Fantastic Fauna in a Global Perspective: understanding composites in early Eurasian Antiquity

Ancient tombs and hoards across the Eurasian steppe call for a thorough revision of art-historical categories associated with pastoral societies from Mongolia to Crimea. This study focuses on one such category. “Animal style” is an umbrella term traditionally used to categorise portable precious metalwork ornamented with dynamic scenes of vigorous animal fights and entwined zoomorphic designs. With its emphasis on irregular animal anatomies and deeply rooted in a “pars-pro-toto” mode of expression, steppe imagery of fantastic fauna presents a useful case study in broader investigations of composites in the ancient world and their diffusion across cultural spheres. This study views beasts through a binary lens, the structured monsters of Greco-Roman thinkers and the organic composites of nomadic steppe artisans. In the Western canon, “composites” existed within a politically-manufactured framework of governable “otherness”, in which fantastic fauna conveys a certain tension with the exotic, unknown and uncontrollable East. Meanwhile, in the visual rhetoric of steppe artisans, monsters represented a tension with the (cyclical) shifts occurring in one's biota rather than the tumultuous events in one's constructed environment. This paper explores how the contrasting steppe pastoralist and sedentary imperial world-views came to define the various functions and meanings of “composites” in Eurasian Antiquity.

Genesis of Russian religious philosophy of the Slavophiles A. S. Khomyakov and I. V. Kireevsky

The article is devoted to the philosophical, religious and world views of A. S. Khomyakov and I. V. Kireevsky. Based on the analysis of the authors’ creative and epistolary heritage, the authors show the ambiguity of their judgment from the point of view of Orthodox theology. The hermeneutic method allowed the author to analyze the primary sources of A. S. Khomyakov and I. V. Kireevsky, their contemporaries and followers from the point of view of Orthodox theology to determine the degree of their compliance with Orthodox doctrine. The purpose of the work is to compare the creative heritage of the founders of the religious and philosophical movement of the Slavophiles A. S. Khomyakov and I. V. Kireevsky. This is a new look at the formation of the religious and philosophical worldviews of A. S. Khomyakov and I. V. Kireevsky. The strongest sides of A. S. Khomyakov are the following: he presents the Church as a single moral union of those who preach the teachings of Christ, based on love for their neighbor. Rationalism is not conducive to the establishment of faith, and everyone who is separated from the Church does not have love. I. V. Kireevsky, on the other hand, followed the path of knowledge of Roman philosophy and its influence on the formation of Western theology; analysis and conclusions in assessing the development of theology in Russia and Europe; negative effect of ritualism on the worldview of true Orthodoxy in Russia.

Understanding cultural artefacts to ensure seamless transitions in the Early Years

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Jarjums (children), the cultural and world views they bring from their home life can be very different to those in school, creating an additional layer of adjustments in the Early Years pathway. We describe an Early Years Transitions Framework that demonstrates how changing transition from a process to move Jarjums as quickly as possible into a Western system to one that acknowledges the beliefs and cultural artefacts Jarjums bring to the Early Years space builds smoother transitions. The Framework is underlain by a mesh of High-Expectations Relationships, which moves the educator from the position of ‘knowledge holder’ to one of deep listening to understand the cultural needs and aspirations of families. By bringing these different world views together and building relationships across the Early Years sectors, educators can create a third cultural space where transition becomes a process of interwoven spaces and incremental learning.

Modern Japan and Multiple Modernities: A Case Study

Transformation studies should be a key topic for the comparative analysis of civilizations. Their most important task is to deal with the changes to world-views and cultural semantics inherited from axial traditions, changes resulting from the emergence of modern society and its radically innovative normative turn. To put it another way, the question relates to modern discursive reworkings of path-dependent figures of thought. In the context of such processes, discourses on identity intertwine with more or less critically oriented discourses on culture and society. For non-European countries, and very emphatically for Japan, Northwestern Europe is an almost exclusive domain of reference, notwithstanding eventual condemnations of European “decadence” or – as the case may be – capitalist contradictions. But when some critical distance from Europe is achieved, it combines easily with returns to a supposedly primordial native legacy, even with the illusory belief that this legacy can inspire a transformative creation of something new in human history. Such intellectual phenomena occur, with significant variations, across a broad political spectrum. This essay discusses a few exemplary Japanese cases.

Americans’ cultural attitudes to group work: Insights from the proverbs

The role of culture, especially the American culture, in group work is relatively understudied because it is often presumed to be no different from the colonialist West, or is alternatively stereotyped as individualistic and competitive. Thus, this paper studies English-language proverbs used in America, as culturally rich symbols, at three levels of discourse, conceptual metaphor, and content to discern what attitude American culture, as represented in the proverbs, has to group work, and what world views and psychosocial factors can inform such attitudes. The findings suggest that American culture is marginally cooperation friendly, with a considerable penchant for individualism and competition. This ambivalence was not simply a proverbial phenomenon, rather a cultural reality because it was observed to be the result of the interplay between heterogeneous conceptual metaphors, representing different world views. Psychosocially, many factors were observed to have molded the American culture’s attitude to group work, noticeably, egoism, distrust, altruism, and socially shared cognition.