Introduction

Author(s):  
Angela Calcaterra

The introduction argues for recognition of specific Native American aesthetic and literary cultures prior to European arrival and highlights their ongoing influence and significance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During a period of American literary development known for white appropriation of Native American content, Native resistance to Euro-American settler colonialism involved aesthetic practices such as narrative mapping, visual art, storytelling, figurative representation, and adornment. These practices contributed to both Native and non-Native literary production, despite Euro-American authors’ assertions that sophisticated artistic traditions were a European import to the North American continent. Bringing the concepts “literary,” “aesthetic” and “representation” to bear on analysis of cross-cultural encounter, the introduction posits new modes of understanding points of connection or distance between Native and non-Native aesthetic practice.

Author(s):  
Brett Grainger

One of the most complex words in the English language, “nature” (sometimes personified as “Nature” or “Mother Nature”) has been central to developments in American religions. Despite their different origins, the three cosmologies present on the North American continent during the early modern “age of contact”—Native American, African American, and Euro-American—shared a number of similarities, including the belief in an enchanted or animate cosmos, the ambivalence of sacred presences manifested in nature, and the use of myth and ritual to manage these ambivalent presences in ways that secured material and spiritual benefits for individuals or communities. Through encounters on colonial borderlands and through developments in society and culture (in science, economics, politics, etc.), these cosmologies have been adapted, developed, and combined in creative ways to produce new forms of religious life. These developments have been characterized by a series of recurrent tensions, including the notion of divine or spiritual realities as being transcendent or immanent, organicism or mechanism, and of the natural world as including or excluding human beings. Organicist and animist cosmologies, severely challenged by the early modern scientific revolution, were resurgent in the antebellum period, fueling a series of new religious developments, from Transcendentalism and revivalism to Mormonism and the early environmentalist movement. These generative tensions continue to reverberate into the modern day, in part as an outworking of the environmental crisis of the 1960s, which saw a purported “greening” of established religions as well as the rise of new forms of nature spirituality.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-381
Author(s):  
Erin Flynn Haynes

Language loss affects many Native American communities in the United States, threatening the vitality of the indigenous languages of the North American continent. This article discusses current and historic reasons for this loss and provides an overview of language revitalization with reference to a framework of desire, opportunity,and capacity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kumar Jha

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.


1936 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. T. Leiper

In an article on “The Longevity of Diphyllobothrium latum” published in 1935 in the “Recueil des Travaux dédié au 25-me Anniversaire Scientifique du Professeur Eugène Paviosky 1909−1934”, it is suggested that present day conceptions regarding the longevity of this parasite are erroneous and that multiple successive infections are frequently attributed to a single long-lived specimen. Ward gives a detailed review and analysis of the evidence hitherto published both in general works and special monographs and cites as specially important the history of the occurrence of this species on the North American continent. He points out that the age of the parasite is regularly based on the statement that the host had not been in an infected region for the period indicated. To this statement, Ward puts forward the objections that the distribution of the parasite and the natural occurrence of plerocercoid carrying fish are far more extensive than was formerly suspected and, further, that infected fish are distributed commercially as food to regions far outside their natural area of distribution. He also refers to certain records which seem to indicate that there is a “period of inactivity” during the adult life of the parasite and suggests that its alleged occurrence throws doubt upon the supposed longevity of the parasite. In support of this contention, he cites, as a typical instance, a case of human infection with Diphyllobothrium latum reported by me (Leiper, 1928) as a “cryptic infection”; regarding which he erroneously states that I believed was “latent” for 5 years.


1962 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Beech ◽  
A. E. Duxbury ◽  
Peter Warner

This paper consists of an epidemiological study of 52 cases of Q fever occurring in metropolitan Adelaide in 1957 and also a description of the results of a survey of 516 sera obtained from abattoir workers.The only case occurring outside the abattoirs was a dairy farmer who probably became infected while visiting the abattoirs. If this were so the incubation period (35 days) of his disease would have been exceptionally long.The general features of the outbreak, which lasted several months, differed from those on the North American continent in that the latter occurred explosively within a few days with very high attack rates. The situation in the Adelaide abattoirs is similar to that in Brisbane, where the disease appears to be endemic. However, unlike in Adelaide, cases are commonly recognized outside the abattoirs in Brisbane.In the abattoirs the disease affected mainly inspectors, those working on killing beef, and those working on offal. Mutton workers were not so severely affected. However, all these groups had similar incidences of low titre antibodies suggesting that in the past Q fever spread equally in all killing departments. In departments not directly associated with slaughtering the incidence both of cases in 1957 and low titre antibodies was relatively small.It was suggested that the epidemiological features of Q fever in Adelaide could be explained by the irregular appearance of animals from infected herds situated perhaps in Queensland—a known endemic area. Perhaps the appearance of such animals in the Adelaide abattoirs might be governed by meteorological conditions such that they were prevented from going to the ordinarily most convenient slaughterhouse.


Polar Record ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-255
Author(s):  
Klaus J. Dodds

President Barrack Obama became, in September 2015, the first US president to travel north of the Arctic Circle. Having started his Alaskan itinerary in Anchorage, attending and speaking at a conference involving Secretary of State John Kerry and invited guests, the president travelled north to the small town of Kotzebue, a community of some 3000 people with the majority of inhabitants identifying as native American. Delivered to an audience in the local high school numbering around 1000, the 41st US president placed his visit within a longer presidential tradition of northern visitation: I did have my team look into what other Presidents have done when they visited Alaska. I’m not the first President to come to Alaska.Warren Harding spent more than two weeks here – which I would love to do. But I can't leave Congress alone that long. (Laughter.) Something might happen. When FDR visited – Franklin Delano Roosevelt – his opponents started a rumor that he left his dog, Fala, on the Aleutian Islands – and spent 20 million taxpayer dollars to send a destroyer to pick him up. Now, I’m astonished that anybody would make something up about a President. (Laughter.) But FDR did not take it lying down. He said, “I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks – but Fala does resent attacks. He's not been the same dog since.” (Laughter.) President Carter did some fishing when he visited. And I wouldn't mind coming back to Alaska to do some fly-fishing someday. You cannot see Alaska in three days. It's too big. It's too vast. It's too diverse. (Applause.) So I’m going to have to come back. I may not be President anymore, but hopefully I’d still get a pretty good reception. (Applause.) And just in case, I’ll bring Michelle, who I know will get a good reception. (Applause.) . . .. But there's one thing no American President has done before – and that's travel above the Arctic Circle. (Applause.) So I couldn't be prouder to be the first, and to spend some time with all of you (Obama 2015a).


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould

This essay investigates the challenges facing Caucasus philology, by which I mean the institutional capacity to conduct deep research into the literary cultures of Azerbaijan Republic, Georgia, Daghestan, and Chechnya. I argue that the philological approach to the literary cultures of the Caucasus has been a casualty of the rise of areas studies in the North American academy during the Cold War, and that Cold War legacies continue to shape Caucasus Studies to this day. I conclude by offering three proposals for opening exchanges between the humanities and the social sciences within Caucasus Studies. More broadly, this essay argues for a rapprochement between the social sciences and philological inquiry vis-à-vis the Caucasus.


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