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.
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.
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, Volume:
28, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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.
The Darreh-Zar porphyry copper in the southeastern part of the Urumieh–Dokhtar magmatic belt developed as a consequence of hydrothermal alteration related to the Darreh-Zar granodioritc porphyry ...stock intruded into mafic volcanic rocks. Hydrothermal alteration and Cu–Mo mineralization are focused on the Darreh-Zar porphyry pluton belonging to Miocene time and the neighboring basaltic country rocks. A core zone of potassic alteration is enclosed by a peripheral zone of chlorite–sericite, sericitic, argillic and propylitic alteration. Judging by petrographic features as well as chemical composition, the biotites studied display variable size, color, and shape and occur as magmatic (M), re-equilibrated (R) and hydrothermal (H) types. The M and R-type biotites are found in the Darreh-Zar porphyry and the H-type formed during potassic alteration within the Darreh-Zar porphyry and the volcanic host rocks as well. The hydrothermal biotites are characterized by the highest amounts of Al2O3 and K2O whereas the magmatic types are hosted by high level of TiO2 (up to 4.38wt.%). XMg values vary between 0.31 and 0.61 which is increased from M to R-biotites then decreased toward low temperature potassic alteration zone. Fluorine and chlorine contents from biotite types also vary between 0.07 to 0.56wt.% and 0.14 to 0.38wt.% respectively. These values change to 2.94 to 2.15wt.% and −3.6 to −4.4wt.% for IV(F) and IV(Cl) respectively. In all types of biotites, positive correlation is observed between XMg, Al2O3, Na2O+K2O+BaO and F but with FeO and Cl it is negative. The TiO2 content clearly decreases from the M to R and H-type (Average: 3.98, 2.9 and 2.4wt.% respectively). A direct relation may be noted between Mg# and oxygen fugacity. Log (fH2O/fHF) and log (fH2O/fHCl) values range from 6.24 to 5.46 and 4.49 to 4.12wt.% respectively. Oxygen fugacity increases during formation of re-equilibrated biotites but it decreases in the course of potassic alteration. Crystallization temperatures range from 600° to 650°C, 550 to 600°C and 450 to 550°C for magmatic, re-equilibrated and hydrothermal biotites respectively. The M-biotites from Darreh-Zar have the δD values of −89 to −101‰ and the calculated δD values of the aqueous fluids (−66 to −78‰) in equilibrium with the biotites are consistent with a large component of magmatic fluid which shows similarities with the biotite originated from the primary mantle source. The δ18O also varies between 7.4 to 8.2‰ for fluids in equilibrium with biotites. The obtained M-biotite data from Darreh-Zar porphyry indicates that there is no clear correlation between δD values, Fe and Mg contents but for δD values, Al and Fe3+/Fe2+ some affinities were observed. The isotopic data indicate that M-biotites are formed at high temperature (620±20°C) from fluids with the highest δ18OH2O (7.8±0.4‰) in comparison with the biotites from some other copper porphyries.
•The Al2O3, K2O, TiO2 contents and the XMg values generally serve as useful key to discriminate biotite types.•Two linear chemical trends show various physico-chemical conditions occurred during formation of M and H biotites.•The δD and δ18Ovalues of biotite indicate granodioritic porphyry stock originated from primary mantle reservoir.•Some chemical affinities were observed between δD, Al and Fe3+/Fe2+ ratio.•XMg values from the studied biotite show positive correlation with fO2.
This article presents the theatre temple of Tlos and two inscriptions carved on the walls of this temple. The temple was built on the central axis of the summa cavea of the Tlos theatre. The façade ...of the temple faces east. An inscription dated to the 2nd half of the 1st century BC was carved on the west-facing wall of the temple. According to this inscription, Aithon dedicated a golden wreath to Apollo and Demos. Thus, it is understood that the temple belonged to Apollo. The inscription states that Aithon belonged to the astikos demos. For this reason, some interpretations of the inscriptions found in Tlos and containing the names of demoi are included in the paper. All of such inscriptions are dated to the Hellenistic Period. From the Early Imperial Period onwards, demos names are no longer found in the inscriptions. In addition, all of these inscriptions were found in the city centre. Therefore, these demoi indicate a topographical division of citizens in the city settlement plan. The second inscription carved on the southeast wall of the Apollo temple is an astragal inscription. The main function of this inscription is to give a prophecy for those who are going on a journey or travelling. This prophecy inscription consists of 56 stanzas. However, the inscription presented here has not survived as a whole. Only the verses of 25 of these stanzas have survived as fragments. The translation of the 1st inscription is as follows: Aithon, son of Polemon, of the astikos (demos), after becoming gymnasiarkhos and agonothetes, offered this golden wreath as an offering to Apollo and the demos.
PDF
