The institution of traditional authority in Okombahe, Erongo Region of Namibia: can the institution be reconciled with democratic values of justice?

The purpose of the article was to explore the roles and functions of the institution of traditional authority in contributing to access to justice or providing a form of justice through the preservation of customary law to the people of the Okombahe community in the Erongo Region of Namibia. The article's aim was to investigate the factors that have contributed to the institution's resilience and how this resilience may be tied to the type of justice this customary institution provides and represents. The institution of traditional authority has recently caught the attention of both scholars and policymakers due to the increasing return or revival of this "ancient" form of governance in the contemporary era that is constantly changing its procedures and rules of appointment to adapt to contemporary concerns and social problems. The scope of traditional leaders' jurisdiction and power is defined in the roles and functions they fulfil. As a popular legitimate informal institution in Okombahe, traditional leaders were found to manage and resolve conflict, and to preserve communal identity, unity, and continuity. This article highlights the significance of the institution of traditional authority as a legitimate customary institution originating from the bottom-up, and as a system that can be complementary to democracy as opposed to the assumption sometimes held that it is contesting with it. In Okombahe, the institution of traditional authority was found to contribute to providing an accessible justice system option grounded in this community's identity, history and social norms. The data collection employed for this qualitative case study of Okombahe consisted of interviews, supporting documents, and relevant scientific articles.

“Then He Stabbed Me with a Spear”: Aggressive Sacred Images and Interreligious Polemics

This paper studies Coptic communal identity in early Islamic Egypt by analyzing two hagiographical narratives from the Christian Copto-Arabic text The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. The narratives relate incidents of sacred images that become ‘aggressive’ when they retaliate against insults. Although the relation between religious violence and sacred art has merited much scholarly attention, the focus is usually on humans as the aggressors and sacred art as the victim. The reverse is scarcer, and its rarity means we miss an opportunity to rethink such narratives as communicative modes of rhetoric to be contextually interpreted. Here I argue that these aggressive sacred images were tools of power within a polemic religious discourse aimed at proclaiming divine truth, undergirding it with supernatural power, and ultimately shaping Coptic communal identity around this discourse.

The Rhythm of Communal Identity

The relationship between language, music and cultural identity has always been of special interest in the social sciences, especially in the areas of anthropology, social psychology and ethnomusicology. The main argument revolves on how language reflected through music positively impacts on the identity of a social group, and what happens where this is lacking. Cultures die and languages go into extinction when there are no creative ways of keeping them alive. The aim of this essay is to investigate how the culture and language of a particular society could be safeguarded through music. Beyond the theoretical framework, I shall substantiate this investigation with the example of the Igbo people of Southeastern Nigeria, whose cultural identity is seriously threatened by the lack of interest in the local language among the people. Part of this disinterestedness is caused by the unique tendency of Igbo people to travel outside their original communities and to culturally adapt in their diaspora communities. This essay therefore aims at a) addressing this problem of identity through a sociological analysis of communal identity, and b) seeking how identity could be rediscovered through music that is delivered in a local language, illustrated with the example of Igbo cultural group. It is hoped that such analysis would aid in presenting another means of safeguarding endangered local languages, which invariably has a lot of implications for the cultural identity of the group involved. Of course, the analysis that is advanced here is not limited to the Igbo since the argument is based on a general epistemological function of music and language with respect to cultural identity.

Radio, Memory, and the Past in the Nostalgia Film

Several prominent New Hollywood filmmakers experimented with limiting their soundtracks to ostensibly diegetic source music. In particular, two films associated with a trend of fifties nostalgia use the compiled pop scoring and the medium of radio to articulate complex sensibilities of the past. Both films experiment with the aesthetic flow of radio broadcasting, while adopting the image of the radio signal itself as a technological-aesthetic metaphor for melancholy temporal distance. In The Last Picture Show, radio conveys a sense of entrapment in the film’s world, and a sense of the fragility of the connections linking past and present. In American Graffiti, radio broadcast cultivates a precious, yet melancholy sense of communal identity. In this way, both films articulate a paradoxical attitude toward the past, a nostalgic desire to conjure what has been lost to time, which coexists with an awareness of the impossibility of this recovery outside of imagined experience.

Reading Literary Theory between the Lines of Creative Writing: The Dialectics of Theory and Practice in the Creative Writing Pedagogy

Literary theory and critical writing have been traditionally perceived as being in tension, either silently ignoring or polemically rejecting each other. In this paper we argue that literary theory and creative writing are interconnected on various levels. By acknowledging this fact, theory may be profitably deployed in the creative writing class, in order to enhance creative writers’ sense of literary mechanisms, conventions, and purposes in specific sociocultural contexts. In this way, theory informs students not only in relation to the poetics, but also to the pragmatics of the literary phenomenon. Theory askes creative writers to contemplate on how they themselves are socially, ideologically and culturally positioned as writers (and as readers) of literature, and how their activity is enmeshed in a broader process of personal and communal identity formation through language and literary representation.

Rural Uncommoning

Shared use of small-scale natural commons is vital to the livelihoods of billions of rural inhabitants, particularly women, and advocates propose that local telecommunications systems that are oriented by the commons can close rural connectivity gaps. This article extends insights about women's exclusion from such Community Networks (CNs) by considering ‘commoning’, or practices that produce, reproduce and use the commons and create communality. I generated data in interviews and observations of rural CNs in seven countries in the Global South and in multi-sited ethnography of international advocacy for CNs. Male biases in technoculture and rural governance limit women's participation in CNs, and women adopt different approaches to performing their communal identity while using technology. This situation contributes to detaching CNs from relations that are produced in women's commoning. It also illustrates processes that co-opt the commons in rural technology endeavours and the diverse ways commoners express their subjectivities in response.

Self-Esteem and Fixed Price in Islamic Law (A Critical Study of the Pesuke Tradition among the Nobles of the Sasak Tribe of Lombok)

The Sasak aristocracy in Lombok is still very passionate about carrying out the pesuke tradition. Although, the pesuke practice did not infrequently cause various conflicts between the prospective bride and groom's families. For instance, when the prospective bride's family sets the pesuke value that is too high, which can burden the groom's family. In contrast, religion forbids us to burden and encourages us to work together, help, and ease each other to create a happy and prosperous family in the world to the hereafter. Therefore, this study aims to examine how the perspective of Islamic law on the concept of self-esteem and fixed price in the pesuke tradition. The results showed that the motivation of the Sasak aristocratic community in setting a high pesuke value so that the public still respected their communal identity. In addition, another reason in determining the fantastic value of pesuke is to make it a fixed price in a marriage with melaik, meruput, or merugul systems. Therefore, the groom's family must pay this Pesuke as a ransom to restore the bride's family's dignity. Meanwhile, according to Islamic law, the pesuke tradition as a form of maintaining self-respect and fixed price should be a tolerable case for the creation of a peaceful and prosperous marriage because of the emergence of mutual willingness and pleasure between the two parties, by the essence of pesuke, namely mutual desire.

Royal Cafe : Chinese-Western In Alberta

Across Alberta there are found many diner style restaurants serving both Chinese and Western Canadian meals to people in the small-towns they inhabit. It’s a culturally significant and interesting aspect of Albertan identity. This research paper describes a journey to photograph and document these spaces and try to contextualize them within the context of Albertan identity. It details the research the author did to richer understanding of these spaces and their part in what it means to be Albertan. Included in this is a discussion on the significance of food and, in particular, the Chinese-Western dishes such as ginger beef, to communal identity. This paper details how the research influenced my own journey across Alberta and how it translated into a fully realized photo-documentary project that led the author to a greater understanding of what it means to be Albertan.

Royal Cafe : Chinese-Western In Alberta

Across Alberta there are found many diner style restaurants serving both Chinese and Western Canadian meals to people in the small-towns they inhabit. It’s a culturally significant and interesting aspect of Albertan identity. This research paper describes a journey to photograph and document these spaces and try to contextualize them within the context of Albertan identity. It details the research the author did to richer understanding of these spaces and their part in what it means to be Albertan. Included in this is a discussion on the significance of food and, in particular, the Chinese-Western dishes such as ginger beef, to communal identity. This paper details how the research influenced my own journey across Alberta and how it translated into a fully realized photo-documentary project that led the author to a greater understanding of what it means to be Albertan.