Through the Ages of Life: Rabindranath Tagore -- Son, Father, and Educator (1861-1941)

Research Framework: This essay attempts to reclaim Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the “Myriad-Minded Man” from colonial India, through his “ages of life” – as a son, father, and educator – and his conceptualization of an alternate education and masculinity. Tagore’s critique of colonial education, his experiments with institutions, and his curriculum emphasizing arts and moral aesthetics over muscular nationalism challenged the dominant culture of masculinity. His paternalism embraced a “manliness” privileging moral and spiritual sustenance over economic and political considerations.Objectives: By focusing on Rabindranath Tagore, an iconic figure of Indian modernity, the essay attempts to demonstrate the tangled relationship between his domestic reality and his public commitment to social justice and pedagogy.Methodology: It deploys the method of contextualized textual analysis by examining a variety of literary sources -- personal narratives, correspondence, lectures, and essays.Results:Foregrounding the importance of family in its enabling and restrictive capacities, the essay explores connections between one family’s life and the Bengali understanding of age, gender, and class in late colonial India.Conclusions:The essay contends that Tagore’s position as a biological father and the transference of his affective concern to a larger body of children, in whom he inculcated a new sense of freedom, were inflected with an alternate sense of masculinity.Contribution:The essay contributes to our understanding that the role of “fathers,” biological and metaphorical, attained heightened significance among the educated, affluent community in colonial Bengal. An examination of the interminable connection between Tagore’s personal and public life disrupts the separation between the home and the world and establishes the centrality of the domestic in Indian nationalist politics. As a father and a reformer, Tagore challenged existing notions of masculinity through his reformed and secular model of education.

The Affluence–Vulnerability Interface: Intersecting scales of risk, privilege and disaster

This paper examines vulnerability in the context of affluence and privilege. It focuses on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California, USA to examine long-term lived experiences of the disaster. Vulnerability is typically understood as a condition besetting poor and marginalized communities. Frequently ignored in these discussions are the experiences of those who live in more affluent areas. This paper seeks to more closely explain vulnerability at its interface with affluence. The aim is to challenge uncritical explanations of vulnerability. We also offer alternative ways of conceptualizing vulnerability as a material condition and social construct that acknowledges broader cultural, ecological, and economic conditions, which may offset, maintain or deepen true risk exposure. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents and emergency service managers, the paper presents a suite of vulnerability categories that intersect to create two concomitant and competing conditions. First, vulnerability is variegated between households within communities, including those in more affluent areas. Second, household vulnerability is collectively altered, and oftentimes reduced, by the broader affluent community within which individual households reside. By paying closer attention to the Affluence–Vulnerability Interface the paper reveals a recursive process, which is significant in the context of building more disaster resilient communities.

The Anatomy of a Public School Teacher’s Dilemma

This is a case study of a dilemma that a British Columbia school teacher named Paul was involved in 2012 during a heated labor dispute between the government and the teachers’ union. In an effort to pressure the government the union asked teachers to halt all extracurricular activities. This directive would not be so problematic in a more affluent community, but Paul teaches in an inner-city neighborhood where extracurricular activities anchor children to the school and provide them with learning opportunities that their parents cannot provide. Paul was plunged into an uncomfortable situation in which he had to balance the needs of the inner-city children that he works with against his professional obligations to the union. This paper utilizes Rushworth Kidders ‘Justice-verses-Mercy’ paradigm and Robert Greenleaf’s ‘Servant Leadership’ paradigm as filters to understand how Paul resolved this dilemma.

Upward mobility in a forgotten tribe

Public discussions of recent demands by the Gujjars of Rajasthan, India, for inclusion on the list of the state's affirmative action beneficiaries have often veered away from the legitimacy of their claims and toward whether elite Gujjar leaders can speak for less educated and less affluent community members. This article examines how this latter set of questions-often described as the “creamy layer“ problem in reference to a group's elite who have “risen to the top“ and need to be “skimmed off“-can obscure the real workings of affirmative action on the ground and the limitations encountered by groups seeking upward mobility. Ethnographic research with the Dhanka tribe reveals deep concerns that upwardly mobile groups are in danger of downward mobility without the protection of affirmative action-based hiring practices, and that middle class elites within the tribe can be important political advocates for others within the community.

Aphrodite in Egypt. Images of the goddess from Marina el-Alamein

The author explores the images of Aphrodite—statuary in marble and bronze, oil lamp discus iconography—originating from the Polish excavations at the site of the ancient town at Marina el-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, tracing the religious syncretism (in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, Aphrodite was linked with the Egyptian goddess Isis), concerning also other Greek gods, that obviously pervaded the affluent community living there. The marble head of Aphrodite and the lamp with a scene of Aphrodite with two Erotes were found in House 19 and they are dated, respectively, to the late Hellenistic/early Roman period and the second half of the 1st-2nd century AD. A bronze statuette of Aphrodite pudica came from a disturbed but apparently ritual context and is dated, like the lamp, to the second half of the 1st-2nd century AD. The evidence collected in the article shows that the goddess, depicted in different forms inspired by Hellenistic and even earlier, Classical, art, made of different materials and with apparently different purposes in mind, was very popular with the inhabitants of this small town on the Egyptian coast. The finds from Marina el-Alamein are an interesting example of syncretism developing in the Roman period.

Monument 3 from La Blanca, Guatemala: a Middle Preclassic earthen sculpture and its ritual associations

Beside one of the earliest Preclassic pyramids in Guatemala the authors discovered a large basin fashioned in clay and shaped like a quatrefoil. The use of the quatrefoil theme on other carvings reveals its association with water and its symbolic role as the mouth of an underworld. Excavations in an adjacent mound exposed an affluent community, rich in figurines. This juxtaposition of monuments and residence at La Blanca shows a society of 900-600 BC in which ritual and the secular power were well integrated.