The Sensitive-Area Complex: A Contribution to the Theory of Guided Culture Contact

1955 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 583-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Lambert ◽  
Marvin Bressler
Author(s):  
Nancy Farriss

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.


Cephalalgia ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ottar Sjaastad ◽  
Carsten Saunte ◽  
JR Graham

Two new chronic paroxysmal hemicrania patients are described. In both, attacks can be precipitated mechanically by applying firm manual pressure to certain sensitive points on the neck, i.e. in the C2 area, in the transverse processes of the C4–C5 vertebrae, or beneath the posterior part o15 the skull on the symptomatic side. The most sensitive area seems to be the transverse process of C4–C5. Susceptibility to this type of attack is dependent on the flow of spontaneous attacks; attacks are easily precipitated in a phase with multiple spontaneous attacks, but are not readily precipitated otherwise. Under indomethacin protection, local tenderness is clearly diminished and attacks cannot be precipitated.


2004 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Deagan

Despite the fact that the Taíno people of the Caribbean were the first Native Americans to encounter and coexist with Europeans after 1492, there has been almost no archaeology of Taíno response to that encounter. This study explores the reasons for (and consequences of) this neglect, and their larger implications for American contact-period archaeology. It also challenges prevailing historical models of Taíno social disintegration, drawing upon six years of archaeological work at the En Bas Saline site in Haiti, the only extensively excavated Taíno townsite occupied both before and after contact. Our results, organized by a household-scale analytical framework emphasizing Taíno constructions of gender and class, suggest that there were few major alterations to traditional Taíno social practice during the post-contact period, and most of these were related to activities thought to have been the domain of non-elite Taíno men. It is suggested that the relatively nonspecialized gender roles among the Taíno, as well as the clearly differentiated nature of their social classes, may have served as mitigating factors in the disruption of Taíno cultural practice under Spanish domination. This work also reveals a marked Taíno resistance to the incorporation of European cultural elements, which provides a striking contrast to the Spanish patterns documented in contact-era European towns, and underscores the critical importance of incorporating gender relations into studies of culture contact.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-208
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Pepinsky ◽  
Barbara Geddes ◽  
Duncan McCargo ◽  
Richard Robison ◽  
Erik Martinez Kuhonta ◽  
...  

Comparative politics has witnessed periodic debates between proponents of contextually sensitive area studies research and others who view such work as unscientific, noncumulative, or of limited relevance for advancing broader social science knowledge. In Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis, edited by Erik Martinez Kuhonta, Dan Slater, and Tuong Vu, a group of bright, young Southeast Asianists argue that contextually sensitive research in Southeast Asia using qualitative research methods has made fundamental and lasting contributions to comparative politics. They challenge other Southeast Asianists to assert proudly the contributions that their work has made and urge the rest of the comparative politics discipline to take these contributions seriously. This symposium includes four short critical reviews of Southeast Asia in Political Science by political scientists representing diverse scholarly traditions. The reviews address both the methodological and the theoretical orientations of the book and are followed by a response from the editors.


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