Beneath the Mustache: A Well-Trimmed History of Facial Hair in the Late Ottoman Era

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-326
Author(s):  
Avner Wishnitzer

Abstract Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of visual representations and written texts, this study argues that officers, civil officials, and urban professionals who came of age in the late Hamidian era adopted the mustache as an expression of a generational identification and a related self-consciously modern masculinity that defined itself against the bearded, Hamidian order. After 1908, when the instigators of the revolution and their supporters climbed up the social and political hierarchies, the mustache rose with them and became the facial ornament of the most powerful people in the empire. Considering the common association of the mustache with youth, its adoption as a marker of identification hints at the unsettling of longtime ageist hierarchies but also, at the durability and adaptability of gender ones.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.


The present work, The Struggle of My Life: An Autobiography of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, is an English translation of Sahajanand’s autobiography, written in Hindi, Mera Jeevan Sangarsh. It carries an introduction by the translator which briefly deals with the Swami’s life and legacy. It needs to be emphasized that this is not an autobiography in the common run. Its primary focus is not on Swami’s persona; its central theme is the cause of the freedom movement in general and in particular, of the peasant movement under his leadership. It tells of the life and legacy of one of the most uncompromising and fearless freedom fighters and peasant leaders. It covers the social and political history of one of the most crucial periods of our national life, 1920–47. Today, when the Indian peasantry is faced with a number of intractable problems, it reminds them of the struggles of the peasants of yesteryears and the kind of trials and tribulations they went through. It is also remarkable that despite his vast learning and command over Sanskrit, Swami chose to write in simple, colloquial Hindi. That only speaks for his total identification with the masses. Both the teaching and student community as well as general readers would find this book useful, interesting and intellectually stimulating.


Author(s):  
Michel Biron

L’écrivain devient rarement écrivain par les voies traditionnelles de l’école. En ce sens, il constitue toujours à quelque degré un autodidacte. Toutefois, la valeur sociale d’une telle figure, qu’il s’agisse de l’écrivain lui-même ou d’un personnage de fiction, varie considérablement selon les cultures et les époques. Dans La Nausée de Jean-Paul Sartre, l’Autodidacte est un personnage complexé qui envie le savoir et la culture de Roquentin. À l’inverse, on trouve nombre de textes littéraires où la figure de l’autodidacte est valorisée. C’est particulièrement vrai dans l’histoire de la littérature québécoise, depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Cet article propose d’en faire la démonstration à travers une série d’exemples tirés de chacune des périodes, mais en insistant sur la figure de « l’autodidacte exemplaire » propre à la Révolution tranquille, qui oppose la culture comme désir à la culture comme héritage scolaire. Abstract A writer becomes rarely a writer through studying at school. Speaking of a self-made writer would seem tautological since every writer could pretend to be one at some extent. Nevertheless, the social value of the self-made writer and of it’s literary representations vary a lot from a country to another, and from a period of time to another. In La Nausée from Jean-Paul Sartre, the character of “L’Autodidacte” envy Roquentin’s background and try to walk in his step. At the opposite, there are many examples of literary texts where the self-made is appreciated, if not admired as the true possessor of culture. It’s often the case in the history of Quebec’s literature, from 19th century up to now. This article try to demonstrate such fortune of the self-made by studying examples of Quebec literature chosen in each of the main periods, but especially during the “Révolution tranquille” around the “autodidacte exemplaire” who refuse the culture as inheritance and worship culture as personal desire.


Fluminensia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković

The aim of the article is to discuss how elements of food narratives meals and kitchen tools used for cooking are used in order to consolidate and shape the Croatian cultural memory, especially in the context of its Mediterranean heritage.For this reason, the texts by Veljko Barbieri, collected in the four volumes under the common and significant title Kuharski kanconijer. Gurmanska sjećanja Mediterana, are analysed. His circum-culinary narratives are a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge, references to historical and literary sources, personal memories and literary fiction. They can be easily inscribed in the Croatian (collective and individual) identity discourse since they are able to strengthen the collective (either national and supranational, or geo-regional) identity, and to construct the cultural memory. They also show Croatia's affiliation to the Western world along with its cultural-civilization rooting in antiquity, the Mediterranean region and Christianity, thus forming a part of the founding memory that develops a narrative about the very beginnings of Croatian presence on this land. The gastronomic narratives serve to create the cultural memory and this version of history which is to stabilize the social identity described by Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen. Through his stories, Barbieri shapes memory based on the representation of the past. In the analysed narratives, the memory carriers are dishes and plates which find reference to the oldest history of Croatia rendered by myths and other narratives. Associated with dishes, the pots enable the narrator to recall the past and the identity coded in individual dishes. They also participate in the processes of repeating, storage and remembering which generate a symbiotic relationship between man and thing. The memory carriers that is, food and plates depicted in Barbieri's culinary narratives do not convey their content in a neutral way, but construct their marked images.


Author(s):  
Alexander Nikulin

The Russian Revolution is the central theme of both A. Chayanov’s novel The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia and A. Platonov’s novel Chevengur. The author of this article compares the chronicles and images of the Revolution in the biographies of Chayanov and Platonov as well as the main characters, genres, plots, and structures of the two utopian novels, and questions the very understanding of the history of the Russian Revolution and the possible alternatives of its development. The article focuses not only on the social-economic structure of utopian Moscow and Chevengur but also on the ethical-aesthetic foundations of both utopias. The author argues that the two utopias reconstruct, describe, and criticize the Revolution from different perspectives and positions. In general, Chayanov adheres to a relativistic and pluralistic perception of the Revolution and history, while Platonov, on the contrary, absolutizes the end of humankind history with the eschatological advent of Communism. In Chayanov‘s utopia, the Russian Revolution is presented as a viable alternative to the humanistic-progressive ideals of the metropolitan elites with the moderate populist-socialist ideas of the February Revolution. In Platonov’s utopia, the Revolution is presented as an alternative to the eschatological-ecological transformation of the world by provincial rebels inspired by the October Revolution. Thus, Chayanov’s liberal-cooperative utopia and Platonov’s anarchist-communist utopia contain both an apologia and a criticism of the Russian Revolution in the insights of its past and future victories and defeats, and opens new horizons for alternative interpretations of the Russian Revolution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Halimi Halimi ◽  
M. Faisol ◽  
Muhammad Majed Al-Dakhiel

<p>لقد عبر شعر الصراع (المقاومة والثورة والحرب) في بلاد الجزيرة العربية مفردات متنوعة طوال تاريخها من خلال البعدين، منهما البعد المكاني متمثلا في الأرض التي حملها الشعر دلالات ومعان تتجاوز ملامحها المادية لتكتسب بعدا روحيا وقيما عليا. والبعد الثاني يتمثل في البعد التراثي والتاريخي. فشعر الصراعات لا ينفصل من الواقع الاجتماعي، وليس هو الشعر الانعزالي، بل هو الشعر الاجتماعي الذي له علاقة متينة بواقعه، والذي يحمل رموزا تاريخية كثيرة نتيجة لامتداد العمر الزمني لهذا المجتمع من العصور القديمة، وكان المجتمع والأرض تصنع تقاليد تتطور إلى رموز، فهناك رمز للكرام وللمروءة ولمعاناة المجتمع وللصراع، وفي الرمز أسلوب فيه تلميح ومداره.</p><p><br />Throughout the history of the Arab world, the poetry of the struggle (the resistance, the revolution and the war) has been a varied vocabulary throughout its history through the two dimensions, including the spatial dimension, in the land where poetry carries meanings and meanings that transcend its physical texture to acquire a spiritual dimension and supreme value. It is the social poetry that has a strong relationship to its reality, which carries many historical symbols as a result of the extension of the temporal age of this society from antiquity. The society and the land made traditions that evolve into symbols. And the suffering of society and the conflict and the virus, and in the code style in which the tip and orbit.</p>


1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Christopher Dawson

The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-269
Author(s):  
Galina M. Yemelianova

The article analyzes the social, political, and symbolic functions of Islam in contemporary Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Over many centuries, Central Asians developed a particular form of Islam based on a productive and fluid synergy among Islam per se, their tribal legal and customary norms, and Tengrian and Zoroastrian beliefs and practices. It is characterized by a high level of doctrinal and functional adaptability to shifting political and cultural environments, the prevalence of mystical Islam (Sufism) and oral, rather than book-based, Islamic tradition. These qualities have defined distinctive Islamic trajectories in post-Soviet Central Asia, which differ significantly from those in other Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim communities in the West. At the same time, the common Eurasian space and lengthy shared political history of Central Asians and other peoples of Muslim Eurasia are also reflected in the considerable similarities in their Islamic trajectories.


Author(s):  
Robert M. Seltzer

This chapter studies the role that Hasidism played in the thought of the modernized Jewish intelligentsia of Eastern Europe toward the end of the 19th century. Simon Dubnow played a pivotal role in the emergence of this new image of Hasidism. In his autobiography, Dubnow describes in some detail the influence on him at that time of Leo Tolstoy and Ernest Renan. The influence of Renan's History of Christianity is quite evident in the structure of Dubnow's History of Hasidism as well as in some of Dubnow's solutions to problems of interpretation. Like Renan, Dubnow opened with a discussion of the social and intellectual background of a movement that can be traced to a founder known only for a long time through oral sources which retained the character of legend or saga. Applying Renan's statement that such pious biographies have a historical core, Dubnow stripped the life of the Baal Shem Tov, as recorded in the Shivhei ha-Besht, of its supernatural elements to reveal a simple, humble man who loved nature, especially the forests of the Carpathian mountains; a man who had immense affection for the common people and disdain for the proud, aloof scholars of his time and who preached a lofty doctrine of religious pantheism and universal brotherhood.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document