scholarly journals Kuzhikkanam (Tomb-fee & Land Tenure): A Re-Discovery from Historical Palm Leave Manuscripts

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Ignatius Payyappilly

This article is an attempt to explore and analyse the practice of levying Kuzhikkanam (tomb fee) for the burial of dead bodies in the Syrian church cemeteries in Kerala. There are eighteenth and nineteenth century palm leaf records in the Syrian churches which provide a lot of interesting information on this practice. This term is borrowed from the secular practice of levying Kulikkanam (Kuzhikkanam), that is, rent paid for cultivating the land that was newly brought under cultivation by land improvements either through reclamation or deforestation.Keywords: Kuzhikkanam, Kulikkanam, tomb-fee, Land tenure, Palm-leaf record, Kaikkaran (Trustee), Panayam (Mortgage)

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ignatius Payyappilly

This paper is an attempt to explore and analyse the practice of the institution of slavery observed by the Syrian Christian communities in Kerala. There are eighteenth and nineteenth century palm leaf (manuscript) records in the Syrian Christian churches in Kerala establishing the same which needs to be understood in its secular and spiritual senses since these records are evidence of both the secular practice of slavery as a social custom and a religious practice of adima (slave) offering as a spiritual activity. So also, this paper is an attempt to explore and analyse the origin of adimappanam or adimakasu found in the Church records. Keywords: Syrian Christians; Slavery; Palm leave records; Adima; Adimappanam; Slave offering


1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-169
Author(s):  
James A. Reilly

The importance of sharī‘a law-court registers as sources for the social and economic history of Syria/Bilād al-Shām in the Ottoman period has been recognized for some time. A number of studies based on them have appeared, but the registers are so vast that scholars have in fact barely begun to investigate them. The Historical Documents Center (Markaz al-Wathā’iq al-Tārīkhīya) in Damascus holds over one thousand volumes. Additional originals exist in Israel/Palestine and a large collection of Syrian and Palestinian registers is available on microfilm at the University of Jordan (Amman). Although it is difficult to use the Lebanese registers nowadays (and those of Sidon may have been destroyed) a volume of the Tripoli registers from the seventeenth century has been published in facsimile by the Lebanese University. Dearth of material, therefore, is not a problem. One obstacle facing researchers, however, is unfamiliarity with the manner in which the registers present information. Persons whose native tongue is not Arabic have the additional problem of language to overcome. Therefore, an orientation to the registers is helpful, and this article is written with that purpose in mind.


2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 366-388
Author(s):  
Alison K. Smith

AbstractIn the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Russian Empire, a new set of state-sponsored provincial newspapers began to include notices seeking fugitives and trying to identify arrested vagrants and found dead bodies. The notices were part of a larger effort to match individuals with specific legal identities based in social estate (soslovie). In principle, every individual subject of the Russian Empire belonged to a specific owner (in the case of serfs) or to a specific soslovie society (in the case of nearly everyone else). The notices were an effort to link people who had left their proper place to their “real” identity. To accomplish this, the notices also made use of a kind of simple biometrics or anthropometrics in order to move beyond an individual's telling of his or her own identity. By listing height, hair and eye color, the shape of nose, mouth, and chin, and other identifying features, the notices were intended to allow for more exact identification. This version of identification developed out of previous practices grounded in the documentary requirements of the tsarist state, and they were slightly ahead of their time in the context of nineteenth-century developments in the sphere of identification practices. They were also distinct from other kinds of anthropometric practices of classification developed at the same time or soon thereafter—where many sought to use physical measurements to classify people by race or by inclination to criminality, the Russian system had no such goals.


2000 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. John Green

Though a nation of discordant regionalism and historically weak central institutions, Colombia can paradoxically claim strong currents of popular national identity. It is well known that long centuries of relative economic isolation, coupled with Colombia's largely subsistence internal economy and torturous topography, provided few opportunities to integrate the nation's different regions. Such conditions resulted in fractured regional identities and racial compositions. What few links to the world market Colombia enjoyed before the late nineteenth century came from the mining of gold, with short episodes of tobacco and quinine exportation. Only in the 1880s and later did coffee production finally reorient the nation's economy and introduce new questions of land tenure and social relations. Colombia's fiercely partisan political system evolved during the nineteenth century, therefore, when the country was still overwhelmingly rural, inward-looking, and little more than a collection of semi-autonomous regions. Keith Christie noted that before the 1950s, regionalism was so strong that “Bogotá was essentially just another provincial capital.” As a consequence, the national army in the nineteenth century seldom proved more powerful than the many rebel armies it faced. Indeed, according to the basic Weberian definition of the “state” as the entity that controls a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and evidenced by the fact that the national government still does not control large portions of the country's territory, Colombia's central state structures continue to be glaringly weak at the end of the twentieth century.


Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nélia Dias

This paper attempts to examine nineteenth-century French skull collections and to shed light on how, why, and when they came to play such a significant intellectual role in physical anthropology. It also seeks to analyze the notion of series of skulls and the sequential arrangement of skulls. It argues that this sort of collection gained particular relevance in Republican France, where the cult of dead bodies was replaced by the secular cult of bones.


1986 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Hodkinson

‘The problem of Spartan land tenure is one of the most vexed in the obscure field of Spartan institutions.’ Walbank's remark is as true today as when it was written nearly thirty years ago. Controversy surrounding this subject has a long tradition going back to the nineteenth century and the last thirty years have witnessed no diminution in the level of disagreement, as is demonstrated by a comparison of the differing approaches in the recent works by Cartledge, Cozzoli, David and Marasco. Although another study runs the risk of merely adding one more hypothesis to the general state of uncertainty, a fundamental reassessment of the question is required, not least because of its significance for the historian's interpretation of the overall character of Spartiate society. Through the introduction of a new perspective it may be possible to advance our understanding of the subject.In Section I of this essay I shall attempt to review several influential scholarly theories and to examine their feasibility and the reliability of the evidence upon which they are based. Section II will begin to construct a more plausible alternative account which is based upon more trustworthy evidence. Finally, Section III will discuss a comparatively underemphasised aspect of the topic, the property rights of Spartiate women, which suggests a rather different interpretation of the character of land tenure and inheritance from those more usually adopted.


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