Conceptualisations of xoshbaxti (‘happiness / prosperity’) and baxt (‘fate / luck’) in Persian

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farzad Sharifian ◽  
Mehri Bagheri

Abstract This paper explores conceptualisations of xoshbaxti (‘happiness / prosperity’) and baxt (‘fate / luck’) in Persian, adopting a combined historical and contemporary analysis. The expression xoshbaxti consists of the free morphemes xosh (‘pleasant’) and baxt (‘fate’). The root of baxt originates from the Proto-Indo-European language (bʰeh₂g). An historical analysis returning all the way to the Proto-Indo-Iranian religion shows that the concept of baxt captured the idea of a pre-determined destiny by conceptualising Bhaga as a god who dispenses fortune. Data from a number of Persian encyclopaedias, dictionaries and weblogs, as well as a word association task carried out by a group of speakers of Persian, revealed that xoshbaxti in contemporary Persian is largely associated with what is considered to be a “good” married life. Overall, the findings of this study illustrate the usefulness of combining diachronic and synchronic approaches when analysing cultural conceptualisations. The study also shows that attempts to trace the historical roots of cultural conceptualisations may benefit from insights gained in other fields, such as the history of religions. In this context, the multidisciplinary nature of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics provides an effective basis for cross-disciplinary openness, which has the potential to deepen the scope of analyses undertaken.

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 22-34
Author(s):  
Andreea Apostu

This paper aims to analyze the way in which Mircea Eliade became, in 1926, a vector of the cultural and scientific transfer between Western Europe and Romania, through his translations of eight fragments from Aldo Mieli, Raffaele Pettazzoni and Sylvain Lévi’s major works. Two out of these eight translations seem to have been ignored to this day by researchers, whilst the others have only been mentioned in passing. The choices made by Eliade, the context in which these translations were published (the journal Orizontul/The Horizon and its public, the precarious state of the history of religions at that time in Romania etc.) and their echoes in Eliade’s works prove that they can be seen as an example of cultural transfer. They also play an important part in the foundation of the history of religions as a discipline in Romania, being, in a way, the textual equivalents of Eliade’s institutional aspiration to found an association and a library for the study of religions, as expressed in his letters to Raffaele Pettazzoni.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-135
Author(s):  
Guanqiong Lin

As a Russian mountain-forest policeman and writer of the Harbin diaspora, B. M. Yulsky combined in his prose the experience of the police service and ideas about the ethnoculture of the Chinese who inhabited the territory of the Far East. This article contains a hermeneutic and comparative historical analysis of the short story The Way of the Dragon (1939) by B. M. Yulsky. The artistic morphology of the dragon is built on the comparison of its image in Chinese, Amur, Slavic and European cultures. One of the key images in the Russian heroic epic, in the Christian legend of Saint George, in Western and Northern European mythology, the dragon is actualized in modern literature. The analysis involves a philosophical treatise and a Chinese classic novel. It is shown that in the Chinese mythopoetic consciousness the temper and morphology of the dragon is different from its interpretation in European and Russian texts. The content of the short story by B. M. Yulsky speaks about his acquaintance with the understanding of the dragon, which is more characteristic in Chinese culture. The writer integrated the archaic image of the werewolf dragon into the real situation and brought a legend to the history of Honghuzi. The facts set forth in the monograph by D. V. Ershov are the real confirmation of the story described by B. M. Yulsky. The Way of the Dragon is an example of the artistic ethnography and the authorial frontier mythology that have developed in Russian literature in Harbin.


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Allyn

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.


Author(s):  
Robert Baum

This chapter focuses on the history of religions created by African communities and which have relied primarily on the inspiration of prophets, mediums, and elders, rather than on sacred texts. Anthropologists, colonial administrators, and missionaries dominated the study of indigenous African religions until the 1970s and relatively few studies emphasized historical approaches. This reflects long-standing Western assumptions about Africa as a place without history or religions, as well as the paucity of written documents about African religious history. The chapter begins with E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s historical analysis of Nuer prophetism, and examines the role of the Atlantic slave trade as a catalyst for religious change, the role of indigenous religions in resistance to colonial conquest, and the ways in which they changed in response to colonial occupation. It examines forms of witchcraft, constructions of gender, and new challenges to indigenous African religions during the postcolonial era.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA KRYLOVA

‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995Magnetic Mountainintroduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001Kritikaarticle ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001Armageddon Avertedmarked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.


Author(s):  
Morny Joy

In 1995, Professor Ursula King published an edited volume, Religion and Gender. This volume comprised a collection of essays that had been presented at the International Association of the History of Religions (IAHR) conference in Rome, 1990. As such, it marked a milestone: it was the first published volume that featured work undertaken solely by women in the history of the IAHR. In her own Introduction, Professor King drew attention to a number of important topics, such as ‘gender’, ‘postmodernism’, that were being debated at that time. The volume remains a testament to Professor King, and her dedication to, as well as support of women’s scholarship in the discipline on the Study of Religions, and to what was then called Comparative Religion. A subsequent volume, edited together with Tina Beattie, Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross Cultural Perspectives (2004), addressed more complex issues that had emerged in the intervening years. This later volume provided another platform from which to explore not only developments in gender, but a number of other crucial topics, including postcolonialism and globalization. In this essay, I propose to follow the effects of such issues as addressed or acknowledged by Professor King in her various works, as well as to examine the further expansion and qualification of these topics in more recent years. This essay will thus explore issues that have had a formative and even decisive influence on the way that women scholars in the Study of Religions today approach the discipline. I will look to certain of my own essays that appeared in Professor King’s edited volumes as well as essays by other contemporary women scholars in order to illustrate these developments.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Walter Cañarte Ávila ◽  
Ned Quevedo Arnaiz ◽  
Nemis García Arias

Este trabajo investigativo tiene como objetivo determinar las etapas en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje del inglés para las carreras de corte técnico en la Universidad Estatal del Sur de Manabí, Ecuador. Para ello, se basa en el análisis histórico del proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje del inglés, y se analiza y sintetiza actividades en diferentes momentos evolutivos para caracterizar el tratamiento que se le ha brindado a la expresión oral. El mismo se ha dividido en tres períodos a partir de los indicadores establecidos hasta llegar a la tercera etapa comunicativa,  con  los  adelantos  tecnológicos  como  laboratorios  de  idiomas,  pantallas gigantes y proyectores, que modificaron la forma de enseñar y aprender   el inglés en la Universidad y que continúan desarrollando la expresión oral en inglés. Palabras Clave: aprendizaje del inglés, expresión oral, enfoque comunicativo The history of the English teaching and learning process in technical majors in  “Universidad Estatal del Sur de Manabí, Ecuador”   Abstract This research work aims at determining the stages of teaching and learning English for majors with technical functions in “Universidad Estatal del Sur de Manabí, Ecuador”. It is essentially based on the method of historical analysis, but the activities in the different evolutionary stages are analyzed and synthesized as well to characterize the treatment given to speaking. It has been divided into three periods taking into account the different aspects considered for the analysis up to the present third stage, the communicative stage, and 7 in which interaction has been communicative and the method was finally replaced by the communicative approach with technological improvements as labs, giant screens and projectors. These modifications have changed the way of teaching and learning English at the University and the way speaking in English is developed. Keywords: English learning, speaking, communicative approach  


2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-279
Author(s):  
Aaron Hughes

This study's point of departure is a famous statement issued by Charles Adams in 1967 that contends that the History of Religions and Islamic Studies are essentially incompatible. In revisiting Adams' claim, this study examines the use of myth and mythopoesis in the Qur'ân. For within this sacred scripture there exist many mythemes that connect it, both linguistically and structurally, to wider and deeper semiotics of meaning. The particular focus is on Qur'ân 8:60-82, which recounts Moses' encounter with a mysterious stranger at "the place where the two seas meet." After some methodological reflections, I examine the Qur'ân's ability to absorb, transform, and subsequently erase previous near eastern narratives. Following this, I examine the way in which Tabari, a 10th-century exegete, attempted to make sense of this passage in such a manner as to connect it explicitly back to these earlier narratives.


2020 ◽  
pp. 93-128
Author(s):  
Julia Elsky

This chapter looks at language choice within the context of Franco-Polish relations in the Resistance in Romain Gary’s novel Éducation européenne. It draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to analyze characters who speak in multiple languages but whom Gary represents in French. Gary’s use of heteroglossic French and of multilingualism in the novel is a response to the politics of La France libre, the journal where excerpts from his novel were first published. French and Polish authors of numerous articles focus on links between France and Poland—especially through a shared history of Romantic Revolution—as an expression of European democracy, one that could pave the way for a united Europe in the postwar period. Gary represents this link through language, but he also inserts Jewish language into the discussion, including the Jewish people in a European Resistance.


Author(s):  
Arlie Loughnan

This chapter offers a counter-history of criminal trial verdicts, restoring special verdicts to the story typically told about trial verdicts. According to this typical story, the dominance of the general verdict (‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, a determination of both the factual and legal issues at trial) is thought to be both inevitable and right. While special verdicts are now virtually unknown in the English trial process, during the period of the development of the modern criminal trial, they played a greater role in criminal process, functioning as a means by which the seismic changes associated with the appearance of the modern criminal trial were negotiated in the courtroom. Bringing to light the all-but-forgotten past of trial verdicts opens the way to think again about verdicts in the current era, considering the possibilities for the restoration of a meaningful role for special verdicts.


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