Civilizing women Boddy, Janice
Civilizing women: British crusades in colonial Sudan,
2018., 20180605, 2018, 2007, 20070101
eBook
Civilizing Women is a riveting exploration of the disparate worlds of British colonial officers and the Muslim Sudanese they sought to remake into modern imperial subjects. Focusing on efforts to ...stop female circumcision in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1920 and 1946, Janice Boddy mines colonial documents and popular culture for ethnographic details to interleave with observations from northern Sudan, where women's participation in zâr spirit possession rituals provided an oblique counterpoint to colonial views. Written in engaging prose, Civilizing Women concerns the subtle process of "colonizing selfhood," the British women who undertook it, and those they hoped to reform. It suggests that efforts to suppress female circumcision were tied to the continuation of slavery and the rise of commercial cotton growing in Sudan, as well as to concerns about infant mortality and maternal health. Boddy traces maneuverings among political officers, teachers, missionaries, and medical personnel as they pursued their elusive goal, and describes their fraught relations with Egypt, Parliament, the Foreign Office, African nationalists, and Western feminists. In doing so, she sounds a cautionary note for contemporary interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief.
This historical ethnography of Central Sudan explores the century-old intertwining of zar, spirit possession, with lives of ex-slaves. Despite very different social and cultural contexts, it has ...continued to be shaped by the experience of slavery. As the treatment of last resort, zar addresses a wide range of problems brought predominantly by women through participation in colorful and often opaque ritual events. Drawing on field research spanning three decades and laced with participants' own narratives, Kenyon shows how zar continues to embody subaltern memories of Ottoman Egypt, which shape and support the structure of contemporary beliefs and practices. At the same time, it is the effective articulation of these memories, with the impact of global capitalism and shifting Islamic realities (both political Islam and Sufism), that accounts for zar's ongoing popularity.
It is necessary to achieve high performance in the task of zero anaphora resolution (ZAR) for completely understanding the texts in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and various other languages. ...Deep‐learning‐based models are being employed for building ZAR systems, owing to the success of deep learning in the recent years. However, the objective of building a high‐quality ZAR system is far from being achieved even using these models. To enhance the current ZAR techniques, we fine‐tuned a pre‐trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). Notably, BERT is a general language representation model that enables systems to utilize deep bidirectional contextual information in a natural language text. It extensively exploits the attention mechanism based upon the sequence‐transduction model Transformer. In our model, classification is simultaneously performed for all the words in the input word sequence to decide whether each word can be an antecedent. We seek end‐to‐end learning by disallowing any use of hand‐crafted or dependency‐parsing features. Experimental results show that compared with other models, our approach can significantly improve the performance of ZAR.
This article is devoted to Teatr ZAR and its creative journey, which includes rehearsals in the heart of Wrocław, field work in the Georgian village of Svaneti, and performances presented around the ...world. It explains the key dimensions of the company’s vision and focuses on ZAR’s major creations—from The Triptych to their most recent experiment, The Maids – Materials. It also establishes certain elements of continuity between Grotowski’s quest for a poor and pure theatre and Jarosław Fret’s constant search for a theatre of sound and presence. It seeks to affirm ZAR’s body of work as a link between this much revered Grotowskian legacy and the landscape of twenty-first century theatricality. Through this process of aesthetic, cultural and historical contextualization, it explores ZAR’s uniqueness in the field of contemporary anthropological performance.
Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Wombs and Alien Spirits explores the zâr cult, the most widely practiced traditional healing cult in ...Africa.  Adherents of the cult are usually women with marital or fertility problems, who are possessed by spirits very different from their own proscribed roles as mothers.  Through the woman, the spirit makes demands upon her husband and family and makes provocative comments on village issues, such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination.  In accommodating the spirits, the women are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their own subordination.     Janice Boddy examines the moral universe of the village, discussing female circumcision, personhood, kinship, and bodily integrity, then describes the workings of the cult and the effect of possession on the lives of men as well as women.   She suggests that spirit possession is a feminist discourse, though a veiled and allegorical one, on women's objectification and subordination.  Additionally, the spirit world acts as a foil for village life in the context of rapid historical change and as such provides a focus for cultural resistance that is particularly, though not exclusively, relevant to women.
Islamic scientists believe that on the basis of verse 172 in Aaraf chapter, there has been a conversation between Allah and human beings and in this conversation all the human beings have accepted ...monotheism. But there were different ideas about the reality and symbolic nature of this conversation among Islamic scientists. Some of these scientists believe that Mithagh supports the idea of Zar world and this conversation and acceptance has been real and it was realized in the materialistic world before the creation of human being and the contents of Mithagh verse reveal it. Others deny using Zar World from that verse. And they believe that there is no Zar World. But some of them do not see the content of verse tamthil as symbolic and they see it real. The findings show that to deny using Zar World based on mithagh verse, you should accept Mithagh verse as having Tamthil and symbolic view of the content of this verse. And you cannot deny inferring Zar world from the verse and view that acceptance as real. Moreover, viewing it as Tamthil and symbolic is against the content of the verse from different perspectives. And therefore, it is unacceptable
Oocyte maturation and early embryo development occur in vertebrates in the near absence of transcription. Thus, sexual reproduction of vertebrates critically depends on the timely translation of ...mRNAs already stockpiled in the oocyte. Yet how translational activation of specific mRNAs is temporally coordinated is still incompletely understood. Here, we elucidate the function of Zar1l, a yet uncharacterized member of the Zar RNA-binding protein family, in Xenopus oocytes. Employing TRIM-Away, we demonstrate that loss of Zar1l accelerates hormone-induced meiotic resumption of Xenopus oocytes due to premature accumulation of the M-phase-promoting kinase cMos. We show that Zar1l is a constituent of a large ribonucleoparticle containing the translation repressor 4E-T and the central polyadenylation regulator CPEB1, and that it binds directly to the cMos mRNA. Partial, hormone-induced degradation of Zar1l liberates 4E-T from CPEB1, which weakens translational repression of mRNAs encoding cMos and likely additional M-phase-promoting factors. Thus, our study provides fundamental insights into the mechanisms that ensure temporally regulated translation of key cell cycle regulators during oocyte maturation, which is essential for sexual reproductivity.
Man is always a Sorcerer to Man. Welten, Ruud
Forum philosophicum (Kraków, Poland),
12/2023, Letnik:
28, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article sets out to reinterpret Sartre’s famous analysis of the look in Being and Nothingness from the cultural-anthropological perspective developed in the posthumous Notebooks for an Ethics. ...In the latter, he comments on some passages by Michel Leiris on the cult of the zar, a North-African belief and practice involving spirit possession. The article also seeks to show the influence of cultural-anthropological thought on Sartre, asking about what new light these rather unexpected analyses may shed on his thinking about the relationship to the Other. I start with the doctrine of the look as we know it from Being and Nothingness. Then I examine how, in Sartre’s Notebooks, his account takes some new directions. The link with possession, already present—though underdeveloped—in Being and Nothingness, becomes clear. I briefly introduce Michel Leiris in order to interpret Sartre’s comments on the zar cult as described by Leiris. This opens up a new perspective on religion and the social. Finally, I offer some concluding considerations.
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