In the Graeco-Roman world, social and political life was concentrated in cities which were often organized following a basic pattern, that of the polis. These cities included their inhabitants in various forms of social organization. Besides the family, individuals belonged to demoi, phratriai, or phylai, the official subdivisions of the city. Male citizens participated in political processes, with their own institutions regulating inclusion. There were also age classes, “the young” and “the old”, tied to the gymnasium. And all inhabitants were involved in religious festivals. The city thus included its members on several different levels, most of which involved little personal choice. Scholarly concepts like “polis-religion” or “embeddedness” of social phenomena try to take this into account. However, beginning in the Hellenistic age, Graeco-Roman cities also gave rise to other forms of organization. Inscriptions tell us about groups of Dionysiastai and Athenaistai, of thiasotai and orgeones (both normally specified by reference to a main deity), of temenitai (“those concerned with a holy precinct”), theoxeniastai (“those who invite the gods to a meal”), but also symposiastai (“those gathering for symposia”) or synklitai (“those dining together”), and, especially in the Roman period, communities based on a common trade or craft. All these groups show similar features of organization and self-presentation; they all do basically the same things; and they can all be included in one category: they are voluntary associations...
More...Keywords: European Union law; legal order; general principles of law; equity
The answer to this question may be, in the existence or inexistence of the legal order of the European Union general principles of law and equity, but that will be way ahead of it, the EU will find their own way, and will vary between federalist traditions of North American and German federalist policy of European integration ? Also, there can be no categorical answer nor simple, even today, in the XXI century, to speak without any preliminary explanations or intellectual inhibitions about general principles of law and equity has become so commonplace and natural as any discourse on humanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially, the rate of production and circulation of ideas is accelerated by the increasing globalization of the contemporary.
More...Keywords: history of historiography; German-Polish and Polish-German relationships; history of West Pomerania
The factor that stimulated the thought of ethical justification of warfare in medieval Europe was among others expansion of Islam. At the beginning of the Islamic religion, its believers were deeply convinced by the ideas coming from the pages of Koran dictated by prophet Mohammed, the words which encouraged them to convert infidels. The fact is that during the lifetime of Mohammed, Muslims bent to their own will many Arabic tribes and just after his death they had a greater part of the Arabian Peninsula in their hands. In 711 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and started conquering the Iberian Peninsula. In the meantime, in Europe, people who, on account of their public role, were supposed to have a wider perspective of the world issues, were aware of the dangers which Islam caused. The fight for reservation of the Latin civilization caused thus far an unprecedented inner consolidation of armed, political and intellectual forces of those times. In this way the epoch of the crusades began.
More...Keywords: gender; mortality; health policy; cultural causes; missing men; breastfeeding; social networks; life expectancy
Much has been made of the higher mortality rate of girls (relative to boys) in some Asian countries (China and India in particular); this has resulted in millions of “missing women”, to use a term coined by Amartya Sen, and is certainly a cause for serious concern. But few people seem to be concerned with the even higher mortality rate of boys (relative to girls) in developed countries. Moreover, the imbalance between the mortality of males and females becomes even stronger as they age. It is likely that the lack of interest in the high mortality of males stems from an implicit assumption that its causes must be biological. In this article I will try to show that culture is likely to also contribute to the differences between genders. I look at the sex differentials in mortality rates of children under 5 years old, adults between 18 and 60 years old, and the elderly (over 65 years old) to see what the patterns in mortality rates can say about the influence of gender. For each age group I review results in the scientific literature that lend support to one particular cultural cause contributing to sex differentials in mortality. Hence I look at the differences in parenting, and in particular breastfeeding, of children under 5 and the association between mortality and parenting style (and breastfeeding); at sex differences in the interaction of adults with the health system and their association with morbidity and mortality; at the sex differences in the social networks of the elderly and the association between social network quality and life expectancy. Finally, I make some small suggestions of how public policy should take into account these gender differences. I think that these results prove that men, in spite of their position of dominance in society, constitute a vulnerable group from the point of view of health policy. Therefore, these finding should inform public policy and lead to policies more adapted to the different needs of men versus women.
More...Keywords: personal and organizational value congruence; diagnostic instrument; expert evaluation. asmeninių ir organizacinių vertybių kongruencija; diagnostinis instrumentas; ekspertinis vertinimas.
Straipsnyje pristatomas naujas asmeninių ir organizacinių vertybių kongruencijos diagnostinis instrumentas, jo sandaros logika ir ekspertinio vertinimo rezultatai. Ekspertinis vertinimas atliktas naudojant standartizuotos apklausos metodą. Remiantis ekspertų vertinimais, nustatyta, kad instrumentas tinkamas asmeninių ir organizacinių vertybių kongruencijos diagnozavimui. The paper introduces a new personal and organizational values congruence diagnostic instrument, its structure and logic and the results of an expert evaluation. The expert evaluation was carried out using a standardized survey method. According to experts, it was found that the instrument is suitable for the personal and organizational values congruence diagnosis.
More...Keywords: demography; communism; post-Jewish possessions; housing policy; property
Having a shelter or a home is one of the most important and subsistent human needs: the point that determines one’s position in the surrounding reality. Hostilities largely deprived the residents of Polish space so needed for their proper functioning. The aim of the this article is to present the consequences of the Second World War for the housing situation in Poland and how it affected the condition of ethical Poles. Difficult, postwar housing issues were deepened by the incompetence and occasional malice and local authorities. The article also highlights the basic demographic transformation resulting from the postwar expulsion of Germans and changes caused by the Holocaust. The analysis of the topic was based on the literature and the results of archival research carried out in selected teams of Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw.
More...I will try in my paper to examine how the project of Balkan cooperation fared within this specific context. The particular form of entanglement that will be the focus of my analysis is the development of the International Association for Southeast European Studies (AIESEE), a supra-governmental scholarly body created under the umbrella of UNESCO by the core Balkan countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia). The Association ballooned into a much larger and comprehensive milieu of trans-systemic interaction. By 1976, it boasted a membership of almost twenty countries (the above included), representing not only Europe, but also North America, Africa, and the Middle East. During the Cold War, Balkan cooperation was much more complex than this project of collaboration in the field of Southeast European Studies. But the AIESEE was the flagship manifestation of this process.
More...Keywords: Emanuel Ringelblum; Oneg Shabat; memory of Holocaust; Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw; Bernard Mark; Artur Eisenbach; Ruta Sakowska
The author presents the changing fate of the edition of the Ringelblum Archives pursued by the Jewish Historical Institute during the first forty-five post-WWII years. She attributes the limited and selective nature of that edition to diverse factors, including the „ghettoization” of the Institute’s actions by the Polish authorities
More...Keywords: historiography; Mazovia; Warsaw University; Jewish schools; Polish-Jewish relations; Warsaw
Emanuel Ringelblum’s legacy as a co-author of the underground archives of the Warsaw ghetto overshadowed his prior accomplishments as a student of the history of the Jewish population of Poland over the ages, especially in Warsaw in the Old Polish period. His output includes several books and numerous popular-science and scientific articles dealing for the most part with Warsaw and Mazovian matters. Emanuel Ringelblum saw the need to present a picture of the history of Polish Jews and of Polish-Jewish relations in a manner free of unfounded generalizations and myths deeply rooted in Polish and Jewish consciousness as the overriding goal of his studies. In his opinion, the ignorance of both parties and especially the poor knowledge of the shared history was one of the reasons for the Polish-Jewish antagonisms. He firmly believed that historical studies should support the striving for social and national emancipation of the Jews and provide arguments for extending equal treatment to Jews and other citizens of the Republic of Poland
More...Keywords: the Sarajevo attentat (Assassination); Gavrilo Princip; Rebecca West; A. J. P. Taylor; Vladimir Dedijer; Christopher Clark; Tim Butcher; The Times; The New York Times;
The paper deals with Western (Anglo-American) views on the Sarajevo assassination/attentat and Gavrilo Princip. Articles on the assassination and Prin¬cip in two leading quality dailies (The Times and The New York Times) have par¬ticularly been analysed as well as the views of leading historians and journalists who covered the subject including: R. G. D. Laffan, R. W. Seton-Watson, Win¬ston Churchill, Sidney Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt, Rebecca West, A. J. P. Taylor, Vladimir Dedijer, Christopher Clark and Tim Butcher. In the West, the original general condemnation of the assassination and its main culprits was challenged when Rebecca West published her famous travelogue on Yugoslavia in 1941. An¬other Brit, the remarkable historian A. J. P. Taylor, had a much more positive view on the Sarajevo conspirators and blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary for the outbreak of the Great War. A turning point in Anglo-American perceptions was the publication of Vladimir Dedijer’s monumental book The Road to Sarajevo (1966), which humanised the main conspirators, a process initiated by R. West. Dedijer’s book was translated from English into all major Western languages and had an immediate impact on the understanding of the Sarajevo assassination. The rise of national antagonisms in Bosnia gradually alienated Princip from Bosnian Muslims and Croats, a process that began in the 1980s and was completed during the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Although all available sources clearly show that Princip, an ethnic Serb, gradually developed a broader Serbo-Croat and Yu¬goslav identity, he was ethnified and seen exclusively as a Serb by Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks and Western journalists in the 1990s. In the past century imagining Princip in Serbia and the West involved a whole spectrum of views. In interwar Anglo-American perceptions he was a fanatic and lunatic. He became human¬ised by Rebecca West (1941), A. J. P. Taylor showed understanding for his act (1956), he was fully explained by Dedijer (1966), challenged and then exonerated by Cristopher Clark (2012–13), and cordially embraced by Tim Butcher (2014).
More...Keywords: dance; world dance; world music; ballet
The term world dance has different meanings for dancers, various dance practitioners and amongst the wider public where it inconsistently denotes various dances or dance forms. There is no uniformity in its use or even agreement regarding connotations connected with how the term is used. This article will attempt to explore the possible meanings covered by the term and offer theoretical deliberations on it through the example of classical ballet. The controversial hypothesis of whether a ballet dance form could also be considered world dance will also be explored.
More...The first part of this article concentrates on the history of the term “Pseudo-Zonar” and on another one it derives from – Zonara, Zonar, used both by medieval scribes and contemporary Slavonic scholars. In the middle of the 13th century, the name “Zonara” was given to the Bulgarian redaction of the Kormchaja of 14 titles with interpretations by South Slavonic men of letters, as attested by the famous Letter of the independent despot of northwestern Bulgaria Yacob Svetoslav, a man of Russian descent, to the Kievan metropolitan Kirill, and by the Note of the scribe Yoan Dragoslav. “Pseudo-Zonaras” (PsZ) is a term proposed by A. S. Pavlov to designate the Slavonic translation of a twelfth-century Byzantine text, Cotelerius nomocanon, evoking the name of the French editor Jean-Baptiste Cotelier (1677). It represents an anonymous penitential of provincial South-Italian, Italo-Greek origin quite exotic in terms of judicial matters, composed on the basis of acknowledged Canon law sources, but with tangible traces of the local secular tradition, namely the Procheiron Legum, the Ecloga ad Procheiron Mutata, the Novels of the Norman king of Sicily, Calabria and Apulea Roger II (1130–1154), the Lombard law. In the Russian manuscript tradition Pseudo-Zonar is also called Zonar, or Zinar, which creates ambiguity in the correct identification of its representatives. In the second part of the article a comparison of some of the earliest Bulgarian copies of PsZ from 14th–15th cc. with Cotelier’s edition is undertaken. The comparison allows for the conclusion that the terms “Pseudo-Zonar” nomocanon” and “Cotelerius’ nomocanon” are not synonymous. Rather, translated sections of the second are part of the core structure of a Canon Law miscellany with presumed Bulgarian origin, created in the 13th or the very beginning of the 14th cc.
More...Keywords: Theophylact of Ohrid; eunuch; monk; oeconomy (οἰκονομία); ecclesiastical and secular legislation
The first part of this paper analyzes a text by Theophylact of Ohrid known as In Defense of Eunuchs. In terms of its genre and topic, this work stands alone in Byzantine literature. Through a dialogue between the two interlocutors – a monk and a eunuch, Theophylact challenges the traditional representation of eunuchs. He particularly focuses on the condemnation of castration in Ecclesiastical Canons and secular legislation (of the late Roman Empire and Byzantium). Theophylact highlights the ambivalence of the views on eunuchs in Byzantine society, demonstrating that castration as such did not necessarily lead to the marginalization of the castrated individual. The most important part of Theophylact’s Defense offers a comparison between “the bearded” and eunuchs in monastic orders. Also, the affirmation of freedom of choice between good and evil and insisting that an individual should be judged according to his own deeds is the guiding idea of Theophylact’s Defense. The second part of the paper contains a Serbian translation of Theophylact’s text with a commentary. Besides the French translation by the editor of the critical edition P. Gautier, this is the second complete translation of the Greek original. It deviates from Gautier’s version in several places, offering alternative readings of ambiguous places.
More...Keywords: reading; libraries; readership
The article presents the results of representative surveys on readership conducted in Poland by the National Library and the problems of promoting reading by public institutions. In view of the general decline of reading and its intensity special attention should be paid to the role of public libraries. A new model of public libraries, and their new forms of activity create the potential of promoting reading. There are presented data illustrating the current status and condition of Polish public libraries. The condition of libraries depends on the policy of local government are very diversed. The National Programme for the Development of Reading was adopted by the Council of Ministers of the multiannual program for the years 2016-2020, in order to improve readership in Poland by strengthening the role of public libraries and school as local centers of social life which are the center of access to culture and knowledge.
More...The paper analyzes three Gospel homilies conserved in eight Serbian triodia from the 14th to the 17th century. So far they have not been encountered in any Slavic or Byzantine hagiographic sources. The homilies explain the Gospel pericopes prescribed for the Second, Fourth and Fifth Sunday of Lent according to the Typikon of the Great Church. One interesting fact is that the homilies are ‘convoyed’ from the Synaxarion homilies for the Triodion of Nikephoros Kallistos Xantopolous. The analysis of the language of the homilies confirms the assumption that they are translated and it points to the 14th century as the time of their emergence. On the basis of a careful investigation of the archeography of the eight copies of the homilies, of their ‘convoy’, and of literary and historical information about independent translations of other liturgically related texts, medieval Serbia is proposed as the area where the homilies were translated.
More...Keywords: Nag-Hammadi-Text; the Fall of Man; gnostic anthropology; the Demiurge; Adam and first man; Gnosis and Old Testament
The discussion uses an extract from the Nag Hammadi „Apocalypse of Adam“ (NHC V,5) to throw light on the distinctive features of Old Testament interpretation in Gnostic writings.The biblical narrative describing „Adam and Eve´s Fall“ fascinated the Gnostics, because it dealt with the central questions of man´s origin and nature. The Coptic Apocalypse of Adam, which shows evidence of a complex textual history, borrows fundamental aspects of the paradise story (such as the creation of Adam and Eve from the soil, desire, knowledge, the entrance of the creator, and mortality), but subjects them to a polemical reinterpretation characteristic of Gnostic writing in general (in this case with a denouement dictated by fate, the denial of „the Fall of Man“, a destructive intervention by the „evil“ Demiurge, and an exoneration of the humans). The story, however, is structured around motifs that are absent from Genesis:The protagonist is a more or less divine, perfect being, whose pride provokes the deadly attack by the angry god, and the drama ends with punishment in „darkness“. A prime candidate for an underlying text is Ezekiel 28, which is well known to have much in common with the account in Genesis. A comparison of the Gnostic version of Adam´s „Fall“ with the prophet´s lament on the „downfall of the mighty ruler“ shows that the representation of man´s beginnings in ApcAd owes a lot to Ezekiel 28:11-19 (LXX).The discussion comes to the conclusion: Ezekiel 28 is the mythological foundation on which the story of man`s origin and Fall in the Apocalypse of Adam is based.
More...Keywords: political map; historical atlas; historical cartography
Since the very beginning of the Department of Political Geography andRegional Studies the study of the creation of the Atlas of political changes in the Worldin the 20th century are conducted, expanded in recent years, also for the first decade ofthe 21st c. Accumulated experience allows us to revise the used methodology and thedifficulties and barriers related thereto occurring during both the accumulation of factualmaterial and its processing and forms of presentation both in text form and cartographic.The article based on own empirical experience discusses some aspects of the processof performing factual queries, critical appraisal of the value of the obtained information,the reliability of sources, difficulties associated with surface measurement systemsexisting in different parts of the world and different calendars.Author analyzed the rank of documents enacted in the same case by differentinstitutions taking into account the political differences in individual countries andhistorical periods.There have been critical analysis of available resources and their variable availabilityresulting from the progress of civilization, which occurred since starting research onAtlas in the late 70s.Issues related to the process of cartographic presentation of political change in alltheir complexity were discussed, taking criticism already issued some historical atlasesand pointing out the good and bad methods of presenting phenomena on the map thatcan be used in future publications of the Atlas.
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