scholarly journals Hospitality

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Elena Isayev

This article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transformative moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the fifth century BCE, hospitality becoming the marker between civic society and the international community, confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question of: Who is the host? The article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty-first century we observe a shift towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measuring society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Elena Isayev

This article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transformative moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the fifth century BCE, hospitality becoming the marker between civic society and the international community, confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question of: Who is the host? The article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty-first century we observe a shift towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measuring society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.


2020 ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
David A. Weintraub

This chapter analzyes the collective thinking about Mars that has been shaped by two centuries of gradually improving astronomical observations of the red planet. It mentions several generations of astronomers that used their increasingly powerful telescopes to map the surface of Mars from the late seventeenth century into the mid-nineteenth century. It also talks about astronomers of recent centuries that believed they were discovering clues at the far ends of their telescopes that revealed Mars was likely the home of Martians. The chapter discusses the international community of astronomers that undertook a decades-long effort to map the Martian globe after they had determined that Mars shared intriguing similarities with Earth. It highlights the ongoing twentieth- and twenty-first-century searches for evidence of life on Mars as the indirect legacy of Giovanni Schiaparelli's discoveries and of Percival Lowell's unfettered imagination and indefatigable efforts to promote his ideas about Mars to the public.


Author(s):  
Richard Beardsworth ◽  
Garrett Wallace Brown ◽  
Richard Shapcott

The twenty-first century saw the emergence of a new doctrine of state and international responsibility in the form of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This doctrine transforms, in principle, the moral and political vocabulary of international politics from one of traditional definitions of state and human rights to a broadened normative understanding of domestic and global responsibilities. The doctrine stipulates that states individually and collectively have responsibilities to protect their citizens and those of other states from mass atrocity crimes. In using this language the international community has formalized the idea that states, in addition to their rights, have responsibilities that are essentially cosmopolitan in that they are owed to people everywhere....


2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rūta Muktupāvela

The ideologies, beliefs and practices associated with new cult places in post-Soviet Latvia are discussed. When social movement for the restoration of an independent nation state started at the end of the 1980s, new pantheistic cult sites gained a certain topicality. In relation to such sites esoteric New Age style ideologies and practices were constructed. Pokaiņi forest - a remote place in Latvia, abundant in stone piles and big stones, has been interpreted as an ancient sanctuary of global significance, as a cosmological and healing centre. Latvian scholars - archaeologists, geologists and folklorists - are treating Pokaiņi as a site with traces of ancient agricultural activity, and its popularity is attributed to the 'use of good management'. The historical perspective of the Pokaiņi phenomenon and modern interpretations of its perception are discussed in the context of revitalisation movements. The analysis of the complex socio-cultural situation of Latvia in the turn of the twentieth and the twenty- first century reveals the reasons, facilitating the emergence and significance of Pokaiņi and similar phenomena in post-Soviet Latvia.


2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura van Waas

AbstractOver the past decade, a deepening understanding of the gravity of the problem of statelessness, as well as the growing realisation that the international legal framework relating to statelessness exhibits numerous shortcomings, has made it clear that this issue warrants further engagement by the international community. This article looks more closely at statelessness as a fundamental challenge for Europe in the twenty-first century. The piece discusses why finding an appropriate response to statelessness can be deemed imperative, taking into account both human rights and human security considerations. To provide an impression of current opportunities for addressing statelessness, some of the strengths and limitations of the existing international legal framework relating to statelessness are presented. Finally, the article discusses a number of recent developments, in particular in Europe, which may open new avenues for meeting the challenge of statelessness in the future.


2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVANTHI MEDURI

In this paper, I discuss issues revolving around history, historiography, alterity, difference and otherness concealed in the doubled Indian/South Asian label used to describe Indian/South Asian dance genres in the UK. The paper traces the historical genealogy of the South Asian label to US, Indian and British contexts and describes how the South Asian enunciation fed into Indian nation-state historiography and politics in the 1950s. I conclude by describing how Akademi: South Asian Dance, a leading London based arts organisation, explored the ambivalence in the doubled Indian/South Asian label by renaming itself in 1997, and forging new local/global networks of communication and artistic exchange between Indian and British based dancers and choreographers at the turn of the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Mary Youssef

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


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