scholarly journals Performing in Crisis Mode: the Munich National Theater, the Great Exhibition and the Cholera Epidemic in 1854

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 39-61
Author(s):  
Meike Wagner

In 1854, the city of Munich had arranged for the “First General German Industrial Exhibition” to promote German industry to the world and invited a global audience to the event. At the same time, Franz Dingelstedt, director of the National Theater, organized a festival displaying the finest actors from Germany. Right after the opening of the festival, cholera started raging in the city and leaving 3,000 deaths in the final count. The author sketches out the role of the theatre in this crisis, when Dingelstedt was ordered by the king to keep the theatre open at any cost. This appears awkward, in regard to the current global pandemic crisis where theaters have been identified as risk zones for infection and consequently closed down. Why was the theatre at the time considered a safe and appropriate place even helping to counter the disease?

Author(s):  
David Konstan

New Comedy was a Panhellenic phenomenon. It may be that a performance in Athens was still the acme of a comic playwright’s career, but Athens was no longer the exclusive venue of the genre. Yet Athens, or an idealized version of Athens, remained the setting or backdrop for New Comedy, whatever its provenance or intended audience. New Comedy was thus an important vehicle for the dissemination of the Athenian polis model throughout the Hellenistic world, and it was a factor in what has been termed ‘the great convergence’. The role of New Comedy in projecting an idealized image of the city-state may be compared to that of Hollywood movies in conveying a similarly romanticized, but not altogether false, conception of American democracy to populations around the world.


Popular Music ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Langlois

On 29 September 1994, Cheb Hasni, the most renowned Rai singer living in Algeria, was gunned down outside his family's house in Gambetta, a quarter of the city of Waharan (Oran). He was one of many public figures (and some 50,000 others) who have been killed since the main opposition political party, the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) was prevented from assuming power by the annulment of elections that they would have won in 1991. Like the most notable of Algeria's victims of violence, which include journalists, lawyers, doctors, television presenters and top policemen, Hasni represented a version of Algerian identity that some people clearly could not tolerate. Responsibility for his assassination has not been claimed, but the manner of his death was identical to others carried out by the armed faction of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). His death has possibly marked the demise of a genre of North African popular music known as Rai as it was produced in Algeria. Rai has been a particularly problematic idiom for Islamists and secularists alike. Both groups nurture distinct views of the place of Algeria, and Algerians in the world, and the role of Islam and liberal secularism in Algeria. Rai music constructs its own distinct trajectories linking local and global, ‘East’ and ‘West’, and, in this way, constitutes a distinct problem for Algerians, and indeed other North Africans today.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Paul R. DeHart ◽  

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced.


2020 ◽  
pp. 75-83
Author(s):  
Svetlana CEBOTARI ◽  
Victoria BEVZIUC

The activity of the World Health Organization is now becoming a topic in disputes between the big power centres – the USA and China. The role of the WHO is also becoming a research topic not only for researchers in medical sciences, but also for political specialists in international relations. With the COVID-19 crisis, the WHO is becoming a scene of the major challenges – the USA and China. This Article aims to highlight the USA and China relations with reference to the work of the WHO, including the effectiveness of the organization with a global pandemic such as that of the COVID-19.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-35
Author(s):  
Hari Martopo

Taizé’s music comes from an ecumenical monastic order with an intense devotion to peace and justice through prayer and meditation. It was founded by Brother Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche in 1940 in the French village of Taizé and later spread throughout the world. Now the Taizé community is also growing in Indonesia, especially in the city of Yogyakarta. The Taizé community introduced its model of worship consisting of prayer, music, and meditation. The Taizé community entered Indonesia through Ursuline nuns’ work, and some of them later chose Taizé music as their worship accompaniment. In Yogyakarta, Taizé music is being used formally in adoration worship, namely The Holy Hour Worship by the Congregational Scholastic Congregation of SCJ Yogyakarta. Simultaneously, an ecumenical community called DNTZ Yogyakarta sings Taizé music in ecumenical fellowship activities. These are voluntary activities which are performed at different places and open for public. These two models of Taizé music in Catholics and Protestants communities have become a unique phenomenon as both communities play an essential role in its development by helping each other and working together in harmony.


Author(s):  
Josimar dos Reis de Souza ◽  
Tatiana Silva Souza ◽  
Beatriz Ribeiro Soares

From the complex sanitary moment faced by Brazil, related to COVID-19, in particular due to the collapse of the health system that has occurred in medium-sized cities, this article aimed to analyze the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Uberlândia, according to reflections from geographic science, in order to help to understand the facts that led to the current scenario of the disease in the city. To achieve the objective, we carried out a theoretical discussion about how Geography faces recent events, especially in relation to the role of the Globalization process, both in the dissemination of information about the emergence of COVID-19 and other events, as well as in the rapid spread of the virus around the world. Based on these reflections, we analyzed the evolution of the pandemic, using data provided by the Municipality of Uberlândia and the Ministry of Health, with a cut-off date of March 18, 2021, in order to understand the chronological path of the facts. The choice for this cut-off date for data clipping is justified by our intention to analyze the first year of virus identification in the municipality. The results showed the negative evolution of the pandemic in the city, mainly over the months of February and March 2021, with 100% of the ICU beds occupied, which demonstrates the complexity and the long way to go to overcome this health crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Asfa Widiyanto

Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has become global pandemic, which affects all countries in the world including Indonesia. The mitigation of covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia cannot neglect the role of religion, since religion constitutes the main identity of most people. Hence, religion becomes value reference and ‘system of knowing’, including in addressing the covid-19 pandemic. By employing comparative and content analysis, it is hoped that this paper will constitute a significant contribution in unravelling the complex role of religion in dealing with covid-19 pandemic, most particularly in the context of post-truth. There are three concerns of this paper. First, it examines the challenges of religious conservatism towards covid-19 mitigation among Indonesian Muslims, most particularly in the context of post-truth which in some ways intensifies the emergence of conservativism in the public space. Second, it explores the possibility of ‘new spirituality’ which is pertinent for the mitigation of Covid-19. Third, it explores the contribution of Indonesian Muslim knowledge culture to the fight against covid-19.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Ryszard W. Wolny

Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), presents a story of an artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, suffering from the writer’s block who travels to Venice to look for inspiration and where he eventually finds his death. In the meantime, he suffers from depression strengthened by feats of febrile listlessness, pressure in the temples, heaviness of the eyelids that make discontent befall him. The putrid smell of the lagoon hastens his departure, but a strange coincidence makes him change his mind. He returns to the hotel drawn by the enthrallment for the young lad, Tadzio, he had spotted there. Wandering through the streets of Venice, he ignores the health notices in the city, only later learning that there is a serious cholera epidemic in Venice. But he does not escape, nor does he warn the boy’s family of the fatal danger. He dies in his beach chair, looking at the boy on the beach. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore the relationship between travel and disease as juxtaposed with a growing passion for a youth, unmistakably, a sign of life affirmation in a sickly body and burnt-out mind.Thomas Mann’s novella has been a subject of extensive commentaries and criticisms for over a century since it was published in Germany, first, in serial form in 1912 and 1913 and, then when it was translated into the French and English in the 1920s, thus introducing it to the rest of the world. The peak of critical interest in Mann’s oeuvre may be pinpointed to the 1970s when Luchino Visconti’s film, Morte a Venezia (1971), was released and Benjamin Britten’s opera composed and first staged (1973).


Author(s):  
Norma Camilla Baratta ◽  
Giulio Magli

AbstractPresent day Beijing developed on the urban layout of the Ming capital, founded in 1420 over the former city of Dadu, the Yuan dynasty capital. The planning of Ming Beijing aimed at conveying a key political message, namely that the ruling dynasty was in charge of the Mandate of Heaven, so that Beijing was the true cosmic centre of the world. We explore here, using satellite imagery and palaeomagnetic data analysys, symbolic aspects of the planning of the city related to astronomical alignments and to the feng shui doctrine, both in its “form” and “compass” schools. In particular, we show that orientations of the axes of the “cosmic” temples and of the Forbidden City were most likely magnetic, while astronomy was used in topographical connections between the temples and in the plan of the Forbidden City in itself.


2018 ◽  
pp. 193-241
Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..


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