Call (On) Your “Mutha’ ”

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-237
Author(s):  
Jane Caputi
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
June Jordan ◽  
New Feature

Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling and a calling upon the “Mutha’,” resulting in a return of a departed life force-source and a renewal of the world. Examples come from Hopi, Greek, and Japanese traditions, as well as contemporary culture. A call to the mother particularly characterizes Afrofuturism, including the poetry of June Jordan, the art of John Thomas Biggers, Kevin Sampson, and Wangechi Mutu, the novels of Octavia Butler, and the musical compositions and poetry of Nicole Mitchell. These stories offer wisdom and direction for spiritual-political activism to bring about a world other than the Anthropocene.

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ita Mac Carthy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
The World ◽  
Changing World

‘Grace’ emerges as a keyword in the culture and society of sixteenth-century Italy. This book explores how it conveys and connects the most pressing ethical, social and aesthetic concerns of an age concerned with the reactivation of ancient ideas in a changing world. The book reassesses artists such as Francesco del Cossa, Raphael, and Michelangelo and explores anew writers like Castiglione, Ariosto, Tullia d'Aragona, and Vittoria Colonna. It shows how these artists and writers put grace at the heart of their work. The book argues that grace came to be as contested as it was prized across a range of Renaissance Italian contexts. It characterised emerging styles in literature and the visual arts, shaped ideas about how best to behave at court and sparked controversy about social harmony and human salvation. For all these reasons, grace abounded in the Italian Renaissance, yet it remained hard to define. The book explores what grace meant to theologians, artists, writers, and philosophers, showing how it influenced their thinking about themselves, each other and the world. It portrays grace not as a stable formula of expression but as a web of interventions in culture and society.

Ayurveda and Communicable Diseases

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (05) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashok G. Naikar ◽  
Ganapathi Rao ◽  
Panchal Vinayak J.
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
World View ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Practical Aspect ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Local Health ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Pertinent Question ◽  
Cultural Domination

Indian medical heritage flows in two distinctive but mutually complimenting streams. The oral tradition being followed by millions of housewives and thousands of local health practitioners is the practical aspect of codified streams such as Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani. These oral traditions are head based and take care of the basic health needs of the people using immediately available local resources. Majority of these are plant based remedies, supplemented by animal and mineral products. Many of the practices followed by these local streams can be understood and evaluated by the codified stream such as Ayurveda. These streams are not static, historical scrutiny of their evolution shows the enriching phenomena at all times. Thus we have more than 7000 species of higher and lower plants and hundreds of minerals and animal product used in local health tradition to manage hundreds of disease conditions. A pertinent question that arises here is that in which basis these systems got enriched. Is it just trial error method over a point of time which gave rise to this rich tradition, is it an intuitive knowledge born out of close association with nature. One of the reasons for this attitude can be, that one is always made to believe that the science means that which can be explained by western models of logic and epistemology. The world view being developed and adopted by the dominant western scientific paradigm never fits in to the world view being followed and practiced by the indigenous traditions. This is well accepted by us due to the last 200 yrs of political and cultural domination by western and other alien forces.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

Unpacking the self

Forum+ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Manju Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cross Linking ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Sensitive Issues

Abstract In this essay, visual artist and writer Manju Sharma reflects on the use of autobiography as a methodology for storytelling in the visual arts. She focuses on the methods that she uses to explore the self and its relatedness to the world that she wishes to grasp. She also sheds light on how autobiography fits into her artistic practice as a means of finding hidden narratives and to keep the personal narrative related to the world. The essay touches upon the use of personal stories, cross-linking and note-taking to unpack everyday sensitive issues that can allow people to find their voice and to speak out.

scholarly journals POWER-KNOWLEDGE RELATIONS IN THE FIELD OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
ENRIQUE LEFF
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Open Dialogue

Abstract The current environmental crisis calls for thinking about the state of the world: the thermodynamic-ecological and symbolic-cultural conditions of organic and human life on the planet. In this regard, it stresses the need to realize the unawareness and life’s unsustainability that humanity has created. In this text I discuss and take a stand about some of the concepts and founding and constitutive research lines of political ecology. In this way I pretend to open dialogue by placing in context some of the principles, ideas, and founding viewpoints of political ecology in Latin America and contrasting them with those from the English-speaking school of thought. I intend not only to establish a political socio-geography, but to question the epistemic core of political ecology, and to stimulate a more cosmopolitan critical thinking in order to be able to face the hegemonic powers that lead the world into social and environmental decay

Flow and Performance Characteristics of a Double-Blade Hydrofoil

2012 ◽  
Vol 433-440 ◽  
pp. 7218-7222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahir Yavuza ◽  
Birol Kilkis ◽  
Emre Koc ◽  
Ozgur Erol
Keyword(s):  
Wind Power ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Clean Energy ◽  
Performance Characteristics ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Operational Effectiveness ◽  
Hydrokinetic Turbines ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance

While our planet is rapidly approaching an environmental crisis under the dominant use of depleting fossil fuels, the need for exploiting all forms of new, small carbon foot-print, renewable, and clean energy resources are increasing in the same proportion. Therefore, the need for exploring all types of clean energy resources that the world has- some of which might have not attracted sufficient attention before- is essential in order to implement sufficient, efficient, and widely use all them. In this respect, operational effectiveness of the wind and hydrokinetic turbines depend on the performance of the airfoils chosen. Using double-blade airfoils in the wind and hydrokinetic turbines, minimum wind and hydrokinetic flow velocities to produce meaningful and practical mechanical power reduces to 3- 4 m /s for wind turbines and 1-1.5 m/s or less for hydrokinetic turbines. Consequently, double-blade hydrofoils may re-define the potentials of wind power and hydrokinetic power of the countries in positive manner.

scholarly journals Autonomia świata a podmiotowość człowieka w ekoteologii

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Jarosław Horowski
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Ecological Problem ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World

One of the most difficult problems, which is to be solved by contemporary culture, is the ecological problem. It concerns the culture because the hedonistic and consumerist mentality of man plays an important part in it. Biocentrism states that the ecological problem results from traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world based on the belief that humans are the central and most significant entities in the universe. Biocentrism puts forward a teleological argument for the protection of the environment. It indicates that non-human species have inherent value as well and each organism has a purpose and a reason for being, which should be respected. Biocentrism states that the anthropocentric attitude to the non-human world results from the Christian worldview based on the Bible where it is written that God gives man dominion over all creatures. The author analyses the main issues of the Catholic concept of the relationship between human beings and other creatures. He indicates that ecotheology respects the inherent value of non-human creatures because, as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et spes says: “all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order”, but maintains that the purpose of the world is connected with its relationship to God. The author considers also what is the human subjectivity in behaving towards the environment and what is the dependence between the autonomy of the world and the subjectivity of man in ecotheology. In the end, the author comes to the conclusion that according to ecotheology the ecological problem results from the broken relationship between the human and God and in consequence it the broken relationship between the world and God.

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