Microcosm and Macrocosm

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Marek Tuszewicki
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The World

This chapter examines the far-reaching consequences of the persistent conviction in folk culture of the close bonds between the human body (the microcosm) and the world (the macrocosm). This conviction was not only the ground from which 'folk-type medicine' grew, but also key evidence that ancient theories surrounding the origins and functioning of the world, the anatomy and workings of the human body, and even astrology were very much alive in the medicine-related beliefs and practices of the residents of eastern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter contains examples of treatments employing methods inspired by folk mythology and expressed in a language that used an anthropomorphic and cosmological code, and of the consequences of the perception of humans as a reflection of the world around them.

Origins and Early Years of the Volozhin Yeshiva

2012 ◽  
pp. 15-47
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Jewish Learning

This chapter takes a look at how the small town of Volozhin became one of the focal points of the Lithuanian Jewish world because of the yeshiva that was established there. The yeshiva of Volozhin represented a novel type of relationship between the Jewish community and Jewish learning: for most of the nineteenth century the Volozhin yeshiva was the most important institution of Jewish learning in all of eastern Europe, and ultimately it served as a model for the rest of European Jewry. The heads of the yeshiva were regarded as leaders of the Jewish community in the Russian Empire and beyond; thousands of young men studied there, many of whom went on to have a significant impact on the Jewish world. Patterns that were set in Volozhin are essentially maintained in yeshivas around the world till today. There are many curious myths about Volozhin, but the reality was even more interesting. A careful look at the history of the yeshiva reveals not only the yeshiva itself but how a society can change in ways that few could have predicted.

scholarly journals Little Fire, Zygmunt! You are a Guest and I am a Guest… Conceptualization of Fire as a Living Creature in the Polish Folk Culture. An Ethnolinguistic Analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 287-302
Author(s):  
Joanna Szadura
Keyword(s):  
Polish Academy ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Cultural Character ◽  
The World ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Living Creature ◽  
Living Being

The analysis is focused on the reconstruction of an image of fire as a living creature, preserved in the Polish folk culture. This image is corroborated by linguistic data, e.g. names, epithets, established connections, riddles, proverbs, formulas of greeting and bidding farewell to a home fire and of obviating fire, as well as by “paralinguistic data” that is beliefs and practices. Conceptualization of natural phenomena (such as fire) in the categories of a living “being” has a general cultural character, corresponds to a vision of the world as an integrated organism whose components are endowed with life and consciousness, and can be a manifestation of the mythical perception of the world. The analysed material has been acquired from dictionaries of dialects, works of folklore collectors and archive resources (i.e. the Ethnolinguistic Archive of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University and the File of the Dictionary of Polish Dialects of the Polish Academy of Sciences).

Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Wodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Arena ◽  
Polish Culture ◽  
The Way

The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism was one of the most important forces in shaping the world of Polish Jewry for almost two centuries, but our understanding of it has long been dominated by theories based on stereotypes rather than detailed analysis. This book challenges the long-established theories about the conflict by contextualizing it, principally in the Kingdom of Poland but also with regard to other parts of eastern Europe. It follows the development of this conflict in its central arena and reconstructs the way the conflict expressed itself. The book shows that it was primarily informed by non-ideological clashes at the level of local communities. Attention is devoted to the general characteristics of hasidism and the Haskalah, as well as to the post-Haskalah movements. Here too the book challenges the ideologically charged assumptions of a generation of historians who refused to see the advocates of Jewish modernity in nineteenth-century Poland as an integral part of the Haskalah movement. Consideration is given to the professional, social, institutional, and ideological characteristics of the Polish Haskalah as well as to its geographic extent, and to the changes the movement underwent in the course of the nineteenth century. Similar attention is given to the influence of the specific characteristics of Polish hasidism on the shape of the conflict. The book presents a synthesis that offers both breadth and depth, contextualizing its subject matter within the broader domains of the European Enlightenment and Polish culture, hasidism and rabbinic culture, tsarist policy and Polish history, not to mention the ins and outs of the Haskalah itself across Europe.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Freedom and life satisfaction in transition

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Strong Predictor ◽  
National Income ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
The World ◽  
Personal Feeling ◽  
Special Meaning

Freedom and life satisfaction are desirable conditions and they both have a special meaning in Eastern Europe — transition was largely about gaining freedom and ultimately overall wellbeing. There are several studies about the effect of freedom on life satisfaction, but none of them focuses on Eastern Europe. I investigate the effect of self-reported freedom on life satisfaction in post-transition Eastern Europe using the World Values Survey. Surprisingly, East Europeans feel less free and less satisfied with their lives than other nationals. But a personal feeling of freedom increases their life satisfaction at a higher rate than in other countries. Freedom is a strong predictor of life satisfaction as compared to national income.

Between High Culture and Low Culture; and also The Difference Between Popular Culture and Folk Culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kunal Debnath
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Common People ◽  
High Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Low Culture

High culture is a collection of ideologies, beliefs, thoughts, trends, practices and works-- intellectual or creative-- that is intended for refined, cultured and educated elite people. Low culture is the culture of the common people and the mass. Popular culture is something that is always, most importantly, related to everyday average people and their experiences of the world; it is urban, changing and consumeristic in nature. Folk culture is the culture of preindustrial (premarket, precommodity) communities.

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa N. Terranova
Keyword(s):  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
Martha Rosler ◽  
The World ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Linguistics

This essay focuses on a body of photoconceptual works from the 1960s and 1970s in which the automobile functions as a prosthetic-like aperture through which to view the world in motion. I argue that the logic of the “automotive prosthetic“ in works by Paul McCarthy, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel reveals a techno-genetic understanding of conceptual art, functioning in addition and alternatively to semiotics and various philosophies of language usually associated with conceptual art. These artworks show how the automobile, movement on roads and highways, and the automotive landscape of urban sprawl have transformed the human sensorium. I surmise that the car has become a prosthetic of the human body and is a technological force in the maieusis of the posthuman subject. I offer a reading of specific works of photoconceptual art based on experience, perception, and a posthumanist subjectivity in contrast to solely understanding them according to semiotics and linguistics.

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