The Concept of War in Ancient Mesopotamia: Reshaping Carl von Clausewitz's Trinity

In this article, the author investigates the concept of “war” during the Akkadian period (ca. 2234–2154 BCE) through fragments and clay tablets that have remained from that period in history more than 4,000 years ago. Given the special place that the divine realm took in the Akkadian worldview, manifesting even in everyday interaction, the author reworks the well-renowned trinity from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. The author argues that Clausewitz’s analysis of war, which relies on the main trinity of the people, the government, and the armed forces, is not applicable to the beginning of human history in Mesopotamia due to the specific circumstances that societies then faced. The main method of inquiry herein will be a textual analysis of Akkadian scriptures that relate to the campaigns of Sargon, the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire, and his reign in constituting the first empire of humankind, as well as sources that explain the role of religion in this historical epoch. Although many of Sargon’s groundbreaking military innovations—such as establishing a standing professional army, securing lines of communication and supplies, and fortifying strategic positions—can be analyzed in a purely descriptive way, the focus of this article will be on his constructed relation to the Akkadian pantheon, which had a direct influence on the way warmongering was perceived.

Co-animation and the Multimodal Management of Contextualisation Problems when Jointly ‘Doing Being’ Others

In everyday interaction, participants speak on their own behalf but may temporarily speak as or on behalf of a figure (i.e. past or fictional self, others or objects). This practice of ‘animation’ can be continued or extended by co-participants in responsive position, resulting in co-animation (Cantarutti, 2020) of the same figure. Animation relies on the successful ascription of roles, participation framework shifts and projected stances to either the here-and-now of interaction or the there-and-then of animated content. In turn, the recognition of a response as a co-animation requires the creation of similarity between animated contributions. Through a multimodal interactional linguistic analysis of 89 cases of co-animation, this paper discusses how participants jointly solve these interactional contextualisation ‘problems’ smoothly through multimodal gestalts of lexico-grammatical, prosodic and gestural detail.

Translating deictic motion verbs among Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian: A corpus-based study

This article deals with translating South Slavic deictic verbs. Specifically, we consider translations among Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian. Deictic verbs are verbs whose interpretation is dependent on the location of speech-act participants (Fillmore 1997), such as come and go. In research on Slavic, certain motion verbs prefixes have been discussed as deictic prefixes (see Grenoble 1991, Filipović 2009, Łozińska 2018). Particular emphasis in this analysis is on the prefixed motion verbs dojda/doći, idvam/dolaziti, otida/otići, and otivam/odlaziti found in Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian literary texts and their translations. We present a brief quantitative overview and conduct a qualitative study of deixis-related meanings, paying necessary attention to other non-deictic meanings. Special attention is given to the constructional interplay of various deictic elements that co-occur with deictic verbs. Since we deal with literary texts and not everyday interaction, we consider the genre and context and apply the notion of viewpoint, which also covers the mental viewpoint adopted by the narrator, in addition to the deictic viewpoint of one of the speech participants. In the study, we observed shifts in point-of-view from deictic to non-deictic construal and vice versa, and from dynamic to static construal. These phenomena relate to the fact that in a text with a third person narrator, there is no innate deictic centre, while in casual conversation, the interlocutors create the deictic centre. The results show a preference for using come when motion towards a protagonist is described in a neutral context.

Translation Policies in Legal and Institutional Settings

This edited volume documents the state of the art in research on translation policies in both legal and institutional settings. Offering case studies of past and present translation policies from all over the world, it allows for a compelling comparison of attitudes towards translation in varying contexts. It highlights the virtues of integrating different types of expertise in the study of translation policy: theoretical and applied, historical and modern, legal, institutional, and political. It effectively illustrates how a multidisciplinary perspective furthers our understanding of translation policies and unveils their intrinsic link with issues such as multilingualism, linguistic justice, minority rights, and citizenship. In this way, each contribution sheds new light on the role of translation in the everyday interaction between governments and multilingual populations.

Translation Policies in Legal and Institutional Settings

Translation Policies in Legal and Institutional Settings documents the state of the art in research on translation policies in legal and institutional settings. Offering case studies of past and present translation policies from several parts of the world, it allows for a compelling comparison of attitudes towards translation in varying contexts. This edited volume highlights the virtues of integrating different types of expertise in the study of translation policy: theoretical and applied, historical and modern, legal, institutional, and political. It effectively illustrates how a multidisciplinary perspective furthers our understanding of translation policies and unveils their intrinsic link with topics such as multilingualism, linguistic justice, minority rights, and citizenship. In this way, each contribution sheds new light on the role of translation in the everyday interaction between governments and multilingual populations.

Friction, Fragmentation, and Diversity

This collection focuses on difficult memories and diverse identities related to conflicts and localized politics of memories. The contemporary and history-oriented case studies discuss politicized memories and pasts, the frictions of justice and reconciliation, and the diversity and fragmentation of difficult memories. The collection brings together methodological discussions from oral history research, cultural memory studies and the study of contemporary protest movements. The politicization of memories is analyzed in various contexts, ranging from everyday interaction and diverse cultural representations to politics of the archive and politics as legal processes. The politicization of memories takes place on multiple analytical levels: those inherent to the sources; the ways in which the collections are utilized, archived, or presented; and in the re-evaluation of existing research.

Cultural memories and their re-actualizations

Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. First, memory scholars theorized how representations of the past become socially shared. Secondly, they theorized how these cultural and collective memories circulate and are being re-actualized in different contexts. But critiques of the field have targeted the metaphorical and reified nature of cultural memory concepts. This article argues that some concepts developed in social scientific narrative studies could provide cultural memory scholars with a precise and less metaphorical vocabulary to understand how people make sense of non-autobiographical pasts in different interactional contexts. In particular, the article focusses on how positioning theory and unexplained events in narrative pre-construction assist analysis of the flexibility of the remembering self in everyday interaction. The examples in this article concern narrations of the Second World War and Holocaust gathered during fieldwork in the contemporary town of Auschwitz in Poland.

Civilisational Foundations of Inter-elite Interaction in Modern Russia

In this article, the author emphasised the absence of stable ideological foundations in the functioning of the Russian elites and the consequences of such a situation both in general and in particular issues of the socio-political life of our country The everyday interaction of the ruling and non-ruling elites (the subordinate and in many respects even the powerless position of the latter) is viewed as traditional for Russia, having historical positive and negative consequences In particular, the weakening of the political, administrative power and will of the political centre almost invariably provokes an open revolt of local and non-ruling elites against it An increase in friction at the present stage between the federal centre and regional elites is noted, which can potentially have serious negative political consequences The idea is rejected that bring to the fore the achievement of certain economic indicators within the framework of tactical pilot projects devoid of integral ideological foundations The conflict between Russia and the West (the ideology of globalism) the author interpreted as ideological; its material aspects are of a secondary nature In the author’s opinion, this or that form of ideocracy will deterministically prevail in Russia; the only question is what ideology and values will be the basis for it.