Humility and the humble: A reading of the Nepali short stories of Maheshbikram Shah

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kritika Chettri
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on a comparative analysis of the chronicling of the civil war in Nepal, within the collection of short stories by Maheshbikram Shah, titled Chapamar ko Choro (‘The guerrilla’s son’), with the novels Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle and Urgen ko Ghoda (‘Urgen’s horse’) by Yug Pathak, and a memoir, Khalanga ma Hamla (‘Attack at Khalanga’), by Radha Paudel. I argue that the short stories adopt a lens of humility in viewing the conflict as opposed to the totalizing narratives of the novels and the memoir that seek to represent their idea of a humble life. The stories engage with an everyday life of the conflict that overturns its representation into a humble life within the novels. This argument opens up a myriad of questions about forms and ways of seeing: what does it mean to have humility in the face of a conflict? How does humility reconcile with questions of agency and dignity? If humility is a way of seeing, then does it also influence the form taken by the short stories? What are the ethical dimensions of the relationship humility forges between self and others? As the article seeks to answer these questions, the aim will be to establish the short stories of Shah as providing an interpretation of the conflict that remains obliterated within the novels and the memoir.

scholarly journals Education for Critical Community and the Pedagogy of Asylum: Two Responses to the Crisis Of University Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leszek Koczanowicz ◽  
Rafał Włodarczyk
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
University Education ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The University ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe current heated debate on the deteriorating status of the university raises a range of pertinent questions, including: What role can the humanities play in culture today in the face of the crisis of higher education? To answer this question, the authors begin by problematizing the relationship between culture, the humanities, and education. In the second part of the paper, they examine the changing role of the humanities in conjunction with the understandings of culture, and outline three salient ways in which culture is conceived of today. Subsequently, they focus on the loss of the dominant status that culture suffered when everyday life was discovered in modernity. In the third part, they argue that everyday life, or rather social representations of everyday life and its practices, are currently becoming the chief criterion for assessing culture, the humanities, and education. However, everyday life remains complex both in theoretical conceptualizations and in research observations. For example, everyday life harbors a range of risks and anxieties which are veiled by its own obviousness and reinforced by socialization. The authors conclude that, given this, everyday life in democratic societies calls for the work of understanding, support, affirmation, and criticism, in which the humanities can retain their superior status. In the fourth part, the authors discuss non-consensual democracy, critical community, and the pedagogy of asylum as the forms of organization and action that promote an auspicious interconnection of culture, the humanities, and education.

scholarly journals Scenes of Commitment

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bharat Jayram Venkat
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Private Clinic ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The Face ◽  
Familial Obligations ◽  
The Relationship

What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic’s staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the relationship between what were experienced as divergent or contradictory commitments—to treatment and to close kin—in terms of what I call hierarchical subsumption. This mode of response worked not simply to recast treatment as noncontradictory with familial obligations; rather, the commitment to therapy became hierarchically subsumed by and therefore necessary to the fulfillment of such kin-based commitments. In attending to those ordinary moments in which commitments are felt to be at odds, I suggest that we might develop a better understanding of the particular styles of ethical reasoning that people employ to manage such conflictual situations, which refuse the kind of tacitness that scholars have associated with everyday life.

scholarly journals Reconceptualization of Gender Relations in Saeed’s Amal Unbound and Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter

sjesr ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-138
Author(s):  
Dr. Muhammad Asif ◽  
Nimra Zafar ◽  
Tahreem Iftikhar
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Women's Status ◽  
Women’S Status ◽  
Cultural Milieu ◽  
The Face ◽  
Objectification Of Women ◽  
The Relationship

This study examines gender relations in Saeed's 'Amal Unbound' and Rao's 'Girls Burn Brighter. The basic aim of this study is to review the existing patriarchal norms that exploit women. This comparative analysis seeks to offer a postmodern feminist worldview by redefining and reconceptualizing women's status, explaining their strengths, and granting them subject status. This study questions the concepts of rationality that perpetuate normative gender stereotypes and demands a brand new way of conceptualizing truth by breaking down the categories. It challenges the authorities, stereotypes, icons, and sexist values. Both texts that are examined in this study are set in the backdrop of the socio-cultural milieu of Pakistan and India. By presenting the cultures of two different countries, an effort has been put in to reconsider gender relations as a means of resistance. It reflects on the relationship between women and the environment and recognizes women's steadfastness in the face of oppression. Furthermore, an attempt has been made to undo patriarchal male coercion and explore the reasons for the continued proliferation of conscious and unconscious objectification of women.

The Germans and their Jewish Neighbors on the Ukrainian Areas at the Second Half of the 19th Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
D. Meshkov
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
South West ◽  
Multiethnic Population ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Relationship

The article presents some of the author’s research results that has got while elaboration of the theme “Everyday life in the mirror of conflicts: Germans and their neighbors on the Southern and South-West periphery of the Russian Empire 1861–1914”. The relationship between Germans and Jews is studied in the context of the growing confrontation in Southern cities that resulted in a wave of pogroms. Sources are information provided by the police and court archival funds. The German colonists Ludwig Koenig and Alexandra Kirchner (the resident of Odessa) were involved into Odessa pogrom (1871), in particular. While Koenig with other rioters was arrested by the police, Kirchner led a crowd of rioters to the shop of her Jewish neighbor, whom she had a conflict with. The second part of the article is devoted to the analyses of unty-Jewish violence causes and history in Ak-Kerman at the second half of the 19th and early years of 20th centuries. Akkerman was one of the southern Bessarabia cities, where multiethnic population, including the Jews, grew rapidly. It was one of the reasons of the pogroms in 1865 and 1905. The author uses criminal cases` papers to analyze the reasons of the Germans participation in the civilian squads that had been organized to protect the population and their property in Ackerman and Shabo in 1905.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Mimetic Monsters

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Edge Of Chaos ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?

Óscar Romero and the Politics of Sainthood

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The One

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization

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