The Sense of Coherence: Measurement Issues

In this chapter, measurement issues are addressed concerning Aaron Antonovsky’s original sense of coherence (SOC) questionnaires of 29 items and of 13 items, as well as several modified translations applicable to the individual, the family, the organization, and the community levels. Validity (face, construct, consensual, criterion, predictive) and reliability issues (test–retest, internal consistency) of the scales are discussed. Criticism of the original scales is deliberated.

On being decent. The meaning and axiology of the lexemes przyzwoity ‘decent’ and przyzwoitość ‘decency’ in the history of Polish

This study was inspired by the famous turn of phrase that came from the Polish statesman Władysław Bartoszewski: “It’s good to be decent” (Warto być przyzwoitym). It is frequently quoted in public discourse and invokes decency as a value that is construed intuitively and is difficult to define. The article presents a diachronic analysis of the lexemes przyzwoity ‘decent’ przyzwoitość ‘decency’, and przyzwoicie ‘decently’ since their oldest records until current usage. These lexemes appeared at the beginning of the Middle Polish period but their axiological load was low at that time. The evolution of their meanings – from axiologically neutral to positive – occurred late (in the second half of the 18th c.) and progressed quickly. Their neutral meanings, which were well-documented as late as in the 18th c., disappeared; the lexemes remained in current usage but as axiologically positive ones. Through an analysis of the early contexts an attempt is made to reconstruct of the original sense of decency and to discover its key sense in contemporary Polish.

The sense of the right to religious freedom in liberal democracies between accommodation and laicization. A study of the North American and Brazilian cases

This work intends to investigate the different conceptions—accommodation and laicization—that underlie processes of legislative regulation and judicial decision in matters of conflicts involving the right to religious freedom, in the legal systems of North America and Brazil. We will also investigate the potential for harmonization of legal in conflicts with other fundamental rights. The objective here is to build possibilities in order to establish a synthesis meaning for the right of religious freedom, in accordance with the democratic constitutional models of law to begin with, the recent modulations which allowed the fundamental right to religious freedom, especially from the edition of some US federal and state legislation, as well as from a set of decisions taken by Brazilian courts. As a corollary of these modulations, the article intends to assess the consequences that these new laws and judicial decisions caused in the legal system, through social andinstitutional democratic practices related to any fundamental rights. We used the dialectical method, since the idea and the foundation of the right to religious freedom follow a three-stage approach: thesis (religious freedom in its original sense and secularized conception), antithesis (right to religious freedom as a possibility to act in the exercise of belief, by claiming accommodation with other rights), and synthesis (the perspective to elaborate a proper sense to liberal democracies). Initial results indicate that both models based on secularization and accommodation can generate democratic and undemocratic meanings to the right of religious freedom; both models can either harmonize conflicting rights or escalate social antagonisms.

“We Are Peronists, We Are Organic”: Discipline, Authority, and Loyalty in Argentine Populism

Since 1945, Argentine politics has been largely defined by Peronism, a populist movement established by General Juan Perón. While the ideology of Peronism has shifted and swerved over its seven-decade history, its central emphasis on loyalty has remained constant. This paper examines the notion of “organicity” (organicidad), a Peronist conception of obedience, to elucidate how populist movements valorize discipline and loyalty in order to unify their ranks around sentiment and ritual in the absence of more stable programmatic positions. The original sense of “organicity”, as Perón developed it in his early writings, equated to strict military notions of discipline, obedience, and insubordination. In other words, Perón understood loyalty as an organic conception of discipline that consisted of both unyielding deference for the leader and unwavering commitment to the Peronist Movement. Yet, at particular moments in Argentine political history, Peronist militants either find organicity and loyalty to be intrinsically incompatible, or vocalize definitions of organicity that seem to question the top-down structure of the movement celebrated in Perón’s writings. As a result, among Peronists there is disagreement over what it means to behave organically and loyally. This article draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Peronist militants to argue that populism’s authoritarian preoccupation with fealty attempts to obscure the internal contradictions that result from its lack of clear ideological commitments. However, an emphasis on loyalty cannot produce eternally harmonious uniformity. As Peronists come to view those holding alternate interpretations of their doctrine as heretical and traitorous, their accusations against their comrades reveal the intrinsic fragility of populist unity.

On Weak Stubborn Sets in Classical Planning

Stubborn sets are a pruning technique for state-space search which is well established in optimal classical planning. In this paper, we show that weak stubborn sets introduced in recent work in planning are actually not weak stubborn sets in Valmari's original sense. Based on this finding, we introduce weak stubborn sets in the original sense for planning by providing a generalized definition analogously to generalized strong stubborn sets in previous work. We discuss the relationship of strong, weak and the previously called weak stubborn sets, thus providing a further step in getting an overall picture of the stubborn set approach in planning.

Key indicators and issues of the development of culture and leisure in Moscow

The concept of culture exists in almost all languages and is used in a wide range of situations, with a huge number of meanings in different areas of human activity. In its original sense, the word "culture" has never referred to any particular object, condition, or content. The notion of culture first appears in Latin. Poets and scholars of Ancient Rome have used it in their treatises and letters to mean "to cultivate" something or "cultivate" it to improve it. In ancient Greece, a close relative of the term culture has been paideia, which refers to "internal culture" or, in other words, the "culture of the soul". In Latin sources, the word first appears in a treatise on agriculture by the Roman statesman and writer Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.), whose Latin translation of the title sounds something like this: agroculture. Hence, the word "culture" is originally used as an agronomic term.

Authorship and date of five family-series nomina in Oligochaeta (Annelida): Lumbricidae, Naididae, Enchytraeidae, Tubificidae and Lumbriculidae

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (Anonymous 1999; ‘the Code’ below) provides Rules for the nomenclature of the ‘names of the group family’, or family-series nomina (Dubois 2000). These Rules have long been ignored or disregarded by some taxonomists, so that the authorship(s) and date(s) currently attached in the literature and in some taxonomic online databases to some family-series nomina of Annelida Oligochaeta[1] prove to be wrong according to the Code. For example, the database Taxonomicon <http://taxonomicon.taxonomy.nl/> credits the nomina Naididae to Ehrenberg (1828), Tubificidae to Vejdovský (1876), Enchytraeidae to Vejdovský (1879) and Lumbriculidae to Vejdovský (1884a). Vejdovský (1884b: 59) also claimed authorship for the nomen Lumbricidae. All of these attributions are incorrect, as will be established below through a chronological survey of the relevant works where these nomina were made available. [1] The nomen Oligochaeta is here used in its original sense (Grube 1850), i.e. excluding the Hirudinea.

Melismatic Madness and Technology

By the mid nineteenth-century, coloratura had become stylized to the point that it could represent hysterical cries. If we consider technology in its original sense as a “practical art” that extends the body’s abilities, then coloratura—an art that features the extended agility and range of the voice—is perhaps the most striking technology employed to mark and empower the operatic madwoman. This chapter explores mid-century mad scenes and related technologies: Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du nord and Le Pardon de Ploërmel, as well as Ophélie’s mad scene in Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet. These operas also feature sopranos who embody a particular, aestheticized view of femininity at mid-century as stylized, objectified icons of hysteria. Exploring the aural impact of these scenes, the sopranos who originally portrayed the mad heroines, the original staging manuals, and the historical context of emerging psychiatry highlights the importance of the visual in thinking about this phenomenon.

SEMANTIC SATIATION FOR POETIC EFFECT

This article argues that the defamiliarization caused by extensive repetition, termed ‘semantic satiation’ in psychology, was used by ancient poets for specific effects. Five categories of repetition are identified. First, words undergo auditory deformation through syllable and sound repetition, as commonly in ancient etymologies. Second, a tradition of emphatic proper-name repetition is identified, in which the final instance of the name is given special emphasis; this tradition spans Greek and Latin poetry, and ultimately goes back to the Nireus entry in the Catalogue of Ships. Third, repetition is used for wordplay, where the final instance of the repeated term not only is emphasized but also incurs some change to its meaning or shape. Fourth, the incantatory repetition of divine names in hymns and cultic invocations amplifies a sense of divine presence behind and beyond the repetend. Fifth, repetition of half and full lines by different speakers in Old Comedy serves to undercut and parody the original sense of the repeated words. Extensive repetition in ancient literature was never merely ornamental but was used for a range of specific auditory and semantic effects with distinct and identifiable structures.

The Hadrami Diaspora: A "diaspora for others" in the Indian Ocean

The term diaspora has, over the past two decades, become ubiquitous both in the vernacular and in academia, to the point that it appears to have lost its acuity as an analytical concept, often meaning little more than a group of migrants. In an attempt to reinvigorate the concept, this article invokes the notion of the “diaspora for others”: a diaspora that has a coherence across space and time, linking the various localisations of a diaspora, and the homeland. The case study is the Hadrami diaspora, and by tracing the links between members of the diaspora, this article demonstrates how the diaspora, although marked by internal differences, nevertheless displays an overall cohesion that grants it a stable and distinct identity as a spatially dispersed community, thus recalling the original sense of the term diaspora.