BRAZILIAN OIL PIONEERS

In the Brazilian popular imagination, the discovery of oil was announced on August 9, 1938, by the Viscount of Corncob. The Donabentense Oil Company drilled Caraminguá’s first well, near the creek that passed through the Yellow Woodpecker Ranch (“Sítio do Picapau Amarelo,” in colloquial Portuguese). The latter was the name of a famous Brazilian children’s book. In fact, the first oil well flowed in Salvador, Bahia, on January 21, 1939, discovered by Manoel Ignácio Bastos (1891 - 1940), a Brazilian geographer engineer, whose business partner, Oscar Salvador Cordeiro (1890 - 1970), was the president of the Bahia Commodities Exchange. A brief analysis of documents, such as reports, Brazilian decrees and executive orders, as well as newspapers, detail the actions of these Brazilian oil pioneers. Statistical data analysis was also performed about onshore and offshore oil production between 1941 and 2019, as a part of Bastos and Cordeiros’ heritage.

Pelican as an ornithic symbol in Ukrainian culture and arts

The purpose of the article. Investigate the determination of the image of the pelican in Ukrainian culture and art as an original manifestation of national symbolics. Methodology. The research methodology is based on the application of a systems approach in combination with historical-genetic, comparative, and art methods, with the involvement of analysis of sources from the field of Ukrainian symbolism. The scientific novelty lies in the actualization of the study of the symbolic image of the pelican as a nationally specific component of Ukrainian culture. Conclusions. The representatives of the Ukrainian avifauna acquired in the popular imagination the forms of established symbolic images, that entered the space of national folklore through mythological thinking. The penetration of the pelican symbol into the arsenal of fine arts of Ukrainian culture did not pass through the mythological element but was borrowed from Christian cult publications and images of European countries. The oldest known images of the pelican in Ukraine belong to the artistic decoration of the book, and since the XVIII century, they are found in Baroque iconography and all kinds of plastic art. In Ukrainian art, as in the art of other countries, the image of the pelican acquires a symbolic meaning in three hypostases: a symbol of Christ's self-sacrifice, paternal self-denial, and human mercy. Priority in the study of the role and place of the symbol of the pelican in the national culture belongs to an art critic, poet, political activist Natalia Kotsyubynska. Further search for information on the role of ornithological symbols in the system of Ukrainian culture opens the prospect of a deeper understanding of the national mentality of our people. Keywords: symbolic image, pelican, art, Ukrainian culture, Natalia Kotsyubynska.

Does Godwin’s law (rule of Nazi analogies) apply in observable reality? An empirical study of selected words in 199 million Reddit posts

As Godwin’s Law states, “as a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person being compared to Hitler, or another Nazi reference, increases.” However, even though the theoretical probability of an infinitely long conversation including any term should approach 1.0, in practice, conversations cannot be infinite in length, and this long-accepted axiom is impossible to observe. By analyzing 199 million Reddit posts, we note that, after a certain point, the probability of observing the terms “Nazi” or “Hitler” actually decreases significantly with conversation length. In addition, a corollary of Godwin’s Law holds that “the invocation of Godwin’s Law is usually done by an individual that is losing the argument,” and, thus, that comparisons to Nazis are a signal of a discussion’s end. In other words, comparing one’s interlocutor to Hitler is supposed to be a conversation-killer. While it is difficult to determine whether a discussion on a given topic ended or not in a large dataset, we observe a marked increase in conversation length when the words “Hitler” or “Nazi” are newly interjected. Given that both of these observations challenge widely accepted and intuitive truisms, other words were run through the same set of tests. Within the context of the initial question, these results suggest that it is not inevitable that conversations eventually disintegrate into reductio ad Hitlerum, and that such comparisons are not conversation-killers. The results moreover suggest that we may underestimate, in the popular imagination, how much conversations may actually become narrower and therefore may tend to have a more impoverished or limited vocabulary as they stretch on. All of these observations provoke questions for further research.

Viewing the American West as a Chicana in China

In both scholarly work and popular imagination, the American West is the final destination of migrant from Europe and Mexico. The stories of those migrants, however, obscure the first migration (12,000 BP) from Asia into North America. That migration across the now-submerged land bridge of Beringia ended humanity’s millennia-long journey across the globe that originated in Africa more than 50,000 years earlier. Using two examples, this essay reflects on how the Asian origins of the first Americans have been transformed into myths that conceal humanity’s migratory nature. First, in Chinese Communist propaganda, those origins are transformed into the myth of Peking Man as a branch of humanity originating in China rather than Africa. Second, in the writing of Rudolfo Anaya, those Asian origins are transformed into the myth of homogenous “Brown Brothers” united against white imperialists. Rather than rely on a myth of racial unity in some original homeland, this essay urges reliance on the shared experience of migration and home-making in hostile environments as the true source of our common humanity. Anaya’s Golden Carp, symbol of the life-giving fierce of water in an arid environment, captures this common human predicament stretching from Tibet and Xinjiang to New Mexico, epitomizing the American West as the place where humanity has been reunited, the home to the last wanderers of the human race.

Detecting the Diagnosis: Parasitology, Crime Fiction, and the British Medical Gaze

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie traces the cultural encounters between the parasitologist and the scientific detective in the medico-popular imagination, revealing how such meetings helped to embed the figure of the doctor-detective in public understandings of science. Parasitologists like Ronald Ross and David Bruce were routinely reported in newspapers using detective fiction’s most famous archetype: Sherlock Holmes, a frame of reference that blurred the boundaries between romance and reality. Recognising the continued cultural currency of Holmesian detection in clinical and diagnostic medicine, she re-immerses the ‘great detective’ and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the literary-historical contexts of the fin de siècle, demonstrating how material and rhetorical entanglements between criminality, tropical medicine, and empire constructed the microscopic world as new kind of colonial encounter.

Clara Schumann Studies

Since the 1980s, when she re-emerged from the peripheries into a more central position in music studies, Clara Schumann (1819–1896) has exerted an enduring fascination over the scholarly and popular imagination. Revisionist biographies, the uncovering of primary sources (diaries, letters, memorabilia), and filmic and literary depictions of Schumann have all brought into sharper focus the details and reception of her life, while simultaneously drawing attention to how much there is still to learn about her creativity. This book brings together a team of leading scholars to reappraise Clara Schumann in three particular respects: first, by delving deeper into her social and musical contexts; secondly, by offering fresh analytical perspectives on her songs and instrumental music; and thirdly, by reconsidering her legacy as a pianist and teacher. In doing so, the volume not only contributes to a rounded picture of Schumann's creative vision, but also opens up new pathways in the wider study of women in music.

Past, present and imaginary: Pathography in all its forms

Diagnosis is a profoundly social phenomenon which, while putatively identifying disease entities, also provides insights into how societies understand and explain health, illness and deviance. In this paper, we explore how diagnosis becomes part of popular culture through its use in many non-clinical settings. From historical diagnosis of long-deceased public personalities to media diagnoses of prominent politicians and even diagnostic analysis of fictitious characters, the diagnosis does meaningful social work, explaining diversity and legitimising deviance in the popular imagination. We discuss a range of diagnostic approaches from paleopathography to fictopathography, which all take place outside of the clinic. Through pathography, diagnosis creeps into widespread and everyday domains it has not occupied previously, performing medicalisation through popularisation. We describe how these pathographies capture, not the disorders of historical or fictitious figures, rather, the anxieties of a contemporary society, eager to explain deviance in ways that helps to make sense of the world, past, present and imaginary.

Archaeological Approaches to and Heritage Perspectives on Modern Conflict

From a wider disciplinary perspective, modern conflict archaeology is now a thoroughly established and mature sub-discipline. However, a significant problem conflict archaeologists in the Netherlands face is that modern eras, including both World Wars, have so far not received serious attention. Although both World Wars appeal strongly to the popular imagination, until recently Dutch researchers had not approached modern conflict from an academic archaeological perspective to any great extent. This is partly the result of problematic legislation on archaeological activity in the Netherlands. When applied and interpreted appropriately, archaeology can play an important role in the preservation, contemporary experience and historical reconstruction of recent conflicts. However, as this book argues, research methods other than excavations will be needed in order to conduct conflict archaeology in the Netherlands effectively. This study aims to develop a Dutch approach to conflict archaeology, integrating archaeology, heritage research and history at a landscape scale.

A Phone of One’s Own: Woolf, TikTok and the Aesthetic Evolution of Bisexuality

Whereas bisexuality, as it existed in modernity, has been described as a ‘floating signifier', one that was problematically conflated with gender and intersex bodies, the articulation of bisexuality is now experiencing a discursive resurgence in spaces and platforms online. Through a deliberately disparate comparison between Virginia Woolf’s modernist writing and the discussions of bisexuality on the video-sharing social networking service TikTok, this essay presents a reflective reassessment of how far bisexual representation in the popular imagination has progressed and by extension, evaluate extant limitations. To realize these ambitions, I compare the reception of sexology (the new science of sexuality) in ‘high’ modernist literature with a post-modern demographic whose bisexuality is articulated in the 2020s online via TikTok’s towards what I would demarcate as a post-queer theory user base. This essay is not intended as an overview of the advancements made in psychoanalytic institutions about bisexuality nor does it set out to comment on the refinement of bisexuality’s aestheticization through time. Instead, it uses these two temporally specific moments in the cultural zeitgeist to compare and contrast how differently two different demographics articulate bisexuality, both as a written mode in modernism and as a visual apparatus online. This is less a critique of bi-erasure, but an interrogation of why and how bisexual representation, as an aestheticized subjectivity that compromises romantic, spiritual, and erotic desires for bodies of all genders, continues to be problematically restrictive.

Educating ‘Temple Cultures’ Heterogeneous Worship and Hindutva Politics in Kerala

Contrary to the popular imagination of Kerala as a secular, rational left bastion, the state is witnessing Sangh Parivar’s active presence in the domain of temples and everyday culture. This study attempts to examine the anxiety of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its sympathisers about the ‘true’ knowledge on temple culture, and their efforts to teach everyday Brahmanical rituals and other forms of worship such as srividya and kuladevathas. I argue that Sangh Parivar is interested in heterogeneous worship practices in Kerala as part of their ideological expansion. Their obsession for the didactics of temple culture is a response to the modern secularisation process and ambition to educate the Other Backward Classes and Dalits in Brahmanical knowledge, for they are not traditionally inclined to the Brahmanical temples. Finally, the study aims to document the ethnographic details of Sangh Parivar activities in the world of worship and temple culture.