Materiality, Oral Incantations and Supernatural Agency in Ancient Healing Magic

In the Ancient World illness was thought to be the effect not of accidental or natural causes, but rather the result of a negative agency, an external attack on the victim’s body. This paper focuses on the diverse strategies used in healing magic attested in the material and textual records from the ancient Near East to Late Antiquity, with special attention paid to how the cultural status of objects and substances was changed through ritual, a process that, along with the invocations of demons and gods, allowed objects to acquire agency to counterattack the harm inflicted on the victim’s body.

As Flanâncias Urbanas de Sophie Calle: Reflexões entre público e privado

Neste artigo, apresento a obra da artista francesa Sophie Calle (1953 - presente) como um vetor para investigação acerca do espaço público, indagando o papel que as práticas artísticas críticas (Mouffe, 2013) podem desempenhar no questionamento da pressuposição democrática de tais espaços a partir dos conceitos de dissenso, aqui compreendido enquanto racionalidade política não consensual, e da partilha do sensível, que nos permite vislumbrar potencialidades da arte enquanto ferramenta política (Rancière, 1996; 2009). A partir das obras Suíte Veneziana (1980), The Detective (1981), The Address Book (1983), The Bronx (1980), Phone Booth (1994) os conceitos de dissenso e partilha do sensível serão articulados para análise das imagens e à luz dos registros textuais da artista sobre estes trabalhos.Palavras-chave: Sophie Calle; Flânerie; Performance Urbana; Partilha do Sensível; Dissenso. SOPHIE CALLE’S FLÂNERIE: REFLECTIONS ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACESAbstract: In this article, I present the artwork of the French artist Sophie Calle (born 1953) as a medium to investigate the public space, inquiring which role that critical art practices (Mouffe, 2013) can play in questioning the assumption of democracy given to public spaces from the concepts of dissent as a non-consensual political rationality, and the distribution of the sensible, which allows us to glimpse the potential of art as a political tool (Rancière, 1996; 2009). From the artworks Suite Venetienne (1980), The Detective (1981), The Address Book (1983), The Bronx (1980) and Phone Booth (1994), the concepts of dissent and distribution of the sensible will be articulated for the analysis of images and the artist's textual records of these artworks.Keywords: Sophie Calle; Flânerie; Urban Performance; Distribution of the Sensible; Dissent.

Marginalities of the Handwritten Qurans of Highland Dagestan as a Historical Source

The article is devoted to the study of the content of extra-textual records — marginals — in the margins of handwritten Qurans, recorded by Dagestan oriental scholars at different times while working with written monuments in private and mosque book collections of highland Dagestan. It was established that most of the discovered marginals were made in Arabic, however, since the beginning of the 18th century, such records were often kept in local languages using Arabic script. It is shown that the Quran, due to its sacred functions, became a repository of the most important documents of various nature. It is reported that extra-textual recordings are extremely diverse in their content, they affect many aspects of the socio-political, spiritual, economic and cultural life of the region. The experience of studying marginals over the past several decades is summarized. The author of the article draws attention to the newest findings of the Qurans made by archaeographic expeditions in 2017—2019 in private book collections in the Shamil region of the Republic of Dagestan. It is emphasized that an analysis of their thematic composition and a scientific description of the manuscripts stored in them will give an idea of some aspects of the social, cultural and religious life of the peoples of Dagestan.

Where Diasporas Met: Hunanese, Cantonese, and the State in Late-Qing Guangxi

Drawing on physical and textual records of Hunanese and Cantonese active in Guangxi, as well as state archival sources, this article traces the expansion of these two diasporic cohorts in Guangxi from the early nineteenth century, through the mid-century wars, and into the postwar era, when they reintegrated this southwestern frontier province into the late-Qing empire.

AKAR SEBAGAI APLIKASI PERINTIS PRESERVASI MEMORI SOSIAL MASYARAKAT

The article entitled AKAR (Family Records) as a Pioneering Application for the Preservation of Community Social Memory discusses genealogy pioneers and digital family records management with the research location in RW Punukan, Wates Village, Wates District, Kulon Progo Regency, Yogyakarta Special Region. The community understands family records but does not yet have the awareness to manage family records properly. This research uses descriptive qualitative methods. Data collection was carried out in 3 ways, namely participatory observation, in-depth interviews, and literature studies. The next step after data collected is processed then reduced and interpreted. To ensure the correctness of the research, the researcher triangulated the data. As a solution to the problems faced by Indonesian families, researchers created an effective and efficient family records storage application. The storage and preservation stages of family records with the AKAR application are capture (transfer of textual records media), registration (registering family records), classification (classifying records based on the classification provided), storage (storing records based on classification results), and use and tracking (use and search of family records).

New Descriptors of Textual Records: Getting Help from Frequent Itemsets

The analysis of numerical data, whether structured, semi-structured, or raw, is of paramount importance in many sectors of economic, scientific, or simply social activity. The process of extraction of association rules is based on the lexical quality of the text and on the minimum support set by the user. In this paper, we implemented a platform named “IDETEX” capable of extracting itemsets from textual data and using it for the experimentation in different types of clustering methods, such as [Formula: see text]-Medoids and Hierarchical clustering. The experiments conducted demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach for defining similarity between segments.

Indus Musicians in Mesopotamia

Human is a musical creature. It is seen ubiquitously through times and spaces that a certain percentage of human population is always musically inclined irrespective of their profession. Music is also an integral part of many social activities humans observe like religious practices, marriages, deaths and what more. Due to the possible presence of Harappan population in Mesopotamia, it may be surmised that a number of Harappan musicians and some of their musical instruments could also have reached there. In this investigation, crucial help could also come from the fact that many a times, names of musical instruments travel with them.On account of a very likely possibility of such an occurrence, a study of archaeological and Sumerian textual records in Mesopotamia was strongly suggestive of a significant presence of Harappan musicians and musical instruments in Mesopotamia. In fact, study of Sumerian text has shown that about 30 musical terminologies out of a total of nearly 60, in the categories such as names of instruments, singers, names of tunes/songs and even musical notations etc. in Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary are found to be both phonetically and semantically very similar to ancient Indian terms with some “Sumerianization”. The study also demonstrated certain patterns in the way words were sumerianized, suggesting the possibility of active human involvement in the process. The translators or interpreters of Meluhhan language are well known to be present in Mesopotamia through archaeological records. To verify the data, other words were studied based on the patterns obtained from musical terminologies from the areas that are related to Harappan presence in Mesopotamia; which yielded many more positive results. In fact, a total of 90 such words are found till now, which are reported here.Furthermore, the study of iconography in Mesopotamian archaeological records has also shown very compelling parallels in musical traditions. Importantly, it predicted a possibility of a Harappan lyre, shaped realistically like a bull, that may have travelled from Indus to Mesopotamia and evolved there in local styles in the forms as found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur.

Language Contact in Celtic and Early Irish

There is little doubt that the early stages of the subgroups of the Indo-European language family involved extensive contact. The movements of early groups of speakers across large stretches of land in Euroasia meant that these people came into contact with others who spoke genetically unrelated languages. This contact is responsible for the non Indo-European lexis in Indo-European languages and may also be the source of non-inherited grammatical features. Establishing the precise source of such lexis and grammar is a daunting task, given the great time-depth involved and the dearth of textual records that could provide helpful data for reconstructing the sources of borrowings external to this language family. But there was also contact within the orbit of the Indo-European languages when members of different subgroups came into close geographical proximity with each other due to repeated migrations. This fact accounts for borrowings across Indo-European subgroups (e.g. from Celtic into Germanic). This chapter examines cases of contact and probable borrowing both within the Indo-European language family and at its external interface to languages from other families, inasmuch as this can be established with reasonable certainty. The focus for this treatment is on early stages both of Celtic and of the Irish language as one of the main members of this group. The consideration of contact effects in Irish is limited to the language as it developed up to the late Middle Ages.

A Reconstruction of the Lost Chronology of Zhou

The first half of the Zhou Dynasty, known as Western Zhou, was a critical formative period of Chinese civilization. Western Zhou introduced philosophical ideas, cultural motifs, governing practices, and social institutions that have had a profound and lasting impact on Chinese and East Asian societies. Unfortunately, only a partial chronology of this time period survives. Recovering the absolute dates of Western Zhou has since become a classical question that remained unresolved for over two millennia. Here I report a successful reconstruction of this long-sought chronology using archaeoastronomical methods. Systematic analysis of the relative compatibility of all 81 known fully-dated bronze inscriptions revealed the definitions of the lunar phase terms, which enabled computation of absolute dates. These calculations, combined with available archaeological and textual evidence, produced a complete chronology starting in the year King Wen received the Mandate of Heaven and ending in the year of King Ping's death. The results also reveal a previously unknown seven-year gap in the regnal years of Zhou, which explains the inconsistencies between excavated material and the annals of Shiji. The complete chronology reported here is highly consistent with archaeological evidence, textual records, and astronomical events, thus providing a reliable temporal framework for studying ancient Chinese history, and facilitating a deeper understanding of the origins of Chinese civilization.

The Changbai Mountain god temple site of the Jin Dynasty in Antu County, Jilin

In 2014 through 2017, Jilin Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and Research Center for Chinese Frontier Archaeology of Jilin University excavated the god temple site for the Changbai Mountains. The main body of the site was an enclosed unit in rectangular plan surrounded by outer walls, in the middle slightly to the north of which is a courtyard centered by an 工-shaped hall and surrounded by covered walkways; outside the courtyard, architecture and water well remains were found. The artifacts unearthed from this site were mainly architectural component parts; based on the jade tablets bearing the characters “guichou 癸丑” unearthed from this site, this site is estimated to be the temple built in the Jin Dynasty for worshipping the god of the Changbai Mountains. The layout and construction rules of this site matched that in the historical textual records, providing valuable materials for the studies on the official-style architecture of the Jin Dynasty. This site is the first case of the state mountain sacrificial ceremonies found beyond the Central Plains area, which is significantly meaningful for the understandings to the layouts of the shrines and temples of the gods of the “yue (sacred mounts) zhen (mounts for pacifying the directions they are located) hai (seas) du (rivers)” in the Song and Jin Dynasties and the development of the ritual system of the Jin Dynasty.