Scholarship and Inquiry in Early Mesopotamia

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Paul Delnero
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Knowledge Acquisition ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
The Many ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThousands of texts documenting the activities of scribes and scholars that shed light on the social context of scholarship and scientific inquiry survive from the first half of Mesopotamian history (c. 3400 bc to c. 1600 bc). Since these texts provide ample evidence that scholarship occupied a central place in Mesopotamian culture and society during the period in question, examining their content is essential to reconstructing what can be known about scientific knowledge and practice in the ancient world. In this chapter some of this evidence will be considered in order to present a modest overview of the social position and intellectual processes of knowledge acquisition and inquiry during the first phase of Mesopotamian history and to address preliminarily some of the many questions that can be asked about scholarship and inquiry in early Mesopotamia.

scholarly journals Influence of CAG Repeat Polymorphism on the Targets of Testosterone Action

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Tirabassi ◽  
Angelo Cignarelli ◽  
Sebastio Perrini ◽  
Nicola delli Muti ◽  
Giorgio Furlani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Body Composition ◽  
Neurodegenerative Disorders ◽  
Genetic Parameter ◽  
Cag Repeat ◽  
Repeat Polymorphism ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Psychiatric Status ◽  
Male Sexual Function ◽  
The Many ◽  
Shed Light

In the last decade, ample evidence has demonstrated the growing importance of androgen receptor (AR) CAG repeat polymorphism in andrology. This genetic parameter is able to condition the peripheral effects of testosterone and therefore to influence male sexual function and fertility, cardiovascular risk, body composition, bone metabolism, the risk of prostate and testicular cancer, the psychiatric status, and the onset of neurodegenerative disorders. In this review, we extensively discuss the literature data and identify a role for AR CAG repeat polymorphism in conditioning the systemic testosterone effects. In particular, our main purpose was to provide an updated text able to shed light on the many and often contradictory findings reporting an influence of CAG repeat polymorphism on the targets of testosterone action.

scholarly journals Some Great Moments in the Practice of Forestry in Québec (1910–2020)

2021 ◽  
Vol 97 (01) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Pierre Mathieu
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Forestry Practices ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Many ◽  
Crown Lands

In 1910, the Forestry School at Laval University was founded at the instigation of the Government of Quebec so that research provides the knowledge needed to intelligently manage the Crown lands. The two and sole teachers at this school were Gustave-Clodomir Piché and Avila Bédard. These first two Quebec forest engineers would develop many forest programs and organizations in Quebec at a time when everything had to be built. It has therefore been a little over 110 years that we have been teaching and practising scientific forestry in Quebec. Scientific knowledge, cultural values, social context, various forest regimes not to mention the many forestry crises have contributed to the evolution of forestry practices.

Collaborative Remembering

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Memory Research ◽  
Collaborative Memory ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many

Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common interest and growing research area, there is currently relatively little crosstalk between perspectives. This is at least partly due to differences in the assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions that guide different approaches, and which can make it difficult to synthesize and compare methods and findings. The primary purpose of this book is to feature outstanding recent work on collaborative remembering across several fields and subfields (including developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, discourse processing, philosophy, neuropsychology, design, and media studies), to highlight the points of overlap and contrast, and to initiate conversations and debate both within and across the various perspectives. Toward that end, we present a comprehensive and field-defining set of chapters that illustrate the many different perspectives of collaborative memory research, and demonstrate the nuance and complexity of collaborative remembering within and across research traditions.

Sound-Making Objects

2021 ◽  
pp. 289-324
Author(s):  
Ellen Swift ◽  
Jo Stoner ◽  
April Pudsey
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Acoustic Environment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alarm Sounds ◽  
Shed Light

The chapter investigates a specific functional category of objects of everyday life: sound-producing objects, with a focus on ordinary, simple items such as bells, clappers, and rattles, and their social function and contribution to everyday experience. After an initial overview of the types of artefacts studied and their dating, evidence from a close examination of the objects themselves is set alongside wider knowledge of their use and social context available from visual and textual sources, and historical and anthropological studies that shed light on the social function of sound-making objects. An innovative aspect of this chapter is the use of evidence from artefact replicas regarding likely notes played, and the volume of the sound produced. This directly inform understanding of the possible roles played by particular types of instruments within everyday social experience in Roman and late antique Egypt, for instance whether they were suited to public performance, more individual entertainment and play, or wider social functions such as the production of alarm sounds, and their audibility to different social groups with discrepant hearing capacity, such as young children, or elderly people. Drawing on experimental recording data including the recreation of the acoustic environment within a Romano-Egyptian house, the final section examines how the sounds produced by the objects may have contributed more widely to the creation of ambient environments and collective experiences.

Latin

2021 ◽  
pp. 559-571
Author(s):  
Réka Forrai
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
The Social ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts ◽  
Shed Light

Latin-Greek and Greek-Latin translations projects, even if asymmetric in their output, are strongly interconnected. This chapter discusses translations made from Greek into Latin in an attempt to reconstruct the canon of translated Greek works in the Latin West. It offers an overview of the major chronological stages of the translation activities, as well as an enumeration of translators and their translations. The chapter also aims to shed light on the social context in which the translator and his text are embedded: patrons, libraries, manuscripts, lay and ecclesiastical courts, religious orders, and cities involved.

‘We can’t live without beliefs’: Self and society in therapeutic engagements

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suvi Salmenniemi
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Emotional Wellbeing ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethical Work ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Shed Light

Therapeutic technologies of happiness, emotional wellbeing and self-improvement are a highly influential cultural phenomenon and a rapidly growing business worldwide; yet little is known of the motivations for engaging with these technologies. This article addresses this gap by investigating how therapeutic engagements are experienced and what participants hope to gain from them. Therapeutic technologies are conceived as psychologically informed regimes of knowledge and practice which aim to transform one’s relationship to oneself and shape the ways in which one makes sense of and acts upon oneself and the social world. Drawing on a set of interviews with consumers of therapeutic technologies in Russia, the article identifies three key motivations for engaging with such technologies: searching for new blueprints for ethical work on the self after a profound transformation of the ideological field; coming to terms with new mechanisms of inequality, particularly in the field of labour; and mobilizing therapeutic technologies as a response to inadequacies in the field of health. By unpacking these motivations and subjective experiences of therapeutic engagements, the article seeks to shed light on the growing popularity of therapeutic technologies under contemporary capitalism.

What's the Fuss about Social Constructivism?

Episteme ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
John Dupré
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Social Enterprise ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Many ◽  
Social Construction Of Science

The topic of this paper is social constructivist doctrines about the nature of scientific knowledge. I don't propose to review all the many accounts that have either claimed this designation or had it ascribed to them. Rather I shall try to consider in a very general way what sense should be made of the underlying idea, and then illustrate some of the central points with two central examples from biology. The first thing to say is that, on the face of it, some doctrine of the social construction of science must self-evidently be true. The notion of science as progressing through the efforts of solitary geniuses may have had some plausibility in the seventeenth century, but it has none today. Science is a massively cooperative, social, enterprise. And surely it is constructed. Scientific knowledge doesn't grow on trees; it is produced through hard work by human agents. Putting these two banal points together we conclude that science is socially constructed.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Simonett
Keyword(s):  
World Music ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Elites ◽  
Identity Discourses ◽  
The Many ◽  
Cultural Agency ◽  
Shed Light

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the inner workings and cultural significance of the accordion. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to reevaluate the accordion and the many musicultural traditions associated with this instrument. It considers the specific histories and cultural significance of a variety of accordion traditions to shed light onto the instrument's enigmatic popularity in the New World. Because power relations between the social elites and the working class—often immigrants or marginalized ethnic communities—have shaped the accordion's histories across the Americas, issues that emerge as pivotal include identity, discourses of inclusion/exclusion, marginality, and cultural agency; music's capability to engender community; sound aesthetics; and the accordion's place in mainstream and “world music.” An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Publishing Houses and the 'Discovery' of Brazil, 1930–1950

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Pellegrino Soares
Keyword(s):  
Popular Science ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Educational Structure ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many ◽  
Selection Of

The flourishing of the publishing market in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century is associated with the social, economic, and political transformations that accompanied the advent of the republic and, after 1930, the inflections of the so-called Vargas era. Publishers with growing prestige began to create repertoires that could capture the multiple dimensions of the nation and affirm identarian matrices. Through letters, lively soirées, and political complicities, they constituted solid sociability networks, reflected in the names of the authors in their catalogues. In the presentation and selection of works, they assimilated the impulses of the modernist and regionalist literary movements, revealing talents from various regions of Brazil. They benefited from the expansion of educational policies, the birth of universities, and the maturing of the human sciences. In addition, they made efforts to educate the reading public using rigorously organized collections under the curatorships of renowned writers and bibliophiles. They were aware of the cultural mission they carried out in a country with a still-precarious cultural and educational structure. Among the many collections which appeared, involving the translation of classics of literature or foreign popular science books, a central place was given to the '(re)discovery of Brazil.' In austere or finely made editions, the Brasilianas (works about Brazil), literary collections, individual works by Brazilian writers, poets, and essayists from different generations, and also foreign perspectives of Brazil all gained materiality. Echoing the famous phrase by the Paulista writer Monteiro Lobato, “a country that makes men and book,” the publishers of the period acted in a profound connection—even in positions of confrontation—with the ideas of the nation that appeared on the horizon at that time.

What Makes Art Art?

1975 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Mary H. Kaprelian
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

Those of us in the field of dance may encounter difficulties discussing the many facets of dance among ourselves, but most of us take for granted that dance can be an art form. Currently, however, there are many approaches to dance including chance choreography, the dance happening, non-dance, and minimal dance which are in radical contrast to what has generally been accepted as the art of dance. It is reasonable to raise questions about how the new dance forms fit into the established scheme of things. It is reasonable to also raise questions about the defining properties of art in general. The purpose of this paper is to point out very briefly, some of the thoughts of respected aestheticians on the concept of art. An examination of pertinent aesthetic theory will indicate there can be no simple answer to the question, “What is art?”. There is no one theory of the artistic which offers a comprehensive explanation. A cross section of references chosen for their readability, accessibility, and relatedness bears this out. Although there are no articles devoted specifically to dance, one can sift through the material and find what pertains not only to art in general, but also to dance.Because the world of art is always changing, the phrase, “work of art,” is bound to be used in varying ways. Paul Ziff has pointed out the difficulties in arriving at a definition of art. Disputes occur simply because of what critics mean when they refer to something as being a work of art. Ziff maintains that these disputes must always be examined in the social context in which they occur.

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