Breaking the Religious Image

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Art ◽  
Positive Form ◽  
Acceptable Alternative ◽  
The Status ◽  
Caspar David Friedrich ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Church Art ◽  
Religious Iconography ◽  
Religious Image

The chapter provides an overview of two tendencies in the transformation of the status of religious motifs in art starting with the painting of Caspar David Friedrich and ending with Expressionism. This period was characterised by a major shift in the mutual positioning of art and religion both institutionally and aesthetically. Church art became an increasingly problematic category at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly because the clergy objected to decorating churches with the unusual interpretation of religious iconography associated with modernist aesthetics. Considered from this perspective abstract art appeared as an acceptable alternative precisely as opposed to other images with unusual modernist interpretations. The absence of figurative images removes all controversies as to how religious subjects should be interpreted. Religious iconography had a continued presence within the work of numerous artists in the different movements of the historical avant-gardes. While the figurative references to religious motifs in most of the cases were quite critical in their tone (whether this was intended by the artist or not) and used as tools of criticism of the institutions of art and religion, abstract art became the medium for expression of a positive form of spirituality.

scholarly journals Rethinking Southern Europe: Society, Networks and Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Alan Granadino ◽  
Eirini Karamouzi ◽  
Rinna Kullaa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Eurozone Crisis ◽  
Development Education ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Definition Of

Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task. Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity. They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures. These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. Once the Eurozone crisis hit in the 2000s these questions came back with renewed force but with even less conceptual clarity, as journalists and pundits frequently gestured towards vague notions of what they considered to be ‘Southern Europe’.

Interethnic contradictions in Transylvania (middle of the nineteenth — early twentieth centuries) as seen through the eyes of Russian observers

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-131
Author(s):  
Aleksandr S. Stykalin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Remote Region ◽  
Interethnic Relations ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Russian Empire

Reorganisation of the Austrian Empire into the dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1867 was followed by an attempt to cancel the special status of the Grand Principality of Transylvania, which had a long tradition of autonomous statehood, and absorb it into the Kingdom of Hungary. This caused a reaction by the Romanian nationalist movement in the region that intensified decade by decade. That this movement became a threat to the integrity of Austria-Hungary could not help but become an object of observation for Russian diplomats in the neighbouring Kingdom of Romania, where the issue of the status of Transylvanian Romanians was gaining more and more political attention. In this essay, based on archival and published sources, it is shown how Russian observers, first and foremost Russian diplomats in Bucharest, described not only the complex interethnic relations at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also the attitude of the Romanian political elite and Romanian public opinion towards the status of Romanians in Transylvania - subjects of the Habsburgs. The author comes to the conclusion that a glace thrown from outside on this remote region, loosely con-nected with Russia, nevertheless allows conclusions to be drawn that help to reassess issues that concerned the Russian Empire (such as the Bessarabia question).

Dalit Liberative Identity as Amalgam

2019 ◽  
pp. 336-363
Author(s):  
George Oommen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Large Section ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The chapter discusses post-conversion experiences and struggles of Dalits who had opted for Christianity, taking the case of Pulayas in Kerala, who had become members of the Anglican Church during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The change of religion led to new self-assessment and identity-seeking. Pulayas had major conflicts with Syrian Christians, including Christian landlords. Many Pulayas had then still the status of bonded labourers or even slaves (adiyan). After covering the early twentieth-century agitations to overcome their social degradation and exclusion from public spaces, the author focuses on the later involvement of Christian Pulayas with the Communist mobilization. Communist activists accepted water and food from the Pulayas. Finally, the chapter discusses the push of Pulaya Christians for a distinctive depressed-class administration within the Anglican Church, ending with the break-away of a large section of Dalit Christians from the Anglican Church and the start of a new church, the CMS Church, in 1968.

Empire and Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 318-341
Author(s):  
Amira K. Bennison
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Geographic Space ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and empire, focusing on the empires of the Islamic world while also alluding to Sasanian Persia, the Byzantine Empire, Latin Christendom, and the European colonial empires which occupied the same geographic space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After exploring the notions of “empire” and “religion,” it will consider associations between power and the sacred, expressed in many societies via cosmologies in which rulers were assumed to play a pivotal role in maintaining a harmonious social order. It will then explore the status rulers held in relation to dominant beliefs or confessional faiths, ranging from headship of a religious community to divine rights to rule, and how this was supported from the material and ideological perspectives in urban centers and across the countryside. The chapter concludes with a brief look at religious movements as a form of resistance to such hegemonic imperial structures.

scholarly journals (Not) getting the credit: women, liminal subjectivity and resisting neoliberalism in documentary production

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 673-688
Author(s):  
Anne O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Work Relationships ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Negative Experiences ◽  
Positive Form ◽  
Positive Adaptation ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
The Status

Women experience positive engagements with documentary as an enclave that values their gendered contribution, but also suffer negative encounters with it as a genre that restricts their full involvement, by promoting masculinist practices as normative. This gendered dynamic means that women occupy a liminal space with regard to documentary. Women’s liminal status is experienced negatively in a number of ways: first, during commissioning, where their approach to narrative, budgets and directing are questioned; second, in terms of work relationships where they are required to be relentlessly ‘likeable’; and third, when credits for work performed are withheld. Women’s subjective identities are constructed around this negative liminal positioning but it can become a position or form of positive adaptation to gendered and neoliberal subjectivity in their working lives. Resistance occurs when women conduct practices such as, first, enhancing the status of affective labour; second, when they undo or reject working through normative hierarchies; and third, when they collaborate in documentary production to negate neoliberal logics of individualization. Liminality, thus, constitutes both a way of understanding women’s negative experiences of gender inequality in documentary production but also a potentially positive form of resistance to the gendered precarity that characterizes creative labour.

of the house, both practically and symbolically — a role which links women, not only with the traditional concept of hearth and home, but also indicates her authority and control in that sphere (Bonomi & Ruta Serafini 1994). Keys and women are further symbolised in religious iconography, as we will see later. Sex The depiction of love-making, on both beds and chairs, is very graphically represented in situla art (fig. 6). Boardman wrote that "love-making has iconographie conventions like any other . . . whether the intention is pleasure, display, procreation or cult" and indeed all these explanations have been offered as explanation for such scenes in situla art. I would concur with Boardman and Bonfante that these depictions are purely secular (Boardman 1971; Bonfante 1981), rather than ritual, as suggested by Kastelic and Eibner. The scene on the Castelvetro mirror (fig. 6, 1), which, as we have seen, is for Kastelic a hieros gamos, could, perhaps, be more plausibly can be read in the form of a strip cartoon, in which a rider arrives on horseback, a prostitute is procured, with price being negotiated between a man and a woman — with the women holding up two fingers the man one — and the act subsequently carried out after further arrangements between a woman and a seated man. In all probability this was a recognisable story, perhaps related to the one about the inn-keeper's daughter still celebrated in Italian popular song, or, if we take into account the link between this and Etruscan mirrors, perhaps even some myth or legend. Even though the bed is in the form of the Urnfield bird-headed sun-boat, since the latter is such a common decorative motif, it cannot be used to interpret this as a religious image. The fact that this 'tale' is depicted on a mirror, which one presumes was a female item, is rather surprising and suggests that, either it was intended as a gift for a high class prostitute, or can be seen a rather crude allusion to sex on a gift for a more respectable woman. Whatever the interpretation, there is surely some relationship between the mirror, as an object of self adornment, and the subject matter depicted on it, which again follows the tendency of situla art to relate decoration to the function of the object. This and other depictions of love-making, rich in the sensuous detail of vibrating mattresses and pubic hair, indeed are more redolent of an earthy Italic sense of enjoyment than any religious allusion to sacred marriage. Such sexually explicit designs are comparable with Eruscan tomb painting and may reflect the open sexuality held to be characteristic of Etruscan women, which was commented on by Theopompus in the 4th century BC (Bonfante 1994). We can conclude that women may be shown in mainly subservient roles on the situlae because these were used in the context of male entertainment and festivals, but on the rattle they appear in a more productive light. The mirror, certainly belonging to someone with wealth, if not respectability, carries a more uncertain message. On Greek red figure drinking cups, objects of male use, we sometime find a duality of the representation of the hetairai and the virtuous wife, sometimes on the same cup, with the latter, incidentally, often engaged in spinning or weaving (Beard 1991: 28- 9). Female deities The representation of a goddess with the keys, as well as animals, is found in situla art on five votive plaques probably found in a hoard near Montebelluna (Fogolari 1956) (fig. 7). The figure, accompanied by both plants and animals, is, according to Fogolari, probably a fertility goddess, Pothnia theron — a Venetic equivalent of Demeter — carrying the key to both the opening of the fertility of plants and help in the birth of animals and women (Fogolari 1956). Keys, however, as we have seen, are also found in female graves in the area, where they suggest the role of women as keepers of the household, a role which may also have been sanctioned in the supernatural world (Bonomi & Ruta Serafini 1994).

2016 ◽  
pp. 162-165
Keyword(s):  
Pubic Hair ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Female Deities ◽  
The One ◽  
Religious Iconography ◽  
And Control ◽  
Religious Image

The Resonance of “Culture”: Framing a Problem in Global Concept-History

2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 676-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Sartori
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Direct Transfer ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Status ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Asian Languages

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “culture” achieved the status of a truly global concept. We find discourses of “culture” emerging to prominence in the German-speaking world during the second half of the eighteenth century (with the closely associated linguistic arenas of the Netherlands and Scandinavia rapidly following suit); in the English-speaking world starting in the first half of the nineteenth century; in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; and just about everywhere else in the course of the twentieth century. “Culture” began to circulate far beyond the European sites of its modern genesis, sometimes through the direct transfer of lexical items from Western European languages (e.g., Russian kulءtura; the use of kalcar in various South Asian languages); and more often through the construction of new translative equivalencies with preexisting words or concepts most often signifying purification, refinement, or improvement (e.g., Japanese bun-ka; Chinese wen-hua; Bangla and Hindi sanskriti; Urdu tamaddun).

scholarly journals Population status and habitat use of southern right whales in the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands of New Zealand

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-116
Author(s):  
Nathalie J. Patenaude ◽  
C. Scott Baker
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Habitat Use ◽  
Molecular Sexing ◽  
Right Whales ◽  
The Status ◽  
Southern Right Whales ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Cow Calf ◽  
High Concentrations ◽  
One Year

In the winters of 1995, 1996 and 1997, research was conducted in the Auckland Islands to evaluate the status of southern right whales inthe New Zealand sub-Antarctic. Whales were present in high concentrations each year (maximum count of 146 whales) in a small area onthe northeast side of the main island. Cow-calf pairs averaged 12% (range 9% to 14%) of the total population. Most cow-calf pairs weresighted resting at the surface (60%) or travelling (36%) and showed a strong preference for shallow ( < 20m depth) nearshore waters. Theratio of females to males, as determined by molecular sexing using biopsy samples, varied from 54% to 39% over the three years but didnot differ significantly from 1:1 in any year. Both males and females were found in varying group sizes, with the occurrence of social/sexualactivity predominant (85%) in groups of three or more whales. Most single whales were found resting (59%) and occasionally approachedthe research vessel (19%). A total of 217 individual whales have been photo-identified over the three years of this study, 24% of which wereresighted more than once in a season and approximately 15% of which were resighted in more than one year. The high density of whalesin Port Ross during winter months, the presence of cow-calf pairs, including newborns, and the frequency of social and sexual activityindicates that the Auckland Islands are a primary wintering habitat for southern right whales in New Zealand waters. However, the lowresighting rates within season and documented movement to nearby Campbell Island (290km) suggest that some whales are not residentin the Auckland Islands throughout the season. The rarity of right whales along the main islands of New Zealand and their apparent increasein numbers in the Auckland Islands suggests a major shift in habitat use from pre-exploitation times or the loss of a component of ahistorically sub-divided stock.

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