Individual expression, cultural specificity and production bias in Ju|’hoan jewelry-making

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex de Voogt ◽  
Siu Ying Ng
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Original Art ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The Way

Few ethnographers have documented the personal experiences of Khoisan communities and even more obscure are perceptions about San individualism and self-expression. Yet anthropologist Richard Lee, in his book The Dobe !Kung (1984), suggested that !Kung (also known as Zu|’hoasi, Ju|’hoansi or Ju|’hoan) women use different colored beads to create intricately patterned headbands whose designs are named and should be regarded as an original art form. To date, Lee’s claim about Khoisan art in their material culture has not been explicitly corroborated or confirmed. This article questions the significance of named patterns, but substantiates the presence of artistic expression through an experiment with beads involving the Ju|’hoan. Ju|’hoan jewelry reveals aesthetic principles that do not seem culturally specific when it comes to the production of jewelry, but rather more so in the context of wearing it. The concept of production bias further separates culture-specific and material-guided elements of the jewelry production. The results confirm that Ju|’hoan beadworking tradition as an art form is reflected in the personal preferences entering the patterns as well as the color schemes and size of the final product. The cultural specificity of San self-made jewelry is mainly expressed in the way it is worn and not through the designs that are created.

Lyric Cousins

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Early History ◽  
Sight Reading ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Way

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.

Entre Reforma e Contra-Reforma

1999 ◽  
Vol 7 (14) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
António Moreira Teixeira ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Major Change ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

By 1576, in order to obtain the censor’s permission to publish his two last treatises, the artist and philosopher Francisco de Holanda was forced to produce a major change in his conception of art. In an anticipation of the trend that was going to spread all over Europe some decades later, he agreed to replace his neo-platonic notion of an art of divine inspiration for a new conception of the artistic expression centred on the aristotelic caracterization of the human creative process. However, in doing that, Holanda paved the way for the development of a true methaphysics of art. In this article, the author intends to establish the network of philosophical influences that made possible this important change of course in the history of european aesthetics, as well as determine its implications.

scholarly journals Law and aesthetics: critical note

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 631-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Satie
Keyword(s):  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Law ◽  
Legal Form ◽  
Critical Note ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Conservative Approximation ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

It is thought in the theory and philosophy of law, aimed at discussing the conditions of possibility of rapprochement between the art form and legal form. The text investigates, dialectically, the implications for the legal philosophy of the impossibility of such approximation, and the problems in a conservative approximation. It follows that: 1) would be a loss for a reason and therefore to legal philosophy, not to communicate between art and law; 2) the relationship between legal and aesthetic standards should be guided by the critical, especially in terms of Adorno's thought. It is by overcoming the dichotomy between possibility and impossibility, opening on the idea of constellation of methodological categorical fields of law and aesthetics in their current forms, paving the way for understanding the legal form as a tragic way.

scholarly journals Challenges of Building and Maintaining an Image Database: a use case based on the Digital Research Archive for Byzantium (DiFAB)

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-224
Author(s):  
Nina Rannharter ◽  
Sarah Teetor
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Image Database ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Use Case ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
Metadata Standards ◽  
The University ◽  
Case Based ◽  
Digital Research

Due to the complex nature of archival images, it is an ongoing challenge to establish a metadata architecture and metadata standards that are easy to navigate and take into consideration future requirements. This contribution will present a use case in the humanities based on the Digital Research Archive for Byzantium (DiFAB) at the University of Vienna. Tracing one monument and its photographic documentation, this paper will highlight some issues concerning metadata for images of material culture, such as: various analog and digital forms of documentation; available thesauri – including problems of historical geography, multilingualism, and culturally specific terminologies –; and the importance of both precise and imprecise dating for cultural historians and their research archives.

scholarly journals Rumi, Sufi spirituality and the teacher–disciple relationship in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Gray
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Teacher Student ◽  
Teacher Student Relationship ◽  
Student Relationship ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

In William Patrick Patterson’s Struggle of the Magicians, a detailed study of the relationship between the prominent figures of Western esotericism, G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky, he writes ‘Only in a time as confused as ours could one think that the teacher–student relationship – an archetypal and sacred form – exists as an option, rather than a necessary requirement, a station on the way’ (1997: 92). My paper examines the numerous ways in which the famous teacher–disciple relationship that existed between Muhammad Jalal ad-Din, known to the anglophone world as Rumi, and his spiritual guide and mentor, Shams of Tabriz, is represented in Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love (2010) and how her depiction of this relationship is predicated upon her knowledge of, and belief in, the general principles of what can be termed ‘Western Sufism’. Although she had previously thematised elements of Sufi dialectics in her earlier fiction and clear, if minor, references to Sufi philosophy permeated novels such as The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), Shafak’s fascination with the teachings of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz reaches its culmination and most significant artistic expression in The Forty Rules of Love. Published in 2010, the novel situates a fictionalised representation of the relationship between Rumi and Shams at the centre of the narrative and provides an overt depiction of the emanationalist, perennialist and universalist ethics contained within Sufi dialectics. In addition, given that Shafak’s text represents one of the more prominent and commercially successful contributions to what Amira El-Zein (2010: 71–85) has called ‘the Rumi phenomenon’ my paper examines how, in privileging the aesthetics and the interests of American readers over conveying a more complete and more nuanced image of Sufism, Shafak succumbs to the oversimplification and decontextualisation of Rumi’s teachings perpetrated by the Western popularisers of his work.

scholarly journals Desgarrandonos de Nuestra Lengua: Ripping Us from our Language

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lillian Ramos ◽  
Julia Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Instructional Practices ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Classroom Teachers ◽  
Latina Teachers ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Language And Education ◽  
The Way

Using a testimonio methodology, this study provides insight on how language ideologies, family, and education in the Texas Borderlands impacted two Latina teachers’ view and understanding of their identity. Through our personal experiences as PK-16 students, classroom teachers, and doctoral students, we were able to understand the colonization of our language and the subsequent endangerment of our bilingualism, which upon reflecting, had an impact on how we see ourselves as individuals, bilinguals, teachers, and Latinas. Our experiences with our bilingualism affected the way in which we perceive ourselves and our community. The reflection and analysis of our experiences allowed us to adjust our mindset towards a culturally sustaining lens, to improve our instructional practices, and to accept ourselves for who we are and where we were raised. Findings reveal how others’ ideologies about language and education can have a lasting consequence on us as well as how we go about changing our mindset to one of acceptance and pride.

Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica Childhoods

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Realm

Research on pre-Columbian childhood refers to all those studies that consider the different evidence and expressions of children in Mesoamerica, prior to the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Archaeology, understandably by its very focus, has been one of the most prolific disciplines that has approached this subject of study. Currently, archaeological research focuses on highlighting the different social experiences of the past (or multi-vocality) of social identities, such as gender and childhood, and its relationship with material culture. In addition, archaeologists recognize a modern stereotype that considers children as passive or dependent beings and therefore biases childhood research in the past. Consequently, it is necessary to critically evaluate the cultural specificity of past childhood since each culture has its own way of considering that stage of the life cycle. Another problem, in the archaeological study of childhood, is to consider that children are not socially important individuals. It has been said that their activities are not significant for the economy or the social realm of communities and societies of the past. From archaeology, there exists a general perception that children are virtually unrecognizable from the archaeological record because their behavior leaves few material traces, apart from child burials. It has been since feminist critiques within the discipline that the study of childhood became of vital importance in archaeology to understand the process of gender acquisition through enculturation. This process refers to the way children learn about their gender identity through the material world that surrounds them and the various rituals that prepare them to become persons. Thus, the intent of recent studies on childhood has been to call upon archaeologists to consider children as social actors capable of making meaningful decisions on their own behalf and that they make substantial contributions to their families and their communities. In this sense, studies on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures have focused at the most basic sense on identifying the presence of children in the archaeological record or ethnohistoric sources. Its aim has been to document the different social ages that make up childhood, the ritual importance of Mesoamerican children, funerary practices, and health conditions marked in children’s bones as well as the different material and identity expressions of childhood through art and its associated material culture.

Toys

2020 ◽  
pp. 394-402
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Heath
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Cognitive Framework ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This article examines colonially-themed toys as historical sources that provide insight into the way that metropolitan boys and girls learned embrace the French empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that colonially-themed toys such as drums, dolls, and games encouraged forms of play that instilled a colonial mindset and attitude among metropolitan French children. These actions provided the foundation for a cognitive framework and worldview that naturalized colonialism and racial and civilization hierarchies. The residues of these earlier practices and imaginations remain, marking toys as a particularly rich genre of material culture with which to understand the inculcation of colonialism and lingering colonial nostalgia.

Think Pink

Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 247-276
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Girl Culture ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Challenges ◽  
The Way

Ballet has come to be an important part of girl culture, in part because so many girls in the United States take ballet at some point in their lives. Consumer products like dolls and music boxes have brought ballet into girls’ homes and reinforce a problematic link between ballet and femininity, though real girls who take ballet class are often quite thoughtful about the way ballet empowers them. Books for children, both non-fiction and fiction, have been important examples of the intersection between ballet and girl culture since the early twentieth century. Children’s ballet books deal with artistic expression, physical challenges, competition, gender, sexuality, racial and ethnic diversity, class barriers, and many other elements of real girls’ experiences with ballet class.

Physics as an Art Form

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Alvaro De Rújula
Keyword(s):  
General Relativity ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Einstein’S Equations ◽  
Einstein's Equations ◽  
Ockham’S Razor ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Ockham's Razor ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Beauty and simplicity, a scientist’s view. A first encounter with Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, space-time, and Gravity. Ockham’s Razor. Why the Universe is the way it is: The origin of the laws of Nature.

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