Variations on Simplicity

2019 ◽  
pp. 102-118
Author(s):  
Charles S. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Italy ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 7 examines the intricate ways in which Philodemus, Crinagoras, and Antipater of Thessalonica engage with the poetry of Callimachus and Leonidas of Tarentum. The chapter finds that the three epigrammatists of Philip’s Garland use these two Hellenistic predecessors as positive or negative models of poetic values and ethical outlooks, upon which they define their own authorial self-representations as Greek poets operating in the social world of Roman Italy. Using techniques of imitation and variation, these authors blend Callimachean and Leonidean models to distil a poetics and ethics defined by the ideal of simplicity (litotes). As this ideal is thematized by successive generations of epigrammatists, it became a part of the generic tissue of epigram.

The Freedman's Story: an Accusation of Witchcraft in the Social World of Early Imperial Roman Italy (CIL11.4639 =ILS3001)

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Duncan E. Macrae
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Social World ◽  
First Century ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Roman Italy ◽  
Ambiguous Position

AbstractThis article proposes a new reading of a late first-centuryc.e.inscribed dedication from Todi (Umbria) as an accusation of witchcraft, a rhetorical text aimed at propagating a particular story among the local community. Historical and anthropological studies of witchcraft accusations in other societies have emphasised how they can reveal tensions and anxieties that are normally not visible to the observer. By drawing on these studies and close examination of the language and content of the inscription, this article analyses an historical agent's experience of the social structure of early imperial Italy. The accusation is read as a freedman's response to his ambiguous position in a slave society, the ambivalent power of writing in Roman culture and the religious claims of Flavian imperial discourse.

Finding Elusive Resonances Across Cultures and Time

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Gerald C. Cupchik ◽  
Despina Stamatopoulou ◽  
Siying Duan
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Model ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Social World ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Autonomous Agent ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Six Dynasties ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter is about meaningful connection in media entertainment in relation to the concept of resonance during an era of social and technological acceleration. A hierarchical model is proposed with a desire for pleasure at the concrete foundation and an aesthetic appreciation of meaning at the more abstract and universal level. This range of experience is examined in the context of Greek and Chinese thinking about resonance. For Ancient Greeks, resonance describes interpretative and expressive events where concrete bodily and immersive practices shape experiences that may have ethical and sociopolitical effects. In Plato, it branched into (1) passive reception that mirrors a copy and offers no direct access to truth but might merely condition a person or (2) a communion that reveals the ideal. Aristotle stressed the dynamics of resonance in theater to build a relatively autonomous agent who appreciates and reflects on ways that causes affect human action in the social world. In the Chinese part of this chapter, we examine scholarship related to the concept of resonance during the Six Dynasties period (220–589 CE) as well as its intellectual roots from Confucianism and Daoism. Major issues explored include: the function of resonance in artistic creation and appreciation as well as its social function from a Confucian perspective; the method that helps people experience resonance with nature or cosmos from a Daoist perspective; and finally, the concept of vital energy across the cosmos which facilitates the more profound experience of resonance.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

The critical theory of democracy in Western political thought

2020 ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Or Applications ◽  
The Ideal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.

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