scholarly journals Dance in Indian culture: A cosmic manifestation of divine creation and a path to liberation

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 15-25
Author(s):  
Adriana Simoncelli
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Emotional Communication ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Time Cycle ◽  
First Time ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Material Evidence

Dance is a human cultural activity aimed at non-verbal emotional communication, mentioned for the first time in the circle of European culture by Homer in the Iliad (8th/7th century BC). In Indian culture — the most extensive one of four contemporary civilizations of antiquity (next to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese), whose cradle is the Indus Valley Civilization — the first material evidence of the presence of dance is dated between 2300–1750 BC. It is a bronze statuette of a dancing girl, making us aware of the fact that this type of activity has accompanied people since the dawn of time, regardless of their origin and cultural affiliation. India and its oldest religion, Hinduism, have made this art highly prized because of its original, pure spiritual character. The first treatise entirely devoted to dance, entitled Natyashastra (Treatise on Performing Arts), was written according to tradition between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD, although many premises indicate that its beginnings date back to the 5th century BC, and the final version — to around 5th century AD. Its author was Bharata Muni, an ancient sage, theatrologist and musicologist who allegedly received knowledge of arts from the god Brahma himself to create a symbolic representation of the world which, by showing good and evil, would persuade both the viewers and the performers to act ethically. From Natyashastra it appears that dance was created by the gods for their worship. In its most original form, dance grew out of the sacrificial ritual, hence the knowledge of it was secret, highly codified and communicated in strict confidentiality. The patron of the dance and its divine performer par excellence is the god Shiva in the aspect of Nataraja (Lord of the Dance), who in one image combines god as the creator, protector and destroyer of the universe, while simultaneously containing the Indian concept of an endless time cycle. Accurate recreation of the mythical dance initiated by Shiva guarantees that the faithful achieve salvation by overcoming sin, ignorance, and laziness represented by the demon Apasmara, on whom the god treads in a dancing trance. For the Indian Hindu culture dance has a highly important ritualistic and mystical meaning, hence it is also present along with music and singing, which is a melodic recitation of sacred verses, in all literature, from the Vedas (sacred books of Hinduism), through encyclopedic Puranas, to epics such as Mahabharata and Ramayana. Dance is indispensable to the theater as well as visual and audiovisual arts, brings relief to those in mourning and sorrow, leads to liberation from samsara (the wheel of incarnations), and is a reflection of divinity in its purest, most dynamic manifestation: movement. Thanks to dance being a rejection of oneself, entering a mystical trance, one can connect with the Absolute here on Earth and experience divinity.

Psychology and the Neoliberal Self

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Call Center ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Assessment Tests ◽  
Economic Concept ◽  
European Culture ◽  
American Psychology

This chapter investigates how neoliberal globalization is not just an economic concept or an economic condition; rather, it brings with it shifts in the spheres of culture psychology and identity. It specifically analyzes how personality and assessment tests and cross-cultural workshops on identity and difference that are primarily developed from Euro-American psychology are utilized in the Indian information technology and call center industry. The cross-cultural framework developed primarily by Western psychologists provided the most important tools, concepts, and vocabularies to understand “culture” in cultural sensitivity workshops and extended training seminars held for offshore companies, such as in India. These workshops promoted highly reified ideas about culture in which Indian work culture was viewed as inefficient, hierarchical, feudal, and indirect, whereas European culture was framed as egalitarian, professional, assertive, and non-hierarchical. This chapter reveals how neoliberal psychological discourses of self, identity, and happiness are becoming a mainstay of Indian culture and society.

scholarly journals Normalizing Vision: The Representation and Use of Spectacles and Eyeglasses in Victorian Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma Almond
Keyword(s):  
Assistive Technology ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
First Time ◽  
Material Evidence

Abstract This study explores the representation and use of Victorian visual aids, specifically focusing on how the design of spectacle and eyeglass frames shaped ideas of the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ body. It contributes to our understanding of assistive technologies in the Victorian period by showcasing the usefulness of material evidence for exploring how an object was produced and perceived. By placing visual aids in their medical and cultural context for the first time, it will show how the study of spectacle and eyeglass frames develops our understanding of Victorian society more broadly. Contemporaries drew upon industrialization, increasing education, and the proliferation of print to explain a rise in refractive vision ‘errors’. Through exploring the design of three spectacle frames from the London Science Museum’s collections, this study will show how the representations and manufacture of visual aids transformed in response to these wider changes. The material evidence, as well as contemporary newspapers, periodicals, and medical texts, reveal that visual aids evolved from an unusual to a more mainstream device. It argues that visual aids are a unique assistive technology, one that is able to inform our understanding of how Victorians measured the body and constructed ideas of ‘normalcy’ and ‘abnormalcy’.

THE ANGLO-NORMAN ABBEY CHURCH OF ST ALBANS AND THE AISLELESS NAVE OF ITS CRUCIFORM PREDECESSOR: THE MATERIAL EVIDENCE

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jill A Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Diagnostic Feature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Existing Building ◽  
Cruciform Structure ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Solid Walls

Within the Romanesque abbey church at St Albans (Hertfordshire), the vestiges of an earlier structure have been identified for the first time. A hitherto unrecorded feature in the transept, noted by the author in 2017, indicates that, at some stage, the nave lacked its existing arcade piers and instead had solid walls. The implications of this are considerable, calling for a thorough reassessment of the building’s history. For now, it is important to record the primary evidence, so as to make it available for further research. This article aims to provide a concise account of the evidence and a summary of what it might mean. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler, Matthew Paris, the existing church was begun in 1077 and completed in 1088. New evidence indicates, however, that the Romanesque building, with its aisled nave and presbytery, was preceded by a cruciform structure without aisles. The inference is that the existing building contains the fabric of this unaisled predecessor. The obvious conclusion – that it therefore represents the lost Anglo-Saxon abbey church – does not follow without question; as yet, excavation has yielded no conclusive evidence of an earlier church on the site. The critical diagnostic feature presented here for the first time adds substance to the view that the remodelling of unaisled buildings was not uncommon in the post-Conquest period, including large as well as minor churches, as identified long ago at York Minster and, more recently, at Worksop Priory.

scholarly journals Intermingling of History and Politics in The God of Small Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Md. Abdul Momen Sarker ◽  
Md. Mominur Rahman
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Election ◽  
Small Things ◽  
First Time

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is a post-modern sub-continental writer famous for her first novel The God of Small Things. This novel tells us the story of Ammu who is the mother of Rahel and Estha. Through the story of Ammu, the novel depicts the socio-political condition of Kerala from the late 1960s and early 1990s. The novel is about Indian culture and Hinduism is the main religion of India. One of the protagonists of this novel, Velutha, is from a low-caste community representing the dalit caste. Apart from those, between the late 1960s and early 1990s, a lot of movements took place in the history of Kerala. The Naxalites Movement is imperative amid them. Kerala is the place where communism was established for the first time in the history of the world through democratic election. Some vital issues of feminism have been brought into focus through the portrayal of the character, Ammu. In a word, this paper tends to show how Arundhati Roy has successfully manifested the multifarious as well as simultaneous influences of politics in the context of history and how those affected the lives of the marginalized. Overall, it would minutely show how historical incidents and political ups and downs go hand in hand during the political upheavals of a state.

Weimar, 1991; Weimar/Röcken, 1994 Zarathustra as Educator? To the Nietzsche Archives

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Rodden
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Youth Movement ◽  
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Spirit ◽  
First Time ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Last Man

“Silberblick.” Bright moment, lucky chance. A sunny day in Weimar, November 1991. Hedwig, 38, waits solemnly for me in the town square still known as Karl Marx Platz (formerly Adolf Hitler Platz). A spirited, voluble woman, Hedwig has been eager to show me the cultural splendors of her hometown—the Goethehaus, the Schillerhaus, the Liszthaus, all lining the Frauenplan in the center of old Weimar. But today she is reluctant; today, warm morning rays beaming down upon us, Hedwig seems reserved as we stride along the Schillerstrasse toward the outskirts of town. Today our destination is Humboldtstrasse 36, the Villa Silberblick, home of the Nietzsche Archive, which opened in May to the public for the first time since 1945. Hedwig hands me a May issue of Die Zeit. “The Banished One Is Back!” blazons the headline: The reopening of the Archives has been the cultural event of the year in Weimar. As we walk, I muse on the significance of the return to eastern German life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900): the author of notorious neologisms and catch phrases such as the Will to Power, the Übermensch (Superman), the Antichrist, master and slave morality, the blond beast, the free spirit, the last man, eternal recurrence, “God is dead,” “Live dangerously!” “Become hard!” “philosophize with a hammer,” and “beyond good and evil”; the writer who inspired thinkers such as Heidegger, artists such as Thomas Mann, and men of action such as Mussolini; the philosopher exalted by the Nazis and reviled by the communists. No discussion of eastern German education “after the Wall”—and the ongoing political re-education of eastern Germans—would be complete without reference to the return of the writer regarded as the most important educator in Germany during the first half of this century. Indeed, Nietzsche als Erzieher (Nietzsche as Educator) was the title of a popular book in Wilhelmine Germany written by Walter Hammer, a leader of the Wandervögel (birds of passage) youth movement.

scholarly journals A theory of the combustion of hydrocarbons

1935 ◽  
Vol 150 (869) ◽  
pp. 36-57 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Induction Period ◽  
Kinetic Data ◽  
Analytical Data ◽  
Inert Gases ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Slow Combustion ◽  
Chain Character ◽  
Energy Chain ◽  
First Time

A comprehensive theory of the combustion of hydrocarbons must describe in detail all the analytic and kinetic data. Up to the present no such theory has been proposed, for though the hydroxylation theory of Bone and his school has been very successful in the former field, it is inadequate in its original form to take account of the latter. In the present paper it is shown that a comparatively small modification, involving the introduction of the conception of chain propagation by free radicals, remedies the earlier deficiency and makes possible for the first time a detailed description of the widely varied phenomena of combustion. The work of Egerton, Hinshelwood, Haber, Semenoff and others has led to the recognition that both rapid and slow combustion are autocatalytic in character, the reaction being propagated through the gas from certain initial centres, so that from every centre started by the primary mechanism, a great many molecules of hydrocarbon are oxidized. The first attempt to interpret the chain character in terms of a concrete theory is embodied in the suggestion of Egerton who has extended the peroxidation theory of Callendar to include an energy-chain mechanism by way of which reactivity is handed on from the active products (peroxides) to new reactant molecules. This theory and its various modifications, however, is unsatisfactory in more than one kinetic aspect, the effect of inert gases in particular being the reverse of the deactivation to be expected for an “energy” chain. Moreover, the peroxidation theory is not reconcilable in all respects with the analytical data, for while the induction period has been interpreted as a period of peroxide building no evidence of any such peroxide formation at this stage has been established, nor is the induction period affected by the addition of any such bodies. There thus arises the need of some further attempt to bring the analytic and kinetic data into relation with one another and in the hypothesis developed below, which we shall call the “atomic chain hypothesis,” it is believed that we have a simple explana­tion which encompasses both the analytical and kinetic results in an adequate manner.

Wole Soyinka's ‘Death and the King's Horseman’, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (37) ◽  
pp. 57-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Rohmer
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
Research Assistant ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In large part due to the relative lack of productions in Europe, the plays of Wole Soyinka have mostly been approached from a literary point of view rather than analyzed as theatrical events. Because the plays rely heavily on non-verbal conventions, this neglect of visual and acoustic patterns promotes an incomplete understanding of Soyinka's idea of theatre. Here, for the first time, a play by Soyinka is analyzed from the point of view of performance – specifically, the production of Death and the King's Horseman staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1990. Martin Rohmer examines the transformation of playscript into mise-en-scène, focusing in particular on the use of music and dance, but looking also at the production as an intercultural event – asking not only how far a European company has to rely on African performing skills, but how far a European cast and audience is capable of a proper understanding of the play. This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held in Bayreuth in June 1992. Martin Rohmer studied Drama, German Literature, Anthropology, and Philosophy in Munich, and Theatre, Film and TV Studies at the University of Glasgow, before completing his MA in Munich in 1992. Presently he is a Research Assistant at the University of Bayreuth, where he is working on a PhD on the performing arts in Zimbabwe.

scholarly journals Micro-analytical studies of discontinuous precipitation in Fe-13.5 at.% Zn alloy

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Zięba ◽  
Mateusz Chronowski ◽  
Jerzy Morgiel
Keyword(s):  
Volume Diffusion ◽  
Discontinuous Precipitation ◽  
Analytical Electron Microscopy ◽  
Solute Concentration ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Analytical Electron ◽  
First Time ◽  
Zn Alloy ◽  
Boundary Diffusivity

Abstract For the first time, the analytical electron microscopy has been used to determine the solute concentration profiles left behind the moving reaction front (RF) of the discontinuous precipitation (DP) reaction in a Fe-13.5 at.% Zn alloy. These profiles have been converted into grain boundary diffusivity (sδDb) values, using Cahn’s diffusion equation in its original form and the data of the growth rate of the discontinuous precipitates obtained from independent measurements. This approach has essentially removed existing difference in comparison to sδDb values obtained from Cahn′s simplified and Petermann–Hornbogen models relevant for the global approach to the DP. Simultaneously, the local values of sδDb have been up to 8–10 orders of magnitude higher than the data for volume diffusion coefficients and much greater than for diffusion at the stationary grain boundaries of Zn in pure Fe. This is clear indication that the rate controlling factor for DP reaction in the Fe-13 at.% Zn alloy is diffusion at the moving RF.

scholarly journals Metabolism of flavone C-glucosides and p-coumaric acid from antioxidant of bamboo leaves (AOB) in rats

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Xiaowei Tie ◽  
Bili Bao ◽  
Xiaoqin Wu ◽  
Ying Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Gastrointestinal Tract ◽  
Small Molecules ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Coumaric Acid ◽  
Metabolic Fate ◽  
Elimination Phase ◽  
Effective Time ◽  
Bamboo Leaves ◽  
Single Oral Administration ◽  
First Time

The metabolism of flavone C-glucosides and p-coumaric acid from antioxidant of bamboo leaves (AOB) in rats is discussed systematically in the present study. Following single oral administration of AOB, p-coumaric acid was detected in plasma but not in gastrointestinal tract extracts and faeces, and the corresponding absorption pharmacokinetic curve at different time points showed a prolonged elimination phase with p-coumaric acid being detected in the kidneys and excreted as its original form (1·80 (sd 0·24) % and 1·90 (sd 0·26) % at 12 and 24 h, respectively). However, the four flavone C-glucosides orientin, homoorientin, vitexin and isovitexin were poorly absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract. More than 50 % recovery of flavone C-glucosides was determined at 12 h and faeces containing these four analytes (21·23 (sd 1·92) %) were excreted at 24 h. These data suggested that the effective time these compounds were in the colon was long enough so that they could exert their antioxidant activity and scavenge free radicals. Besides the excretion of the original forms, moieties of the flavone C-glucosides were hydrolysed by deglycosylation and the opening of the heterocyclic C ring. Some small molecules such as phloroglucinol (PG), hydrocaffeic acid (HCA) and phloretic acid (PA) were detected and identified as metabolites of the flavone C-glucosides. In the present work, we compared the metabolic fate of flavone C-glucosides to that of flavone O-glucosides in rats, and evaluated the absorption, tissue distribution and excretion of flavone C-glucosides in AOB on their metabolism for the first time.

scholarly journals Tragic Narrative Strategies in Contemporary American Cinema. Eastwood-Penn-Grey (1995-2001)

Panoptikum ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Martina Olivero
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Political Role ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Clint Eastwood ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Good And Evil

Tragedies were performed for the first time in ancient Greece between the sixth and fifth century BC. A century later, Aristotle in the Poetics gave his famous definition of tragedy, transforming it into a narrative genre. Our aim is primarily to introduce and analyse some characteristics of the tragic scheme. Three main elements will be taken into consideration. We will see that at the very heart of the tragic narration there is “something” unrepresentable, unbearable and nameless that Lacan, in the VII seminar on ethics, names Das Ding or La Chose, The Thing. After that, we will consider the representation of an ethical power which disputes the traditional and institutionalised order. Thirdly, the presence of sacred forces will be evoked to contextualise the ancien and contemporary tragic narrations in a mythical, pre-logical, pre-textual framework. However, in order to identify any forms of tragic narratives in the contemporary era, a consideration of the medium itself cannot be avoided, as tragedies were shown and affected large crowds of people and had a substantial political role. Cinema is thus revealed to be the most privileged media device to present modern tragic narrations and their typical aesthetic solutions. In this article, we will discuss three examples of tragic narratives in mainstream American cinema from the last three decades. Works by Sean Penn (The Pledge, 2001), James Grey (Little Odessa, 1995) and Clint Eastwood (Midnight in the garden of good and evil, 1997) will be investigated.

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