Thinking the Ramayana Tradition through Performance

Author(s):  
Rustom Bharucha

This introductory chapter explores the role of performance in questioning, transforming, and subverting the Ramayana narrative tradition. Calling attention to diverse modes of enactment in which the story of the Ramayana gets interpreted through specific performative circumstances and techniques of psychophysical embodiment, it provides a dense vocabulary of different categories of performance in Indian languages in relation to acting, presenting, feeling, showing, exhibiting, transforming, and doing. Not only do these diverse epistemologies of performance shape the retelling of Ramayana at a structural level, they also contribute to the affective and spiritual dimensions of experiencing Ramayana at the level of the senses. Beyond enactment, the essay also provides a few examples of what happens to the Ramayana narrative when it gets performed outside the limits of the stage in the cultures of everyday life, where the politicization of the Ramayana places new demands on the agency and interpretive skills of actors.

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson

This introductory chapter sketches the near-ubiquitous role of conditional statements, questions, and commands in human cognitive life and decision-making. It emphasizes that the standard way of instantiating a known or hypothesized generalization ‘Every F is a G’ is with a conditional, ‘If this is an F, it is a G’; this matters in both everyday life and science. The chapter also sketches how conditionals are passed from one context to another by memory and testimony. These features of our use of conditionals suggest desiderata for the semantics of conditionals. In particular, various kinds of computational complexity and context-sensitivity would tend to unfit conditionals for the cognitive role they are expected to play.


2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Hom ◽  
Jonathan Haidt
Keyword(s):  

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Hom ◽  
Jonathan Haidt
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Samuel Freeman

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of liberalism, which is best understood as an expansive, philosophical notion. Liberalism is a collection of political, social, and economic doctrines and institutions that encompasses classical liberalism, left liberalism, liberal market socialism, and certain central values. This chapter then introduces subsequent chapters, which are divided into three parts. Part I, “Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Economic Justice,” clarifies the distinction between classical liberalism and the high liberal tradition and their relation to capitalism, and then argues that libertarianism is not a liberal view. Part II, “Distributive Justice and the Difference Principle,” analyzes and applies John Rawls’s principles of justice to economic systems and private law. Part III, “Liberal Institutions and Distributive Justice,” focuses on the crucial role of liberal institutions and procedures in determinations of distributive justice and addresses why the first principles of a moral conception of justice should presuppose general facts in their justification.


Author(s):  
Chris Lorenz

This introductory chapter assesses the role of theory in history and traces the developments in the discipline of history. Theoretical reflection about the ‘true nature’ of history fulfils three interrelated practical functions. First, theory legitimizes a specific historical practice—a specific way of ‘doing history’—as the best one from an epistemological and a methodological point of view. Second, theory sketches a specific programme of doing history. Third, theoretical reflections demarcate a specific way of ‘doing history’ from other ways of ‘doing history’, which are excluded or degraded. The chapter then considers three phases of theoretical changes from analytical to narrative philosophy of history, and then on to ‘history from below’ and the ‘presence’ of history, ultimately leading to the current return of fundamental ontological and normative questions concerning the status of history and history-writing.


Author(s):  
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

The concept of shape is widely used by musicians in talking and thinking about performance, yet the mechanisms that afford links between music and shape are little understood. Work on the psychodynamics of everyday life by Daniel Stern and on embodiment by Mark Johnson suggests relationships between the multiple dynamics of musical sound and the dynamics of feeling and motion. Recent work on multisensory and precognitive sensory perception and on the role of bimodal neurons in the sensorimotor system helps to explain how shape, as a percept representing changing quantity in any sensory mode, may be invoked by dynamic processes at many stages of perception and cognition. These processes enable ‘shape’ to do flexible and useful work for musicians needing to describe the quality of musical phenomena that are fundamental to everyday musical practice and yet too complex to calculate during performance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Ata Saei ◽  
Christian M. Beusch ◽  
Pierre Sabatier ◽  
Juan Astorga Wells ◽  
Hassan Gharibi ◽  
...  

AbstractDespite the immense importance of enzyme–substrate reactions, there is a lack of general and unbiased tools for identifying and prioritizing substrate proteins that are modified by the enzyme on the structural level. Here we describe a high-throughput unbiased proteomics method called System-wide Identification and prioritization of Enzyme Substrates by Thermal Analysis (SIESTA). The approach assumes that the enzymatic post-translational modification of substrate proteins is likely to change their thermal stability. In our proof-of-concept studies, SIESTA successfully identifies several known and novel substrate candidates for selenoprotein thioredoxin reductase 1, protein kinase B (AKT1) and poly-(ADP-ribose) polymerase-10 systems. Wider application of SIESTA can enhance our understanding of the role of enzymes in homeostasis and disease, opening opportunities to investigate the effect of post-translational modifications on signal transduction and facilitate drug discovery.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Samuel Thoma ◽  
Isabelle Schwänzl ◽  
Laura Galbusera

Classical and contemporary phenomenological approaches in psychiatry describe schizophrenia as a disorder of common sense and self-affection. Although taking into account intersubjectivity, this conceptualization still puts forward an individualistic view of the disorder, that is, the intersubjective deficit resides within the person. To overcome such individualism, in this article, we first propose that schizophrenic experience might be understood as arising from a dialectic relation between the self’s loss of openness to the world and the world’s loss of openness to the self. To show the relevance of social factors at the onset of schizophrenic experience, we propose a phenomenological analysis of trigger situations. In the second and main part of this article, we then focus on the implications of these phenomenological insights for the clinical practice: we argue that if schizophrenia is understood as a loss of openness between self and social world, psychiatric institutions should be transformed into spaces that enable a reopening of selves. We first describe <i>enclosing</i> phenomena such as coercive treatment to then, in contrast, present particular forms of <i>open psychiatric spaces</i> such as open door approaches and open dialogue. Besides the institutional-structural level, we also highlight aspects of openness at the intersubjective level of the individual agents, thus particularly emphasizing the role of an open therapeutic stance. We thus speak of (re)opening <i>selves</i> as we believe that the reopening of the patients’ self cannot but be related to and fostered by a reopening of the professionals’ self and stance. We thus argue that openness in the therapeutic stance is key to initiating the further process of recovery, which we describe as a reattunement of selves both at the bodily and narrative level. Last but not least, we sketch out possibilities for future phenomenological research on the question of psychiatric space and draw some broader societal implications.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 82-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Vilches-Montero ◽  
Nik Mohd Hazrul Nik Hashim ◽  
Ameet Pandit ◽  
Renzo Bravo-Olavarria

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
E. V. Golovenkina ◽  

This paper focuses on the role of the poetics of mystery in the formation of the romantic trag-edy genre. “The Spaniards” by Mikhail Lermontov is considered as a characteristic example of this genre, manifesting “melodramatization” of tragedy and tendency towards genre-generic synthesis. The action of “The Spaniards” is based on events related to the sphere of the mysterious, which are exceptional in life and common in melodrama. Central to the plot is the motif of the loss of a child. The secret of Fernando’s birth and “ignobility” form the con-flict and organize two storylines (love and family) and two (everyday life – melodramatic, and existential – tragic) levels of conflict. Mystery also plays an important role in revealing the inner world and expressing the romantic ideal of the hero. The ability to comprehend the mysterious, to pass beyond human experience and logic is not only the motivation of his ac-tions, but it also connects the hero with the ideal sphere. The study examines how the charac-ters’ anticipation of the “terrible” motivates their moral choices. Analyzing the interaction of lyrical motifs, the author suggests the motif of mystery as important for implementing the main (tragic) conflict, unlike melodrama, where the functions of mystery are plot-forming, stimulating the spectator’s interest and maximizing the dramatic tension. Mystery in the plot and the lyrical concept of the tragedy contributes to the understanding of the essence of the romantic conflict, has a suggestive impact on the audience, and deepens the psychologism.


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