The Traditional Romanian Folk Dance in Şieuţ, Bistriţa-Năsăud County, as Part of the Winter Traditions and Customs. Carol Singers and the “Beer”

"The present study focuses on the custom of “Beer”, a remarkable event that shaped the evolution of the communities that were part of the Second Romanian Border Regiment at Năsăud, a military unit of the Austrian army in Transylvania between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It focuses specifically on the Şieuţ village and the detailed manner in which this social event was organized by the village’s young men between Christmas and the New Year, when young villagers could attend the “Beer”, an important occasion for social interaction. This research is based on a series of interviews with active community members from then and now and aims to offer an overview of the custom’s meaning and structure. According to tradition, during the Nativity Fast, young men would follow the call of the “bucin” and meet at the house of a host to plan the event. They were assigned the roles of “vătafi” and “colceri” who hired musicians for the event, while the “căprari” were responsible for collecting the traditional pastry received by carol singers. On Christmas Eve, they grouped and went caroling throughout the village. After the Christmas church service, the traditional folk dance (“Beer”) started at the host’s house. The traditional festive garments, the young men going caroling or the traditional men’s folk dance from Şieuţ, included in the UNESCO World Heritage, represent elements of this custom that have survived the passage of time, integrating the traditional into modern life. Keywords: Şieuţ, ”Beer”, Romanian folk dance, tradition, carol "

On Remembering Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969

This assembled interview centers both Elaine Mokhtefi and Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969 (PANAF), a festival which she organized and attended as a part of the Algerian Ministry of Information, noting it as an exemplary instance of the power of performance at the nexus of political ideology, activist history, and the subsequent nostalgia for that era of liberation. It is equally an attempt to overcome a distant relationship to each, reflecting on the potential of oral histories to open up new pathways through the past. This history—of entangled international relations negotiated under the guise of a festive performance, a complicated trajectory of global politics which culminated in a remarkable event of celebration and solidarity—remains understudied, a footnote to more “political” concerns of Third World agendas, decolonial reorderings, and capitalist critiques. Yet through Mokhtefi’s testimony, interwoven with searching tendrils of archival detail, we can see that this festival was not a superficial exaltation in extravagance, but a pivotal moment in foreign affairs. More importantly, through her personal history, we can trace the central role that women played in these politics, if often unacknowledged. Edited in 2020, it also counters the pejorative label of non-essential labor applied to most cultural activities during the contemporary pandemic response to COVID-19.

Volcanic deformation at Sakurajima between 2015 and 2020 revealed by Sentinel-1 InSAR time series

<p>Surface displacements recorded in volcanically active regions are often driven by magmatic, hydrothermal or tectonic processes. Measuring the deformation experienced by the ground as a result of these processes allows to constrain the changing volcanic conditions and to infer quantitative estimates of the subsurface magmatic storage, thus increasing the knowledge of volcanic hazards for the closest local population. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has proven to be an useful tool to observe ground deformation in volcanically active areas like the Sakurajima volcano, southern Japan, one of the most active volcanoes worldwide. Its current activity is characterized by degassing and almost daily explosive eruptions. We performed an InSAR time series analysis to identify and characterize time-dependent ground deformation using Sentinel-1 data between 2015 and 2020. During this period several large explosions with plume heights of up to 6000 m occurred. We found evidence of ground deformation associated with precursory inflation connected to major explosions. In addition, we processed interferograms spanning a remarkable event that occurred on August 15 2015, in which we identified strong deformation around the Showa crater, in agreement with previous studies.</p>

About Glory, Crying and Formulas. Review of: Monuments of the Book Epic of West and East, ed. by S.Yu. Neklyudov, N.V. Petrov. Moscow, INFRA-M Publ., 2018. 482 p.

The reviewed collective monograph edited by S. Neklyudov and N. Petrov focuses on issues of the book epic, monuments of ancient and medieval genre in between folklore and literature; the oral tradition in them is refracted and transformed in the process of written fixation. The research of the book epic makes it possible to set and solve problems far beyond the scope of epic studies: the book raises issues related not only to the formation and features of one of the literary genres, but also to the emergence of literature as such, its socio-cultural role in different epochs, the relationship between tradition and individual authorship, the evolution of poetic technique, the ways and circumstances of cycling epic tales. This capital work appears to be a remarkable event in world science.

About Glory, Crying and Formulas. Review of: Monuments of the Book Epic of West and East, ed. by S.Yu. Neklyudov, N.V. Petrov. Moscow, INFRA-M Publ., 2018. 482 p.

The reviewed collective monograph edited by S. Neklyudov and N. Petrov focuses on issues of the book epic, monuments of ancient and medieval genre in between folklore and literature; the oral tradition in them is refracted and transformed in the process of written fixation. The research of the book epic makes it possible to set and solve problems far beyond the scope of epic studies: the book raises issues related not only to the formation and features of one of the literary genres, but also to the emergence of literature as such, its socio-cultural role in different epochs, the relationship between tradition and individual authorship, the evolution of poetic technique, the ways and circumstances of cycling epic tales. This capital work appears to be a remarkable event in world science.

Foundations of relativism by J. Margolis in the polemic of R. Rorty and H. Putnam

The polemic about the realism of H. Putnam and R. Rorty is a remarkable event of the 20th century for a number of reasons. Forming within the analytical philosophy, and using the most relevant concepts and ideas of this direction as arguments, this polemic for almost three decades of its existence balanced on the border with relativism, the least popular and admited direction of philosophy of the 20th century. Putnam's arguments against metaphysical realism reject any "point of view of God", entail "internalism", accept the concept of incommensurability of conceptual schemes and the relativization the reality described by the epistemic agent to his experience. Rorty's arguments reject not only relativism, but also realism, but his concepts of ethnocentrism and solidarity also take the view that the standards of truth correlate with the conceptual schemes, are "sociologized" and meet the interests of the majority. J. Margolis find in this polemic not only a retreat into relativism, but also recognized its pragmatistic potential, which gave him the opportunity to defend relativism, proposing its reliable (robust) version and building a neo-pragmatist philosophy on the development of the arguments of both sides.

PAC Natural Products: A Story Six Decades in the Making

In 2020, IUPAC celebrates the 60th anniversary of its scientific journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. The journal was established in part to record written accounts of plenary lectures presented at IUPAC-sponsored conferences. This brought back personal memories and prompted me to take a look in the archives in relation to the beginning of the Natural Products Symposium series. The inaugural IUPAC International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products was also held in 1960, from 15–25 August, in Australia, and was a veritable moving feast from Melbourne to Canberra and Sydney. It was a remarkable event that featured no fewer than five Nobel Laureates and two IUPAC Presidents, and set the stage for a wonderful series of conferences that continues still. Records of that event in Pure and Applied Chemistry are published in 1961, Volume 2, issue 3 [1].

DECENTRALIZED PLANNING IN AN INDIAN STATE: AN EXPLORATORY EXERCISE

In India, the idea of decentralized planning gained momentum after the country became independent in 1947 but its rudimentary practice was not completely unknown before 1947. In post-independent India a number of government committees and commissions had recommended for introduction of decentralized planning at different points of time. The most remarkable event in this regard were twin Constitutional amendments which clarified the role of local bodies and institutionalized participation of the people which signaled what is often called a paradigmatic change. The amendments gave decentralized planning constitutional sanction and sanctity, and provided a model of planning for the whole country. In this paper, an attempt has been made to capture the different phases in the evolution of the decentralized planning processes in India as a backdrop and to assess and analyze the experiences of introduction of decentralized planning in one state of the Union of Indian states called West Bengal. It is one of the states where the exercise was done through active participation of people sought to be achieved through institutional structures created in the villages. This paper tries to make use of the available secondary data to arrive at some of the major conclusions and to justify the contentions made. Reference has also been made to some limited field work which was done through village survey. The authors have also highlighted some of the key emerging issues which call for further research. It also seeks to explores what could be the probable lessons the developing countries in general, and India, in particular.

Sevilha andando, com “A sevilhana que não se sabia” / Sevilha andando, with “A sevilhana que não se sabia”

Resumo: Em 1987, quando foi publicada a coleção de poemas de João Cabral de Melo Neto intitulada Crime na Calle Relator, “A sevilhana que não se sabia” era o segundo na ordem de exposição, logo após o poema homônimo ao livro. Aquele poema foi reproduzido como o primeiro da coleção seguinte do autor, intitulada Sevilha andando (1989), ao passo que deixou de figurar nas reedições do livro em que constara de início. Assim, o poema que era de um livro passou a compor outro, exclusivamente, por iniciativa do próprio autor, para quem importava a constituição do artefato estético que o livro vem a ser. Este traço diferencial na trajetória do autor incide retrospectivamente sobre toda sua obra, a partir desse evento marcante que interfere na compreensão do que constitui um livro, seja sua publicação ou a reunião de poemas que demanda uma apreciação particularizada, de caso a caso, dos poemas entrelaçados entre si. Acompanhando a repercussão do poema no contexto da obra poética em pauta, será feito um cotejo entre as edições disponíveis dos volumes implicados para se chegar a uma compreensão mais palpável do poema, perspectivado ao longo daquela produção poética.Palavras-chave: poesia brasileira moderna; João Cabral de Melo Neto; estilo; editoração.Abstract: In 1987, when the João Cabral de Melo Neto’s collection of poems was published under the title of Crime in Calle Relator (1987), “A sevilhana que não se sabia” was the second in the order of exhibition, shortly after the poem of the same name to the book. That poem was reproduced as the first of the author’s next collection, titled Sevilha andando (1989), while it ceased to appear in the reissues of the book in which it was initially listed. Thus, the poem that was from one book began to compose another, exclusively, at the initiative of the author himself, for whom it mattered the constitution of the aesthetic artifact that the book comes to be. This differential trait in the author’s trajectory focuses retrospectively on all his work, from this remarkable event that interferes with the understanding of what constitutes a book, be it its publication or the meeting of poems that demands an appreciation particularized, on a case-by-case basis, of the poems intertwined with each other. Following the repercussion of the poem in the context of the poetic work, it will be made a comparison between the available editions of the volumes involved, to reach a more palpable understanding of the poem, perspectived throughout that poetic production.Keywords: modern Brazilian poetry; João Cabral de Melo Neto; style; publishing.

The 30th Anniversary of Fall of the Berlin Wall and Russian-German Relations as Reflected in the Media

The article deals with mass media impact on Russian-German relationships after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which used to divide the world into two socio-political systems. This remarkable event of the XX century has never lost its topicality in the media. The authors make a retrospective analysis of stages of the two countries bilateral relations development. The research shows that the bilateral and world wars have greatly influenced Russians and their perception of Germany and its subjects. At the same time, due to the wars, perception of Russians by Germans has also been ambiguous. The article studies the role of the mass media in the deterioration in state-to-state relations in the recent years in the context of the information war. The current shift in the vector of Russian-German relations has inevitably found its reflection in the media. It was the commentariat that, being a powerful international political and communication tool, gave impetus to the massive promotion of the negative image of Russia, which was fuelled by the crisis in the EU and global sanctions. All this has resulted in Russias becoming a key villain-like character in the global media landscape whose image is influencing a large number of current processes in the world. The authors have analyzed interpretations of over 500 media texts dealing with Russian-German relations, both in Russian and in German, and highlighted such components as fake news and post-truth as applied in political media discourse.