Introduction

Author(s):  
Helena Simonett

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the inner workings and cultural significance of the accordion. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to reevaluate the accordion and the many musicultural traditions associated with this instrument. It considers the specific histories and cultural significance of a variety of accordion traditions to shed light onto the instrument's enigmatic popularity in the New World. Because power relations between the social elites and the working class—often immigrants or marginalized ethnic communities—have shaped the accordion's histories across the Americas, issues that emerge as pivotal include identity, discourses of inclusion/exclusion, marginality, and cultural agency; music's capability to engender community; sound aesthetics; and the accordion's place in mainstream and “world music.” An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Paul Delnero

AbstractThousands of texts documenting the activities of scribes and scholars that shed light on the social context of scholarship and scientific inquiry survive from the first half of Mesopotamian history (c. 3400 bc to c. 1600 bc). Since these texts provide ample evidence that scholarship occupied a central place in Mesopotamian culture and society during the period in question, examining their content is essential to reconstructing what can be known about scientific knowledge and practice in the ancient world. In this chapter some of this evidence will be considered in order to present a modest overview of the social position and intellectual processes of knowledge acquisition and inquiry during the first phase of Mesopotamian history and to address preliminarily some of the many questions that can be asked about scholarship and inquiry in early Mesopotamia.


Author(s):  
Seteney Shami ◽  
Cynthia Miller-Idriss

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national contexts. The book presents some of the findings of a decade-long (2000–2010) research project organized by the Social Science Research Council in New York, which began with examining Middle East studies and expanded to investigate other area studies fields as well as the thrust toward the global in US universities. It is concerned with three main themes: the relationship between MES and various disciplines (political science, sociology, economics, and geography), current reformulations and new emphases in MES (in terms of university restructuring, language training, and scholarly trends), the politics of knowledge, and the impact on the field of MES of the many crises in the region.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This chapter focuses on hucksters who peddled farm produce in towns, brought town goods to farms, in the nineteenth century. The social role of the huckster offers an exceptional opportunity to probe the moral ambiguities of American culture as the nation transitioned from an agrarian to an urban economy. In simplest terms, hucksters occupied a liminal space that was neither fully rural nor fully urban, connecting the two as they passed goods from one to the other. They served as a significant commercial link antecedent to the establishment of large-scale wholesale and retail markets. As important as this role was economically, its cultural significance was equally important. By their own account and in the many accounts that contemporaries gave of them, hucksters transgressed familiar occupational and spatial categories and in so doing dramatized both in negation and in affirmation the shifting meaning of those categories.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Đorđe Marković ◽  

The article analyses the attitude of writers of the constitutional law textbooks from the former Yugoslavia towards the Vidovdan Constitution. The author focuses on the textbooks used at the time of writing in teaching and for exam preparation of Constitutional Law at state-owned law faculties as of academic year 2020/21. However, the analysis also includes several textbooks that represent a kind of historical readings. By comparing the relevant materials, the author made an attempt to shed light on scientific, legal and even political attitude of various authors towards the Vidovdan Constitution, and indirectly towards the Yugoslav state itself. The significance of this analysis is reflected in the fact that young generations - future lawyers and members of the social elites of the states created on Yugoslav foundations, get acquainted with their constitutional history through textbooks of constitutional law.


Author(s):  
Justin Farrell

This introductory chapter briefly presents the conflict in Yellowstone, elaborates on the book's theoretical argument, and specifies its substantive and theoretical contributions to the social scientific study of environment, culture, religion, and morality. The chapter argues that the environmental conflict in Yellowstone is not—as it would appear on the surface—ultimately all about scientific, economic, legal, or other technical evidence and arguments, but an underlying struggle over deeply held “faith” commitments, feelings, and desires that define what people find sacred, good, and meaningful in life at a most basic level. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 788-832
Author(s):  
Lukas M. Muntingh

Egyptian domination under the 18th and 19th Dynasties deeply influenced political and social life in Syria and Palestine. The correspondence between Egypt and her vassals in Syria and Palestine in the Amarna age, first half of the fourteenth century B.C., preserved for us in the Amarna letters, written in cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in 1887, offer several terms that can shed light on the social structure during the Late Bronze Age. In the social stratification of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian rule according to the Amarna letters, three classes are discernible:1) government officials and military personnel, 2) free people, and 3) half-free people and slaves. In this study, I shall limit myself to the first, the upper class. This article deals with terminology for government officials.


Author(s):  
Tatyana B. Markova

The article discusses the social and cultural functions of reading. Philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of reading reveals its transformation into knowledge society. The types of modern reading are analyzed and a new role of libraries in society is showed.


1969 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naveeda Khan

We begin with the words of rural and riverine women from Bangladesh recalling the events of their children's deaths by drowning. These events are cast as the work of supernatural beings, specifically Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir, who compel the mothers into forgetfulness and entice the children to the water. Is this a disavowal of loss and responsibility? This article considers that the women, specifically those from northern Bangladesh, assert not only their understanding of the losses that they have suffered but also their changing relationship to the river and its changing nature through their evocations of mythological figures. Alongside the many experiences of the river, the article takes note of its experience as paradoxical, with paradoxicality serving as the occasion for the coming together of the mythological, the material, and the social. The article draws upon Alfred North Whitehead to interrelate the strata of myths and their permutations, with the women's experiences of the river, and the river as a physical entity, allowing us to explore how the women's expressions portend the changing climate.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Matthew S. Seligmann

As soon as he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, Winston Churchill sought to buttress his credentials as a social reformer by improving conditions for sailors in the Navy and widening the social composition of the officer corps. This chapter examines his efforts towards both of these ends. It shows how he fought against the Treasury and his Cabinet colleagues to offer sailors their first meaningful pay rise in decades. It similarly catalogues the many schemes he introduced to entice people from a wider range of backgrounds, including sailors from the lower deck, to become naval officers. As with enhanced naval pay, this required him to persevere against entrenched interests, but as this chapter will show, his achievements in this area were considerable.


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