Humanizing the Sacred

2018 ◽  
pp. 219-279
Author(s):  
Ahmad S. Dallal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Critical Studies

Another main idea in revisionist historiography is that hadith studies were revived in the eighteenth century and that hadith was used for socio-moral reconstruction. This last notion implies that the significance of hadith was in the practical ordering of social life and providing a blueprint for social behaviour, and not on intellectual grounds. In contrast, the book argues that some of the most original ideas were introduced in the course of academic/theoretical discussions of hadith, in particular the theory of hadith (‘ilm mustalah al-hadith). This chapter traces the development of two distinct schools of hadith studies in India and in Yemen, and teases out the implications of these very radical theories for notions of authority. The chapter proposes new ways of reading and analysing hadith, not just in terms of its social and cultural significance but also in relation to earlier traditions of hadith studies. In contrast to most contemporary critical studies of hadith, which focus primarily on the early period and on the question of authenticity, this chapter argues that these questions are not significant beyond the first three centuries of Islam, and that new techniques of analysis are needed for the study of this important body of literature.

Drezno w relacjach polskich osiemnastowiecznych peregrynantów. Rekonesans .

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Marcin Pliszka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

The article analyses descriptions, memories, and notes on Dresden found in eighteenth-century accounts of Polish travellers. The overarching research objective is to capture the specificity of the way of presenting the city. The ways that Dresden is described are determined by genological diversity of texts, different ways of narration, the use of rhetorical repertoire, and the time of their creation. There are two dominant ways of presenting the city: the first one foregrounds the architectural and historical values, the second one revolves around social life and various kinds of games (redoubts, performances).

Feasting Ritually: An Ethnography on the Implications of Feasts in Religious Rituals

2021 ◽  
pp. 0972558X2110571
Author(s):  
Anil Gopi
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
The People ◽  
Religious Festivals ◽  
The World ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
And Gender

Food and feast are integral and key components of human cultures across the world. Feasts associated with religious rituals have special social and cultural significance when compared to those in any other festivities or celebrations in people’s life. In this study, an approach is made to comparatively analyze the feasts at religious festivals of two distinctive groups of people, one with a characteristic of simple society and the other of a complex society. The annual feast happening at the hamlets of the Anchunadu Vellalar community in the last days of the calendar year is an occasion that portrays the egalitarian nature of the people. While this feast is restricted within a single community of particular caste affiliation and geographical limitations, the feast associated with the kaliyattam ritual of village goddess in North Malabar is much wider in scope and participation. The enormous feast brings the people in a larger area and exhibits a solidarity that cuts across boundaries of religion, caste and community. Beyond the factors of social solidarity and togetherness, these events also illustrate its divisive characters mainly in terms of social hierarchy and gender. A comparative study of both the two feasts of two different contexts reveals the characteristic features of religious feasts and the value of food and feast in social life and solidarity and also how it acts as a survival of their past and as a tradition.

scholarly journals Slaves’ dress between representation and materiality

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Isabela Cristina Suguimatsu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Social Barriers ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Ideal

Since the 1960s the focus of historical research about dress and clothing turned from a purely descriptive approach to a semiotic one: researches have started aiming at the representations and tried to understand the symbols behind the objects. Resting on the so called material culture studies, the objective of this article is to conceive dress no more subordinate to the dimension of the ideal meanings, but rather as materiality actively used in the process of signifying and making of social life. In the article I try to understand the role of dressing for “being a slave” in eighteenth-century Brazil: a society that valued ideals expressed in European fashion, but imposed social barriers for accessing them – for the slaves wear the materiality linked to such ideals. O vestuário dos escravos entre representação e materialidade Desde a década de 1960, os estudos sobre a indumentária e o vestuário passaram de uma abordagem puramente descritiva para outra baseada na semiótica: buscou-se atingir as representações e entender os símbolos por trás dos objetos. Com base nos chamados estudos da cultura material, o objetivo desse artigo é pensar o vestuário não mais subordinado à dimensão dos significados ideais, mas como materialidade ativamente usada no processo de significação e conformação da vida social. Para tanto, busca-se entender o papel do vestuário na constituição do “ser escravo” no Brasil oitocentista: em uma sociedade que valorizava ideais expressos na moda europeia, mas que criava barreiras para o acesso irrestrito a esses ideais e para o uso, pelos escravos, da materialidade a eles associada.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

Catherine The Great and Shakespeare

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 790-806
Author(s):  
Ernest J. Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Peter The Great

Although some two hundred years separate the reigns of Catherine II (1762–1796) of Russia and Elizabeth (1558–1603) of England, both periods have much in common. Russia had so lagged behind the rest of Europe that in the eighteenth century her social life and intellectual radius were not much farther advanced than those of sixteenth century England. Her prolonged lethargy had been dissipated by Peter the Great (1672–1725) who, like Henry VIII, had succeeded in injecting new life into his kingdom at the expense of offending nearly the whole country; but it was Catherine who realized Peter's great vision of advancing Russia to a leading place among the nations, a service which Elizabeth had performed for England.

Women in Sectarian Sabbatianism

2015 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Ada Rapoport-Albert
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Female Sex

This chapter looks at the evidence on the eruption of messianic prophecy during an early period, which suggests that women responded en masse to Sabbatai Zevi's tidings. It discusses women's particular receptivity to the Sabbatai Zevi's messianic call in light of the promises he made specifically to the female sex. It also mentions the adherence to the messianic faith that did not demand that the restraints of Jewish law be cast off or subverted, but instead called for repentance in entirely traditional terms. The chapter examines the first antinomian acts being ordered by Sabbatai Zevi that were not able to split the believers or generate any tension between their self-perception as pious Jews and the integrity of their Sabbatian faith. It discusses sectarian organizations in which Sabbatianism persisted throughout the eighteenth century in which the traditional barriers between men and women crumbled, both in theory and in practice.

The Discovery of Afghanistan in the Era of Imperialism

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-138
Author(s):  
Senzil Nawid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Personal Observation ◽  
The West ◽  
Asiatic Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Royal Asiatic Society ◽  
Travel Accounts

The establishment of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century, whose chief goal was to introduce the civilizations of Eastern societies to the West, encouraged a series of enquiries by British writers and travelers on the history, culture, art, antiquities, and literature of Eastern countries, including Afghanistan. This chapter analyzes the writings of three enterprising British explorers who traveled to Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the travel accounts of George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Masson, men separated in time, interests and ambitions, but whose work, when examined collectively, delivers from personal observation an expansive picture of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such detail has not been found anywhere else, even within indigenous sources, which makes their writings essential and indispensable resources for studying the history, culture and society of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Together, their enquiries concerning ethnographic, cultural, and social life in Afghanistan have formed a topographical and cultural template for future researchers.

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