Rites of Passage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Michaels
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Sexual Maturity ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Transformational Process ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Vulnerable Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This chapter examines the classical Hindu life-cycle rites, the term saṃskāra and its history, and the main sources (Gṛhyasūtras and Dharma texts). It presents a history of the traditional saṃskāras and variants in local contexts, especially in Nepal. It describes prenatal, birth and childhood, initiation, marriage, old-age, death, and ancestor rituals. Finally, it analyzes the transformational process of these life-cycle rituals in the light of general theories on rites of passage. It proposes, in saṃskāras, man equates himself with the unchangeable and thus seems to counteract the uncertainty of the future, of life and death, since persons are confronted with their finite existence. For evidently every change, whether social or biological, represents a danger for the cohesion of the vulnerable community of the individual and society. These rituals then become an attempt of relegating the effects of nature or of mortality: birth, teething, sexual maturity, reproduction, and dying.

The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Trade Flows ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slavery

This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights () can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.

Sons and Fathers in the Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis A. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Male Adolescents ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

Abstract: A major focus of the school themes in the collections of Roman declamations knowrn as controversiae (practice court cases) is the period of a young man's adolescence, and especially his relationship with his father during this period. In part this can be explained because teachers in the private schools of rhetoric selected themes that naturally appealed to their students——male adolescents in their mid and late teens. This focus is especially notable in the Major Declamations, and since they are the only full examples of controversiae,the phenomenon can most easily be explored in reference to this werk. In its nineteen declamations youths are generally portrayed sympathetically, in contrast to their fathers who are often cruel and harsh. Relations between the two are generally very strained. The themes were popular because they reflected the reality of growing up in a paternally dominated society where fathers had absolute power(even of life and death) over their sons. These declamations therefore had a cathartic effect and escapist value fer Roman teenaged boys,who could vent or explore in legitimate and acceptable ways their repressed, pent-up, and often hostile feelings toward their fathers. The declamations therefore provide an important resource, when used judiciously, for associating social history with the history of rhetoric.

Jewish Martyrdom in the Works of Adolf Rudnicki

1998 ◽  
pp. 247-262
Author(s):  
Józef Wróbel
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S

This chapter discusses the theme of Jewish martyrdom in the works of Adolf Rudnicki. Without losing sight of the universal dimensions of the theme he was taking up, Rudnicki enriches the subject-matter with characteristics that are specifically Jewish. First, the situation of Jewish society during the occupation differed from that of other nations. Jews were pushed to the very bottom of the invader's hierarchy. Their life and death depended not only on Germans but also on the aid of Poles among whom they lived, which was not always forthcoming. A second specific feature is derived from Rudnicki's chosen artistic genre, which monumentalized the suffering of Jews by including them in the biblical circle and the almost 2,000-year history of the Diaspora, the wandering and persecution with which God tries his chosen people. This problem dominated the writing of Rudnicki for at least ten years. Undoubtedly, the literary situation in the first half of the 1950s was decisive in Rudnicki's abandonment of the theme, since the subject of the war was quickly recognized as outdated. The chapter then studies occupation literature.

Bacon's history of life and death

1852 ◽  
Vol s1-VI (163) ◽  
pp. 557-557
Author(s):  
H.
Keyword(s):  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

The Power of the Dead’s Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Cultural Institution ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnicity And Race

This chapter examines how workers used the rituals of death to interpret, accommodate, and resist their living and working conditions during the period 1873–1913. It first traces the history of the American cemetery, and especially its rise as a cultural institution, before turning to Chicago's cemeteries as social and cultural spaces on the city's landscape. It then discusses how broader tensions in industrial society were reflected in the processes of death and burial. It also looks at the ways that Chicago's working classes turned to cemeteries to extend the terrain of contemplating the consequences of industrialization; the importance of religion, ethnicity, and race in the establishment and use of Chicago's cemeteries; and how Waldheim Cemetery became a space that linked anarchism, the labor movement, and radicalism in Chicago to similar movements across the globe. Finally, the chapter cites the case of the Haymarket memorial in Waldheim to show how the meanings of life and death came to be expressed in Chicago's cemeteries as the nation marched into the twentieth century.

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