Religion, Patriotism and War Experience in Digitized Wartime Letters in Finland, 1939–44

This article examines religious and patriotic languages in digitized letters written by ordinary Finnish people in the Second World War. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse how religious and patriotic languages were used throughout the war years. Our findings show that the frequency of religious and patriotic vocabulary fluctuated widely during the war. Religious words were most notably connected to the intensity of the warfare, peaking during the periods of heated combat and dropping in the period of stationary warfare. Patriotic words were likewise common during the early periods of combat, but their use waned in the later war years. The analysis of words occurring in close proximity to the religious and patriotic words suggests that this was due to the different functions of the two languages. Religious parlance was essentially a vehicle of private emotional coping, while patriotic style gave a collective meaning to the sacrifices of the war. Religion and patriotism diverged during the war because the collective meaning of the war vanished but the need for emotional comfort persisted until its end.

Collectives in the Romance Languages

Just like other semantic subtypes of nouns such as event nouns or agent nouns, collectives may be morphologically opaque lexemes, but they are also regularly derived in many languages. Perhaps not a word-formation category as productive as event nouns or agent nouns, collective nouns still represent a category associated with particular means of word formation, in the case of the Romance languages by means of derivational suffixes. The Romance languages all have suffixes for deriving collectives, but only very few go directly back to Latin. In most cases, they evolve from other derivational suffixes via metonymic changes of individual derived nouns, notably event nouns and quality nouns. Due to the ubiquity of these changes, series of semantically and morphologically equivalent collectives trigger functional changes of the suffixes themselves, which may then acquire collective meaning. Most of these suffixes are pan-Romance, in many cases going back to very early changes, or to inter-Romance loans. The different Romance languages have overlapping inventories of suffixes, with different degrees of productivity and different semantic niches. The ease of transition from event or quality noun to collective also explains why only few suffixes are exclusively used for the derivation of collective nouns.

Annotazioni sul testo del Salmo 17

On the basis of the Hebrew manuscripts and other ancient textual witnesses, this article singles out and discusses many text-critical and translational issues regarding Psalm 17, dwelling particularly upon vv.11 and 14. For v.11, the author accepts the conjectural reading אִשְּׁרוּנִי עתַָּה סְבָבוּנִ י , “they have advanced/moved against me, now, they have encircled me”. For v.14, the author gives preference to the qere וּצְפוּנְךָ with the collective meaning: “and your protected ones”.

Working with the potential of arts-based learning: Making sense and leaving ‘business as usual’ behind in an art seminar

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the interest in arts-based learning as part of the growing literature on artistic initiatives in business contexts, by advancing the understanding of the potential of arts-based business learning that people can yet fail to benefit from. We draw on Weick’s framework for how people construct meaning in organized situations and on a qualitative study of an art seminar in business education to consider arts-based learning in the face of pitfalls that can prevent people from engaging in approaches that differ from their usual ones and from which they can learn. We show that people can benefit from the potential of arts-based business learning when collective meaning-construction processes such as sensemaking or sensegiving can unfold and work in an iterative, active and intense way, to take people towards new experiences. Our study also highlights the usefulness of taking a perspective centred on ongoing collective meaning-construction processes and of focusing on both learning activities and learning situations when studying business learning.

The Individual and Collective Meaning of the Notion of Employer in Polish Legal System

This article aims to identify the normative relationships between the notion of employer defined in individual labour law and collective labour law. The paper covers problems relating to both theoretical and practical problems.

Can representation of individual trauma mobilize collective memory and cultural trauma?

The way events are represented can result in the emergence of different narratives about a commonly experienced, and yet contested past. It is argued that such a process develops the formation of cultural trauma and collective memory in a given society. This essay aims to discuss the representation of one’s individual experiences to a wider audience as a means of creating meaning in a broader community and mobilize collective memory and cultural trauma. Hence, the case of the arpilleristas in Chile will be discussed as an example of the use of cultural artifacts as a means to represent individual trauma. I argue that the capacity of a group to create collective meaning relies on their ability to establish certain patterns of identification with that community. In this sense, the appropriation of the arpilleristas on typical Chilean cultural artifacts was essential for their impact on Chile’s national memory as they became the symbols of resistance and one of the main ways to recall the military regime. Nonetheless, such improvements were not perceived in the country’s cultural trauma as the arpilleristas mobilization did not seem to affect the core aspects of Chile’s identity.

The phenomenon of fan creativity: the main directions of studies

The article considers the main directions of foreign and domestic studies of fan communities and fan creative production. The article synthesizes theoretical knowledge collected abroad. Media fandoms are understood as interpretive, participatory communities that are able to influence media production. Fanfiction is shown as one of the forms of expression of criticism and various potential interpretations and meanings of the original work. The Russian scientific community also refers to fan communities as interpretive communities. Fanfiction is defined as a literary work that performs the function of demonstrating a variety of individual readers interpretations of the work. It was revealed that despite the existence of some differences in approaches to the study of fan creativity, there is a common focus on the activity of the audience. More attention is given to the study of collective meaning-making and ways of expressing different interpretations of the original media product.

Measuring the Unmeasurable? Production & Certification of Halal Goods and Services

Attending to the rise of halal economy and particularly halal certification initiatives in the region and globally, this paper asks why and how third-party certifiers would gain credibility and authority, and what does authority have to do with the work of entrepreneurs in the sector. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2015, and interviews with entrepreneurs and a private halal certification agency in Kyrgyzstan as well as their accreditors in Kazakhstan, I pay close attention to the collective meaning-making deliberations that revolve around questions of what makes goods and services halal and also what makes one a ‘good Muslim’. Certifiers and entrepreneurs come to form what I call a valuation circuit. In these circuits, they construct shared understandings of ethnical and behavioral norms for market actors, create and reinforce binaries around halal and haram, and rely on transnational network of religious authority as they attempt to valuate and measure compliance to halal standards.