scholarly journals Conversation and Civility

Author(s):  
Delphine Denis

In the wake of Italian handbooks of good manners, France forged the figure of the honnête homme from 1630 onward. If his merits were evident in conversation, it was thanks to conversation itself that he was able to acquire them. A new form of sociability flourished, one in which women played a decisive role. A host of terms concurrently attempted to define gentle and refined manners, among others civilité (civility), politesse (courtesy), urbanité (urbane elegance), and galanterie (gallantry). Trained in the school of the world, the galant homme should not be confused with the honnête homme, whose ideal, with a solid moral basis, was reshaped by the late seventeenth century. The air galant converted the social qualities of refined society into aesthetic values, thus giving birth to a new form of modern literature, although not without quite a few objections. In its social dimension as well as in its artistic achievements, galanterie was a genuine cultural phenomenon. As such, it was and remained identified for a long time as a key feature of the French nation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haifeng Huang

AbstractFor a long time, since China’s opening to the outside world in the late 1970s, admiration for foreign socioeconomic prosperity and quality of life characterized much of the Chinese society, which contributed to dissatisfaction with the country’s development and government and a large-scale exodus of students and emigrants to foreign countries. More recently, however, overestimating China’s standing and popularity in the world has become a more conspicuous feature of Chinese public opinion and the social backdrop of the country’s overreach in global affairs in the last few years. This essay discusses the effects of these misperceptions about the world, their potential sources, and the outcomes of correcting misperceptions. It concludes that while the world should get China right and not misinterpret China’s intentions and actions, China should also get the world right and have a more balanced understanding of its relationship with the world.


Author(s):  
Rachel Elior

Mysticism is one of the central sources of inspiration of religious thought. It is an attempt to decode the mystery of divine existence by penetrating to the depths of consciousness through language, memory, myth, and symbolism. By offering an alternative perspective on the world that gives expression to yearnings for freedom and change, mysticism engenders new modes of authority and leadership; as such it plays a decisive role in moulding religious and social history. For all these reasons, the mystical corpus deserves study and discussion in the framework of cultural criticism and research. This book is a lyrical exposition of the Jewish mystical phenomenon. Its purpose is to present the meanings of the mystical works as they were perceived by their creators and readers. At the same time, it contextualizes them within the boundaries of the religion, culture, language, and spiritual and historical circumstances in which the destiny of the Jewish people has evolved. The book conveys the richness of the mystical experience in discovering the infinity of meaning embedded in the sacred text and explains the multivalent symbols. It illustrates the varieties of the mystical experience from antiquity to the twentieth century. The translations of texts communicate the mystical experiences vividly and make it easy for the reader to understand how the book uses them to explain the relationship between the revealed world and the hidden world and between the mystical world and the traditional religious world, with all the social and religious tensions this has caused.


Author(s):  
JORGE FLORES

AbstractThis article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individual mutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughal mutasaddi of Gujarat.


2008 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 87-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Foxall

On 2 March 1692, Sir Christopher Wren visited the governors of Christ’s Hospital in London, bringing with him a design for a new writing school to be erected on the Hospital’s Newgate Street site. Seven drawings for the school building survive in the Wren collection at All Souls College, Oxford. However, rather than suggesting Wren’s authorship, these drawings are customarily attributed to his pupil and long-time assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is generally accepted that Hawksmoor received delegated commissions from Wren by at least the early 1690s, but, although the draughtsmanship and stylistic evidence of the Writing School drawings suggest consistency with this interpretation, the surviving documentary evidence by no means proves Hawksmoor’s involvement. In fact, Wren’s name appears no less than thirteen times in the surviving Hospital minutes of 1691 to 1696, while Hawksmoor is never mentioned.The Writing School designs are briefly described in most architectural histories of the period, although they are considered remarkable more for heralding a shift in architectural taste than for the building shown in the drawings or for the social and ideological impulses that impelled its creation. This article considers the Writing School in the context of contemporary debates and anxieties concerning the provision of education for the poor, and within the wider sphere of late seventeenth-century charity-school building. Wren’s involvement is considered in relation to his philanthropic interest in the charity-school movement. The article concludes with an analysis of the designs and building history of the Writing School, and, on the basis of previously unpublished eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic sources, discounts Giles Worsley’s suggestion that Hawksmoor added a pediment to the final design. Wren and Hawksmoor’s specific responsibilities for the conception, design and execution of the building are considered, and it is argued that, although Hawksmoor was responsible for most of the surviving drawings relating to the project, Wren directed the process, taking responsibility for all designs produced in his office and claiming authorship for the drawings produced.


Tekstualia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 325-339
Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Starnawski

The author of the articles shows that the grotesque is one of the most interesting ways of diagnosing changes and crisis in the anthroposphere (as a continuation of thinking about the subject from the middle of the seventeenth century through to postmodernity). According to Thomas Mann, the grotesque is one the most active notions in contemporary art. Its productivity results from the subject’s tendency to self-fulfilment, self-cognition, and self-definition; it is an independent vision and position in the “me – the world”, “me – community” relations. The grotesque is a strongly philosophical proposition, which bases its discourse on a conscious protest against present values and on transgressing all limiting and oppressive conventions. Therefore, the grotesque enhances the status of the subject, but it neither defends nor affi rms the subject in a direct manner. Apart from the social dimension, the grotesque also has numerous metaphysical references, the expression of which can be found in Kierkegaardian understanding of the metaphysical crisis as despair. Facing piercing emptiness, the human being tries to find some support and resorts to anything only to make a leap into the future. Laughter is only a manifestation of horror vacui, a specific dialectic moment devoid of any prospect of purification or comfort. What dominates a grotesque work is its open structure. The motifs which shape the spatiotemporal order do not always form a cause-and-effect system. Deliberately incoherent themes (logical coherence is not an aim) seem to be rather “deconstructors”, not constructors of the plot; they are intermittent, provoke the impression of a secret, a gleam, the absurd.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Dwi Andri Ristanto ◽  

Concerns that arise currently are the development of a culture of hatred, the fading of a culture of love, secularism and social injustice. In the midst of that situation, the Church stands as a concrete manifestation of the face of God's love in the middle of the world. In the Ecclesia de Eucharistia encyclical, John Paul II asserted that the eschatological character emphasize the Christian commitment to the world, especially establish the social life order (cf. EE 20). The Eucharistic dimension of the Eucharist implies that the world order must be transformed as a form of participation towards fulfillment at the end of time. Whereas in the Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, Benedict XVI, asserted that the Eucharist celebration brings our whole lives into spiritual worship that pleases to God (cf SCar 70). From this research, it is known that the Eucharistic social dimension becomes a spirit of love culture according to the writer. This love culture finds its source and power in the Eucharist. Through the celebration of the Eucharist, people are mystically united with Christ. In the light of the theology of the Eucharistic social dimension of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, mystical union with Christ refers to the oneness of God's thankfulness to the fulfillment of the last days (cf. John 15:13).


Author(s):  
Johannis Tsoumas

The Japanese ceramic tradition that was to emerge along with other forms of traditional crafts through the Mingei Movement during the interwar period, as a form of reaction to the barbaric and expansive industrialization that swept Japan from the late nineteenth century, brought to light the traditional, moral, philosophical, functional, technical and aesthetic values that had begun to eliminate. Great Japanese artists, art critics and ceramists, such as Soetsu Yanagi and Shōji Hamada, as well as the emblematic personality of the English potter Bernard Leach, after caring for the revival of Japanese pottery, believed that they should disseminate the philosophy of traditional Japanese pottery around the world and especially in the post-war U.S.A. where it found a significant response from great American potters and clay artists, but also from the educational system of the country.  This article aims to focus precisely on the significant influence that postwar American ceramic art received from traditional Japanese pottery ideals. The author in order to document the reasons for this new order of things, will study and analyze the work of important American potters and ceramic artists of the time, and will highlight the social, philosophical and cultural context of the time in which the whole endeavor took place. 


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Neville

Between 1525 and 1640, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in the world of print: England saw the production of more than two dozen editions identified by their imprints or by contemporaries as 'herbals'. Sarah Neville explains how this genre grew from a series of tiny anonymous octavos to authoritative folio tomes with thousands of woodcuts, and how these curious works quickly became valuable commodities within a competitive print marketplace. Designed to serve readers across the social spectrum, these rich material artifacts represented both a profitable investment for publishers and an opportunity for authors to establish their credibility as botanists. Highlighting the shifting contingencies and regulations surrounding herbals and English printing during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the book argues that the construction of scientific authority in Renaissance England was inextricably tied up with the circumstances governing print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781009031615.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-228
Author(s):  
Constantin Ardeleanu

This paper explores the social dimension of cruising by looking at new forms of sociality created by the advent of steamboats along the Danube and in the Black Sea. Since a Viennese steamship company introduced cruises between Vienna and Istanbul in the mid-1830s, Austrian steamboats became a busy stage of diverse social encounters. The idea of ships as “floating spaces”, “historical arenas” or “contact zones” in which different cultures meet has been developed by scholars for a long time. Framed within the new mobilities paradigm, this paper details a large range of social interactions on board Austrian steamers based on the accounts of more than a dozen travellers who plied along the Vienna–Istanbul route in the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s. With sociality as an integral part of modern transportation, this paper analyses the early phases in the industrialisation and commodification of travelling and focuses on the social experiences that steamboat cruising provided to customers.


Author(s):  
Sabri Çelik

Migration is a phenomenon that affects individuals and societies multi-dimensionally. Migration, whether voluntary or forced is a troublesome process for immigrants, because everything in their lives changes. Migration affects both immigrants and local people who live in migration areas. In this study, economic and educational effects of migration are discussed. In fact, in many places and in many countries, governments help immigrants with basic vital needs and if immigrants try to continue their efforts to establish new order, many them do succeed. Several precautions have been taken for immigrant children in many places such as language courses, training and financial aid in many countries to improve on the educational performance of immigrants. If we look at the other side of the coin however, social inclusion, discrimination, stigmatization experiences of immigrants should also be searched, because the social dimension of migration is still an open sore in many places of the world.


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