scholarly journals THE “CORDIAL MAN”: A LATIN AMERICAN CONCEPT IN THE BRAZILIAN ESSAY

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (41) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Pedro Meira Monteiro

Abstract: This article analyzes Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil (1936), a seminal book in the Brazilian essayist tradition. Discussion begins with the limits of Brazil’s search for national specificity, so as to consider Brazilian cultural formation as a projection of its colonial Iberian roots. In this context, the “cordial man” emerges as a metaphor for the lack of public space in Brazil. On the one hand, the cordial man is a product of turn-of-the-century debates on Latin American exceptionalism, a figure almost capable of withstanding the disillusions of the modern world. On the other hand, the cordial man offers Buarque de Holanda a window into the limits of democratic liberalism and the personalistic political traditions of Latin America: an impasse discussed at length but never resolved in Roots of Brazil. Ultimately, the book permits a deeper questioning of the collective pulses and individual desires that, together, form the matter to which populism would respond, a political form temporarily capable of meeting the people’s demands.

Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov

‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethno-national mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’ This is the central question of a book arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies. The book discusses the themes of public space/sphere, the Tanzimat reforms, millet, modernity, nationalism, governmentality, and the modern state, among others. It offers a new, thirteen-point model of modern belonging based on the concept of ruler visibility.


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-112
Author(s):  
Antonio A. Arantes

This structural analysis focuses on the compadrio system. The empirical background is provided by observation carried out among sertanejo peasants of Bahia in the late 1960s and by the literature on the Latin American and Southern European variants of this institution. It is mainly concerned with two complementary problems. On the one hand, to draw a model that might represent that institution's elementary structure, virtually present in the variants of this system; on the other, to offer an interpretation of its meaning, by contrasting it with elements of the kinship and marriage systems, and taking in consideration the peasants' religious background. This exercise was inspired by Edmund Leach's Rethinking anthropology and his ideas about the Virgin Birth. Analytical perspectives for further research are suggested.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Spector

On his mother's side, W. Cameron Forbes was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on his father's, the grandson of John Murray Forbes, who made his fortune in the China clipper trade. He carried in his heredity the shrewd business ability of the one and the liberalism of the other. In Hofstadter's turn of phrase, he was the patrician as liberal. His wealth, his education — the best available (Milton Academy, Hopkinson School, Harvard) — would have entitled him to admittance to the innermost recesses of post-Civil War Republicanism. Yet he remained at best only affiliated with that party, and at heart an outspoken Independent. In 1892, on graduation from Harvard, he joined Stone and Webster, later gained experience in business as officer and director of several Boston banks, and then, just before the turn of the century, joined the family firm of J. M. Forbes and Co., Merchants.


THE BULLETIN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (390) ◽  
pp. 44-49
Author(s):  
R. Aetdinova ◽  
I. Maslova ◽  
Sh. Niyazbekova ◽  
O. Balabanova ◽  
Zh. Zhakiyanova ◽  
...  

The article justifies for the need to identify and to keep track, in practice, of different groups of risks inherent in educational institutions under current conditions of pandemic and post-pandemic transformation of education under the influence of modern world uncertainty. Transformation of education functions in the epoch of digital economy changes the content and types of risks concomitant to the activities carried out by schools. Schools belong to the most conservative types of organizations. However, the environment in which schools operate is constantly changing. An educational institution, as any enterprise, has to engage in the activity aimed at risk management. Manifestation of the risk is, on the one hand, fraught with threats and damage, on the other hand, with opportunities. Assessment of possible threats and risks allows timely projection of undesirable results, creation of a system for situational response to unforeseen circumstances and, in the final analysis, formulation of a strategy for development of the university which would allow achievement of modern high quality education, its fundamentality and conformity to important topical requirements of the personality, society and state. Causes of developing risks characteristic of educational institutions are disclosed. External and internal risks characteristic of educational institutions, sources generating them and the importance of managing them are analyzed. The analysis of risks made reveals multi-varied threats and opportunities in the external and internal envi-ronment of the institution and their ability to have a significant effect on educational, organizational and financial activities of the schools.


2019 ◽  
pp. 114-135
Author(s):  
David Brydan

Social experts played an important but contested role in Francoist attempts to establish Spain as an influential power in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. By encouraging Spanish experts to form ties with their Latin American colleagues, the Franco regime aimed to promote an image of itself as modern, scientific, and technically advanced on the one hand, and as socially progressive on the other. Despite the significant resources dedicated to this task, the Francoist narrative was strongly resisted both by Latin American leftists and by exiled Republican social experts who promoted a more collaborative model of Ibero-American identity. Nevertheless, Latin America did offer a route through which Francoist experts were able to engage with wider forms of international health and welfare. In areas such as social security, it also provided an opportunity for the regime to promote its vision of Francoist modernity to the outside world.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Giorgi

Resumen: Distintas intervenciones desde prácticas activistas y culturales en torno al VIH escenifican poéticas y políticas del resto corporal en las que se juegan, por un lado, una reorganización de los modos en que se dramatiza en umbral entre lo vivo y lo muerto en lo público –redefiniendo así el tejido mismo de lo que llamamos “comunidad”—; y por otro, indican los modos en que estos activismos impulsan una disputa sobre los “marcos de temporalización” desde los cuales lo viviente se vuelve reconocible políticamente y donde la noción de supervivencia adquiere una centralidad decisiva. Combinando materiales heterogéneos el artículo busca iluminar los modos en que los activismos y las culturas en torno al VIH configuran un terreno decisivo para pensar políticas de la supervivencia del presente. Palabras clave: VIH, ACT-UP, Supervivencia, Temporalidades, Biopolítica. Abstract: Different interventions from activist and cultural practices around HIV staged poetics and politics of the body remmant. They implie, on the one hand, a reorganitzation of the dramatization of the threshold between the living and the dead in the public space; and on the other, they indicate the ways in which these activisms mobilize a dispute over the “frames of temporalization” from which the living becomes politically recognizable and where the notion of survival acquires a decisive centrality. Combining heterogeneous materials, the article seeks to illuminate the ways in which activism and cultures on HIV constitute a decisive ground for thinking about the present policies of survival. Keywords: IHV, ACT-UP, Survival, Biopolitics.


Author(s):  
C. Philip Beaman

The modern world is noisy. Streets are cacophonies of traffic noise; homes and workplaces are replete with bleeping timers, announcements, and alarms. Everywhere there is the sound of human speech—from the casual chatter of strangers and the unwanted intrusion from electronic devices through to the conversations with friends and loved ones one may actually wish to hear. Unlike vision, it is not possible simply to “close our ears” and shut out the auditory world and nor, in many cases, is it desirable. On the one hand, soft background music or environmental sounds, such as birdsong or the noise of waves against the beach, is often comfortingly pleasurable or reassuring. On the other, alarms are usually auditory for a reason. Nevertheless, people somehow have to identify, from among the babble that surrounds them, the sounds and speech of interest and importance and to follow the thread of a chosen speaker in a crowded auditory environment. Additionally, irrelevant or unwanted chatter or other background noise should not hinder concentration on matters of greater interest or importance—students should ideally be able to study effectively despite noisy classrooms or university halls while still being open to the possibility of important interruptions from elsewhere. The scientific study of auditory attention has been driven by such practical problems: how people somehow manage to select the most interesting or most relevant speaker from the competing auditory demands made by the speech of others or isolate the music of the band from the chatter of the nightclub. In parallel, the causes of auditory distraction—and how to try to avoid it where necessary—have also been subject to scrutiny. A complete theory of auditory attention must account for the mechanisms by which selective attention is achieved, the causes of auditory distraction, and the reasons why individuals might differ in their ability in both cases.


Author(s):  
Katja Garloff

This chapter jumps to the turn of the century, when the rise of racial antisemitism fostered a new Jewish self-awareness and rendered “interracial” love and marriage central to the public debates about German Jewish identity. It analyzes three German Jewish writers of different and paradigmatic political orientations, who used love stories to diagnose the reasons for the faltering of emancipation: the assimilationist Ludwig Jacobowski, the Zionist Max Nordau, and the mainstream liberal Georg Hermann. Their works, including Jacobowski's Werther the Jew (1892), Nordau's Doctor Kohn (1899), and Hermann's Jettchen Gebert (1906), show how love stories potentially escape the ideological constraints of increasingly racialized models of identity. On the one hand, the love plot affords an opportunity to expose the obstacles encountered by Jews seeking integration in times of rising antisemitism. On the other hand, the open endings of most love stories and the ambiguous use of racial language allow the authors to eschew a final verdict on the success or failure of integration. The chapter argues that the love plot generates a host of equivocations between the social and the biological, and the particular and the universal, creating a metaphorical surplus that opens up venues to rethink the project of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.


Author(s):  
Laura Quick

The conclusion brings together the threads of the preceding chapters in order to demonstrate the major insight of the book, namely, that for the biblical authors personhood was negotiated in relation to the body and bodily objects. These insights have far-reaching implications for how we understand ancient conceptions of the body, the person, and relationships. On the one hand, dress is essential to the articulation and construction of identity, and this is also the case in the modern world. On the other, the multi-material aspect to ancient bodies is very different from modern Western ontologies. Ancient constructions of dress and the body are thus like and at the same time quite unlike our own. These constructions animate and inform biblical literature, and so are essential to properly understand and unpack the Hebrew Bible.


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