The King’s Chinese Spittoon: Global Commodities, Court Culture, and Vodun in the Kingdoms of Hueda and Dahomey (Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-153
Author(s):  
Roberto Zaugg

As key players in the transatlantic slave trade, the monarchies of Hueda and Dahomey (in modern-day southern Benin) connected themselves to global commodity flows. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, imported merchandise fueled practices of conspicuous consumption and ritualized largesse, the performance of which was pivotal in consolidating their rulers’ power. Focusing on specific items (tobacco, porcelain) and behavioral practices (smoking, spitting), this article examines how these goods were materially and symbolically integrated into courtly culture and associated with the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Vodun. In order to track recurring aspects of courtly scenography, to compare the signification of bodily practices in different parts of the world, and to identify material links engendered by global trade, it combines microhistorical investigation based on written records with archaeological findings, anthropological observations, and the analysis of visual sources and sculptural artifacts. The essay argues that royal palaces constituted crucial laboratories of aesthetic change and new cultures of elite consumption. In this process, exogenous elements not only enriched the material culture of the palaces, celebrating the monarchs’ global splendor; they were also charged with new meanings that inscribed foreign goods and related practices into specifically regional cultural codes.

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-103
Author(s):  
N.I. Osmonova

Phraseological units that embrace artistry, emotional value, expressiveness in their meaning, can not fully disclose the situation, therefore, between the components of such phraseological units there are free words, word combinations from different parts of speech. This method, contributed to the emergence of additional meanings in phraseological units. The writer, masterfully using in his work changes already established forms of phraseology, on such phenomena as replacement, joining, or promoting the emergence of new meanings of phraseological units by an innovative method, the use of free words, phrases between components of phraseological units, showed his worldview, relentless pursuit, the language essence. The appearance of anew the individual character of phraseological units or the appearance of a new variant, causes not only various artistic and stylistic possibilities, but also contributes to the emergence of different versions of phraseological units, enriching the world of phraseology in the language. Appearing in different situations and conditions, using an individual method to introduce additions from the lexico-semantic side to primary values to components within phraseological units, using phraseological units as aesthetic means, the writer created spiritual value in his works. In this article, this type of problem is revealed using specific examples.


Author(s):  
Наргул Осмонова ◽  
Nargul Osmonova

Phraseological units that embrace artistry, emotional value, expressiveness in their meaning, cannot fully disclose the situation, therefore, between the components of such phraseological units there are free words, word combinations from different parts of speech. This method, contributed to the emergence of additional meanings in phraseological units. The writer, masterfully using in his work changes already established forms of phraseology, on such phenomena as replacement, joining, or promoting the emergence of new meanings of phraseological units by an innovative method, the use of free words, phrases between components of phraseological units, showed his worldview, relentless pursuit, the language essence. The appearance of anew the individual character of phraseological units or the appearance of a new variant, causes not only various artistic and stylistic possibilities, but also contributes to the emergence of different versions of phraseological units, enriching the world of phraseology in the language. Appearing in different situations and conditions, using an individual method to introduce additions from the lexico-semantic side to primary values to components within phraseological units, using phraseological units as aesthetic means, the writer created spiritual value in his works. In this article, this type of problem is revealed using specific examples.


1963 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-224
Author(s):  
Raymond C. Mellinger ◽  
Jalileh A. Mansour ◽  
Richmond W. Smith

ABSTRACT A reference standard is widely sought for use in the quantitative bioassay of pituitary gonadotrophin recovered from urine. The biologic similarity of pooled urinary extracts obtained from large numbers of subjects, utilizing groups of different age and sex, preparing and assaying the materials by varying techniques in different parts of the world, has lead to a general acceptance of such preparations as international gonadotrophin reference standards. In the present study, however, the extract of pooled urine from a small number of young women is shown to produce a significantly different bioassay response from that of the reference materials. Gonadotrophins of individual subjects likewise varied from the multiple subject standards in many instances. The cause of these differences is thought to be due to the modifying influence of non-hormonal substances extracted from urine with the gonadotrophin and not necessarily to variations in the gonadotrophins themselves. Such modifying factors might have similar effects in a comparative assay of pooled extracts contributed by many subjects, but produce significant variations when material from individual subjects is compared. It is concluded that the expression of potency of a gonadotrophic extract in terms of pooled reference material to which it is not essentially similar may diminish rather than enhance the validity of the assay.


Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-204
Author(s):  
Shrikant Verma ◽  
Mohammad Abbas ◽  
Sushma Verma ◽  
Syed Tasleem Raza ◽  
Farzana Mahdi

A novel spillover coronavirus (nCoV), with its epicenter in Wuhan, China's People's Republic, has emerged as an international public health emergency. This began as an outbreak in December 2019, and till November eighth, 2020, there have been 8.5 million affirmed instances of novel Covid disease2019 (COVID-19) in India, with 1,26,611 deaths, resulting in an overall case fatality rate of 1.48 percent. Coronavirus clinical signs are fundamentally the same as those of other respiratory infections. In different parts of the world, the quantity of research center affirmed cases and related passings are rising consistently. The COVID- 19 is an arising pandemic-responsible viral infection. Coronavirus has influenced huge parts of the total populace, which has prompted a global general wellbeing crisis, setting all health associations on high attentive. This review sums up the overall landmass, virology, pathogenesis, the study of disease transmission, clinical introduction, determination, treatment, and control of COVID-19 with the reference to India.


Author(s):  
Larisa V. Kalashnikova

The article enlightens the probem of nonsense and its role in the development of creative thinking and fantasy, and the way how the interpretation of nonsense affects children imagination. The function of imagination inherent to a person, and especially to a child, has a powerful potential – to create artificially new metaphorical models, absurd and most incredible situations based on self-amazement. Children are able to measure the properties of unfamiliar objects with the properties of known things. It is not difficult for small researchers to replace incomprehensible meanings with familiar ones; to think over situations, to make analogies, to transfer signs and properties of one object to another. The problem of nonsense research is interesting and relevant. The element of the game is an integral component of nonsense. In the process of playing, children cognize the world, learn to interact with the world, imitating the adults behavior. Imagination and fantasy help the child to invent his own rules of the game, to choose language elements that best suit his ideas. The child uses the learned productive models of the language system to create their own models and their own language, attracting language signs: words, morphs, sentences. Children’s dictionary stimulates word formation and language nomination processes. Nonsense-words are the result of children’s dictionary, speech errors and occazional formations, presented in the form of contamination, phonetic transformations, lexical substitution, implemented on certain models. The first two models are phonetic imitation and hybrid speech, based on the natural language model. The third model of designing nonsense is represented by words that have no meaning at all and can be attributed to words-portmonaie. Due to the flexibility of interframe relationships and the lack of algorithmic thinking, children can not only capture the implicit similarity of objects and phenomena, but also create it through their imagination. Interpretation of nonsense is an effective method of developing imagination in children, because metaphors, nonsense as a means of creating new meanings, modeling new content from fragments of one’s own experience, are a powerful incentive for creative thinking.


2020 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Sara Benninga

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context


Author(s):  
Kristina Bross

Chapter 3 analyzes English claims to a central role in a global network of indigenous and English people connected by faith around the world, claims made manifest in Of the Conversion of Five Thousand Nine Hundred Indians on the Island of Formosa, a 1650 publication by Baptist minister Henry Jessey, printed by radical bookseller Hannah Allen. It reports on Dutch missions in Taiwan, comparing them with evangelism efforts in New England. The coda considers the experiences of an Algonquian woman who is unnamed in Jessey’s tract but is identified as a basket maker, speculating on the meaning she may have encoded in her basket designs. Though we cannot “read” them directly, the fact that she made them, coupled with the provocative arguments offered by recent scholars about Native material culture in the colonial period, enables us to reconsider the print archive in which she appears.


Author(s):  
David Fearn

The introduction sets the following discussions in their scholarly context, with particular attention to other contemporary approaches to lyric both within Classics and in comparative literature and critical theory, as well as to art-historical approaches. Literary approaches to lyric deixis are brought together with art-historical and other literary approaches to visuality, subjectivity, and ecphrasis. Pindar’s immersion in a world of material culture and attention to the world as perceived visually fosters a special poetic creativity. The upshot is a poetics of referentiality, according to which Pindar’s consumers are invited to consider the distance between their own situatedness and the worlds being creatively referred to, through the complex mediation of poetic voices. The sensibilities, attitudes, and experiences being constructed also contribute to a new understanding of the importance of lyric as a culturally valuable resource in fifth-century Greece.


Author(s):  
Chris Wickham

Building on impressive new research into the concept of a ‘global middle ages’, this chapter offers insights into how economic formations developed around the world. Drawing on new research on both Chinese and Mediterranean economies in the ‘medieval’ period, it compares structures of economy and exchange in very different parts of the world. The point of such comparisons is not simply to find instances of global economic flows but to understand the logic of medieval economic activity and its intersections with power and culture; and, in so doing, to remind historians that economic structures, transnational connections, and the imbrications of economy and politics do not arrive only with modernity, nor is the shape of the ‘modern’ global economy the only pattern known to humankind.


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