Yoruba Traditions in the Midst of Foreign Influences, A Critical Evaluation

The Yoruba of South west Nigeria pride themselves as a “nation” with a rich cultural heritage. Tis jealously guided heritage believed to have been handed down from ancient times has however suffered greatly from modern influences owing to contacts with foreign cultures. Tis essay highlights the measures to preserve the Yoruba heritage and the militating problems in the light of the unbridled contacts with foreign cultures. The paper also provides evidence to suggest that the Yoruba, just like every other ethnic groups in Nigeria, could have fashioned their own developmental frameworks but for the imposition of foreign ideas/ideals.

In Search of Equal Justice (al-ʿadl bis-sawiyya)

In the last century and a half, modern legal ideas and institutions have more or less found their way into traditional Muslim societies. The translation and transmission of foreign ideas, notions, and concepts into the Islamic context brought about a crisis, which has led to the evaluation of a field of discourse over modernity. The current paper seeks to explain the modifications of the legal language and concepts within the constitutional experience of the Islamic world during the 19th and 20th centuries, by reference to Reinhart Koselleck’s “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”. For this purpose, the essay deals with the development of the modern concept of “equality” and some related notions, such as “justice” and “fairness”, with a focus on selected source texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman-Turkish.

Hong Kong as special cultural zone: Confucian geopolitics in practice

Responding to An, Sharp, and Shaw’s article, ‘Towards Confucian Geopolitics’, I consider how strategies and interpretations of Chinese geopolitics are playing out in Hong Kong with attention to their cultural dimensions. First, I reflect upon the reactions of individuals and the media in the West—specifically Britain—to the protests and street violence that rocked its former colony in the summer of 2019. Second, to reckon with An, Sharp, and Shaw’s contention that the hybridized nature of Chinese geopolitics emerges from its ‘strategic adaptability’, thereby enabling the integration of foreign ideas into Chinese cultural traditions, I offer a brief critique of cultural and infrastructural developments in Hong Kong relating to the West Kowloon Cultural District. Initially intended to showcase local culture and link it into the art world’s global circuits, the megaproject is increasingly being made in China’s image. Third, as a counterpoint to the supposed flexibility of the Chinese geopolitical imagination, I address the ossification of Western geopolitical thought and practice. In order for geographers to build more pluralistic critical geopolitics, engaging with a diversity of geopolitical approaches and their cultural underpinnings is key. For Western nation-states, failing to practice a more hybridized geopolitics may represent a more existential risk.

Foreign ideas, native spaces: Crime and Punishment in recent Asian cinema

In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.

Sarmatians on the Borders of the Roman Empire

The Jazygi, the westernmost tribe of the steppe Sarmatian coalition, migrated to the Great Hungarian Plain in the 1st century AD followed by several later waves. Their material culture changed in some generations, for they arrived into a completely new political and geographical environment and were separated from their steppe relatives. For several generations Hungarian scholarship has been dealing with a search for the eastern roots of the Alföld Sarmatians. Our study summarises this research, dealing also with some cultural phenomena imported from the Romans and with the possible ways of re-interpretation of the foreign ideas.

The reception and use of John Dewey's educational ideas by Hu Shi in the Early Republic of China

PurposeSome studies have claimed that Chinese thinker Hu Shi (or Hu Shih) received and responded to John Dewey's educational ideas only at a theoretical level and did little for education at a practical level. This paper reexamines Hu's reception of Dewey's ideas with a focus on how he used those ideas to solve China's educational and social problems during the late 1910s and 1920s.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws upon what Schriewer (2012) has called “theories of reception.” Rather than focusing on the international dissemination of ideas and knowledge, this approach emphasizes the reception of foreign ideas from the perspective and needs of the receiver, interpreter and/or reader who apprehends such ideas within a particular socio–cultural context.FindingsThis paper finds that Hu not only received — and examined — Dewey's educational ideas in a systematic way, but also used them pragmatically to reform China's systems of education as part of the New Culture Movement after 1919.Originality/valueThis research offers a new understanding of Hu's reception of Dewey's educational ideas. It shows that Hu was not merely a “thinker” in the field of education but also a “doer” who sought to apply Dewey's ideas in practice. This new view allows us to reevaluate Hu's role in the modernization of Chinese education.

Lessons in Supervision

Western concepts of supervision were unknown in China, where supervision is more about being told what one has done right or wrong. The effort to create supervision as a reflective space was one of the most foreign ideas that we brought to the training program. Our struggles with them at the boundaries of how the therapy groups were to be organized and run revealed some vast differences in our assumptions. They live in an authoritarian political culture where the system can always be gamed. We presented a conceptual model where boundary violations are possible but always costly in terms of the therapy. The need to think things through and reason to clinical decisions was conceptually and practically strange to them. Initially they tried to do exactly what they thought we told them to do or exactly what they had seen us doing. This chapter details how the Chinese learned how to learn from our Western model of teaching.

Functional model of the developed reading skill

In the modern world reading is one of the main ways of getting information irrespective of the age and education of a person. This article briefly considers the classical concept of the formation of reading skills in ontogenesis, proposed by T.G. Egorov. Some foreign ideas about the structure of reading skills are analyzed and the methods used there to diagnose the structural components of this skill. The functional model of the developed reading skill being drafted using the example of reading a foreign text is also described in this article.

Sobre los inicios de un revisionismo filosófico en Argentina y sus derivas políticas: Homero Guglielmini, Saúl Taborda y Carlos Astrada

This article analyzes the theoretical and ideological interests of the first philosophical essays in Argentina from an intellectual-history perspective. Saúl Taborda (1885-1943), Homero Guglielmini (1903-1968) and Carlos Astrada (1894-1971) had similar theoretical and political trajectories. From the 1920s, when they were in charge of incipient philosophical and avant-garde magazines, they were influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Sorel. Later, they were interested in German romanticism and Heidegger's work, in the moment when Astrada and Guglielmini became two of the most important intellectuals of Juan Domingo Perón's government. While the so-called historical revisionism has received a remarkable attention, we only have a few works on this philosophical revisionism in Argentina. It is necessary, thus, to differentiate these early revisionist writings from their counterparts dedicated to history. The philosophers did not react to the continuous waves of immigration but rather to liberal political innovations taken as "foreign ideas". They focused especially on the figure of the gaucho and proposed a non-Catholic reading of Hispanicism. In a nutshell, they argued against individualism and forth theoretical tools to think a collective subject. Therefore, this work describes a theoretical trajectory that is well known at the European level, ranging from vitalist and aestheticist irrationalism to nationalist and strongly anti-individualist organisationalist positions.