the interplay of its specific material and the content of the fables told, has a poetological level. In his description, Reynke hybridizes the political discourse of the early modern period, in which the virtue of prudentia becomes more and more important, with the rhetorical competence to deliver speeches and tell fables. In his fiction of the mirror he draws up a poetological draft that combines the role of a rhetor in court with his well-known properties of being clever and cunning. By describing the artefact, Reynke shows how to use rhetorical strategies, especially to tell fables, as an instrument to gain acceptance and to acquire political influence.


Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892199807
Author(s):  
Jonathan Clifton ◽  
Fernando Fachin ◽  
François Cooren

To date there has been little work that uses fine-grained interactional analyses of the in situ doing of leadership to make visible the role of non-human as well as human actants in this process. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction as data, this study seeks to show how leadership is co-achieved by artefacts as an in-situ accomplishment. To do this we situate this study within recent work on distributed leadership and argue that it is not only distributed across human actors, but also across networks that include both human and non-human actors. Taking a discursive approach to leadership, we draw on Actor Network Theory and adopt a ventriloquial approach to sociomateriality as inspired by the Montreal School of organizational communication. Findings indicate that artefacts “do” leadership when a hybrid presence is made relevant to the interaction and when this presence provides authoritative grounds for influencing others to achieve the group’s goals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Rivera-Lillo ◽  
Emmanuel A. Stamatakis ◽  
Tristan A. Bekinschtein ◽  
David K. Menon ◽  
Srivas Chennu

AbstractThe overt or covert ability to follow commands in patients with disorders of consciousness is considered a sign of awareness and has recently been defined as cortically mediated behaviour. Despite its clinical relevance, the brain signatures of the perceptual processing supporting command following have been elusive. This multimodal study investigates the temporal spectral pattern of electrical brain activity to identify features that differentiated healthy controls from patients both able and unable to follow commands. We combined evidence from behavioural assessment, functional neuroimaging during mental imagery and high-density electroencephalography collected during auditory prediction, from 21 patients and 10 controls. We used a penalised regression model to identify command following using features from electroencephalography. We identified seven well-defined spatiotemporal signatures in the delta, theta and alpha bands that together contribute to identify DoC subjects with and without the ability to follow command, and further distinguished these groups of patients from controls. A fine-grained analysis of these seven signatures enabled us to determine that increased delta modulation at the frontal sensors was the main feature in command following patients. In contrast, higher frequency theta and alpha modulations differentiated controls from both groups of patients. Our findings highlight a key role of spatiotemporally specific delta modulation in supporting cortically mediated behaviour including the ability to follow command. However, patients able to follow commands nevertheless have marked differences in brain activity in comparison with healthy volunteers.


Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Eve Bouchard

AbstractIn São Tomé and Príncipe, the language shift toward Portuguese is resulting in the endangerment of the native creoles of the island. These languages have been considered of low value in Santomean society since the mid-twentieth century. But when Santomeans are members of a diaspora, their perceptions of these languages, especially Forro, change in terms of value and identity-marking. It is possible to observe such changes among the Santomeans who learn Forro when they are abroad, who use it as an in-group code, and start to value it more. In this article, I address the role of language contact in the maintenance and expansion of Forro. I investigate the mechanisms of language maintenance by focusing on the shifts in community members’ attitudes and beliefs regarding their languages, as a result of contact. The changing attitudes and beliefs have led to a redefinition of the role of Forro in the speech community. This qualitative study is based on semistructured interviews conducted on São Tomé Island and in Portugal. Findings suggest that the change in value attributed to Forro by Santomeans as a result of contact contribute to the valorization of the language.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003329412199778
Author(s):  
Luca Tisu ◽  
Andrei Rusu ◽  
Coralia Sulea ◽  
Delia Vîrgă

Job resources play a prominent role in employee performance literature, yet a fine-grained understanding of how resources are relevant for several performance types is still needed. Relying on the Job Demands-Resources and Conservation of Resources theories, the present study addresses this call in two ways. First, it examines the predictive effect of four job resources (i.e., role clarity, feedback, autonomy, and opportunities for development) on nine types of performance (i.e., proficiency, adaptivity, and proactivity as an individual, team, and organization member). Second, it tests the moderator role of strengths use in these relationships. Data was gathered from a sample of Romanian employees (N = 332) and analyzed via hierarchical multiple linear regression. The results indicate that the selected job resources are, indeed, predictors of different types of employee performance and not in a unitary manner. Role clarity and feedback appear to be the most relevant predictors for various performance types, while autonomy seems to be the least important. Also, strengths use moderates these relationships, but in a reinforcing manner only regarding opportunities for development. The interaction of strengths use with role clarity and feedback renders the latter two obsolete, indicating that individual strategies may act as substitutes for job resources. These findings add to the Job Demands-Resources theory's versatile nature and provide more clarity to practitioners who plan interventions to enhance specific performance types, taking individual strategies into account.


Author(s):  
Géraldine Escriva-Boulley ◽  
Emma Guillet-Descas ◽  
Nathalie Aelterman ◽  
Maarten Vansteenkiste ◽  
Nele Van Doren ◽  
...  

Grounded in SDT, several studies have highlighted the role of teachers’ motivating and demotivating styles for students’ motivation, learning, and physical activity in physical education (PE). However, most of these studies focused on a restricted number of motivating strategies (e.g., offering choice) or dimensions (e.g., autonomy support). Recently, researchers have developed the Situations-in-School (i.e., SIS-Education) questionnaire, which allows one to gain a more integrative and fine-grained insight into teachers’ engagement in autonomy-support, structure, control, and chaos through a circular structure (i.e., a circumplex). Although teaching in PE resembles teaching in academic courses in many ways, some of the items of the original situation-based questionnaire (e.g., regarding homework) are irrelevant to the PE context. In the present study, we therefore sought to develop a modified, PE-friendly version of this earlier validated SIS-questionnaire—the SIS-PE. Findings in a sample of Belgian (N = 136) and French (N = 259) PE teachers, examined together and as independent samples, showed that the variation in PE teachers’ motivating styles in this adapted version is also best captured by a circumplex structure, with four overarching styles and eight subareas differing in their level of need support and directiveness. The SIS-PE possesses excellent convergent and concurrent validity. With the adaptations being successful, great opportunities for future research on PE teachers (de-)motivating styles are created.


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