Traditional Songs of Ìlọrin: Enacting Identities, History, and Cultural Memories

Ìlọrin is a distinct community and a melting pot where people of diverse ethnic and cultural identities came together to form a settlement in the 17th century. These ethnic groups include Yorùbá, Haúsá, Fúlàní, Núpé, Kànnìké, Kéńbérí, Bàrùbá, and Malians¸ Arabs, among others. However, despite these ethnic and cultural diversities of Ìlọrin and the Fúlàní political hold on it, Yorùbá language is the lingua franca of the community. How these ethnic groups fnd their voices and articulate their historical and cultural identities within this unified framework becomes a source of concern. As a response to this concern, traditional songs of Ìlọrin like dàdàkúàdà, bàlúù, agbè, wákà, kèǹgbè, orin ọlọ́mọ-ọba Ìlọrin, among others sung in Yorùbá language become a site of contestation of ethnic and cultural identities. Te focus of this essay is to analyze Ìlọrin traditional songs as they portray and contest ethnic identities, reconstruct history, and revitalize cultural memories of indigenes. The paper argues that given such a diverse ethnic and cultural origins, performance of Ìlọrin traditional songs become a reminder of family histories, origins, political structure, hegemonic influences, myths, legends, Islamization of Ìlọrin, and a way of ensuring harmony and bridging generational gaps among the various groups in a state that is known as the “State of Harmony”.

The Floating Village: Fostering Social Capital in Chinese Migrant Settlements through Mobile Architecture

<p>In the past two decades, China has realised one of the fastest and largest rural to urban migrations in the world. The country’s urban population has increased by 20% over the last 20 years due to rapid urbanisation and a drastic improvement in urban opportunities. It is projected that by the year 2020 China aims to house 60% of its population in urban areas, resulting in a population shift of over 100 million people. One of the major issues which is presented to rural migrants is the hukou system. Hukou acts as a domestic passport which prevents rural migrants from attaining social benefits within urban areas. This has created an underclass within China’s urban areas known as the “floating population”. This thesis focuses on the architecture of the “floating villages” of China which accommodate this floating population. The floating village is an informal settlement of migrant workers which develops around construction sites. The village provides services such as food, entertainment, medical care and recycling to the construction workers., However, as a pseudo-urban typology accommodating many of the functions of a town, it lacks one important element: a focused communal area. The absence of deliberately designed a communal space has led to social tensions within the floating village due to the different cultural origins of the migrant workers. Migrant workers arrive in floating villages without knowledge of urban culture and with no communal support. Varying migrant accents, and traditions, alongside struggles with poverty, creates friction between workers. This thesis proposes a temporary and portable architectural intervention within the floating village which fosters a positive community. The research of community design is explored through an architecturalisation of Dr Robert D. Putnam’s understanding of social capital.</p>

The Floating Village: Fostering Social Capital in Chinese Migrant Settlements through Mobile Architecture

<p>In the past two decades, China has realised one of the fastest and largest rural to urban migrations in the world. The country’s urban population has increased by 20% over the last 20 years due to rapid urbanisation and a drastic improvement in urban opportunities. It is projected that by the year 2020 China aims to house 60% of its population in urban areas, resulting in a population shift of over 100 million people. One of the major issues which is presented to rural migrants is the hukou system. Hukou acts as a domestic passport which prevents rural migrants from attaining social benefits within urban areas. This has created an underclass within China’s urban areas known as the “floating population”. This thesis focuses on the architecture of the “floating villages” of China which accommodate this floating population. The floating village is an informal settlement of migrant workers which develops around construction sites. The village provides services such as food, entertainment, medical care and recycling to the construction workers., However, as a pseudo-urban typology accommodating many of the functions of a town, it lacks one important element: a focused communal area. The absence of deliberately designed a communal space has led to social tensions within the floating village due to the different cultural origins of the migrant workers. Migrant workers arrive in floating villages without knowledge of urban culture and with no communal support. Varying migrant accents, and traditions, alongside struggles with poverty, creates friction between workers. This thesis proposes a temporary and portable architectural intervention within the floating village which fosters a positive community. The research of community design is explored through an architecturalisation of Dr Robert D. Putnam’s understanding of social capital.</p>

The аccusatory еrend in Russian satirical journalism in the first half of the 1860s: Foreign policy aspect

The article is devoted to foreign policy topics in Russian satirical journals of the first half of the 1860s. The author analyzes the historical content of feuilletons and caricatures of the leading satirical magazines of the era “Iskra” and “Zanoza”. The article reveals the historical and cultural origins of the “accusatory trend” in public opinion and the press of Russia at the turn of the 1850s-1860s, the peculiarities of its implementation in relation to the foreign policy aspect. The article compares the radical and moderate trends in the satirical reflection of the phenomena and events of international life.

Socioeconomic Status, Culture, and Reading Comprehension in Immigrant Students

Research on reading comprehension in immigrant students is heterogeneous and conflicting. Differences in socioeconomic status and cultural origins are very likely confounds in determining whether differences to native pupils can be attributed to immigrant status. We collected data on 312 Spanish students of Native, of Hispanic origin–therefore with the same family language as native students- and Non-Hispanic origin, while controlling for socioeconomic status, non-verbal reasoning and school membership. We measured reading comprehension, knowledge of syntax, sentence comprehension monitoring, and vocabulary. Differences among groups appeared only in vocabulary and syntax (with poorer performance in the non-Hispanic group), with no differences in reading comprehension. However, regression analyses showed that most of the variability in reading comprehension was predicted by age, socioeconomic status, non-verbal reasoning, and comprehension monitoring. Group membership did not significantly contribute to explain reading comprehension variability. The present study supports the idea that socioeconomically disadvantaged students, both native and immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds, irrespective of the language of origin, are probably equally at risk of poor reading comprehension.

Demographic model and biological adaptation inferred from the genome-wide SNP data reveal tripartite origins of southernmost Chinese Huis

The culturally unique Sanya Hui (SYH) people are regarded as the descendants of ancient Cham people in Central Vietnam (CV) and exhibit a scenario of complex migration and admixture history, who were likely to first migrate from Central and South Asia (CSA) to CV and then to South Hainan and finally assimilated with indigenous populations and resided in the tropical island environments since then. A long-standing hypothesis posits that SYH derives from different genetic and cultural origins, which hypothesizes that SYH people are different from the genetically attested admixture history of northern Hui people possessing major Han-related ancestry and minor western Eurasian ancestry. However, the effect of the cultural admixture from CSA and East Asia (EA) on the genetic admixture of SYH people remains unclear. Here, we reported the first batch of genome-wide SNP data from 94 SYH people from Hainan and comprehensively characterized their genetic structure, origin, and admixture history. Our results found that SYH people were genetically different from the northern Chinese Hui people and harbored a close genomic affinity with indigenous Vietnamese but a distinct relationship with Cham, which confirmed the hypothesis of documented recent historical migration from CV and assimilation with Hainan indigenous people. The fitted admixture models and reconstructed demographic frameworks revealed an additional influx of CSA and EA ancestries during the historical period, consisting of the frequent cultural communication along the Southern Maritime Silk Road and extensive interaction with EA. Analyses focused on natural-selected signatures of SYH people revealed a similar pattern with mainland East Asians, which further confirmed the possibility of admixture-induced biological adaptation of island environments. Generally, three genetically attested ancestries from CV, EA, and CSA in modern SYH people supported their tripartite model of genomic origins.

The Old and the New Israel: The Cultural Origins of the Special Relationship

Understandings of the new American nation as a “Second Israel,” and a prevalent political discourse devoted to the narratives of the Old Testament, were a distinct trait of the early United States. Indeed, the images and narratives of the Old Testament were as common in the formative decades of the United States, in the words of the great historian Perry Miller, as “the air that the people breathed.” This attachment to the Old Testament, and the fact that American nationalism and twentieth century Zionism crystalized around the biblical history of the Israelites, bears considerably on the relationship of the two nations. The “special” bond between the modern countries, which is commonly understood in terms of pragmatism, interests, and shared ideologies, thus rests on a deep cultural connection. The American public’s consistent backing of the State of Israel (one that far surpasses the constituency of evangelical Christian Zionists), which politically translates into a robust, lasting and bi-partisan support that defies the arithmetic of appeals to Jewish voters (or donors) seems puzzling at times. It becomes more intelligible in light of the centuries-long tradition of American public speech describing the nation as a new incarnation of biblical Israel. This usable biblical past, which continues to influence American culture in meaningful ways, adds an important dimension for our understanding of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel.