scholarly journals The Limbu Script and the Production of Religious Books in Nepal

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-69
Author(s):  
Martin Gaenszle

Abstract With the rise of ethnic politics in Nepal, the Limbu (or: Yakthumba) have made increasing use of the Limbu script, also known as Srijanga or Kiranti. Whereas in the past this script was suppressed by the state and known only to a minority, since the return of democracy to Nepal in the 1990s a new literature using this script has come into being. Here, religious books play a prominent role. This essay deals with the emerging importance of the script as a marker of ethnicity since its first general propagation by Iman Singh Chemjong and Phalgunanda Lingden in the early twentieth century. It focuses on the early production of printed books, in particular books published by followers of the Satyahangma movement, which promotes reforms of Kiranti religion and society.

Hydrofictions ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 69-107
Author(s):  
Hannah Boast

This chapter examines the changing meanings of swamp drainage in Israel’s national mythology. Swamp drainage was undertaken in the early twentieth century by the Jewish National Fund and again after the establishment of the State of Israel. Once seen as a triumph of Zionist ingenuity, draining swamps was redefined in the late twentieth century as an emblem of Zionism’s environmental hubris. This chapter assesses this history through Meir Shalev’s magical realist novel The Blue Mountain (1988), situating Shalev’s text in its contemporary contexts of environmentalism and post-Zionism.


Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.


Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.


Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Andrea Bonfanti

This essay demonstrates that it is impossible to appreciate the actions of the Italian communist Emilio Sereni without considering his Zionist background. Anyone who is interested in understanding the complexities of communism in the past century and to avoid simplistic conclusions about this ideology will benefit from the study. The problem at stake is that researchers often approach communism in a monolithic manner, which does not adequately explain the multiform manifestations (practical and theoretical) of that phenomenon. This ought to change and to this extent this essay hopes to contribute to that recent strand of historical research that challenges simplistic views on communism. More specifically, by analysing the Management Councils that Sereni created in postwar Italy, we can see that many of their features in fact derived from, or found their deepest origins in, his previous experience as a committed socialist Zionist. The study, then, also relates Sereni to and looks at the broader experiences of early twentieth-century Zionism and Italian communism in the early postwar years.


Author(s):  
Aneta Drożdż

This paper presents a short history of Polish formations protecting the governing bodies of the state, starting from the moment Poland regained independence at the end of the twentieth century. The considerations are presented against the rules and principles of the functioning of the state security system, with particular emphasis on the control subsystem. This paper demonstrates the need to research attitudes to safety in the past, in order to develop and apply effective contemporary solutions. The considerations contained in it also concern the existing threats to the management of state organs. They may contribute to further discussions on the purpose and rules of operation of the formation which is supposed to protect the most important people in the state.


2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
Marion Bowman

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert J Van Klinken

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish mission became an established branch of Protestant mission in general. As the Jewish converts to Protestantism remained fairly few in numbers, these converts were expected to engage in missionary efforts too, among their fellow Jews. One of the results of the ensuing polarization was the exclusion of baptized Jews from the citizenship of the State of Israel, where they were considered traitors by a majority of society. This article argues that programmes for Jewish-Christian dialogue in the State of Israel came under pressure to bar the Jewish Christians from taking part, and explores the question whether the ensuing policies can be ranked as examples of discrimination against this group.


Author(s):  
Meredith Martin

This chapter looks closely at the rise of state-funded English education to uncover the disciplinary role that poetry played. It shows how the naturalization of English “meter” was a crucial part of the English literary curriculum. “Meter” is placed in quotation marks because the “meter” that emerges in the state-funded classroom has little to do with the prosody wars going on outside its walls. Educational theorist Matthew Arnold's cultural metrics, in which poetry by Shakespeare, for instance, will subtly and intimately transform a student into a good citizen, is replaced by a patriotic pedagogy wherein verses written in rousing rhythms are taught as a naturally felt English “beat.” It suggests that poet and educational theorist Henry Newbolt's figure of the “drum” performed a naturalized rhythm that brought England together as a collective. The collective mass identification with (and proliferation of) patriotic verses created an even sharper divide between the high and low, elite and mass, private and public cultures of poetry in the early twentieth century.


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