Cultural History and Hebraism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Steven Grosby
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Cultural Analysis

This chapter provides both an initial formulation of Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within Christendom and an overview of the problems of that formulation. In doing so, it examines the complications of other categories of cultural history, for example, Hellenism, and of religious categories, specifically monotheism. The characteristics of Hebraic culture are presented: an ascetic mode of conduct that affirms life in this world, an historical orientation, law, and the nation. Also examined are early formulations of the Hebraic influence on the changing significance of the Old Testament, beginning with Matthew Arnold’s contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism.

Visibility and security in the smart home

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110300
Author(s):  
Justine Humphry ◽  
Chris Chesher
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Smart Home ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Security Systems ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
A Site ◽  
Over Time

Smart home, media and security systems intervene in the territory and boundaries of the home in a variety of ways. Among these are the capacity to watch the home from afar, and to record these observations over time, as well as using the home as a site of performance for those on the outside. In this paper, we map the meanings of the smart home and explore the tensions between security and visibility, adopting a cultural history and cultural analysis methodological approach. We make a contribution to the literature on the smart home, highlighting its connection to longer trajectories of media and cultural change, and to understanding the contemporary formations of technologised surveillance, with attention to practices that emerged in response to COVID-19. We focus on two aspects of our model of domestic smartification: Ludics (devices and systems for play or entertainment) and exteriorities (security and communication interfaces that remotely monitor and expose the home). We focus on these aspects relating them to ideas of haunting and the uncanny to explore the implications of making what was previously hidden visible and manipulable to others.

Reading Hebrew Bible Narratives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Andrew Dearman
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Multiple Methods ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Samuel 1 ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Historical Dramas

The narrative traditions in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible are classical and canonical accounts in Western society and can be interpreted as historical dramas, using multiple methods of literary and historical analysis. Chapters in the book include introductory discussions of literary approaches to historical narratives such as plot, theme, characterization, and semantics, as well as historical and cultural analysis of their ancient contexts. Each chapter emphasizes interaction with specific biblical texts, interpreting them in the context of ancient Israel’s national storyline, and encourages readers to approach them dialogically. Narratives for examination are drawn from the books of Genesis, Deuteronomy, Judges, Ruth, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Texts from the books of Genesis and Ruth receive repeated attention, as does the topic of marriage and family in ancient Israel. This attention allows readers to see the same topic in various literary/historical settings and to engage similar texts with multiple methods.

IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF IDEAS: ARTHUR LOVEJOY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS AS A FORM OF CULTURAL HISTORY

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-464
Author(s):  
DANIEL WICKBERG
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Academic Cultures ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Disciplinary Cultures

The last fifteen years have seen a number of attempts to imagine what lies “beyond” the linguistic and cultural turns of recent decades in historiography. The impulse is derived, one suspects, from the need for academic cultures to declare current established practice “dead” in favor of some new departure. We have had thirty years of discourse study, cultural analysis of texts and meaning, attention to the constitutive power of language, and suspicion of reading texts as unmediated referential documents. It seems inevitable that voices would arise declaring the attention to culture and language exhausted, asking us to turn away from language and culture and plant our feet on some firmer ground. Academic disciplinary cultures, try as they might to abandon modernist commitments to a belief in progress in which today's know-how trumps yesterday's ignorance, can't seem to transcend their nineteenth-century origins. We know, or think we do, that the humanities are not the bearers of progress in knowledge, that we are no wiser than our forebears, that the holy grail remains as far out of reach as it ever was. And yet we act as if we can expose the shortcomings of our intellectual ancestors and in doing so inaugurate a new and better understanding of the realm in which human beings act and create meaning. Hence a new generation, having decided that it has either absorbed the lessons of the cultural and linguistic turns or realized what a constraining dead end such a turn represents, advocates a departure for more fertile ground.

Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gatta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Intimate Relation

What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale’s genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility, can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions had been broached already by “ecocritics” concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature and by theologians concerned with “ecotheology” and “ecospirituality.” Yet this book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place, that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection while focusing on the multilayered witness presented by American literary texts. Its interpretive readings range across texts by an array of both canonical and lesser-known writers. Along the way, it addresses themes such as the religious implications of localism versus globalism; the diverse spiritualities associated with long-term residency, resettlement, and pilgrimage; what seems to hallow some sites more than others; and how the creative spirit of Imagination figures in place-identified apprehensions of the numinous. This study grants that, whether in Christian or other religious terms, no discrete place matters absolutely. Yet it demonstrates, above all, how and why hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our cultural history. The book concludes with a case study of one collegiate experiment in place-making and contemplative learning.

scholarly journals Josephus, Joseph and the Greek Novel

Ramus ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Roman Archaeology ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Greek Novel ◽  
Greek World

The challenge to classicists to read Josephus ‘as literature’ is an awkward one, because it throws into relief the crooked, appropriative practices we undertake in the name of literary criticism. If Josephus' works are to be seen as ‘literature’—a category closely associated with specifically Hellenic literary ideals, in much of the ancient world as well as the modern academy—then we are also avoiding looking at them as documents of early Jewish cultural history or belief. ‘Literature’ is far from a neutral category.Josephus would, however, have probably approved, at any rate up to a point. In the proem to the Jewish Archaeology—on which this article will focus—he promises a work of ‘universal usefulness’ (κοινή ὠϕέλειαν, 1.3), which will appear ‘worthy of study to the whole Greek world’ (ἅπασι…τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἀξίαν σπουδῆς, 1.5). Unlike Against Apion, which denigrates Greek historiography in relation to Jewish and other near-eastern narrative traditions (see esp. 1.6-56), the Archaeology seeks to translate biblical discourse into a Greek-friendly register. In terms of communication, ‘universal’ necessarily means ‘Greek’, a point of which the translators of the Septuagint were aware (as much as Cicero and Paul). Moreover, the tralatitious language (Thucydidean ὠϕέλεια, Dionysian σπουδή) coupled with the direct allusion in the work's title to Dionysius' Roman Archaeology reinforce the already clear impression that Josephus is inscribing his project into the Greek cultural tradition, marking its intelligibility within the conceptual framework that we would call ‘literature’, and Josephus and his contemporaries called paideia. The Archaeology converts the fragmented and at times self-contradictory narrative of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) into a coherent chronological narrative, seeking to confer on it the legitimacy (as gentile Greeks would see it) of historical narrative.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-176
Author(s):  
Steven Grosby
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Jewish Christianity

Hebraism has to do with the changing relation between Christianity and Judaism, between the New and Old Testaments, made possible by the cultural phenomenon of different contents coexisting within a symbol, for example, Israel. This concluding chapter provides a summary of the characteristics of Hebraism as a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or ‘Old Testament Christianity’, including patriotism. The chapter further situates Hebraism within the analysis of the axial age. In doing so, the distinctiveness of religion is taken up, as well as the place of pluralism in cultural history that requires the distinction between unity and uniformity. The chapter also discusses the place of sovereignty in Hebraic culture.

Narrative Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Andrew Dearman
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World

Modern discussion of social issues provides an analogy to the historical and cultural analysis of Old Testament narratives by contemporary readers. Implied and expressed tensions regarding multiethnic marriage in the books of Ruth, Ezra, and Nehemiah are discussed as ways to understand the social contexts influencing these three books and how various generations in ancient Israel might have responded to the accounts, given these tensions. Interpreters have proposed that the book of Ruth originated as a story to counter the rejection of marriage to foreign women presented in the books of Ezra and that proposal is examined for its strengths and weaknesses and as an example of exploring the world behind a text.

Reception History of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Markl
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Developments

The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (HB/OT) is like a prism through which ancient Near Eastern traditions were transformed and transmitted to Jewish and Christian cultures. Through the Jewish diaspora and the Christian missions, it became a nomadic text that spread to all continents. It was received and transformed in diverse genres of literature, music, art, theatre, law, and politics. Interest in processes of reception has intensified since World War I, but reception history became a major field within biblical studies only at the turn of the millennium. Analyzing the history of reception of the HB/OT poses a variety of challenges: what hermeneutical expectations, attitudes, interests, and methods were applied to its texts? How were they involved in diverse fields of culture, and how did different modes of reception influence each other? What historical developments occasioned changes in interpretation? In analyzing textual reception, three basic aspects should be considered: the texts with their respective genres and themes, the hermeneutics applied to them, and the social contexts in which the reception takes place. Each of these aspects is characterized by great variation: biblical genres are as diverse as curse and love poetry, law and lament; hermeneutical approaches involve extremely different interests and results in, for example, allegorical, kabballistic and historical critical interpretation; social contexts of reception include family education, monastic lectio divina, public reading and preaching, and academic teaching. Investigating this history of reception means looking at cultural history through the lens of the HB/OT. Rather than defining itself as a field of research separate from interpretation, reception history should be seen as a constituent of the hermeneutical endeavor.

scholarly journals Usage of Urdu as the Language of Elitism among the Muslims of the Northern and the Deccan parts of India: A Socio-Cultural Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
Arshi Siddiqui ◽  
Ismail Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
High Status ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The North ◽  
British Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose: The paper examines how Urdu evolved from the language of the rulers to the lingua franca of Muslims in the modern times. The paper attempts to highlight how Urdu is still being used as an identity marker for Muslims with respect to the other communities and is a source of ascendancy, an achieved elitist status within the Muslims of the North and Deccan. Approach/Methodology/Design: Socio-cultural analysis. Findings: The usage of Urdu as a political instrument by the Muslim League and the cultural influence the language has exerted on the Muslim community led to its usage as a source of elitism within the community in the modern times. The analysis indicates that there is harking back to the highly Persianised, nastaliq form of Urdu, which was manifested in its literature in the twentieth century as the pure, hegemonic and the aspired language, true to the identity of the community.  The language was characterized by its emergence as a monolithic, distinctive medium, overcoming the different varieties and registers during the British rule through the Hindi-Urdu controversy. Practical Implications: This review study situates Urdu in a socio-cultural context, reflecting   the historical status of the language in India. Originality/value: Urdu has been recognized as a language of a particular community i.e. Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, especially those in the Northern and the Deccan parts of the independent India. This review article, through the use of literature review and content analysis, shows that Urdu is used as a language by Muslims in a way that denotes their high status within the community, due to a variety of factors embedded in the socio-cultural history of the community in the Indian subcontinent.

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