scholarly journals Amazonian worlds of other-than-human beings and the Apurinã through the materiality of oral stories

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen ◽  
Francisco Apurinã ◽  
Sidney Facundes
Keyword(s):  
Language Documentation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
The People ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Community Meeting ◽  
Southwestern Amazonia

Abstract This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional stories. Analogous to the ways that speakers of many other languages who distinguish the entities that they talk to or about, the Apurinã make use of linguistic resources to establish the ways they interact with different entities. Besides these resources, the material means of mediating stories is a crucial tool to narrate the worlds of humans and nonhumans. Storytelling requires material mediation, and a specific context of plant substances. It also involves community meeting as a space of trust in order to become a communicative practice and effectively introduce the history of the people. Our sources are ethnography, language documentation, and autoethnography.

Education as Arikara Spiritual Renewal and Cultural Evolution

2014 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa
Keyword(s):  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Old People ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Universe

In May 2009, the Arikara returned to the land of their ancestors along the Missouri River in South Dakota. For the first time in more than a half century, a Medicine Lodge was built for ceremony. The lodge has returned from its dormant state to regain its permanent place in Arikara culture. This event will be remembered as a significant moment in the history of the Arikara because it symbolizes a new beginning and hope for the people. Following this historic event, Arikara spiritual leader Jasper Young Bear offered to share his experience and deep insight into Arikara thought: You have to know that the universe is the Creator's dream, the Creator's mind, everything from the stars all the way to the deepest part of the ocean, to the most microscopic particle of the creation, to the creation itself, on a macro level, on a micro level. You have to understand all of those aspects to understand what the lodge represents. The lodge is a fractal, a symbolic representation of the universe itself. How do we as human beings try to make sense of that? That understanding, of how the power in the universe flows, was gifted to us through millennia of prayer and cultural development… It is important for us to internalize our stories, internalize the star knowledge, internalize those things and make that your way, make that your belief, because we're going to play it out inside the lodge. It only lives by us guys interacting with it and praying with it and bringing it to life… We're going to play out the wise sayings of the old people… So you see that it's an Arikara worldview. A learning process of how the universe functions is what you're actually experiencing [inside the Medicine Lodge]. What the old people were describing was the functioning of how we believed the universe behaves. And we had a deep, deep understanding of what that meant and how it was for us. So that's what you're actually seeing in the Medicine Lodge.

scholarly journals Touchstones for Sustainable Development: Indigenous Peoples and the Anthropology of Sustainability in Our Common Future

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 369-393
Author(s):  
John Ødemark
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sustainable Living ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Common Future

The Anthropocene is regularly invoked as an occasion for the rethinking of the Anthropos, for instance through a reexamination of human origin stories. This article examines one such anthropological origin story; the construction of an exemplary and sustainable humanity based upon notions of “indigenous cultures” in Our Common Future in the context of D. Chakrabarty’s call for a history of the human that merges the biological and cultural archives of humanity. The UN report, Our Common Future, first formulated “sustainable development” as a global policy. Through a close reading of the report, the article demonstrates that a combined ecological and anthropological exemplarity is associated with “indigenous and tribal peoples”, who are also construed as living examples of sustainable living for the global society, and links to humanity’s past. Furthermore, the article aims to show that particular conceptions of “culture” and “ecological” wholes enables a translation between different scales, between local and “bounded” indigenous cultures and earth as the bounded habitat of humanity. The fusion of the concepts of “development” and “sustainability” in Our Common Future lies behind present UN concerns with sustainable development goals in current international policy. Hence, an inquiry into the anthropological and cultural historical assumptions of the report is vital. Questions of natural and cultural time have come to dominate discussions of the Anthropocene. The article also reconnects the global scale with a very literal struggle over space inside the Brazilian nation state, through reading the comment on the report from Ailton Krenak. Applying what we could call a language of survival, Krenak relates the global eco-political scale of OCF with a very concrete struggle over territory inside the political space of the Brazilian nation state.

Hula

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angeline Shaka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Tourist Industry ◽  
Multiple Origin ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Traditional Performance ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Hula, as the Native Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui (1895–1986) noted, is a general name for Hawaii’s folk dances. While it is impossible to point to one origin story for hula, multiple origin stories for the dances are included in various Hawaiian myths. In addition to hula’s beginnings, these myths also explain the creation of the island chain and its indigenous inhabitants, revealing an interconnected relationship between hula, the land and Hawaii’s people. With the establishment of the tourist industry in Hawaii at the turn of the twentieth century, hula became commodified and gendered as female for vacationing tourists. New performance contexts established in the late twentieth century, however, challenged this commodification of hula, as Native Hawaiian practitioners sought to reclaim the ancient hula traditions that seemed to be erased through the ‘hula girl’s’ acculturated dance. Hula competitions and concert hula productions set alternative parameters for defining and performing traditional hula styles. Both draw on hula’s established history of incorporating hybrid musical, compositional, bodily, choreographic and narrative influences into its traditional performance. Such hybridization encapsulates hula’s various encounters with modernity and its influences, becoming a flash point for producing cosmopolitan Native identities and for capitalizing on tradition.

scholarly journals Features of a Booming Reproductive Practice: The Medical Process, the Market, the Antecedents, and the Risks

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-37
Author(s):  
Daniela Bandelli
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
The People ◽  
Commercial Transaction ◽  
Assisted Procreation ◽  
Biomedical Technologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Legal Frameworks

AbstractSurrogacy is a social practice aimed at the procreation of human beings through the use of biomedical technologies. It includes the willingness of a woman to carry out a pregnancy and give birth to a child, with whom she has no genetic link, which will be immediately entrusted at birth to the people who wanted and commissioned it, known as the intended parents. A multi-million transnational market has flourished around this kind of arrangement, with the national legal frameworks being very different from each other and constantly changing. The surrogate’s revenue varies considerably from country to country, as does the price that the aspiring parents pay. This chapter aims to introduce readers to the topic by providing the main coordinates of the phenomenon: how the medical-procreative procedure takes place, what the commercial transaction consists of; the history of this market, the similarity of surrogacy with other procreative practices, and the difference with other assisted procreation practices; the variety of regulatory frameworks, the flexibility of the market according to the logic of globalization; the health risks and the inevitability for the child of the fracture with the “environment” in which he began his psychophysical development.

scholarly journals Partition of Bengal: a Posthumanist Study of Select Literary Works

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra Sankar Ghatak ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The People ◽  
National Human ◽  
History Of

The Indian Partition ushered in one of the most historical migrations in human history where millions had to change their native affiliations. This event led to the formation of two nation-states (India and East Pakistan) out of a single cultural geography and the drawing of boundaries (Radcliffe line) disrupted the emotional, cultural and spatial link of the people with the native countries. Selected short stories from Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories and the memoirs in Adhir Biswas’ Border: Bangla Bhager Dewal encapsulate the variegated experiences of the dislocated during 1946-1955, who were sabotaged by fellow Bengalis in the name of gender, community (bangal-ghoti), and religion. This paper looks at select samples from the collections mentioned above and correlates them with the history of the period. It raises the question “of which ‘human’ is the posthuman a ‘post’?” (Ferrando, 2019, p. 9) The narratives from the Bengal partition capture the phenomenon of border crossing which had led to fluid identities (refugees/migrants/infiltrators) as individuals had been deterritorialized and reterritorialized. The migrant bodies symbolize an anthropogeographic entity that had been exploited severely, and the refugees present themselves as the cultural metaphor in order to capture the traumatized and ambivalent condition of post-national human beings.

scholarly journals A Critique of Freud’s Theory Regarding Man’s Personality Structure from the Quran Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Rasoul Muhammad-Jafari ◽  
Mohsen Azimi ◽  
Sadegh Zamani
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Personality Structure ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Body And Soul

Throughout the history of man, the Almighty assigned prophets to lead human beings. Along the same lines, the Almighty assigned the last prophet and provided him with the last divine book to offer to the people and lead them through the most complete religion. Hence this religion and its book would be a criterion for evaluating man’s thoughts. Freud was among one of the theoreticians who had an influential effect in human societies. He had a numerous theories regarding man, one of which was the description of human personality with the three concepts of id, ego, and super-ego. which opposes and is in contradiction with the teachings of the Quran. Hence, this study is after critically analyzing the structure of man’s personality from the Quran perspective. The findings of the study showed: (1) Freud seems to exclusively believe in one sole physical dimension for a man and no other dimensions while based on the Quran perspective and teachings, man is composed of the two dimensions of body and soul; (2) based on the Quran perspective, man is continually under the exposure of the two pulling and pushing forces of Havaye Nafs [Fads or wishes] and wisdom; (3) from the Quran standpoint, the personality of an individual is composed of three levels or layers: Nafs Ammarah; Nafs Lavvamah; and Nafs Motmaennah; and (4) there is reference to and confirmation of the hidden angles of human psych or mind in the holy Koran; yet, there is no reference to any hidden file for the repressed wishes.

Heavenly Numbers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Cullen
Keyword(s):  
Direct Access ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Original Material ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Technical Practice ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Narrative Thread

This book is a history of the development of mathematical astronomy in China, from the late third century BCE, to the early third century CE—a period often referred to as ‘early imperial China’. It narrates the changes in ways of understanding the movements of the heavens and the heavenly bodies that took place during those four and a half centuries, and tells the stories of the institutions and individuals involved in those changes. It gives clear explanations of technical practice in observation, instrumentation and calculation, and the steady accumulation of data over many years—but it centres on the activity of the individual human beings who observed the heavens, recorded what they saw, and made calculations to analyse and eventually make predictions about the motions of the celestial bodies. It is these individuals, their observations, their calculations and the words they left to us that provide the narrative thread that runs through this work. Throughout the book, the author gives clear translations of original material that allow the reader direct access to what the people in this book said about themselves and what they tried to do. This book is designed to be accessible to a broad readership interested in the history of science, the history of China and the comparative history of ancient cultures, while still being useful to specialists in the history of astronomy.

His own Chernobyl: The embodiment of radiation and the resistance to nuclear extractivism in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942093398
Author(s):  
Vivek Santayana
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Power ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The People ◽  
Human Ecosystem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Human Landscape

According to Gabrielle Hecht, nuclear energy in South Africa is mired in a wider history of colonial extractivism and racial oppression. Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life critiques this politics of nuclear power and the way in which it extends the logic of colonialism to the exploitation of the non-human ecosystem in the interest of capital. However, the spatial and temporal scale of nuclear colonialism defy representation in discursive knowledge. This is because the threat posed by nuclear contamination, on both the non-human ecosystem and the people who have been exposed to radiation, is what Rob Nixon describes as a form of “slow violence”, dispersed across vast temporal and geographical scales that are unrepresentable within human understanding. In response, Get a Life marks a phenomenological shift in Gordimer’s strategies of engagement: through the ambiguities and contradictions of form, the novel demonstrates the reconfiguration in the human subject’s encounter with the non-human ecosystem following the impact of nuclear technology in neo-imperial contexts. Through the protagonist Paul Bannerman’s emerging radioactivity, the novel tentatively imagines a shared vulnerability of both human and non-human beings to nuclear catastrophe in a way that rejects the binary logic of human exploitation of the non-human landscape and characterizes what Donna Haraway terms “response-ability” towards the non-human. Through this embodied response-ability, Gordimer presents a new idiom that offers an alternative way of engaging with the unrepresentable scale of nuclear colonialism.

scholarly journals Good Governance According to Nahjolbalaghe Context

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Fereshteh Tavakoli Saadat ◽  
AbdoReza Beigi Nia ◽  
Mohsen Abedi ◽  
Akbar Rahnema
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Dynamic Economy ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
The People ◽  
Final Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

Good Governance has a long history of human thought and has proposed in the works of various thinkers. By examining the different theories, we are going the government agency, Required for sure non-infringement any community of human beings. The thought of Imam Ali also how the rule and governance in an appropriate manner, has been attending. This article has been extracted from Research on noble Nahjolbalaghe and to assess components of governance had paid from the sight of Imam Ali. Using content analysis, Statements related to governance derived from Nahjolbalaghe and then encrypt the data and using the software SPSS, the data have been analyzing. The final study Extraction and compilation of eleven components: The rule of law, Justice, and Anti-oppression, equality, participation, Self-regulatory Instead of monitoring people, preparing the groundwork to move people toward God, Clarifying public opinion, preparation for a healthy and dynamic economy, manage life’s value of a poor class of Society, Social security and accountability to God and the people. These are Indicators that Imam Ali believed are required for "Good governance" in the society.

Ownership and Origin Stories

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Origin Story

One of the most prominent motifs in the narration of the WPS agenda is a repeated, and repeatedly coherent, story of the history of “the agenda,” which tells of the advocacy surrounding the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in 2000 and anchors the agenda firmly in the passage of this resolution by the UN Security Council. The narration of this “origin story” is of critical importance in shaping what the agenda could and would become in the following twenty years. The “ownership” of the agenda by the women’s civil society organizations that lobbied for the adoption of the foundational resolution is a touchstone of political activism around the agenda and has had an impact on its development over the past two decades. These ownership claims, deriving from the origin stories, thus have important constitutive effects on the future of the agenda and on the legitimacy and credibility of various WPS subjects.

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