scholarly journals Identity, Fidelity, and Cross-Cultural Relationships in Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly

Author(s):  
Robert McParland

Almayer’s Folly (1896) by Joseph Conrad challenged the conventions of the fictional romance while confronting the need of native-born Malayans and other Asian individuals to find voice and identity in an imperial context. Along with the narrative voice in this text are the many other voices of those who have been colonized. Fidelity to one’s identity and openness to relationships across cultures lies at the crux of this study. Conrad’s critics of the 1950s and 1960s dismissed his first novel as a romance with a weak subplot. However, that subplot, about Almayer’s daughter Nina and her love affair, sets forth moral claims of loyalty and fidelity that must be taken into account. For her relation- ship with a Malay prince expresses a love that is binding and enduring, one that crosses boundaries and divisions and is an apt model for our culturally convergent world. Conrad creates a dialectic of intercultural subjectivities to make a point about identity, loyalty, and self-fashioning. Whereas Almayer is portrayed as foolish and inflexible, his daughter, Nina, faces significant issues of identity, as she has to choose between the traditional, indigenous heritage of her mother and her father’s modern European aspirations. With Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad showed himself to be an international novelist who could develop a story with an inter-racial and intercultural cast of characters.

Author(s):  
Saw Ralph ◽  
Naw Sheera ◽  
Stephanie Olinga-Shannon

This chapter describes Saw Ralph's first meeting with Naw Sheera and his subsequent marriage to her. He met Naw Sheera as a soldier during the 1950s, as his unit passed by the village where she worked as a teacher. But there were complications to this love affair, as wedding arrangements had to be made in advance, with the knowledge of the higher authorities in the revolution, besides. Despite certain difficulties, however, the wedding pushed through, although this proved to be only the first of the many challenges the new couple would experience in married life. This chapter follows Saw Ralph's life after his marriage as he and Naw Sheera attempt to raise a family.


1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-162
Author(s):  
Lee Anna Clark

1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-10
Author(s):  
Rosalind Cottrell

When I was growing up in the 1950s in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the urban Delta, the closest I came to an anthropologist was the man who dug the dump site near our home looking for old scrap iron to sell. Certainly there was no expectation for me to become an anthropologist from my grandmother, the matriarch of our family. However, she had moved to the city after the death of her husband with expectations of a better life for her four girls. Stressing education as "the way out," she told stories about her slave uncle who recognized the value of education and learned to read from two young girls he drove to school. In turn, he taught this daily lesson to his family around the fire each night. The many evenings sitting on our front porch, and on the front porch of neighbors, watching and listening to grandma's stories and the stories of others, set a foundation for anthropology in my life and led to my becoming a medical anthropologist.


1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 147-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald K. Hambleton ◽  
Anil Kanjee

Translating or adapting psychological and educational tests from one language and culture to other languages and cultures has been a common practice for almost a hundred years, beginning with Binet's test of intelligence. Despite the long history and the many good reasons for adapting tests, proper methods for conducting test adaptations and establishing score equivalence are not well known by psychologists. The purpose of this paper is to focus attention on judgmental and statistical methods and procedures for adapting tests with special focus on procedures for identifying poorly adapted items. When these methods are correctly applied, the validity of any cross-cultural uses of the adapted test should be increased.


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-136
Author(s):  
Felise Tavo

Images of the church are found scattered throughout the Apocalypse. These have thus been the focus of recent studies in the ecclesial notions of the seer of Patmos. But as this article illustrates, these studies vary to some extent in their principal focus while the methods of approach have been remarkably 'selective' in their treatment of the many church images of the book. As a way of bringing together these disparate methods and focus, this article discusses seven key thematic emphases in the recent studies of the seer's ecclesial notions since the 1950s, which could perhaps serve as 'rallying points' for further development of a more comprehensive portrait of the church in the Apocalypse: the 'cross-event' as underpinning; the eschatologi cal people of God; a community of equality; corporate in nature; non-addi tive in character; a community seeking repentance; and a trans-historical view of reality.


Author(s):  
Norman Gillen ◽  
Kakali Bhattacharya

This article is a response to calls for more first - person accounts from researchers using narrative formats to interpret data. The authors examine the practice of ethnodrama as a means of exploring and analyzing the experiences of a Latina public - school student in a small South Texas coastal town during the 1950s and 1960s as she attempted to negotiate multiple ethnic spaces while resisting traditional behavioral expectations representative of that period. Through coding and synthesizing the participant’s responses, the researchers established theme s on which to base the composition of three dramatic scenes for purposes of data representation. In addition to conveying how the participant overcame challenges she faced as a young Chicana activist, we discuss implications surrounding current thinking on ethnodrama as a cross - cultural endeavor, a creative practice, and a potential emancipatory tool.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-242
Author(s):  
Isabelle Richet

This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship that developed between English-language periodicals published in Italy and major reading rooms in Rome and Florence. This relationship took various configurations – from Luigi Piale in Rome, who opened a reading room and published the weekly The Roman Advertiser, to the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence that provided access to the many English-language periodicals published in Italy – and created important spaces of transnational cultural interaction. The paper looks at the cultural practices and the forms of sociability represented by the reading of periodicals and the patronizing of reading rooms as ‘imported traditions’ brought to Italy by the many British cultured travellers and residents in the nineteenth century. It identifies the actors who promoted these cultural practices (editors, librarians, cosmopolitan intellectuals) and analyses their role as mediating figures who created in-between spaces where cross-cultural exchanges unfolded. The paper also discusses the broader transnational cultural dynamic at work as those cultural practices imported from England favoured a greater engagement of British visitors and expatriates with the Italian political and cultural environment.


Antiquity ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (289) ◽  
pp. 509-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Loosley

The Limestone Massif of northwest Syria has the largest concentration of late antique churches in the world. All date from between the second half of the 4th century and the first decade of the 7th century and are remarkably consistent in their conformity to a recognizably ‘Syrian’ architectural style. Almost without exception they are apsed basilicas varying only in terms of size and the quality of decoration.This region was extensively surveyed in the 1950s by Georges Tchalenko, whose monumental three-volume study Villages antiques de la Syrie du nord remains the definitive work on the area. Of the many ecclesiastical buildings included in this survey Tchalenko identified a group of approximately 45 churches possessing a bema. The bema is a horseshoe-shaped structure in the nave that mirrors the curve of the apse. Entered via steps at the east end, it provided benches for the clergy and a pulpit at the west end that was used for scriptural expositions and homilies.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Aaron T. Hollander

A workshop on “comparative hagiology” over the course of three years at the American Academy of Religion has yielded not only a series of articles but an experimental methodology by which scholars hailing from different disciplines and working in different fields might collaborate in threshing out commonalities and entanglements in their respective treatments of holy figures. This article’s response to the workshop identifies three pillars of general consensus among the participants that serve as promising footholds for aligned innovation in our respective fields: That hagiography (1) is constituted not only in verbal texts but in a wide array of media, both material and ephemeral; (2) is best interpreted by attending substantially to the “processes” of thought, life, and society in which it is rendered; and (3) opens possibilities of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary comparison by way of the many family resemblances in how saints (or more broadly, religious and even para-religious exemplars) are rendered in transmittable media and mobilized for a particular group’s benefit. The article concludes by suggesting vectors for further development on these grounds, indicating how the category of “hagiography” affords a resource for interpreting unauthorized and apparently irreligious phenomena akin to sanctification, and calling for a professional and pedagogical ethic of collaboration that extends beyond any particular scholarly fruits of hagiological comparison.


2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilaria Marchesi

Abstract This paper investigates the status that the genre of fable acquires when it is employed in literature. In particular, it surveys Horace's treatment of fables in the Satires andEpistles and the carefully controlled circumstances in which zoomorphic language is allowed to emerge during the banquet at Trimalchio's in Petronius' Satyrica. The analysis of the distribution of fables in Horace shows that for the Roman literary public the act of speaking through fables bore in itself a negative connotation, so much that the moral discourse of the satirist needed at first to provide additional justification in order to incorporate them: from vindication of ingenuitas and shifts in narrative voice, to use of rhetorical misnomers and eventually of philosophical frankness. Petronius' text, in turn, suggests that what is wrong with fable is precisely its being reminiscent of a servile past. During the dinner at Trimalchio's allusions to recognizable fable plots and zoomorphic language are allowed to surface only during a momentary absence of the host. This circumstance suggests that fable is not just another literary genre among the many genres abused in Trimalchio's house: for both the host and his freedmen guests fables are an uncomfortable reminder of an enduring past inscribed in their language.


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