After the Reformation, England's Catholics were marginalised and excluded from using printed media for propagandist ends. Instead, they turned to oral media, such as ballads and stories, to plead ...their case and maintain contact with their community. Building on the growing interest in Catholic literature which has developed in early modern studies, Alison Shell examines the relationship between Catholicism and oral culture from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In order to recover the textual traces of this minority culture, she expands canonical boundaries, looking at anecdotes, spells and popular verse alongside more conventionally literary material. In her archival research she uncovers many important manuscript sources. This book is an important contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and culture of the Catholic community and will be of great interest to scholars of early modern literature, history and theology.
This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national ...identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level.
The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state.
Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.
Ecological spirituality encapsulates the relation between spirituality and nature. Situated within this context, this article offers a Christian response to contemporary ecological threats and draws ...from existing spiritual traditions to propose a Christian ecological spirituality as the basis of and the means to ecological conversion, reformation, healing and renewal. The Story of Creation in the Book of Genesis, is used in exploring the individual roles of God, nature and humans in creation, the initial harmonious balance between them and the loss of this balance due to sin. Environmental exploitation and devastation are then explained in terms of human sin, followed by the need for an ecological conversion. Finally, it posits how God can be rediscovered through ecological spiritual practices inherent in the covenantal, sacramental, ascetic and wisdom traditions, and how these ultimately enable restoration of the harmonious balance between Creator and creation.
From the Famine to political hunger strikes, from telling tales in the pub to Beckett's tortured utterances, the performance of Irish identity has always been deeply connected to the oral. Exploring ...how colonial modernity transformed the spaces that sustained Ireland's oral culture, this book explains why Irish culture has been both so creative and so resistant to modernization. David Lloyd brings together manifestations of oral culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how the survival of orality was central both to resistance against colonial rule and to Ireland's modern definition as a postcolonial culture. Specific to Ireland as these histories are, they resonate with postcolonial cultures globally. This study is an important and provocative new interpretation of Irish national culture and how it came into being.
Il volume intende rappresentare le principali linee di ricerca sviluppate in ambito accademico italiano da studiosi nazionali e internazionali sulle aree caucasica e centroasiatica. In questa ...prospettiva, il volume presenta una serie di saggi che traggono spunto da interventi effettuati nell’ambito dei principali appuntamenti annuali incentrati sull’area: l’edizione del 2021 del Convegno annuale dell’Associazione per lo Studio in Italia dell’Asia centrale e del Caucaso (ASIAC) e la XV Giornata di Studi Armeni e Caucasici. Per sua natura, il volume ospita dunque contributi di differente matrice disciplinare, che spaziano da studi di carattere storico e filologico fino a studi di taglio linguistico, letterario e politologico.
Slaves tell tales Forsdyke, Sara
2012., 20120722, 2012, 2012-07-22
eBook
Most studies of ancient Greek politics focus on formal institutions such as the political assembly and the law courts, and overlook the role that informal social practices played in the regulation of ...the political order. Sara Forsdyke argues, by contrast, that various forms of popular culture in ancient Greece--including festival revelry, oral storytelling, and popular forms of justice--were a vital medium for political expression and played an important role in the negotiation of relations between elites and masses, as well as masters and slaves, in the Greek city-states. Although these forms of social life are only poorly attested in the sources, Forsdyke suggests that Greek literature reveals traces of popular culture that can be further illuminated by comparison with later historical periods. By looking beyond institutional contexts, moreover, Forsdyke recovers the ways that groups that were excluded from the formal political sphere--especially women and slaves--participated in the process by which society was ordered.
Forsdyke begins each chapter with an apparently marginal incident in Greek history--the worship of a dead slave by masters on Chios, the naming of Sicyon's civic divisions after lowly animals such as pigs and asses, and the riding of an adulteress on a donkey through the streets of Cyme--and shows how these episodes demonstrate the significance of informal social practices and discourses in the regulation and reproduction of the social order. The result is an original, fascinating, and enlightening new perspective on politics and popular culture in ancient Greece.
Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, ...manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilized as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers—ethical, practical and conceptual—in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature in the Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.
How can traditions be subversive? The kinship between African traditions and novels has been under debate for the better part of a century, but the conversation has stagnated because of a slowness to ...question the terms on which it is based: orality vs. writing, tradition vs. modernity, epic vs. novel. These rigid binaries were, in fact, invented by colonialism and cemented by postcolonial identity politics. Thanks to this entrenched paradigm, far too much ink has been poured into the so-called Great Divide between oral and writing societies, and to the long-lamented decline of the ways of old. Given advances in social science and humanities research-studies in folklore, performance, invented traditions, colonial and postcolonial ethnography, history, and pop culture-the moment is right to rewrite this calcified literary history. This book is not another story of subverted traditions, but of subversive ones. West African epics like Sunjata, Samori, and Lat-Dior offer a space from which to think about, and criticize, the issues of today, just as novels in European languages do. Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampâté Bâ of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature.
Pekarangan ngajeng (Ngajeng yard) is an open area at the front of the residence. Ngajeng yards are formed based on the division of residential land. The formation of the Ngajeng yard is based on ...tradition. The Ngajeng yard's use is determined by social, religious, traditional, and agricultural factors. The ngajeng yard is still preserved by the Kalang village's Javanese sub-ethnic group, the Kalang. The advantage of the ngajeng yard space as a path for the sun's movement is provided by the Limasap house, where the Kalang people reside, being oriented towards the North and South. Specifically, the objective of the ngajeng yard following the direction of the sun's movement will be covered in this research. The methods used are 1) ethnography, describing traditions related to the Ngajeng yard as well as religious aspects and beliefs of the Kalang people; 2) Analysis of the sun's movement in the East to West trajectory. The orientation of the traditional Limasap omah (house) building influences the existence of the ngajeng yard; 3) The next stage is looking for a belief system through ontology, explanation, prediction, axiology, practice, and epistemology approaches. At this stage, a belief system about the Ngajeng yard is obtained. Thus, it can be concluded that the Ngajeng yard is an open space that has various functions for the Kalang people. These functions are 1) Social function, as a communication, mitigation, and security space; 2) The function of tradition, as a space for the obong tradition to lead ancestors to nirvana; 3) Agricultural function, related to tandur (planting) traditions and harvest traditions. The belief system that is formed is a legacy of tradition related to the implementation of the wong (people) Kalang tradition.
