We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Because the topic is complex, the representatives of various scientific disciples have taken up the question of the corporeality of the human person. For example, biological and medical science researchers analyze the human body as a biological phenomenon, while those in the humanities, philosophy, or the social sciences consider the socio-cultural dimensions of corporeality. This article takes the latter approach both by considering the thoughts of select Christian philosophers and analyzing results obtained from a study carried out among people aged 60 years and older in order to answer the following questions: Do the elderly perceive the human body as a biological or as a sociocultural reality? How does this same population understand the aging body? According to the results of this study, seniors perceive the human body at any age primarily as a biological reality. The way that the study participants experience the drama of aging, as St. Augustine calls it in his writings, could have influenced why they rarely consider the sociocultural dimension of aging.
More...
This article is an attempt to analyze two films of a German director Doris Dörrie: Kirschblüten - Hanami (2008) and Grüße aus Fukushima (2016), created with the fascination by Japanese culture. This fascination, which is important in Wolfgang Welsch's theories becomes a point of departure for the transcultural interpretation. In this context, the meeting of cultures is not a binary opposition, but includes the entanglement of both sides in the complex cultural networks. And the natural transcultural mind that Wolfgang Welsch sees in the Japanese, can also characterize the German director. In these two films the author looks for various elements representing different cultures, accepting the surface character of research, which according to Krystyna Wilkoszewska takes into account the surface knowledge of another culture, if it leads to an in-depth study of our culture. The border crossing being showing one's own and the other as two sides of the same coin, resembles the Japanese-painted face of a buto dancer, which contrasts with his black, braided hair, which in turn is mediated from the aesthetics of expressionism. Differences between characters and cultures are therefore not a contrast between two homogeneous cultures but inside the transcultural network. In the transcultural network the journey of film characters takes place through the butoh dance process, which is intertwined with the road symbolism. Also the name of the butoh dance reveals a connection with traversing the road. The word butoh was created from two complex ideograms: "bu" - meaning dance, and "toh" - means a step. The step of the butoh dancer Yu from Kirschblüten - Hanami or the elegant geisha Satomi from Grüße aus Fukushima is therefore a step of traversing Europeans - Rudi and Marie – trying to find themselves and rebuild their lives.
More...
Taking into consideration of the current data, for the concept of the other one -villain- in Albanian folk or written literature, we have many examples of their presence in literature from the antiquity till nowadays. Historically the concept of villain in Albanian history is present from the early ages, in the traditional and oral history, up to contemporary Albanian literature where is more or less present. So while with some of our neighboring nations those figure appear as heroes from the antiquity, in our culture they have a negative connotation, and are considered as concept of the other one-the villain in Albanian literature. So the mythical figure like: Black Knight, Cyclopes, Hades, Dragon, Mummy, Cerberus,Bogeyman, etc. are considered as terrifying figure that cause bad luck, hatred, jealousy, dismay, and great traumas, so they are considered as the foreign element of the other one -the villain.
More...
In the era of fast information that we are in, cyberspace has created the possibility for a new dominant form of communication between internet users. Communication appears in new forms, as are various sites like Google and Youtube, than various social networks, and various information portals. This new form of communication is also becoming the bearer of traditional culture in general, including spiritual in particular, which is beforehand being reconstructed by changing the traditional practice of performing, by being adapted to an auditor wishing to see them off. This phenomenon in media literature has been labelled as 'staged authenticity', meaning that in media it is intended to be broadcast only what viewers might like, or what is considered to be authentic by stage managers (in this case, choreographers, directors...). Therefore in the internet are shown old values, or those that are build on them, as well as completely new creations, often alienated, offering and creating opportunities to access, analyze and study them, especially from perspective of social and humane fields.The aim of this paper is to review the report that cyberspace dictates in transmitting a new form of traditional culture and to what extend it jeopardizes the authenticity and content specificity of traditional forms of culture.
More...
In recent decades, African American identity has been explored through the theory of cultural trauma. This theory implies that the trauma which a certain community has experienced and which is kept alive in the collective memory through literature and arts, strongly influences their present and future identity. For African Americans, the theory of cultural trauma treats slavery as a trauma which permanently marked their identity. This paper analyzes the role of the novel The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead in maintaining the cultural trauma of slavery through Whitehead’s exploration of key elements of African American female identity.
More...
In this work, the authors report results of complete research of haplogroup testing for two medieval Russian burials from the Radonezh area near Serguiev Posad, Moscow region (Old Radonezh settlement, the Parish of Athanasius The Great). The excavations were made by the Sergiev Posad (former Zagorsk) State History and Art Museum-Preserve expedition, headed by Dr. V. I. VishnevskyThe time period is the 16th–17th centuries, the periods of Russian Czardom and the consequent Time of Troubles. The results are typically Central and Eastern European Slavic R1a-M458 Y-haplogroup subclade and H2a1 and H or JT mitochondrial haplogroups (typical for the Northern and Eastern Europe). This suggests the preliminary assumption, that f the populations of western Slavic regions can have a genetic affinity to the medieval population of the Moscow area. The area of continuity could include the Baltic area (one Slavic R1a-M458 from Usedom was published) or the Danube-Carpathian region (the region of earliest Slavic presence according to Russian chronicles and Bronze Age R1a presence). Mitochondrial DNA also show the Central European or Baltic affinities. The whole result show the relation of the buried people to Nothern and Central European poputations. To perform the genotyping process, the partially automated process was developed and the system was assembled as a unique complex containing the glove boxe that maintains high purity nitrogen, allowing DNA extraction in ultraclean conditions.
More...
The present paper takes a threefold look inside Dimitrie Cantemir’s destiny as a pivotal Romanian thinker and political figure. Although much has been written about Cantemir’s political, philosophical and cultural activity, my approach here is set on superimposing aspects that pertain to different areas of investigation. Since I am more interested in Cantemir as a whole, I turn to an encomiastic speech delivered by Lucian Blaga, who depicts key aspects of Cantemir’s work and personality. Blaga’s conference is virtually unmentioned in the Romanian research on Cantemir. So, at least in part, my intention here is to reach back to Dimitrie Cantemir through Blaga’s observations and interpretive tools.
More...
The present article attempts to show how culture-specific factors dominant in a given social group influence and model evaluation of literary characters. Special attention is paid to the character’s attitude towards challenges he faces, his decisions, his personality traits, his mental states (beliefs, desires and thoughts) as well as folk psychology which guide him in his life. The profile of our research project fits into contemporary investigations of how culturally defined thinking can shape reading and understanding of literary works in terms of both evaluation of literary characters, comprehension of plot, and perception of time implied in the work. Our research project contributes to the current discussion on cultural differences between the West and the East. Students from Poland and China took part in the project. They all answered several dozen questions of a specially prepared social questionnaire concerning their evaluation of Stanisław Wokulski, the protagonist of Bolesław Prus’ novel Lalka (The Doll). The results show that students from the two cultural groups responded in different ways to many questions which were correlated with specific cultural parameters that differ the East and the West, which in the profile of our research is interpreted as a visible cultural transfer from one area of thinking into another.
More...
This communication aims to approach the names of places in the literary text, particularly in fairy tales. Starting from the premise that the fairy tale fictional world is structured on the duality principle, good vs. evil, we will show that the names of places that can be found in the fabulous discourse are also classified in good and bad. However, there is no clear delimitation between the two toponymic categories, some names changing, at some point, their meaning from good into evil and vice versa. Thus, we will investigate the lexico-semantic status of toponyms in the fabulous universe in diachronic perspective while focusing both on classical and modern fairy tales. At the same time, we will underline the similarities and the structural and content differences between the Romanian toponyms (the formation of the toponymic appellations, predominant in this type of text). The approach is interdisciplinary, the areas concerned being anthropology, ethnolinguistics and semantics. The corpus is taken from Romanian fairy tale anthologies, as well as from children / cartoon films.
More...
Historical events of the 20th century caused serious changes within the family life at the individual level as well as in the family as a special kin structure. Even though the changes seemed to be slow, moreover in the constructed reflections and memories family is frequently presented as a stable institution, which is a part of everyday ontological security of its members. Analysing the narratives, which depict individual life courses of people, we receive (representations which lead to) answers to questions concerning changes of family structure, responsibility and the status of family members, etc. Analysing mostly qualitative data, the proposed paper is going to show the complexities and varieties of life courses in the context of the radical social transformations which was (and still is) experienced in Slovakia, representing a Central European region. Mostly rural-urban cooperation within generations, as well as tensions in between generations, work migration (within and later out of the country), unstable marriage ties, were experienced both in the eras of socialism and globalization. The paper is partly based on secondary sources concerning an overview of family studies development in Slovakia. The other part is based on already published empirical studies gathered in rural as well as urban areas of Slovakia since the early 1980s up until nowadays within life course and family studies as well as women’s studies in ethnology.
More...
This study questions the impact of over forty years of atheistic communist rule on the religious practices and beliefs of Romanians. Multiple national and international databases and reports provided the information necessary for an investigation of religious practices and beliefs following the collapse of the communist regime. An historical review provided the needed background and base for comparison of the extent and type of impact the communist government had on religion. The evidence supported the conclusion that communist restrictions did little more than force religious practice out of the public space, despite its atheistic ideology and its harsh treatment of believers. Religious practices and beliefs, however, survived and have progressively prospered, reclaiming visibility in the public space after the end of communist rule.
More...
This text puts emphasis on the following issues: esteemed information of family stories of the Tatars in Bulgarian Dobrudja according to written and oral accounts; the image of the past in these stories; the role of the process of “history democratisation”, as well as the role of science and scientific and popular publications as generators of interest in the past; processes of building a prestigious past and aristocratic genealogy. These family histories are just fragments of the historical memory of the Tatar immigrants in Dobrudja. We can call them alternative memory, i.e., memory that complements, and even competes with, the dominating national memory in the formal historiography by asserting a plural point of view regarding the events of the past.
More...
The aim of this contribution is to understand how family members reorganize themselves while one member is in another country for work, and the impact of migration on the families’ social environment. The research question guiding this research is: What are the observable patterns in the transnational organization of family life under the condition of individual and spatial poverty in the place of origin? The focus is the transnational organization of family life of poor migrants from the point of view of family members who remain in their place of origin. For this purpose, a study of migration from the Roma neighbourhood of Stolipinovo in the city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to Western Europe (EU 15) has been conducted. This study examines the individual and spatial factors that affect family life under the conditions of migration and poverty. The results show that families have changed dramatically through the migration process, and that the transnational organization of family life has also had an impact on their spatial environment.
More...
The political changes in Bulgaria of November 1989 were accompanied by a severe economic crisis, a high level of unemployment and the rise of strong social inequality, which led to intensive migratory processes. The opening of the borders was followed by various forms of cross-border mobility. Since the very beginning of the 1990s, the Karakachani, in contrast to the rest of the Bulgarian citizens, got an easy access to visas to Greece. It enabled labour mobility which in only a few years spread among a significant part of the members of the community. For most of them, gurbet turned out to be more than just a supplementary opportunity: it became a main strategy for realization in life. The subject of the present study are the “damages” that labour mobility causes to the structures of the life-world of the migrants and their relatives. There are two main questions: how does labour mobility transform main principles of family relations and of the statuses of family members; and how does the family on its part determine the nature of labour mobility.
More...
Since the early 1990s, female labour migration from Bulgaria has become a common practice and has acquired unprecedented dimensions. In this paper I will address the characteristics of the most popular form of the Bulgarian female labour migration to Italy, namely work as caregivers of old people, sick family members and children. The specificity of work – from the decision to get employed abroad as domestic care workers – through its practice to its meaning for the families of the female migrants marks it as an intersection point of pure economic goals and relationships, on the one hand, and moral ones, on the other. This defines my research problem: to analyse the moral economy of care from the perspective of women care workers.
More...
After the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, the migration of women from this region has sharply increased. In particular, a number of women (mainly middle-aged mothers with teenage children) from the Lovech district of northern Bulgaria have travelled to Italy and Greece in order to work as live-in caregivers or domestic helpers. Drawing on long-standing fieldwork in Bulgaria and on short-term fieldwork in Italy, this study examines the impact of migration on Bulgarian women and their life courses. Based on the interviews with women from two Bulgarian villages, the most important reason for their migration was that it was “for their children”. The idea that mothers must make money, as part of their role in the household, may represent the continuation of the socialist worker-mother ideology. At the same time, these migrant mothers were expected to be caregivers in their own homes, despite the fact that they were working abroad. Although the women’s migration may not have had a significant impact on changing gender roles in Bulgaria, working abroad enabled these “single” women (in this case, divorced or widowed) to live independently, while providing financial support to their children. The implication of this finding is that migration may create new possibilities for women’s life courses to be “single” in Bulgarian villages.
More...
The question of the border between Albania and Yugoslavia was a taboo subject for those who lived in the border region for almost half a century, because of the tense political situation between the two states. That border, as a historical event and experience, produced various detrimental effects for the residents of this region. At the same time, it produced very powerful personal stories which, when analysed through the lenses of memory and border studies, enable us to take a new position on the issue of the border. How really this political border has affected people’s life courses? In taking the example of an Albanian family from both sides of that political border, or more precisely, the experiences of three generations of women in the same family, I will try to examine this question at a micro level. In providing extracts from the interviews from the fieldwork, I will try to bring out the emotional side of this historical and political state border, as well as another aspect to the truth behind these facts. The most important part to this research remains the intergenerational memory that reflects the pain and longing caused by the border suffered by one generation after another. The theoretical framework of my paper will be based mainly on studies of Dianne Bell, Maurice Halbwachs, Astrid Erll, Aleida Assman, William Zartman, and Noel Malcolm.
More...
This work examines the narrative configuration of deportations conducted in the Western Romanian countryside at the beginning of the collectivization process. The villagers interviewed belong to the generation born between 1935 and 1945 and provide long-term accounts of the displacements experienced. The abduction from home, the journey to the deportation destination, life at the new domicile, and the return are the chronological sequences of the narrative depicted by our analysis. This study contributes to the understanding of individual and collective responses to state-enforced repression and its accommodation in micro-level contexts.
More...