Maya at the Edge of the World

Author(s):  
David A. Freidel

This summary chapter weaves together the themes presented by various authors into a broader view of greater Mayab. The author draws on his wide experience excavating on Cozumel Island and in Yucatan, Belize, and Guatemala to link Chetumal Bay, situated on the eastern edge of the region, to more distant Maya polities across time and space. He follows the themes of waterborne travel, noted in new discoveries at El Achiotal, the precocious early development of a long distance exchange network at Yaxuna and elsewhere, the rise of the El Mirador polity in the Late Preclassic, and the fortunes of the Classic era Kaanal kingdom to link individual site histories to broader historical trends.

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 177-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannis Vardanis ◽  
Jan-Åke Nilsson ◽  
Raymond H.G. Klaassen ◽  
Roine Strandberg ◽  
Thomas Alerstam

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Pizzuto ◽  
Matteo Bonato ◽  
Gialunca Vernillo ◽  
Antonio La Torre ◽  
Maria Francesca Piacentini

Purpose:To analyze how many finalists of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Junior Championships (WJCs) in the middle- and long-distance track events had dropped out from high-level competitions.Methods:Starting from 2002, the 8 male and the 8 female finalists in the middle- and long-distance events of 6 editions of the WJC were followed until 2015 to evaluate how many missed the IAAF rankings for 2 consecutive years starting from the year after WJC participation. For those still competing at elite level, their careers were monitored.Results:In 2015, 61% of the 2002, 54.8% of the 2004, 48.3% of the 2006, 37.5% of the 2008, 26.2% of the 2010, and 29% of the 2012 WJC finalists were not present in the IAAF rankings. Of the 368 athletes considered, 75 (20.4%) were able to achieve the IAAF top 10 in 2.4 ± 2.2 y. There is evidence of relationships between dropout and gender (P = .040), WJC edition (P = .000), and nationality (P = .010) and between the possibility to achieve the IAAF top 10 and dropout (P = .000), continent (P = .001), relative age effect (P = .000), and quartile of birth (P = .050).Conclusions:Even if 23 of the finalists won a medal at the Olympic Games or at the World Championships, it is still not clear if participation at the WJC is a prerequisite to success at a senior level.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Sierra Smith-Flores ◽  
Lisa Feigenson

Infants show impressive sensitivity to others’ emotions from early on, attending to and discriminating different facial emotions, using emotions to decide what to approach or avoid, and recognizing that certain objects and events are likely to produce certain emotional responses. But do infants and toddlers also recognize more abstract features of emotions—features that are not tied to any one emotion in particular? Here we examined the development of the higher order expectation that emotions are more or less mutually exclusive, asking whether young children recognize that people generally do not express two conflicting emotions towards a single stimulus. We first asked whether 26-month old toddlers can use an agent’s incongruent versus congruent emotional responses (“Yay! Yuck!” versus “Yay! Wow!”) to reason about how many objects were hidden in a box. We found that toddlers inferred that incongruent emotions signaled the presence of two numerically distinct objects (Experiment 1). This inference relied on the incongruent emotions being produced by a single agent; when two different agents gave two incongruent emotional responses, toddlers did not assume that two objects must be present (Experiment 2). Finally, we examined the developmental trajectory of this ability. We found that younger, 20-month olds failed to use incongruent emotions to individuate objects (Experiment 3), although they readily used incongruent novel labels to do so (Experiment 4). Our results suggest that by 2-years of age, children use higher order knowledge of emotions to make inferences about the world around them, and that this ability undergoes early development.


2021 ◽  
pp. 298-319
Author(s):  
Lidija Bajuk

Trying to interpret oneself and the other in the world, the traditional Man has established a real world and an otherworld. Specific herbal and animal attributes were ascribed to particular people who allegedly had the power to communicate between worldliness and transcendence. Also some human characteristics were linked with herbal and animal mediators. These attributes were folklorized as miraculous powers. Such supernatural beings from South Slavic traditional conceptionsof the world have been largely associated with the pre-Christian deities and their degradations, based on the observed real attributes of the vegetal and animal species. The interdisciplinary comparative way of treating South Slavic folklore real-unreal motifs through time and space in this article is its ethnological, animalistic and anthropological contribution.


2014 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-304
Author(s):  
Mateusz Jaeger

Zusammenfassung: In den letzten Jahrzehnten nahm die Siedlung von Spišský Štvrtok eine wichtige Rolle in der Debatte über jene Fernbeziehungen ein, die die Welt der mykenischen Kultur mit Mitteleuropa verbanden. Obwohl die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen auf dem Gelände noch immer nicht in ihrer Gesamtheit veröffentlicht sind, postulierte der Ausgräber J. Vladár eine Übereinstimmung der Steinmauern und Bastionen mit solchen mykenischer Architektur und fand für diese Thesen wissenschaftlichen Zuspruch. Im vorliegenden Artikel wird der Annahme jedoch widersprochen. Die Befestigungen von Spišský Štvrtok werden in einem vergleichenden Ansatz diskutiert und Siedlungsstrukturen gegenübergestellt, die aus der Otomani-Füzesabony-Kultur und der mykenischen Kultur bekannt sind. Der Autor zeigt im Vergleich mit weiteren Befunden bronzezeitlicher Verteidigungsarchitektur die Alleinstellung der vorliegenden Anlage. Die dabei sichtbar werdenden Unterschiede rechtfertigen die Notwendigkeit, nach alternativen chronologischen Ansätzen für die steinerne Befestigungsanlage von Spišský Štvrtok zu suchen. Résumé: L’habitat fortifié de Spišský Štvrtok a joué un rôle important au cours des dernières décennies dans le débat sur les relations à longue portée entre le monde de la civilisation mycénienne et l’Europe centrale. Quoique les résultats des fouilles de ce site n’aient pas été entièrement publiés, les opinions de leur auteur, J. Vladár, proposant que les murs et bastions en pierre encerclant le site démontrent des affinités avec l’architecture mycénienne, ont largement été acceptées. L’auteur du présent article conteste cette thèse. Les fortifications de Spišský Štvrtok font ici l’objet d’une approche comparative, les confrontant à d’autres structures d’habitat appartenant à la culture d’Otomani-Füzesabony et à la civilisation mycénienne. L’auteur démontre ainsi le caractère distinct de Spišský Štvrtok par rapport aux modèles courants de l’architecture de l’âge du Bronze. Cette disparité demande un autre modèle pour expliquer la chronologie des fortifications en pierre sur le site en question. Abstract: In recent decades, the settlement at Spišský Štvrtok played an important role in the debate concerning the long-distance relationships linking the world of the Mycenaean civilisation with Central Europe. Although the findings of the excavations at the site have not been published in their entirety, the views of its excavator, J. Vladár, who suggested that the site’s stone walls and bastions bore a similarity to Mycenaean architecture, have been widely accepted. In this article, the author challenges this thesis. The Spišský Štvrtok fortifications are discussed in a comparative approach, set against other settlement structures known from the Otomani-Füzesabony culture and the Mycenaean culture. The author demonstrates the apparent distinctiveness of Spišský Štvrtok when compared with the known models of Bronze Age defensive architecture. The disparity justifies the need to seek an alternative explanation for the chronology of the stone fortifications at the site in question.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alemante A Ayalew ◽  
Zeytu G Asfaw ◽  
Solomon A Lemma

Abstract Background: HIV/AIDS pandemic seriously ravaged the world for the past three decades. It left the world with full of complicated social, economic and political problems. The problem has continued as major health problems for most developing countries, including Ethiopia. Socio-cultural practices which are predominantly determining the life of most of these peoples have structured the spread of HIV/AIDS. The aim of this study was to investigate how socio-cultural factors are affecting patients' adherence at ART clinics in Hawassa and Yirgalem Referral Hospitals. Methods: Qualitative and quantitative designs were used to collect the data. Results: The findings have shown that for fear of stigma and discrimination at family and community levels forced patients' affected adherence at ART clinics. People living with HIV were forced to travel long distance to get rid of social exclusion and isolation that resulting in drug interruptions and drop outs. The findings have also shown that most of the followers of protestant religion make believe that HIV could be cured and boycotted them from taking ART drugs. Moreover, confidentiality of information about HIV positive children living with care givers and newly tested patients found to be resistant to start or continue their drugs. Sense of wellbeing elicited form long term ART drugs effects made patients to imagine complete healing thereby dropping their treatment. Conclusions: The findings made clear that multidimensional socio-cultural factors structure and restructure adherence problems at the ART clinics in the study hospitals. Interventions targeting to change socio-cultural factors play crucial roles to prevent and control new infections, occurrence of drug resistant strains, and social and economic repercussions in the society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-127
Author(s):  
Tiffany Rhoades Isselhardt

Where are the girls who made history? What evidence have they left behind? Are there places and spaces that bear witness to their memory? Girl Museum was founded in 2009 to address these questions, among many others. Established by art historian Ashley E. Remer, whose work revealed that most, if not all, museums never explicitly discuss or center girls and girlhood, Girl Museum was envisioned as a virtual space dedicated to researching, analyzing, and interpreting girl culture across time and space. Over its first ten years, we produced a wide range of art in historical and cultural exhibitions that explored conceptions of girlhood and the direct experiences of girls in the past and present. Led by an Advisory Board of scholars and entirely reliant on volunteers and donations, we grew from a small website into a complex virtual museum of exhibitions, projects, and programs that welcomes an average 50,000 visitors per year from around the world.


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