Researching the ‘Grammar of Schooling’: An Historical View

Modern India’s diplomatic ties with Afghanistan were officially instituted in 1950. But relations between the people of these countries are civilizational, and based on extensive cultural exchange. Starting with the impact of Rabindranath Tagore’s legendary short story, Kabuliwallah, on India’s imagination of Afghanistan and its people, this chapter offers a long historical view of India-Afghanistan relations. Its main focus, however, remains on British India’s approach towards Afghanistan and the 1947-1979 phase when India fought three wars with Pakistan and one with China. This historical overview allows for the teasing out the aforementioned drivers of India’s Afghanistan policy.

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A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times

10.1093/oso/9780190682088.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Germana

Keyword(s):

Music Criticism ◽

Invisible Man ◽

The Past ◽

Historical View ◽

Sense Of Time ◽

Cultural Forms ◽

The Times ◽

Musical Forms

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.

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Born to sing! Song development in a singing primate

Current Zoology ◽

10.1093/cz/zoab018 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Chiara De Gregorio ◽

Filippo Carugati ◽

Vittoria Estienne ◽

Daria Valente ◽

Teresa Raimondi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Vocal Communication ◽

Developmental Trajectories ◽

Ontogenetic Changes ◽

Call Structure ◽

Historical View ◽

Singing Behavior ◽

Vocal Behaviour ◽

Temporal Features ◽

Vocal Activity ◽

Song Development

Abstract In animal vocal communication, the development of adult-like vocalization is fundamental to interact appropriately with conspecifics. However, the factors that guide ontogenetic changes in the acoustic features remains poorly understood. In contrast with a historical view of nonhuman primate vocal production as substantially innate, recent research suggests that inheritance and physiological modification can only explain some of the developmental changes in call structure during growth. A particular case of acoustic communication is the indris' singing behavior, a peculiar case among Strepsirrhine primates. Thanks to a decade of intense data collection, this work provides the first long-term quantitative analysis on song development in a singing primate. To understand the ontogeny of such a complex vocal output, we investigated juvenile and sub-adult indris' vocal behaviour, and we found that young individuals started participating in the chorus years earlier than previously reported. Our results indicated that spectro-temporal song parameters underwent essential changes during growth. In particular, the age and sex of the emitter influenced the indris' vocal activity. We found that frequency parameters showed consistent changes across the sexes, but the temporal features showed different developmental trajectories for males and females. Given the low level of morphological sexual dimorphism and the marked differences in vocal behavior, we hypothesize that factors like social influences and auditory feedback may affect songs' features, resulting in high vocal flexibility in juvenile indris. This trait may be pivotal in a species that engages in choruses with rapid vocal turn-taking.

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