Frescoes

Across these essays Arnold Berleant demonstrates how aesthetic values and theory can be used to reappraise our social practices. He tackles issues within the built environment, everyday life, and politics, breaking down the dichotomy between the natural and the human. His work represents a fresh approach to traditional philosophical questions in not only ethics, but in metaphysics, truth, meaning, psychology, phenomenology, and social and moral philosophy. Topics covered include the cultural aesthetics of environment, ecological aesthetics, the aesthetics of terrorism, and the subversion of beauty. The corruption of taste by the forces of commercial interests as well as how aesthetics can advance our understanding of violence are also considered. Berleant’s exploration is supported by his analysis of 19th-century art to the present day, starting with impressionism through to postmodernism and contemporary artistic interventions. By critically examining the field in this way and casting new light on social understanding and practice, this collection makes a substantive contribution in identifying and clarifying central human issues, guided by an understanding of aesthetic engagement as a powerful tool for social critique.

Several years ago, during the reconstruction and refurbishment of the Church of Saint Ana above Perast, the original layer of frescoes was discovered in this church, which is otherwise known for the wall paintings by Tripo Kokolja (beginning of the XVIII century). Since this church is also known as indicated in the paper, by the name of Saint Veneranda, or Saint Paraskevi, the point that was discussed first of all, was the change in the dedication of the church. On the basis of an analysis of the architecture it was argued that this was one of the oldest shrines in Perast, dating from the mid-XV century. Fragments of frescoes were then analysed, which made it possible to conclude beyond a doubt that Saint Paraskevi was painted on the triumphal arch, on the southern side, and above her, the Crucifixion. The placement of this scene in the main place in the temple resulted from the fact that the Church of Saint Ana was located at the end of the Way of the Cross (Via Crucis), in Perast. All this indicates that the educated population of Perast knew exactly how to create the sacral topography of a town. Finally, it seems that the paper proves, persuasively enough, that the wall paintings in Saint Ana are the work of Lovro Marinov Dobricevic, a painter of Kotor and Dubrovnik from the middle and the latter half of the XV century.

Michel Foucault shows a profound interest in a minor text by Immanuel Kant, ist die (What is Enlightenment?).1 In Foucault's view, with this text Kant opens up a new form of philosophically critical problematization which was be further developed by very different authors such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Frankfurt School, and Foucault himself. Kant raises philosophical question of present day in a specific way. For first time in ist die philosophy directly addresses question of what is contemporaneous: is not seeking understand present on basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect yesterday?2 What is this in which we are inserted and that defines context in which philosopher writes? Kant's question, Was ist die Aufklarung? is essentially a historical question aiming at identification of an essential aspect of present which questioning philosopher belongs: a problematization of discursive actuality emerges, a problematization of our belonging a specific, social context, i.e., to a cultural context characteristic of one's own actuality.3 Now, if we want ask a question of present day, our question might be: what is capitalism? is a religion. This is surprising answer given by Walter Benjamin in a brief, but extremely dense, fragment written in 1921. The sociologist Dirk Baecker, who has recently edited a collected work on this subject, also affirms that now more than ever it is legitimate conceive capitalism as a religion.4 Once socialist alternative has disappeared, it seems hard even think of possibility of a non-capitalistic society, and capitalistic values acquire religious overtones. Moreover, Giorgio Agamben's recent essay In Praise of Profanation, inspired by Benjamin's fragment, further develops thesis of religious character of present phase of capitalism.5 To begin, I want consider Benjamin's dense fragment. In Benjamin's view capitalism is not merely, as Max Weber believed, a religiously conditioned construction, but an essentially religious phenomenon which serves satisfy same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion.6 Benjamin therefore describes capitalism in light of four different characteristics: 1) In first place, capitalism is a cultic religion without any specific form of theology or body of dogma. Capitalism is apure religious cult, perhaps most extreme there ever was. Within it everything only has meaning in direct relation cult.7 2) The celebration of cult is without any solution of continuity: Capitalism is celebration of cult sans reve et sans merci (without dream or mercy). Here there is no 'weekday,' no day that would not be a holy day in terrible sense of exhibiting all sacred pomp.8 This cult therefore should be celebrated without any interruption: it does not allow pauses. 3) The capitalist cult does not expiate, but creates guilt. Benjamin says it is a verschuldender Kultus It is important emphasize the demoniac ambiguity of verb verschulden in German, which refers at same time both debt and guilt.9 is a movement of Verschuldung, which aims at becoming universal. is attempt make Schuld (debt and guilt) universal, to hammer it into consciousness.10 Its process of assimilation does not have any limit. Its objective is include God in system of guilt: The nature of religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right end, point where God, too, finally takes on entire burden of guilt, point where universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not reform of existence, but its complete destruction. …

This research explores the poem Reluctant by Farzana Aqib using Norman Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study aims to understand how poetic language is used to express emotional pain, especially the silent suffering of men, and how such silence challenges the expectations of a patriarchal society. The poem is analyzed on three levels: its language and structure (text), how it is produced and interpreted (discursive practice), and the social beliefs it reflects or resists (social practice). Through symbolic images like dusk, blood, and silence, the poem portrays deep emotional wounds that are hidden due to social pressure. The findings reveal that Reluctant uses silence as a form of emotional resistance and poetic protest, highlighting how even a quiet, short poem can question powerful gender norms. This research shows that poetry can give voice to the unspoken and challenge the idea that strength means emotional silence. By uncovering these hidden meanings, the study adds to the understanding of how literature reflects and resists social ideologies.

During the 1970s, Britain’s trade unions expanded into new areas of the economy, making considerable progress among the low-paid workers of the expanding welfare state. The Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) both made huge strides recruiting women and particularly women of colour in the National Health Service, as the laundry, cleaning, catering and portering services of Britain’s hospitals became union strongholds. This article questions why the increased weight of feminized service work is so marginal in our idea of 1970s workplace activism and why it features so rarely in histories of British trade unionism, despite being one of the movement’s most significant growth areas. Drawing on NUPE’s photographic archive, I argue that by looking at the changing character of worker-activist visual culture in this period we can reinsert women and women of colour back into those histories. This is followed by a close reading of trade-union branch minutes which explores how women re-ordered the gendered hierarchy of both their male-dominated union and their hospital between 1970 and 1979, exercising new-found agency within the highly paternalist setting of the NHS.

RESUMO:O trabalho proposto aborda tema atual e contemporâneo, a violência contra a mulher e sua evolução social até os dias atuais. Através de uma análise bibliográfica e documental, tem como principal objetivo analisar as diversas perspectivas nas quais a mulher estava inserida enquanto vítima e enquanto criminosa e seus reflexos no mundo jurídico, especialmente o penal, levando em conta aspectos históricos, culturais e sociais. Os resultados revelaram que as mulheres são historicamente discriminadas de forma direta ou indireta uma vez que estão presentes crenças subjetivas e sociais acerca de seu papel na sociedade. Permitiuse apurar que, mesmo nos tempos atuais, a mulher sofre constantes violações de seus direitos, pois algumas visões patriarcais ainda se encontram incrustradas na nossa sociedade e geram reflexos no mundo jurídico.

In this timely study, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb explores the nature and prospects of cultural freedom by examining the conditions that favor or threaten its development in the political East and West. Goldfarb who examines conditions in the Soviet Union, the United States, and their respective European allies focuses most closely upon Poland and the United States. He investigates a wide range of concrete cases, including the Polish opposition movement and Solidarity, the migration of artists, the American television and magazine industries, American philanthropy, and communist cultural conveyor belts. From these cases, Goldfarb derives a definitive set of sociological conditions for cultural freedom: critical creativity which resists systematic constraints, continuity of cultural tradition, and a relatively autonomous public realm for the reception of culture. Cultural freedom, Goldfarb shows, is not a static state but a process of achievement. Its parameters and content are determined by social practice in cultural institutions and by their relations with other components and the totality of social structure. So defined, cultural freedom is transformed from an ideological concept into one with real critical and analytical power. Through it we can appreciate the invisible nature of constraint in the West and the unapparent but acting supports of cultural freedom existing in socialist countries. Most importantly, Goldfarb's conclusions provide a framework for understanding more clearly than before the circumstance of cultural freedom in both East and West so that citizens may utilize their full creative abilities as they address the problems of the present day.

Scholars have recently begun to turn their attention to the study of sensory perceptions, however to date their focus has overwhelmingly been on sight and sound: this is perhaps understandable, given the cultural importance of art, film and music. Crucially they are the sensations that can most easily and accurately be captured and arguably are more easily framed and described in most languages than are the sensations from smell, taste and touch. Yet smell is a crucial sense, and within this scent and fragrance are a core and universal feature of human cultures and activities. For as long as records have existed, there is plentiful evidence of scent being used in personal hygiene, mate attraction, religious ceremonies, life events, as a food additive and in a range of other social practices. The Middle East, and the Gulf more specifically, figures prominently in this history, extending to the present day, where scents and perfumes play prominent cultural and social roles and where there is a strong perfume industry with its own traditions and a growing global reach. This article is an initial scoping study and literature review of scent and perfume in the Gulf, seeking to begin a redress of the traditional neglect of the topic. It offers a case for much greater scholarly attention on the topic, given how scent and perfume connect to so many disciplines and fields within Gulf studies: history, sociology, anthropology, political science and other disciplines all stand to gain from more attention on the role and uses of fragrances in the Gulf, as do more specific interdisciplinary studies in areas such as identity, cosmopolitanism, sexuality, social class and others. While the article is necessarily cursory given the breadth of its scope, the intention is to identify an area of research currently underexamined, spark greater scholarly discussion and ultimately to trigger future research on an important aspect of the contemporary Gulf.

The starting-point of my essay is conviction of wide-spread crisis of western civilization. The analysis of this crisis was achieved basing on the Horkheimer's theoretical settlements which are leading to show typical of Plato character of western culture. Basing on the example of 'solar myth' presented by Plato in "Politeia", it is shown totalitarian and captivating human-beings paideia model, which is being realized till the present day in the Mediterranean culture region. Dictatorial, anti-humanistic and oppressing elements of Platonism and related to it civilization, are shown from the G. Bataille's settlements point of view. In his project, ones are suspecting the chance of liberation of human-being.

This paper begins with the assumption that the interpretive practices people acquire in social worlds often transfer to their stances toward and interpretations of worlds encountered in literature (Beach, Thein, & Parks, 2007). The goal of this paper is to identify the history and logic behind one student's negative, ambivalent, and positive responses to classroom texts. This paper joins socio-cultural theories of response to literature (Galda & Beach, 2001) with theories of identity (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 2002) and cultural models (Gee, 1999) to understand the social and cultural history that this student, Molly, drew upon in her interpretations of texts. More specifically, this paper examines Molly's interpretations of her lived-worlds and the worlds of texts that she read outside of class as locations for investigating social and cultural practices that were relevant to her. This paper develops a case study that looks closely at the cultural models (Gee, 1996, 1999, 2004) that Molly drew upon in her interpretations of her lived-worlds and worlds of texts she read outside of class in order to better understand how social and cultural practices and beliefs mediated her responses to classroom literature. Findings from this study suggest that teaching students to identify, acknowledge, and value the stances that they bring with them to the classroom, while at the same time teaching them to understand the usefulness of other theories for interpreting texts, has the potential to engage students in more critical and thorough interpretations of literature.

Mixed couples face more marital conflict than endogamous couples. Drawing on intersectional theory and narrative victimology, this study examines women’s accounts of abuse in mixed heterosexual Arab/Palestinian–Israeli Jewish intimate partnerships amid the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The narratives of 25 women formerly in an abusive relationship are the primary data, which are supplemented by a comprehensive list of calls seeking advice or intervention from a non-governmental organization (NGO) that assists women in mixed relationships, and the NGO’s recorded in-service training sessions during which social workers discuss clients’ plights and abuse exposure. Consistent with research on mixed couples, the women’s narratives connect their abuse to differences, dynamics, and tensions rooted in cultural, religious, and social beliefs and practices. Importantly, the narratives also highlight how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict amplifies and escalates the women’s abuse. Intersections of gender, religion, and nationality as well as life in a conflict zone critically affect the abuse dynamic the women experience. The article concludes with a discussion of the relevance of narrative victimology and political enmity for intersectional approaches to domestic violence.

In this article, I discuss the pedagogical interventions I make in the health professions by combining core concepts in medical anthropology with creative writing methods, emphasizing the need for future health professionals to not only think critically about the dominant biomedical epistemologies they have learned, but to also actively imagine creative solutions for the future. Here, the objective is to use creative writing as a tool to stimulate and practice creative thinking as a way of transforming the world we live in, our relationships to our bodies, and complicating the ways in which we think about health and illness. Creative writing exercises that force future health professionals to think outside of their training and to re-inhabit their own bodies and social worlds can have a powerful impact on the culture of medicine, health and illness, and the overall social beliefs and practices surrounding health care. As a medical anthropologist, I teach future health professionals creative writing with a social responsibility component with the intention of transforming our present social world, but also and perhaps more importantly, with the goal of imagining and creating a healthier future.

This thesis examines martyrdoms and suicides, or ‘voluntary deaths’ in Greek and Latin literature from the second to fourth centuries AD and analyses their similarities and differences to understand how they contributed to shaping contemporary social practices and beliefs. It attempts to bridge the gap between the study of martyrdom and the study of suicide by comparing accounts of martyrdom to stories of suicide in the same period. Taking a literary approach, and employing a narratological reading, this thesis proposes answers to the following questions: What are the rhetorical and thematic conventions of these narratives, and can they be referred to as similar? What do these descriptions reveal about social practices during this time, such as those associated with gender and sexuality? Can ideas about martyrdom be applied to suicide and vice versa? What do these literary similarities or differences reveal about how voluntary death was treated? Questions such as these have continued to be a source of contention for historians in martyrdom and suicide research. This thesis expands upon existing interpretative and theoretical models, such as those used by van Hooff (2002), Hill (2004), and Grig (2004), in order to increase the sophistication of modern understanding of ancient voluntary death and to contextualise stories about voluntary death within their own time and place. The primary goal of this thesis is therefore to explore what a comparative study of martyrdom and suicide accounts can tell us about the societies that produced them. In particular, it focuses on themes of power and chastity in relation to identity and gender and how they were presented in stories of voluntary death. I analyse how these deaths directly or indirectly contributed to shaping the practices and beliefs of men and women around these ideas in the second to fourth centuries AD. There are four texts analysed in relation to these themes: The Passion of Perpetua with Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and The Acts of Paul and Thekla with Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story. Connecting the martyrdoms and suicides within these texts to ancient authors and audiences reveals that accounts of voluntary death must not be taken at face value, and that they should be interpreted more critically while acknowledging their literary functions.

The study aimed at investigating the cultural influence on animal colours in English descriptive essay writing at Lesotho General Certificate of Secondary Education in order to establish any cultural relations or diversifications between Sesotho and English animal colours. To achieve this purpose, the study was guided by Opponent Process Theory of colours (OPT) developed by Wilson in 1949 and Attribution Theory of Success and Failure (ATSF) by Weiner 1972. OPT helped the researcher to group colours as they were used by both learners and their English Language teachers while ATSF helped to unpack the reasons behind such use or failure to use certain colours as per the pairings provided by OPT. Informed by an interpretive paradigm, the study employed a sequential mixed method of quanti-QUAL. The data was collected from a sample drawn from Form E learners and their English Language teachers at LGCSE using essay writing and focus group interviews for learners as well as individual interviews for teachers. Learners wrote an essay under the supervision of their English Language teachers and the researcher to ensure trustworthiness of the findings. The essay was written to assist the researcher identify how learners use and pair animal colours in English descriptive essay writing and investigate any cultural influence behind such use. The findings for this study revealed that most learners (75% of the sampled essays) preferred black and white for their favourite animals. 2% preferred blue/yellow colour pair while 0% used red/green colour pair. 23% of the sampled essays preferred other colours not provided in the theory. The study revealed that choice and pairing of animal colours at LGCSE is culturally influenced by linguistic relativity, linguistic arbitrariness, lexical variations and social practices and beliefs. On this note, the study proposed team teaching, consistent teacher workshops on animal colours, regular visits by experts on animal colours and zoo visiting by LGCSE learners and their English Language teachers.

In this chapter, I look at the longer narratives children produced in the course of their conversations with me in my interviews with friendship pairs. Children used these narratives to present and reflect on themselves and their experience and they also had the time and space in the interviews to explore questions that concerned them, at some length. Building on the discussion about reported voices and narrative in Chapters 4 and 5 and focussing again on the three levels of narrative meaning (textual, interactional and contextual), I shall look in particular at the moral issues which were centrally important to many of the stories told by the children within the interview context. A story functions as a memorable shared resource for further meaning-making and the moral issues it raised were often explored later in the conversation following the narrative, rearticulated through reported voices. This exploration of moral positions is crucial to children’s working out of their own moral code and identity as a person and is also intricately tied up with learning about the social practices, beliefs and values which constitute their social world.KeywordsMoral PositionTaboo WordWillow WarblerEvaluative FunctionEvaluative PositionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.