scholarly journals Modern singing sons of the Pharaohs

Ethnologies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Carolyn M. Ramzy

In 2009, the U.S. Library of Congress officially launched the Ragheb Moftah Collection, an online exhibit that presented the largest music archive of Coptic liturgical recordings and music transcriptions outside of Egypt. Moftah, an amateur Egyptian collector, had commissioned an English composer, Ernest Newlandsmith, to notate and record the entire Orthodox hymnody. They both believed that, as the last connection to a Pharaonic and pre-Islamic past, the ancient melodies lay unchanged, “buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation.” Drawing on Wendy Cheng’s notion of strategic orientalism (2013) and Timothy Mitchell’s staging modernity (2000), I explore contemporary discursive politics of sound archives in the Coptic community. Specifically, I investigate the role of Coptic music archives in articulations of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and agency as a religious and political minority in a Muslim majority nation. How have today’s cantors and activists rendered western transcriptions as sound objects which to negotiate authenticity as Egypt’s last remaining “modern sons of the pharaohs,” even without being able to read them? As the principal curator of the site, I explore how Western scholarly encounters have not only entangled Coptic music discourses in a western-centered teleology of modernity and progress, but in emulating the West, also infused them with orientalist critiques that equated heterophony and embellishments to “Arab debris” that marked signs of backwardness.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Presya Ramadhan

This paper examines the role of Middle East Investment Initiative (MEII) in development in the West Bank, Palestine in the U.S.-Palestine Partnership (UPP) framework. Answering the question of how the role of the Middle East Investment Initiative (MEII) in development in Palestine in the US-Palestine Partnership (UPP) framework and how the contribution of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to development in Palestine, the author's thesis statement is that amid diplomatic and territorial disputes, The Middle East Investment Initiative (MEII) as a public-private partnership becomes the main channel for collecting and channeling development assistance such as resources and private sector investment that can benefit the West Bank and bring prosperity to people Palestinians. While the private sector such as the Middle East Investment Initiative (MEII) cannot do much to address diplomacy or security issues, the private sector can play an equally important role through the contribution of resources and investment to conflict areas such as Palestine to help economic development In the West Bank, Palestine.


Author(s):  
Oliver Charbonneau

This chapter recounts the story of Americans and Moros in colonial Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. It ranges from 1899, when U.S. military forces relieved the Spanish garrison at Zamboanga, to 1941, when Japan invaded the Commonwealth of the Philippines. It also considers the Spanish legacy in Mindanao-Sulu and American precolonial contacts with the region. The chapter elaborates the minor role of Muslim-majority areas in many histories of the American Philippines and explains the historiographical absence that perpetuates trends originating in American and Christian Filipino colonial imaginaries. It points out how the South's position as a politically and culturally subordinate space in an emerging nation-state created the preconditions for its marginalization in the literature on the U.S. colonial empire.


Halloween ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder ◽  
Murray Leeder

This introductory chapter provides an overview and a synopsis of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Halloween is an acknowledged horror classic, and one of the relatively few horror films added to the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress, an honour accorded to it in 2006. A large part of the effectiveness of Halloween lies in its willingness to be basic and uncomplicated. Even its stylistic flourishes, highly ambitious for such a low-budget independent production, are smoothly integrated, instead of being showy and ostentatious. Carpenter has characterised Halloween as an exercise in style, and freely uses the term ‘exploitation film’ to describe it. The chapter then considers the relationship between Halloween and the slasher film. It also assesses the role of urban legend themes in Halloween, and how the film evokes a practice that anthropologists and folklorists have dubbed ‘legend tripping’.


2003 ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
I. Dezhina ◽  
I. Leonov

The article is devoted to the analysis of the changes in economic and legal context for commercial application of intellectual property created under federal budgetary financing. Special attention is given to the role of the state and to comparison of key elements of mechanisms for commercial application of intellectual property that are currently under implementation in Russia and in the West. A number of practical suggestions are presented aimed at improving government stimuli to commercialization of intellectual property created at budgetary expense.


2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-160

The separation wall, one of the largest civil engineering projects in Israel's history, has been criticized even by the U.S. administration, with Condoleezza Rice stating at the end of June 2003 that it ““arouses our [U.S.] deep concern”” and President Bush on 25 July calling it ““a problem”” and noting that ““it is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank.”” A number of reports have already been issued concerning the wall, including reports by B'Tselem (available at www.btselem.org), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (available at www.palestinianaid.info), and the World Bank's Local Aid Coordination Committee (LACC; also available at www.palestinianaid.info). UNRWA's report focuses on the segment of the wall already completed and is based on field visits to the areas affected by the barriers, with a special emphasis on localities with registered refugees. Notes have been omitted due to space constraints. The full report is available online at www.un.org/unrwa.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-112
Author(s):  
Pierre Legendre

"Der Beitrag reevaluiert die «dogmatische Funktion», eine soziale Funktion, die mit biologischer und kultureller Reproduktion und folglich der Reproduktion des industriellen Systems zusammenhängt. Indem sie sich auf der Grenze zwischen Anthropologie und Rechtsgeschichte des Westens situiert, nimmt die Studie die psychoanalytische Frage nach der Rolle des Rechts im Verhalten des modernen Menschen erneut in den Blick. </br></br>This article reappraises the dogmatic function, a social function related to biological and cultural reproduction and consequently to the reproduction of the industrial system itself. On the borderline of anthropology and of the history of law – applied to the West – this study takes a new look at the question raised by psychoanalysis concerning the role of law in modern human behaviour. "


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