scholarly journals Intersecting Homeliness: Vietnamese Australian Reflections of a Suburban Home (Strathfield, NSW)

Author(s):  
Helary Ngo

In year 2013, I lived in Vietnam. Once a year, the Vietnamese people have a particular tradition called khom đất, where the people set out a guest table filled with delicious feast of food and paper clothing, shoes, accessories and money for the spirits of the house. Khom in khom đất means a set of rituals or prayer to bow down and pay respect. Đất means land. It is a ritual which acknowledges the spirits within the home and the agency these spirits have to the home. There would be separate rituals for different types of spirits and incense would burn as an offering to various places. For example, an incense and food offering would be on an alter directly above the fire stove in the kitchen to be grateful to the fire spirit of the home. There is a belief that if the fire spirit gets angry, the spirit may be a danger to the family. The spirit has the agency and a power over the home. It is a ritual to recognise that a home has its ghosts, its history and its spirits that reside long before the current people residents and that they have the power to protect or destroy. Mostly, it is to recognaise that land and place is not to be owned, and matters such as fire or water or wood is not mere commodities. Rather, these materialities are living and only would be at our disposal to help us when they given the respect and recognition that they are living and are powerful agents.Within the Vietnamese language, there is no specific word for differentiate ‘home’ and ‘house’ but rather, use the word ‘house’ to mean both the building and the home – nhà (Rather then state, ‘I go home’ one states literally, ‘I return to the house’ – Tôi về nhà). To state house rather than home could mean that home is not to be possessed but rather, has it’s own agency, vitality and spirit.With this in mind, I will tell you about a particular uncanny phenomenon that has happened in my family home in Strathfield (a loved family home where my family still resides in) that has happened 10 years ago and has not escaped the memories of any of us. I hope to capture, in a self-reflexive way, the merging of the past and the present within the Vietnamese migrant experience living in the Australian landscape, with its dark history of the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. I wish to mourn and acknowledge that the land that has given my refugee family opportunity to begin life safely and freely, and my birthplace is a stolen land. And that we are always both grateful and in mourning with our homeland.

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-90
Author(s):  
jason leahey

This story details the history, wares, and business philosophy of the Sahadi Importing Company, a third-generation Lebanese-American family food business in Brooklyn. It begins by noting the ways Brooklyn's commercial and cultural landscapes have drastically changed over the past few years, positioning Sahadi's as a local throwback to the borough of yore still thriving next to the powerful and national businesses that are now its neighbors. It then relates the history of the store and the family, starting in 1895 up until 2012, relating the growth from small ethnic importer on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the successful importer/manufacturer with a broad customer base that it is today. The essay attributes credit for the health of the business to the owner's emphasis on the personal touch in customer service, noting that he considers his business’ character as a family institution, not its financial success, his proudest accomplishment. Lastly, the essay relates the owner's pride in having an ethnically diverse staff and his belief that the people who comprise a family need not necessarily be related by blood, positing that Sahadi's family business may more accurately be considered business-as-family, and that such a warm attitude that emphasizes the individual is a small taste of the locally oriented America of the past.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 425
Author(s):  
Neşide Yıldırım

Virginia Satir (1916-1988) is one of the first experts who has worked in the field of family therapy in the United States. In 1951, she was one of the first therapists who has worked all members of the family as a whole in the same session. She has concentrated her studies on issues such as to increase individual's self-esteem and to understand and change other people's perspectives. She has tried to make problematic people compatible in the family and in the society through change. From this perspective, change and adaptation are the two important concepts of her model. This is a state of being and a way to communicate with ourselves and others. High self-confidence and harmony are the first primary indicator of being a more functional human. She starts her studies with identifying the family. She uses two ways to do this; the first one is the chronology of the family that is history of the family, the second one is the communication patterns within the family. With this, she updates the status of the family. Updating is the detection of the current situation. The detection of the situation, in other words updating, constitutes the very essence of the model that she implements. In this study, communication patterns within the family are discussed for the updating, the chronological structure has not been studied. The characteristics of family communication patterns, the model of therapy that is applied by Satir for these patterns and the method which is followed in the model are discussed. According to her detection, the people who face with problems, use one of those four patterns or a combination of them. These communication patterns are Blamer, Sedative/Accepting, distracter/irrelevant and rational. Satir expresses that these four patterns are not solid and unchanging but all of them “can be converted”. For example, if one of the family members is usually using the soothing (sedative/accepting) pattern, in this case, it means that he/she wants to give the message that he/she is not very important in the inner world of the individual itself. However, if such a communication pattern is to be used repeatedly by an individual, he/she must know how to use it. According to Satir, this consciousness may be converted to a conscious gentleness and sensitivity that is automatically followed to please everyone. This study was carried out by using the copy of Satir’s book, which was originally called “The Conjoint Family Therapy” and translated into Turkish by Selim Ali Yeniçeri as “Basic Family Therapy” and published in Istanbul by Beyaz Yayınları in 2016. It is expected that the study will provide support to the education of the students and family therapists.


Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar

This chapter discusses conflict and violence in Lakhipathar, over a period of two decades, drawing on oral histories from the people of Lakhipathar. Listening to the narratives of past sufferings here has worked not merely a tool to know what happened to the narrators in the past but it also gives a key to analyse why and how they live in the present. Apart from offering evidence towards the larger argument of the work, this part of the book has also aimed towards opening a conversation on some buried and forgotten moments in the history of the Indian state that resemble what could be called an Agambenian ‘state of exception’. The dense narratives give a picture of the collaboration and deceit, revenge and violence, suspicion and fear in war-torn Lakhipathar and how the common people negotiated their ways through these.


Heritage ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-605
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal ◽  
J. Scott Cardinal

Archaeologists have likely collected, as a conservative estimate, billions of artifacts over the course of the history of fieldwork. We have classified chronologies and typologies of these, based on various formal and physical characteristics or ethno-historically known analogues, to give structure to our interpretations of the people that used them. The simple truth, nonetheless, is that we do not actually know how they were used or their intended purpose. We only make inferences—i.e., educated guesses based on the available evidence as we understand it—regarding their functions in the past and the historical behaviors they reflect. Since those inferences are so fundamental to the interpretations of archaeological materials, and the archaeological project as a whole, the way we understand materiality can significantly bias the stories we construct of the past. Recent work demonstrated seemingly contradictory evidence between attributed purpose or function versus confirmed use, however, which suggested that a basic premise of those inferences did not empirically hold to be true. In each case, the apparent contradiction was resolved by reassessing what use, purpose, and function truly mean and whether certain long-established functional categories of artifacts were in fact classifying by function. The resulting triangulation, presented here, narrows the scope on such implicit biases by addressing both empirical and conceptual aspects of artifacts. In anchoring each aspect of evaluation to an empirical body of data, we back ourselves away from our assumptions and interpretations so as to let the artifacts speak for themselves.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1934578X1400900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerald J. Nair ◽  
Lucie Rárová ◽  
Miroslav Strnad ◽  
Jaume Bastida ◽  
Lee Cheesman ◽  
...  

The family Amaryllidaceae has a long history of usage in the traditional medicinal practices of the indigenous peoples of South Africa, with three of its species known to be used for cancer treatment. Furthermore, the Amaryllidaceae is widely recognized for its unique alkaloid constituents, several of which exhibit potent and selective cytotoxic activities. In this study, several crinane alkaloids derived from local Amaryllidaceae species were examined for cytotoxic effects against the human cervical adenocarcinoma cell line, of which distichamine was the most potent (IC50 2.2 μM).


1941 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 819-852

William Bulloch, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London and Consulting Bacteriologist to the London Hospital since his retirement in 1934, died on n February 1941, in his old hospital, following a small operation for which he had been admitted three days before. By his death a quite unique personality is lost to medicine, and to bacteriology an exponent whose work throughout the past fifty years in many fields, but particularly in the history of his subject, has gained for him wide repute. Bulloch was born on 19 August 1868 in Aberdeen, being the younger son of John Bulloch (1837-1913) and his wife Mary Malcolm (1835-1899) in a family of two sons and two daughters. His brother, John Malcolm Bulloch, M.A., LL.D. (1867-1938), was a well-known journalist and literary critic in London, whose love for his adopted city and its hurry and scurry was equalled only by his passionate devotion to the city of his birth and its ancient university. On the family gravestone he is described as Critic, Poet, Historian, and indeed he was all three, for the main interest of his life outside his profession of literary critic was antiquarian, genealogical and historical research, while in his earlier days he was a facile and clever fashioner of verse and one of the founders of the ever popular Scottish Students’ Song Book .


1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (18) ◽  
pp. 618-625

Joseph H. M. Wedderburn, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics of Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A., was found dead in his residence at Princeton on 9 October 1948. Professor Wedderburn who was a bachelor had, for many years, lived alone. His body was found by the people who took care of the house and grounds. The medical authorities concluded, after examination, that death had occurred several days previously as a result of a heart attack. Wedderburn was born on 26 February 1882, in Forfar, Scotland, the tenth child in a family of fourteen children, which included seven brothers and six sisters. His father was Alexander Stormonth Maclagen Wedderburn, M.D., of Pearsie. His mother was Anne Ogilvie. On his father’s side his grandfather was Parish Minister of Kinfauns and Professor of Exegesis in the Free Church College of Aberdeen. His paternal great-grandfather was Parish Minister of Blair Atholl and a Chaplain in the Black Watch. On his maternal side his grandfather was a lawyer in Dundee, as had been true of the family for several preceding generations. The detailed history of the Wedderburn family has been recorded in the Wedderburn Book . Of his many brothers and sisters only two survived him, a brother, Ernest Wedderburn of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a sister, Miss Elizabeth Wedderburn, of Paris, France. Wedderburn’s early school years were spent at the Forfar Academy from 1887 to 1895. In the latter year he transferred for the last three years of his school education to George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, 1895-1898. From this college at the age of sixteen and a half years he obtained the leaving scholarship and entered Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1898. After five years as a student in this university he obtained, in 1903, the M.A. degree with First-Class Honours in Mathematics.


10.12737/6572 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Наталья Гаршина ◽  
Natalya Garshina

Having a look at the tourist space as a cultural specialist, the author drew attention to the fact that the closest to the modern man is a city environment he contacts and sometimes encounters in everyday life and on holidays. And every time whether he wants it or not, it opens in a dif erent way. One way of getting to know the world has long been a walking tour. It’s not just a walk hand in hand with a pleasant man or hasty movement to the right place, but namely the tour, in which a knowledgeable person with a soulful voice will speak about the past and present of the city and its surroundings, as if it is about your life and the people close to you. Turning to the beginning of the twentieth century, the experience of scientists-excursion specialists we today can learn a lot to improve the process of building up a tour, and most importantly the transmission of knowledge about the world in which we live. Well-known names of the excursion theory founders to professionals are I. Grevs, N. Antsiferov, N. Geynike and others. They are given in the context of ref ection on the historical development of walking tours, which haven’t lost their value and attract both creators and consumers of tour services.


1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Easton

In the decline of his life, a disappointed man might well ask himself what destiny would have held in store for him if at some crucial juncture of his maturity he had accepted the earnest advice of a solicitous friend or even of a keen-sighted foe. Today liberalism is confronted with a similar question. It is on the defensive in all parts of the Western world except in the United States. Even there its position is deceptive. Perhaps it survives tenuously under the artificial protective canvas of postwar inflation. Today one can hardly question this threatened eclipse of liberalism. Because of this foreboding, disturbing questions haunt the liberal. What deficiency in liberalism is leading to the abandonment of its tenets throughout Europe? Was there counsel offered and ignored in the past which might have retarded the infirmities of age?The answer to the first question has long been apparent. Yet in practice contemporary liberalism, both of the progressive and nineteenth-century varieties, has never assimilated its essential meaning. Following the French Revolution and the English Reform Act, liberalism began its long history of divorcing theory from practice. In the splendor of Victorian industrial success, this separation was not driven into the consciousness either of the intellectual leaders or of the people. But with the tension, domestic and international, of the eighties, liberals themselves, like T. H. Green and then Hobhouse, undertook the task of correcting some of the glaring discrepancies between the doctrine and the reality. In the light of the basically abstract character of liberalism, these collectivist renovations now appear like amateurish tinkering with a vastly complex apparatus.Liberal doctrine had indeed long been suffering from a negative attitude toward the state. But this was simply a diagnostic symptom of an even deeper defect: liberalism's unconscionable indifference to the material conditions of society, and its ensuing failure to put its theories to the test of the social reality.


2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 575-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ciscel

The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.


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