Germania de Tácito: en los límites del género literario

This article proposes a new generic label for Tacitus’ Germania as “frontier ethnography”. Our reading is supported by Germania’s textual instability, due to its topical originality and compositive innovation. Although these features place Germania in a disruptive positioning face of historiographical tradition of Monography, it is consistent with the particular rhetorical situation of the late first century AD, traversed by the mixture of genres and the inversion of center-periphery relationships, and with the rise of a new dynasty as well. These characteristics are found in the two main text features of Germania. On the one hand, Ethnography, which was traditionally relegated to the excursus, is used here as the text’s main narrative device, whereas historical discourse is relocated to the digression. On the other hand, Barbaric periphery beyond the frontier becomes the central narrative matter of the text. Therefore, these textual features allow us to state that Germania insinuates a discourse move towards the limits of Roman generic and geographical space. Hence, Tacitus’ Germania can be interpreted as a literary exercise representing a new space within its sociopolitical context: the frontier.

Stigma and Misconceptions of Poverty Reduction

This chapter examines the notions of stigma, bias, and myth of poverty reduction and focuses specifically on rural poor populations in nations that fell behind in implementing the global targets of poverty reduction, the majority of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. The task is to examine various characterizations of myth and stigma in historical discourse and explain the processes and mechanisms by which myth and stigma function as a mediator of various tensions within historical discourse. First, this chapter describes the characterizations of stigma and the misconceptions of poverty; second, it explains the barriers and the daunting task of poverty reduction; and third, it shows how negative perceptions of poverty ultimately complicate the implementation of the poverty reduction agenda.

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.

On the Imperative of Language for Understanding African Art

I was deeply touched and honored by the roundtable organized at the 2016 African Studies Association Conference to focus on my book, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (2014). I want to thank Professor Funṣọ Afọlayan for contacting and bringing together a formidable group of scholars of Yorùbá art and culture to that end. I was gratified that, by and large, all the panelists endorsed my premise on the fundamental importance of language in Yorùbá art studies. The first paper by Moyọ Okediji was a pleasant surprise. Even though this possibility has always existed, as I had taught a course in Yorùbá art entirely in Yorùbá language at the University of Ifẹ (renamed Ọba ̀ ́fẹmi Awo ́ ́lọẃ ọ University) in ̀ the 1980s1 , no one was expecting that his entire contribution to the roundtable discussion would be presented in Yorùbá language. Why not? I realized. The language is as fully developed as any other language in the world and it can, and should be spoken as well as written -- especially when we discuss Yorùbá art. For the benefit of those not literate in Yorùba language, Michael Af ́ ọlayan gave an elegant translation of Okediji’s paper in English. The excellent contents and presentation by Okediji touched on issues that lay at the heart of my book, namely its methodology and its insistence on the need for a Yorùbá voice to be heard literally and metaphorically in art historical discourse.

Strategic Partnership in the Shadow of History

The article analyses selected problems in the implementation of the Polish-Ukrainian strategic partnership assumptions. The aspects of bilateral relations that undoubtedly made it difficult to engage in a constructive dialogue in the 21st century, were outlined. It was also pointed out that the implementation of foreign policy assumptions in both countries is often the result of a historical politics and a mythologized image of a neighbouring country. In addition, putting the historical discourse over political, economic and social took part in the events. Kwaśniewski recalled then “the bravery and merits of those soldiers problems may result in lowering the standards of democracy, and the expectation from the other side to accept a specific vision of the past may indicate that politicians are focused on domestic politics at the expense of the country’s position on the international arena.

Aboriginal Australian mental health during the first 100 years of colonization, 1788–1888: a historical review of nineteenth-century documents

Past histories charting interactions between British healthcare and Aboriginal Australians have tended to be dominated by broad histological themes such as invasion and colonization. While such descriptions have been vital to modernization and truth telling in Australian historical discourse, this paper investigates the nineteenth century through the modern cultural lens of mental health. We reviewed primary documents, including colonial diaries, church sermons, newspaper articles, medical and burial records, letters, government documents, conference speeches and anthropological journals. Findings revealed six overlapping fields which applied British ideas about mental health to Aboriginal Australians during the nineteenth century. They included military invasion, religion, law, psychological systems, lunatic asylums, and anthropology.

Site-Specific Installation Art in Historical Perspective

The argument in this chapter starts with a discussion of the art historical discourse on site-specific installation art. Artists as well as critics have explored various notions of site specificity, usually in concordance with successive art historical periods: the first “wave” of site-specific installations created during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a second period, from the 1980s and early 1990s until today. The chapter elucidates several art historical perspectives on both periods and the shifts occurring in the relationship between artists and museum institutions, between the artwork and the site. Furthermore, it is important to realize that site-specific installation artworks are highly diverse in form, content, and meaning. For the current purpose of developing a model with an eye to the artworks’ perpetuation, a chronological approach is only partly effective. A further abstraction in categorization is needed, focusing on the network of site-specific functions and their changes over time. To this end, a selection of relevant notions elucidate the extended lives of site-specific installations, which I derive from case studies and observations made by artists and art historians in this respect. The discussion is a prelude to chapter 3, in which I take the vocabulary for site-specific installation artworks one step further by employing a triadic set of spatial functions, which I derive from Henri Lefebvre’s theory on space.

Fundamentals and Advances in Elastohydrodynamics: The Role of Ramsey Gohar

This paper commemorates Ramsey Gohar by acknowledging his contributions to the fields of contact mechanics and elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) within the context of the developments of these subjects. A historical discourse is provided on elastohydrodynamics, from its inception in the 1940s to present. We demonstrate that Ramsey Gohar was not only a pioneer in the discoveries and fundamentals of the subject, but also led or contributed significantly to continual advances in the understanding of EHL and its diverse applications.

Everyday Life and Traditions of the Russian Community of Interwar Сhisinau in the Memoirs of Contemporaries

The article examines the everyday and cultural traditions of the Russian population of interwar Сhisinau based on sources of personal origin. There were selected and analyzed unpublished memoirs of contemporaries who belonged to the noble and intelligent urban stratum, kept in the personal funds of the National Archives of Republic of Moldova. The range of topics and plots is very wide, but Russian problems are implicitly present in all memoirs. Describing everyday habits, leisure, professional occupations, social activities of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia of those years, the authors reflect the world outlook and opinions inherent in their ethno-cultural environment. The studied memoirs show that the everyday life and culture of the Russian population of the 1920s and 30s reflected continuity with those that were characteristic of the previous decades. During the period when Bessarabia was part of Royal Romania, the Russian community, being in new social and ideological conditions, tried to preserve their religious and cultural forms of everyday life. However, while remaining outwardly unchanged, many traditions were filled with a different content moving from social to private life. These personal documents and memoirs allow us to focus on the key topic in ethnology: investigation of the daily life of the Russian population in Bessarabia during the interwar period, less studied in historical discourse.

Historical and translation discourse of Abay in the ethnopedagogic paradigm: features of Analy

The article is devoted to the study of Abay's creativity as a historical precedent personality in the context of his ethnopedagogical, historical and translation discourses. Purpose of the work: identifying the essence of Abay's main discourses, analyzing them, determining the contribution of the precedent personality to the historical process of the formation of ethno-identity, as well as clarifying the degree of precedence of the personality and his texts. In the process of analysis, a complex method was used, based on the combination of discursive-historical, cognitive-discursive, and pragmatic-communicative approaches, the method of sociological survey. The results obtained include: description of Abay as a precedent historical personality, widely known for his legislative, social and political activities; a comprehensive analysis of the historical discourse of Abay, the discourse of biy (in Kazakh language), its extralinguistic, cognitive, pragmatic, linguo-stylistic components have been identified and described; the historical character of Abay's translation discourses is established, a comprehensive analysis of such a discourse is carried out, the precedent of the text of Abay's translations is noted. It is concluded that Abay Kunanbaev not only acted as an active historical person who managed to influence the actualization of historical events and their promotion, but also as a poet, translator, who created various discourses (historical, translation, literary). Abay's translation discourse acts as a kind of historical discourse - historical and literary discourse, since it has signs of historicity (created by a historical person, it reflects the features of the historical era). Therefore, these discourses can be analyzed based on a complex discursive-historical and cognitive-discursive approaches.