scholarly journals THE REIFICATION OF FATE IN EARLY CHINA

Early China ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 147-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercedes Valmisa
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
First Century ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Early China ◽  
Common Pattern ◽  
External Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Cases Study ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractEarly Chinese texts make us witnesses to debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of events, the outcomes of their actions, and their own lives. In the midst of these discourses on the limits of the efficacy of human agency, the notion of ming 命 took a central position.In this article, I present a common pattern of thinking about the relationship between the person and the world in early China. I call it the reifying pattern because it consisted in thinking about ming as a hypostasized entity with object-like features. Although external and independent, ming was not endowed with human qualities such as the capacities for empathy, responsivity, and intersubjectivity. The reification of fate implied an understanding of ming as an external, amoral, and determining force that limited humans without accepting intercommunication with them, thereby causing feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and existential incompetence.I first show that the different meanings of ming hold a sense of prevailing external reality, and hence can be connected to the overarching meaning of fate. Then, I offer an account of the process of reification of fate in early China and its consequences, theoretical and practical, through cases study of received (Mengzi 孟子) and found (Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道) texts. I end with some reflections on the implications of ming as a nonpersonal and nonsubjective type of actor for both early Chinese and twenty-first-century accounts of agency.

The Reifying Pattern

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Mercedes Valmisa
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Human Intervention ◽  
Human Control ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
The World ◽  
Chinese Texts

Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to (sometimes implicit) debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of events, the outcomes of their actions, and their own lives. In the midst of these discourses on the limits of the efficacy of human agency, the notion of ming命‎ acquired particular relevance and took a central position. Overall, we may understand ming as everything that happens without human intervention and remains out of human control. Most early thinkers shared a pattern of thinking about ming that established a problematic relationship between the person and the world: the reifying pattern, where the person was thought to be overpowered by external, objective, imposing, limiting, and detrimental forces. Chapter 4 analyzes the reifying pattern via the Mengzi and Guodian Tang Yu zhi dao.

Messiah with the Microphone? Oral Historians, Technology, and Sound Archives

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Perks
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Digital Audio ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The World ◽  
Technological Skills ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship

For decades, oral historians and their tape recorders have been inseparable, but it has also been an uneasy marriage of convenience. The recorder is both our “tool of trade” and also that part of the interview with which historians are least comfortable. Oral historians' relationship with archivists has been an uneasy one. From the very beginnings of the modern oral history movement in the 1940s, archivists have played an important role. The arrival of “artifact-free” digital audio recorders and mass access via the Internet has transformed the relationship between the historian and the source. Accomplished twenty-first-century oral history practitioners are now expected to acquire advanced technological skills to capture, preserve, analyze, edit, and present their data to ever larger audiences. The development of oral history in many parts of the world was influenced by the involvement of sound archivists and librarians. Digital revolution in the present century continues to influence oral history.

A Tale of Two Balloons: Intercultural Cinema and Transnational Nostalgia in Le voyage du ballon rouge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott Diffrient ◽  
Carl R. Burgchardt
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Transnational Film ◽  
The Relationship

Millions of movie lovers around the world have experienced a range of emotions upon viewing Albert Lamorrise’s 1956 French classic Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon). Many adulatory responses have been triggered but perhaps none other more clearly than Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon, France-Taiwan, 2007). Although lacking the fantastical interludes of the earlier film and filled with fewer flaneurial excursions through the alleyways of Paris, Hou’s feature-length work is no less compelling as a series of quotidian scenes concerning the interwoven themes of companionship, loneliness, memory, nostalgia, and the restorative power of art. Drawing upon phenomenological and memory-based studies of intercultural cinema, this chapter explores the relationship between recollections, references, and transnational film remakes, ultimately aiming to transnationalise (or “uproot”) nostalgia and show how twenty-first century cinephilia performs a similar cultural function to the remaking process.

scholarly journals A modern rendering of Naboth’s vineyard

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-41
Author(s):  
Matthew Vandagriff
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship

The story of Naboth’s vineyard is a simple story to conceptualize for most readers. A king sees something he desires, and he devises a way to take it. In the case of Naboth, the king had him murdered. In the twenty-first century, imagining a king or other leader who wields this type of authority and influence can be difficult. This article outlines a different understanding for the story (1 Kgs 21:1–16), in which economic forces, not a singular person, drive the procurement of land through the use of fair and legal means. After a brief contextualization of the passage, the article moves to outline the relationship between Kirkwood, MO and the area of Meacham Park. The purpose of this article is help readers understand how fair and legal means can wield the same power as a monarchy, and that Christians must see the world through a lens other than economic issues.

The World is Flat in the Twenty-First Century: A Response to Hasnas

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. 427-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Dunfee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Unethical Behavior ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
Legal Policy ◽  
Law And Ethics ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACT: Hasnas is correct that ethicists should pay attention to law and be on guard for perverse effects from regulation and legal interpretations that may encourage or require unethical behavior. He is not correct that the business ethics literature assumes that law and ethics consistently pull in the same direction. Analysis of the relationship between law and ethics requires nuanced, in-depth treatment. An example is provided regarding the well-known case of United States v. Park. Ultimately, there is a need for more serious consideration of ethical principles and norms in legal policy making and practice.

Communicating the Quest for Sustainability: Ecofeminist Perspectives in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-112
Author(s):  
Archana Parashar ◽  
Mukesh Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Regional Sustainability ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship

The objective of this article is to study the relationship between men, women and nature in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’ by using ecofeminist perspectives. The cultural and moral vision of Jewett is imperative to the scope of American regionalist writing and her work characterizes the extreme concern to representing the region from which the author comes. The setting of the story holds its relevance even in the twenty-first century when the world is facing a deep ecological crisis. In ‘A White Heron’, Sarah Orne Jewett narrates the story of a 9-year-old girl Sylvia, exploring the grounds around her home in search of a prized white heron. Therefore, I suggest, it is through this relationship that the author demonstrates regional sustainability through clearly defined repressive gender roles, feminizing the concept of submissiveness while masculinizing attitudes of dominance over nature and competence in dealing with the challenges that nature presents.

How the Pandemic Made Sensory Power Visible

2022 ◽  
Vol 121 (831) ◽  
pp. 10-16
Author(s):  
Engin Isin
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Evolution ◽  
First Century ◽  
Behavioral Rules ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Fourth Form ◽  
The Relationship

During the COVID-19 pandemic, three long-established forms of power—sovereign, disciplinary, and regulatory—have been conspicuously deployed around the world, as seen in lockdowns, quarantines, and behavioral rules. The pandemic has also revealed a fourth form of power: sensory power, which emerged with the rapid evolution of sensing and surveillance technologies. The data collected by tracking and tracing constitutes a planetary ecosystem for governing people. Whether this leads to digital dictatorships or digital democracies, the growth of sensory power will change the relationship between states and citizens in the twenty-first century.

Closure in dystopia: Projecting memories of the end of crises in speculative fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110543
Author(s):  
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Dystopian Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
China Dream

In this piece, I approach the relationship between the paradigm of imbricated crises pertaining to the second decade of the twenty-first century and its contemporaneous dystopian literature. I focus particularly on how dystopian literature forges a sense of closure that attempts to give meaning through the construction of imaginary memories of how crises came and went, or came and stayed. Dystopian tales provide the troubled reader of its time with a sense of narrative continuation and a substitute for closure. For my analysis, I draw on a corpus of literary works from around the world, which includes The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz; Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel; The Emissary, by Tawada Yōko; Severance: A Novel, by Ling Ma; China Dream, by Ma Jian; Ansibles, Profilers and Other Machines of Wonder, by Andrea Chapela; and The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

VIRTUE AND TALENT: WOMEN AND FUSHI IN EARLY CHINA

NAN Nü ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhou Yiqun
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Early China ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Confucian Morality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Share

AbstractA study of two early historical records shows that women had a share in fushi (presenting the Odes), a social ritual and high art that is otherwise known as a preserve of the male elite. The paper retrieves the context of women's participation and analyzes the Confucian morality underlying the portrayals of the two female practitioners, both in light of the principle of sexual separation. The formulation of the relationship between female virtue and talent in these early records exemplifies the parameters of the later development of the dichotomy, and the metamorphosis of the images of the two female fushi practitioners in the first-century-BCE Lienü zhuan represents the first definitive version of the orthodox Confucian position on that issue.

Performing Property: Making The World

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Blomley
Keyword(s):  
External Reality ◽  
Improved Outcomes ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Careful Exploration ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

Scholars under the ‘Progressive Property’ banner distinguish between dominant conceptions of property, and its underlying realities. The former, exemplified by Singer’s ‘ownership model’, is said to misdescribe extant forms of ownership and misrepresent our actual moral commitments in worrisome ways. Put simply, it is argued that our representations of property’s reality are incorrect, and that these incorrect representations lead us to make bad choices. Better understandings of the reality of property should lead to better representations, and thus improved outcomes.However, the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ is not made fully explicit. This essay seeks to supplement progressive property through a more careful exploration of the relationship between the two, by drawing from performativity theory. From this perspective, accounts of property are in an important sense not descriptions of an external reality, but help bring reality into being. The ownership model is not so much constative (descriptive) as performative. Such an account, I suggest, directs us to several important insights. Rather than asking what property is or is not, the task becomes that of trying to describe how property is performed (or not) into being. But concepts do not stand alone: rather, other ideas, people, things and other resources have to be enrolled in complicated (and often fragile) combinations. Rather than criticizing the ownership model for its mismatch with reality, we might consider that models do not have to be ‘true’, just successful. As such, it may be more useful for progressive scholars of property to redirect their energy into enquiring how it is that certain conceptions of property are successful, and others not. To do so also requires that we think about the role of scholars in performing property, for good or bad, into being.

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