Aaron Antonovsky (1923–1994): The Personal, Ideological, and Intellectual Genesis of Salutogenesis

This chapter is of particular importance in the handbook. Written by Aaron Antonovsky’s son Avishai Antonovsky, and by one of his closest colleagues and former PhD student, Shifra Sagy, this chapter provides the first biography of the founding father of salutogenesis. The authors share their insight regarding the development of the salutogenic idea, by drawing lines connecting it to the person Aaron Antonovsky was. They were very close to Aaron for several decades, and their familiarity with his background contributes to understanding the development of salutogenesis. They shed some light on Aaron’s personal experiences, ideological beliefs, and professional development throughout his life, until the crystallization of the salutogenic idea.

Salutogenesis From Its Origins to the Present

Part I provides an overview of the development of the field of salutogenesis, as background for the remaining chapters in The Handbook of Salutogenesis. Chapter 2 by Bengt Lindström reviews mileposts in the development of the field from the late 1990s until today. Chapter 3 by Maurice Mittelmark and Georg Bauer is a revision and expansion of a chapter in the 2017 Edition, meant to convey some of the main ways the term ‘salutogenesis’ is used today. Chapter 4 is of particular importance in this Handbook. Written by Aaron Antonovsky’s son Avishai Antonovsky, and by one of his closest colleagues and former PhD student, Shifra Sagy; this revised chapter from the 2017 Edition provides the first biography of the founding father of salutogenesis. Chapter 5, also from the 2017 Edition, is a summary of Antonovsky’s development of the Salutogenic Model of Health. The editors are convinced it is among the best synopses available. Chapter 6 by Georg Bauer provides the reader with a description of Salutogenesis meeting places. The reader wanting to connect more directly to a global salutogenesis network will find this chapter to be of great practical value. Finally, Chap. 7 by Lenneke Vaandrager of The Netherlands and colleagues from Spain, Germany, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and Poland trace the development of higher education in salutogenesis in Europe, spanning 30 years.

The Psychosis of Power: A Lacanian Reading of Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme

In the mid-seventies, Paraguay was two decades into what would ultimately be the second longest dictatorship in its history, second only to the reign of its “founding father,” Doctor José Rodríguez Gaspar de Francia. The regime of Alfredo Stroessner justified its existence and articulated its continued role in Paraguayan politics on a genealogy of national identity that had its supposed roots in the Francia government, Francia’s political ideology and, in fact, in the historical person of Francia himself. In this essay I show how the great Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos’s 1974 novel, I, the Supreme, takes aim at the “kernel of the real” in the Stroessner regime’s political genealogy, using fiction to make evident its anamorphic manipulation of national and nationalist identity. By taking at its word the regime’s historical discourse, I, the Supreme reveals the psychotic logic animating its version of political power.

A Century of Dialogue around Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Social Sciences

In 2012 social scientists, philosophers and religious scientists celebrated the centennial of the publication of one of the most seminal books in the modern study of religion, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, by the then leading French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s (1858–1917); in 2017, we commemorated that author’s untimely death at age 59, broken by World War I in which he lost his only son and many of his beloved students. Educated, first as a Rabinnical student then as a modern philosopher, Durkheim earned his place among French thinkers primarily as a “founding father” of the social sciences. Having recently (on the basis of a life-long preoccupation) devoted a book-length study to Durkheim’s religion theory, I intend in this essay to highlight major aspects of Durkheim as an exponent of French thought. I shall first briefly situate Durkheim in his time and age, with special emphasis on his political views and his ethnic identity as a secularised Jew. Then I turn to Durkheim’s relation with the discipline in which he was originally trained, philosophy. I shall pay attention to the complex relationship between Durkheim and Kant and further highlight his dualism, epistemology, and views on primitive classification, as well as his puzzling realism, the place of emergence in his thought, and his moralist tendencies. I shall finally articulate Durkheim’s transition to sociology and how he gave over the torch of emerging sociology to his main students, having thus created an adequate context in which to discuss Durkheim’s final masterpiece (Les formes) and the still dominant theory of religion it expounds.

Reading Dalit Autobiographies in English: A Top Ten List

Dalit autobiography has joined protest poetry as a leading genre of Dalit Literature since the nineteen seventies. Finding their inspiration in the social and political activism of B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), leader of the India’s anti-caste movement and a founding father of the Republic, low caste men and women have documented their struggles and victories in the face of ongoing violence and deprivation. Surveying ten life narratives translated into English from Marathi, Hindi, and Kannada, the essay treats works by Ambedkar, Daya Pawar, Sharankumar Limbale, Baby Kamble, Laxman Gaikwad, Siddhalingaiah, Omprakash Valmiki, Urmila Pawar, Vasant Moon and Namdeo Nimgade. Tracing the origins of Dalit autobiography in the writings of Siddharth College and Milind College students in the 1950s, protest writers in the 1960s, and the Dalit Panthers and their followers in the 1970s, the survey identifies recurring themes of social exclusion, poverty, patriarchy, survival and assertion in the realms of politics, employment, education, and religion. These intimate testimonials share a radical vision of social transformation across caste, class, gender, linguistic and geographic boundaries and provide a needed corrective to mainstream portraits of modern Indian social history.

Dr. Richard C. Nelson: The Founding Father of Biomechanics

Recollections on meetings with Dick Nelson in the 1970s, his interactions with Soviet authorities, his impact on data collection at Olympic Games, and his work as the President of the International Society of Biomechanics.

From signs of language and culture to semioses of life: appreciating Tom Sebeok’s role in the building of global semiotics

This paper is an attempt at evaluating the advancement of the conceptual and methodological framework of semiotics across its neighboring disciplines as launched and promoted by Thomas Albert Sebeok on a worldwide scale. Writing in a first-person account, the author describes, firstly, his own road to the semiotic study of linguistics, owing to the acquaintance with editorial outputs as well as with the professional proficiency of this founding father of global semiotics as a visiting scholar with an affiliation in the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies of Indiana University at Bloomington. And secondly, he also tries to assess the power of Sebeok’s influence on the career progress of his contemporaries, scholars, followers, and pupils. Some of them, including the author himself, acted soon after as distinguished masters of particular semiotic disciplines or organizers of international enterprises. Finally, the author provides an epistemological evaluation of semiotic thresholds in the research activities of scientists.

Temperance, Liberalism, and Nationalism in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires

Chapter 4 turns to temperance and liberalism within the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. In Germany, liberals promoted temperance not through social movements that had no hope of penetrating the closed autocracy, but as incremental policy reforms within the autocratic bureaucracy. Their primary target was the exploitative East Prussian Junker aristocracy and their high-proof schnapps. Along with the “cult of the offensive,” in the lead-up to World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German high command promoted what this chapter calls the “cult of military sobriety”—that a sober army will be a victorious one—which would be emulated worldwide with the outbreak of the Great War. Meanwhile, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the temperance cause is taken up by liberal nationalists, such as Czechoslovak founding father Tomáš Masaryk, who made the case for abstinence, democratic liberation, and self determination.