Living Memory and the Travelling Mountain Narrative of Taranaki

<p>The Travelling Mountain Narrative is the origin myth of Taranaki maunga and the foundation on which Taranaki tribal tradition and identity is constructed. The story pattern of the Travelling Mountain Narrative relates the journey of Taranaki maunga and Te Toka a Rauhoto to Te Tai Hauāuru. This thesis establishes that the origin myth was sourced in the historical migration account of the ancestor Rua Taranaki and mythologised over multiple generations. Te Toka a Rauhoto is the tangible connection between the past and the present and is represented by the sacred stone located at Puniho Pā. Informed by mātauranga Māori paradigms, a literature and qualitative mixed method research framework collated a wide variety of information about the Travelling Mountain Narrative and the tūpuna of the Kāhui Maunga, the early inhabitants of the Taranaki region. Exploring the way myth and history intersects with the lived reality of a contemporary tribal community this thesis contributes to the critical analysis of these tribal traditions. This thesis also highlights how participating and contributing to the pā, hapū and the iwi throughout the duration of PhD research also offered insider insights into the modern retention of ancient knowledge.</p>

Living Memory and the Travelling Mountain Narrative of Taranaki

<p>The Travelling Mountain Narrative is the origin myth of Taranaki maunga and the foundation on which Taranaki tribal tradition and identity is constructed. The story pattern of the Travelling Mountain Narrative relates the journey of Taranaki maunga and Te Toka a Rauhoto to Te Tai Hauāuru. This thesis establishes that the origin myth was sourced in the historical migration account of the ancestor Rua Taranaki and mythologised over multiple generations. Te Toka a Rauhoto is the tangible connection between the past and the present and is represented by the sacred stone located at Puniho Pā. Informed by mātauranga Māori paradigms, a literature and qualitative mixed method research framework collated a wide variety of information about the Travelling Mountain Narrative and the tūpuna of the Kāhui Maunga, the early inhabitants of the Taranaki region. Exploring the way myth and history intersects with the lived reality of a contemporary tribal community this thesis contributes to the critical analysis of these tribal traditions. This thesis also highlights how participating and contributing to the pā, hapū and the iwi throughout the duration of PhD research also offered insider insights into the modern retention of ancient knowledge.</p>

Narrative and nuclear weapons politics: the entelechial force of the nuclear origin myth

This paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.

Spirou’s Origin Myth and Family Romances

This article focuses on the narratives of Spirou’s origins and backstory from Rob-Vel to Feroumont and Bravo, examining his progressive departure from the Tintinesque adventure paradigm. The Freudian notion of family romance, developed by Marthe Robert into the figures of the foundling and the bastard, is key, as it thematises the hero’s origins and early life in a domestic sphere. This motif, absent in Tintin, occurs in Spirou as Rob-Vel’s artistic creation becomes origin myth, and post-Franquin ‘naturalised’ conceptions give the character a family, a childhood, and related memories. The article examines how Spirou’s family romances, however small and allusive, create a connection between adventure and the domestic sphere and how this contributes to reinventing the Tintinesque model of adventure in contemporary bande dessinée.

Christ, Santa Claus, Doctor Deliverer: For Carolee Schneemann

This essay attends to the force of aggression in Carolee Schneemann's work, emphasizing the conflicts in the artist's representation of enjoyment, knowledge, and truth in her own body, with a focus on Up To and Including Her Limits (1973–76) and the underexplored text “Anti-Demeter: The More I Give the More You Steal” (1994). Addressing how the latter presents an origin myth for the artist, the essay underscores Schneemann's struggle over questions of genealogy, alliance, influence, and debt. On the question of debt, particular attention is given to its quality of ambivalence on terms of sexual difference, especially for father figures perceived as models of artistic expressivity, and the mothering body as a body of prohibition, labor, illness, and death. Examining the negation of the body, the role of aggression and violence, and the critique of the bind of “male fantasies” in Schneemann's work, the essay proposes a shift in feminist art historiography and its projections on Schneemann the artist. The essay asserts Schneemann's tale as a cautionary and self-reflexive one for those who come after, the would-be-daughters, who would negate the body, the struggle, the art yet again for the myth, in a time ripe for myth, in the wake of the artist's passing.

Contemporary Grammars of Meaning Creation: Scientific Creationism and New Atheism

This article approaches the grammars of meaning creation by Scientific Creationism and New Atheism from an anthropological-communicological perspective. By grammars of meaning creation, we understand the different languages that the human being uses to communicate the meaning of their existence to themself and others. Nowadays, Scientific Creationism is disseminated around the world and has transcended evangelical Christianity by permeating non-Christian religions. On the other hand, New Atheism, headed by Richard Dawkins, has also reached non-Western cultures such as Muslim cultures. Starting from Apelian transcendental semiotics, the hermeneutics of Durand’s symbol, and Lluís Duch’s anthropological study on mythos and logos, we reflect on the horizons of understanding of both movements. Our study shows that, contrary to what one might think given the antagonistic metaphysical positions the two movements seem to profess, Scientific Creationists and New Atheists share the same grammar of meaning creation: positivism. What one could interpret as a new epistemological controversy between science and religion can be better understood as a fight based on positivist science to establish the true origin myth. Thus, creationists and atheists implicitly recognize positivism as the contemporary theological discourse, i.e., the self-evident grammar of meaning creation that allows the Truth to be expressed.

La imagen de Dios como mito del origen

This essay offers a critical survey of recent research into Augustine’s interpretation of Gn 1.26. The first part contextualizes the discussion within the broader landscape of world creation narratives and origin myths. Against this background, the second part analyzes recent learned discussion on Augustine’s (anti-Manichean) interpretation of Gn 1.26 for the period 387-400. By way of preface, the study offers a concise state of the art on the study of Gn 1.26 in the work of Augustine. The survey suggests the image of God functions as an origin myth during the period in question. The conclusion suggests exploring the neglected communal embedding of Augustine’s interpretation of Gn 1:26 as a fruitful venue for future research.

From ‘La Grande Chartreuse’ to The British Album

By analysing the late-eighteenth-century reception of ‘The Album of the Fathers’ at the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, the chapter offers an exemplary instance of the issues at stake in album culture. The book was instrumental in promoting the elite practice of inscribing occasional texts in albums. In 1789 fashionable newspapers the World and the Oracle publicly fought over ownership of a transcript from the album and of ‘Della Cruscan’ poetry. The quarrel gave rise to scurrilous journalism, satirical prose, and parodic verse in which the term ‘album’ and its occasional and heterogeneous aesthetic was claimed and contested. In William Gifford’s attack on the Della Cruscans, Bell’s poetry anthology The British Album (1790) became shorthand for poetry’s debasement through cultural feminization. The Grande Chartreuse album disappeared during the French Revolution, but created a grand origin myth for the Romantic album.

“What’s He a Judge Of?”: Blood Meridian’s Paths of Law

This article reads Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a legal allegory. It focuses on the novel’s mysterious villain, Judge Holden, and traces three titular “paths of law.” First, it reads Blood Meridian as a self-deconstructing legal origin myth, arguing that the murderous but cultured Holden reveals the law’s tautological foundations by blurring Walter Benjamin’s binaries of “lawmaking” and “law-preserving” violence. Second, it construes the judge’s destructive pursuit of natural science as allegorizing the violence of legal interpretation, in which the validation of one interpretation entails the destruction of all others. Finally, it finds a counterpoise to Holden’s juridical violence in the cryptic epilogue, in which the possibility of meaning is not arbitrarily narrowed but endlessly proliferated.