Abstract: Hunter-gatherers emerged from the "Man the Hunter" conference in 1966 as the "original affluent society." The main features of this thesis now seem to be widely accepted by anthropologists, despite the strong reservations expressed by certain specialists in foraging societies concerning the data advanced to support the claim. This essay brings together a portion of the data and argumentation in the literature that raise a number of questions about hunter-gatherer affluence. Three topics are addressed: How "hard" do foragers work? How well-fed are members of foraging societies? And what do we mean by "work," "leisure," and "affluence" in the context of foraging societies? Finally, this essay offers some thoughts about why, given the reservations and critical observations expressed by anthropologists who work with foragers, the thesis seems to have been enthusiastically embraced by most anthropologists.

Abstract: The written word and what the eye can see are brought together in this fascinating foray into the depiction of resistance to slavery through the modern medium of film. Davis, whose book "The Return of Martin Guerre" was written while she served as consultant to the French film of the same name, now tackles the large issue of how the moving picture industry has portrayed slaves in five major motion pictures spanning four generations. The potential of film to narrate the historical past in an effective and meaningful way, with insistence on loyalty to the evidence, is assessed in five films: "Spartacus" (1960), "Burn!" (1969), "The Last Supper" (1976), "Amistad" (1997), and "Beloved" (1998). Davis shows how shifts in the viewpoints of screenwriters and directors parallel those of historians. Spartacus is polarized social history; the films on the Caribbean bring ceremony and carnival to bear on the origins of revolt; "Amistad" and "Beloved "draw upon the traumatic wounds in the memory of slavery and the resources for healing them. In each case Davis considers the intentions of filmmakers and evaluates the film and its techniques through historical evidence and interpretation. Family continuity emerges as a major element in the struggle against slavery. "Slaves on Screen" is based in part on interviews with the Nobel prize-winning author of "Beloved," Toni Morrison, and with Manuel Moreno Fraginals, the historical consultant for "The Last Supper." Davis brings a new approach to historical film as a source of "thought experiments" about the past. While the five motion pictures are sometimes cinematic triumphs, with sound history inspiring the imagination, Davis is critical of fictive scenes and characters when they mislead viewers in important ways. Good history makes good films.

Abstract: By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. By Ellen T Charry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xiii + 264 pp. $16.95 (paper). This book corrects two distortions in Western Christian theology@ The first is the modem constriction of what is "reasonable" in theology to what can be empirically and rationally proven. The second is the premodern preoccupation with and anxiety over sin and whether one is pleasing to God. In response to both, Charry calls for a return to a patristic emphasis on "sapience," that is, the "engaged knowledge" of knowing and loving God. As a form of sapience, Christian doctrine functions as a "pastoral" pedagogy that engages the reader and listener in a life of "dignity and excellence." Charry locates her argument in relation to contemporary interest in literature as a source for moral guidance. She notes that this turn to fiction should encourage theologians to reclaim not only emotions in their reflection but such neglected sources as inference, experience, prayer, and worship. in addition, Charry draws an analogy between theology and the practical art of medicine. Like medicine, theology also requires not only "inferential knowledge" based on accumulated cases but "experimentation" and a high level of "trust" among its practitioners. Its purpose is to enable us to live more excellent lives. To support this point, Charry coins the word "aretegenic," meaning "conducive to virtue" (from the Greek arete, "virtue," and gennao, "to beget"). Christian doctrines are to be 11 aretegenic. " They exist not solely to provide correct information nor even certainty about the afterlife but "to change how we think and act-to remake us" (p. vii), And their effect on us is "salutary" Only the first and last chapters of this book make a formal defense of its thesis; the main portion develops a material argument by way of a close reading of classic texts. In this reading, Charry highlights how classical theologians were concerned with moral formation. She reads St. Paul in relation to his depiction of God's work of transforming believers, a work that is primarily public and social, and deeply ontological. Her reading of the Sermon on the Mount stresses how it calls Christians to a "new purity" and "perfection" patterned after the "model of God." She even reads early doctrinal development in this light. Athanasius's stress on the honwousios is only intelligible when set within the context of how the Incarnation restores our true nature and provides us with a standard of excellence. In turn, Basil of Caesarea makes the point that the Trinity is a "precise model of what we are to become" even as it is also "the means for its achievement" (p. 118). And Augustine's trinitarian theology is yet another pedagogy that "establishes the seeker's identity"in God's being, reassuring her that "a new and better self is both called for and possible" (p. 147). Charry is critical of the theology that comes after the patristic period for being overly preoccupied with sin and the certainty of one's salvation. Nonetheless, she is able to find even in medieval and Reformation theology indications of Christian doctrine's "salutary value." Anselm's stress on satisfaction (and honor and debt) is simply yet another strategy leading us to God's standard for us--the rescue of others for the sake of justice and mercy working in tandem" (p. …

Abstract: This volume explores and explains every angle of the word's most widely spoken language. It defines the latest scientific and technical terms, as well as surveying more unusual, literary or archaic vocabulary. It gives detailed information about correct usage ("different from?", "different than?" "different to?") and words that are commonly confused with one another ("imply" and "infer", uninterested" and "disinterested"). It contains thousands of illustrative examples, many of them drawn from the works of major literary figures, that serve not only to show how individual words work in context, but also to give a sense of the richness and variety of English. It includes word histories that explain the often tortuous routes by which individual words have developed their meaning over the centuries. And it supplements definitions of key concepts in subject areas as diverse as physics, philosophy, politics, and music with contributions from leading experts in the filed -Anthony Grayling on "reason", Rudy Rucker on "infinity", Donald Lopez on "reincarnation", Catherine Belsey on "deconstruction", and David Thomson on "film noir". The result is a meticulously researched, versatile dictionary that encompasses the huge range of the language, and offers clear guidance to its many complexities.

Abstract: Mark Anthony Neal. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp. $19.99. Mark Anthony Neal's What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture interprets the volatile political and cultural issues that arise from the clash between black music's two separate but overlapping lives. The first is black music's single life, lived in "organic connection" to "formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere." Symbolized by backwoods social clubs, or "jook joints," and the "Chitlin' Circuit," venues which served largely "segregated" audiences in the North and South, the music of this "sphere" provided (provides?) an autonomous soundtrack to black social life. For Neal, the second life of black music has been a "tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass consumerism-one in which black agency is largely subsumed by market interests." In many ways, What the Music Said is a "torch song" for black music's tragic entanglement in a bad marriage. What the Music Said chronicles another bad marriage even more compellingly--if apparently unwittingly. That is the wedding of African American culture to the jargon of late-twentieth-century professional academic cultural critique. As it bears witness to this marriage, What the Music Said consistently distances, simplifies, even silences the musical voices whose complexity and struggle for "agency" is the point. While Neal opens the work with an invocation of the cultural critiques that happened in Jesse Hodges's barbershop in the Bronx and consistently invokes the "organic" call-and-response dynamics of "vibrant counterpublic(s)" in the Black Public Sphere, he devotes far more space to the problems of intra-racial class antagonism, inter-racial entanglement, and "mass-mediated" cultural events. For instance, Neal's attention to the most thoroughly commodified kinds of contemporary black music--hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced R&B--to the total exclusion of other forms--House, Techo, Go-Go-- which have "resist ed" mainstream market saturation and remained more "covert" signals the analytical preferences of the work. In Literary Theory and the Claims of History Satya Mohanty suggests that one of the limitations of postmodern literary and cultural criticism has been how "anti-foundationalist epistemological" claims have eroded the perceived existence of facts. This philosophical issue has led to a methodological turn away from evidence. At times, the "evidence" supporting points of analysis is the mere "fact" that a present theorist's claim mirrors another theorist's previous theoretical claim. What the Music Said suffers from its reliance on circular references to the discourse of cultural critique where evidence apropos to the music itself might appear. As a result, in What the Music Said, the beauty and subtle complexity of the music, even that which occurs within the Black Public Sphere, is often ensconced in complex--long--sentences and simplified by conceptual abstraction. Among the abstractions which supplant historical evidence and primary accounts are the uniformly stifling effects of "liberal bourgeois models of black public life," "middle-class sensibilities," and "mass-consumer markets" on the "mass-mediated counternarratives" of the artists. The strongest aspect of What the Music Said is Neal's meditation on the convergence of consumer economics, hip-hop, and the would-be legacy of oppositional Black Power rhetoric as score and soundtrack of contemporary inner-city black life. His work counters uncritical approaches to hip-hop which construe the music as the "authentic" voice of inner-city black youth and reveals the extent to which the integrity of the art is threatened by the "For the Love of Money" ethics which permeate much of American culture. Neal's portrayal of hip-hop artists' attachment to "the real" and their efforts to create the present through a reconstituted past presents a valuable portrait of artists' struggle for sovereignty in post-industrial America. …

Abstract: The work of Nathaniel Mackey inheres most insistently in its engagement with music. It records a "research at the interstice" 1 of expressive media, a deliberate and oblique elaboration of Louis Zukofsky's oft-repeated dictum that "poetry may be defined as an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approach- es in varying degrees the wordless art of music as a kind of mathematical limit" (19). This project takes place not simply through a poetics that makes recourse to song, but also through an attention to the ways music, and black music in particular, approach- es speech—approximates or aspires to what Mackey terms a "telling inarticulacy," or an "alternate vocality." 2 What is common to black creative expression is not necessar- ily an emphasis on what we have perhaps too easily come to think of as "orality," but instead an aesthetic imperative to test and break the limits of what can be said. As Mackey puts it: "Everyone talks about the speechlike qualities of instruments as they're played in African-American music. Built into that is some kind of dissatisfac- tion with—if not critique of—the limits of conventionally articulate speech, verbal speech. One of the reasons the music so often goes over into nonspeech—moaning, humming, shouts, nonsense lyrics, scat—is to say, among other things, that the realm of conventionally articulate speech is not sufficient for saying what needs to be said. We're often making that same assertion in poetry" ("Cante Moro" 86). This is not a poetics of transcendence, however. It is an inherently self-reflexive mode which is not unrelated to Mackey's own description of Edward Kamau Brath- waite's second trilogy, in that it "both announces the emergence of a new language and acknowledges the impediments to its emergence, going so far as to advance impediment as a constituent of the language's newness" ("Wringing the Word" 734). Mackey's fascination with edges, with extremes, with erosion, with modes of expres- sion that strain against themselves, bears witness to a "research at the interstice" ultimately less involved with the particularities of the media involved (scripture and orature), and more engaged with the task of pressing or distending elements of those mediums (repetition, inflection, timbre, pitch, phrasing, literary structure, ortho- graphics) to bear witness—"eroding witness," as he terms it—to that necessary cohabitation of originality and flaw, mobility and limp, articulation and stammer. Consider the music that charges this work: the otherworldly falsettos described in Bedouin Hornbook; flamenco's aspiration to a quality of duende, a singing so raspy and gnarled that it is "dark," crouched "at the rim of the wound" and drawing toward "places where forms fuse together into a yearning superior to their visible expres- sion"; the jazz of musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton and Yusef Lateef,

Abstract: Soviet activity theory, largely developed by A. N. Leont'ev, can be seen as a European complement of American I/O psychology and an important current of action theories in general. This paper identifies the major strength of Leont'ev's theory as the bridging potential it achieves by situating activity between each of several major pairs of opposite poles: mind and matter or body (exemplified by thinking workers and their work tasks), subject and object, understanding and explanation, theory and practice, humanist psychology and behaviourism. Some implications of activity theory and its bridging potential are pursued in the contexts of I/O theory-construction and research methods, and in the substantive problem areas of job design, job analysis, organization development, and personnel training. An Overview of Activity Theory THE PRIMACY OF ACTIVITY "Die Tat ist alles - The deed is everything," wrote Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Faust, Part 2. For Martin Heidegger, the major problem of Western philosophy since Plato seems to have been the exclusive focus on abstractions and theory which obscure the practical activity and pre-theoretical knowledge out of which concepts and categories really evolve in the first place. G. W. F. Hegel moved away from static essences to dynamic processes, an orientation which greatly influenced the action- and revolution-oriented Karl Marx. In America, pragmatism is the philosophical school of thought most immediately associated with a focus on "the deed," on the Greek pragma ("act," "business"). Skinner (1989) reminded us that "to define" once meant "to mark the bounds or ends," that "to distinguish" was originally "to mark something by pricking it," and that "to determine" meant "to locate the end of something." On the level of human evolution, Dennett (1984, pp. 38-41) humorously traced the development of thought from overt acts of communication between "Bob" and "Alf" back in the early stone age, to internalized conversations with others and eventually with oneself. Activity theory is a conceptual framework based on the idea that activity is primary, that doing precedes thinking, that goals, images, cognitive models, intentions, and abstract notions like "definition" and "determinant" grow out of people doing things. What is unique about activity theory is that it pursues the ramifications of this idea in contexts ranging from broad philosophical issues such as the development of mind, to political economics, and to practical questions of how work impacts on the long term well-being of workers. THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND PRACTICAL FACES OF ACTIVITY THEORY Originated by L. S. Vygotsky, developed by A. N. Leont'ev (1978, 1981), influenced greatly by the general psychology of S. L. Rubinstein, and applied with vigour in both West and East Germany as well as in Scandinavia and Switzerland, activity theory can be seen as a European complement of American I/O psychology and the management practices it supports. In both Eastern and Western Europe, activity theory has emerged in two contexts. The first is the philosophical issue of the relationship between subject and object, the second is the issue of how work should be designed and executed. The two contexts overlap. Activity theory sees workers as deliberating subjects and promotes job and work design interventions which allow workers to engage in the human, i.e., thinking and reflecting, way of being. In concrete terms, activity theory seeks to increase two kinds of opportunities available to workers: Opportunities to regulate their own behaviour on the job and, in the long run, opportunities to learn and develop. Corresponding to the two contexts of the subject versus object dichotomy and the broad issue of how work should be designed, we pursue two related objectives in this article. The first is to examine this European way of looking at basic dichotomies that underlie psychological theorizing and practice with a view to bringing extremes closer together. …

Abstract: Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. Edited by Charlene Cerny and Suzanne Seriff. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, 1996. Pp. 208, 136 illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper) On the outskirts of New Delhi, an inveterate salvager risks his high caste status for the sake of his convictions by crafting toys and utilitarian objects from the metal, plastic, and paper scraps he collects at that megalopolis' bazaars. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, a retired junkyard owner, thoughts of the Guinness Book of World Records weighing on his mind, rigs his trailer home with thousands of hooked-together aluminum pop-tops, radiant in the Florida sunshine. And in the Port-au-Prince iron market, two Vodou priests and artists assemble the debris of Haiti's major city-car parts, slivers of mirror, dolls-into "mojo boards" that honor Vodou deities. What links such diverse people and manifold agendas resulting in the production of things in disparate places? According to folklorist Suzanne Seriff it is the "act of recovering and transforming the detritus of the industrial age into handmade objects of renewed meaning, utility, devotion, and sometimes arresting beauty" which contain "visual, material, and conceptual reference to multiple technologies, histories, and temporalities." She terms this process "intercultural recycling" (9-10). Not to be confused with official, please-separate-glass-from-plastic curbside recycling programs, this vernacular process is the subject of Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Art fiom the Global Scrap Heap, a volume that complements the traveling exhibition opened at Santa Fe's Museum of International Folk Art in May 1996. Co-curators and editors Charlene Cerny and Seriff have grouped the thirteen essays of Recycled, Re-Seen, save the introduction and afterword, into four parts: "Recycling and Transformation of the American Landscape"; "Recycling and the Global Marketplace"; "Recycling in the Streets"; and "Wearing the Other, Transforming the Self," The reader's Grand Tour of the global, jerry-built village takes off from America, eventually landing him or her in Mexico, Trinidad, and Kenya, among other ports of call. Essays facilitate an understanding of "intercultural recycling" by illuminating the "broad range of motivating factors and aesthetic sensibilities that influence how, why, and for whom these refabricated objects are produced and consumed" (22). In line with divergent disciplinary imperatives, authors utilize historical, sociocultural, and/or behavioral approaches to contextualize the objects of the exhibition. Some writers integrate several perspectives within a single article. Although many contributors discuss individual makers, no matter how briefly, most essays represent a broad cultural approach as authors explore how objects made from cast-off materials symbolically express ethnic or national identity, materialize philosophical and religious tenets, or reflect a group's aesthetic ideals. An exception is "Sci-Fi Machines and Bottle-Cap Kings," in which Joanne Cubbs and Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr. focus on the work and lives of two American artisans, investigating the mens' motivations and the role expressive behavior plays in formulating their identities. Regardless of primary perspectives, all of the articles argue, implicitly or explicitly, that intercultural recycling must be understood in local terms, studied from the inside-out, not the outside-in. In such a diverse collection, some essays are bound to be more compelling in their insights, nuanced in their observations, and engaging in their exposition than others. Fortunately, authors transcend the "argument" that making new things out of old `junk" is often an economic necessity, particularly in the developing world, and move on, by and large, to interesting questions. Research findings are presented in different styles, ranging from syrupy to sassy, footnote heavy (footnotes of footnotes) to a form of fieldwork chronicle. …

Abstract: This study deals with an unusual and absorbing topic: how the Arabs see and deal with reality and the implications this has for the nature of power in the Arab world. "Tents" and "pyramids" are, metaphorically, opposed mental images; the first signifies the absence of hierarchy and graded authority, the second the presence of both, Khuri argues that the Arabs perceive both social and physical reality as a series of discrete, non-pyramidal structures that are inherently equal in value - much like a Bedouin encampment composed of tents scattered haphazardly on a flat desert surface with no visible hierarchy. Authority is not built into a hierarchial arrangement where roles are subordinated to one another in a graded system (as in the West); it is, rather, derived from the use of sheer physical power, with one person dominating the others - a first among "equals". Strategy, manoeuvrability and tactics take precedence over office and structure. The strategy is to act in groups - the isolated are vunerable. There are striking parallels between these mental constructs and the behavioural patterns in Arab society, in situations ranging from backgammon to autocratic rule. The book examines the mechanisms involved in sports and card games, poetry and prose, charting genealogies and the laws of inheritance. Since there are no "pyramids", there are no standardized rules of succession to high office. Government belongs to the powerful, the conquerors. Power rests in the control of solidarities, or endogamous groups, which militates aginst the rules of a "public" that holds the ruler accountable for his actions. There is no public and therefore no republic. Whether "president", "king", "sultan", "imam" or "emie", the governor always rules autocratically.

Abstract: As a way of beginning to think about Prozac, and about other "enhancement technologies" as well, let's consider these sentences from Michel Foucault's The Care of the Self, the third volume of his "History of Sexuality": In keeping with a tradition that goes back a very long way in Greek culture, the care of the self is in close correlation with medical thought and practice. This ancient correlation became increasingly strong, so much so that Plutarch is able to say, at the beginning of Advice about Keeping Well, that philosophy and medicine are concerned with a "single field" (mia chora). They do draw on a shared set of notions, whose central element is the concept of "pathos." It applies to passion as well as to physical illness, to the distress of the body and to the involuntary movement of the soul; and in both cases alike, it refers to a state of passivity, which for the body takes the form of a disorder which upsets the balance of its humors or its qualities and which for the soul takes the form of a movement capable of carrying it away in spite of itself. On the basis of this shared concept, it was possible to construct a grid of analysis that was valid for the ailments of the body and the soul.[1] In this account, ideas about passion and activity are deeply implicated in conceptions of disease and health, both physical and spiritual. The care of the self, which is the defining ambition of philosophy, and the care of the body, which is the defining ambition of medicine, are both characterized as the conquest--however temporary--of "pathos." The philosopher and the physician equally struggle against an "involuntary movement," a disorder that presses itself on one from "outside" (so to speak), upsetting the internally regulated and harmonious balance of forces that is, in the ideal, one's natural activity. Health, whether of the body or of the soul, is pictured here as a certain sort of imperviousness, a capacity to resist depredations on one's internal ordering of oneself; to be well is to exercise a particular sort of well-ordered self-determination. To be easily "moved," and especially to be subject to "involuntary movement," is dangerous; to submit to "pathos" is to open oneself to disturbance and disease. And this way of thinking is not just an historical artifact, now replaced by much more detailed and accurate physiological accounts of disease etiology. We still think in these ancient terms, especially at the level of trope (and what deeper level is there?). In the ordinary forms of our talk with one another, we constantly find ourselves picturing illness as something that besets us against our will, as a disequillibrating force from "outside" our natural ordering, a "foreign" entity against which we struggle to free ourselves. "Don't get too close; I'm fighting a cold," we caution our neighbor. Or we report, "John's depression really has him by the throat these days." Or as children we tell a silly joke to explain why we got sick: "I slept with the window open and in flew Enza." We "suffer" our illnesses, we say, and that doesn't (just) mean that they often cause us pain. It means that we bear them; they come to us as passions to be undergone, as burdens laid on us, willy-nilly, from outside our natural course of orderly and self-determined activity.[2] Even our words "pathology" and "pathogen" enshrine the ancient idea that "pathos" is essentially linked to disease. Enhancement Rightly Earned How might Foucault's analysis help us to think about Tess, the woman transformed by Prozac in one of Peter Kramer's most memorable case histories?[3] Well, when Tess was ill with her depression, she was in the grip of a "passion," an "involuntary movement" of body and soul; that is, she was "moved" off her normal (self-regulating, self-determining) course through life by a "force" from "outside" that slowed her down, sapped her energy and hope, deflected her from her ordinary aims, and diminished her capacity for self-possession. …

Abstract: When it becomes clear that a given interpretative model (or set of criteria) contains irreducible contradictions and is incapable of resolving certain stubborn problems, it is time for a new paradigm. Recognizing that scholarship on Gothic architecture has long since reached this impasse, this study identifies new terms of understanding in the oppositional pair "modernism" and "historicism." These two transhistorical concepts are found to offer numerous interpretative advantages over such traditional categories as "skeletal form," "diaphaneity," "linearity," "diagonality," "square schematism," and the like, all of which are severely burdened by the well known constrictive problematics of "style," among other difficulties. Properly defined and understood, the modernism/historicism paradigm is shown to offer numerous advantages in studying medieval architecture across a wide range of concerns, from descriptive, componential, and formal analysis to social, intellectual, and contextual integration. The entire...

Abstract: It is a commonplace of history that we do not encounter events from the past, but rather descriptions of these events. To be more contemporary, and perhaps more accurate, we encounter "spins" on the events. While a kind of precise objectivity based on careful duplication of experiments may be prized by the "hard" sciences, most historians today do not believe that such things as "the past" or "culture" will yield to such treatment. Indeed, the more we seek to "pin down" an event, to argue for a document's "authentic" privileging, the more any kind of objective truth may recede, to be replaced by yet another false front. It is, of course, not necessarily the facts which are in doubt in a particular case, but how they are assembled, organized and presented. The reality of the past, if it appears to us at all, does so through what some have called the "convergence of evidence," and always requires a leap of faith on the part of any investigator or beholder. If this is true of history in general, it must also be true for the written history of polar exploration, something which, surprisingly, has captured the imagination of the reading public. Twenty years ago it was difficult to find the classic works of the genre outside of an antiquarian bookshop; today bookshops are overflowing with paperback reprints. Thanks to Roland Huntford and others, authoritative biographies are available for such pio­ neers as Fridtjof Nansen, Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Roald Amund­ sen, Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. The title of the classic misadven­ ture chronicle, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's recently reprinted The Worst Journey in the World, hints at the appeal of this collective hoard of volumes, and a host of others on catastrophic journeys. Sitting in our warm homes, computers buzzing, these harrowing tales are like ghost stories around the fireplace, reminding us of our own comforts and teaching us lessons of heroism and bravery. Some stories, however, tell better than others, and there has always been a tension between the desire to write history and the storytelling urge, where the requirements of crafting a good yarn do battle with the desire to "get it right." We shall argue here that the same is true when we attempt to understand music and musical meaning. As we take this journey, our guide will be a work "set," as it were, in the cold deserts of Antarctica, a piece that has had something of a mixed reception from audiences and critics-a possibly ambivalent symphony about an ambiguous hero.

Abstract: John Ashbery ranks among the exemplary postmodernist poets, and his long poem of the mid-sixties, "The Skaters," is a strong candidate for the title of exemplary postmodernist long poem. Unlike the more obviously disjunctive poems of Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath period, "The Skaters" often appears to make sense locally, inviting the reader to expect to make global sense of the poem. Instead, one encounters an intractable flux of verbal "found objects," shifting styles and registers, teasing literary allusions and echoes, fragmentary narrative episodes and descriptive scenes. How is one to negotiate or manage such flux? Critics tend to select "key" lines or passages, treating these as interpretative centers or "nodes" around which to organize the heterogeneous materials of the poem. Other materials come to be subordinated in various ways (explicitly or, more often, implicitly) to these "key" passages or are simply passed over in silence, so that the poem is reduced to a skeletal structure of points that yield most readily to a particular interpretative orientation. However, in "The Skaters Ashbery anticipates this sort of reading, appearing to cater to it but only in order to entrap and outflank the reader. The present essay undertakes to examine three types of key or nodes in "The Skaters," demonstrating how Ashbery's text anticipates and preempts interpretative moves in each case. The types of keys to be considered are (1) descriptive (world-oriented) statements; (2) autobiographical (or speaker-oriented, expressive) statements; and (3) ars-poetic (or text-oriented, textually self-reflexive) statements. "The Skaters" appears to be a descriptive poem; it has often been read as more or less veiled autobiography; and it is undeniably self-reflexive. I undertake to demonstrate how descriptions, the ontological rug having been pulled out from under them, are retrospectively reframed as ekphrases. Similarly, putatively autobiographical confessions are reframed as the utterance of a fictional persona. Finally, ars-poetic statements, which seem to promise hermeneutical mastery over the text, are evacuated of that mastery by the indeterminacy of their scope. Moreover, all categories of "key" statement-descriptive, autobiographical, and ars-poetic alike-are deprived of their "purchase" on the text by our chronic inability to distinguish instances of "use" from instances of "mention" in "The Skaters."Such an account of "The Skaters," even if it does not "solve" the problems and puzzles with which the poem challenges us, at least enunciates those problems and puzzles and compels us to reflect on our own interpretative procedures.

Abstract: Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940. By Jane S. Becker. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 331. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper) Selling Tradition adds to the critical examination of culture and folklore by asking "what is tradition?" in a way that directs the reader to the intertwining of "tradition" and "modernity," two categories often considered to be in opposition. From the outset it is clear that Jane Becker is not going to let such a dichotomy go unexamined. "The very nature of cultural forms defined as traditional and folk," she writes, "raises questions about the process by which those forms have evolved, the new meanings they embody in historical contexts so different from those of their inception, and the implications of their new status and interpretation for members of the cultures and communities they presumably represent" (3). Becker's book, as this passage indicates, can be situated among other recent studies of global cultures that are teaching us that it is no longer possible to consider "folk" or "traditional" as categories outside of "modern," or to think of "crafts" as having little relationship to a field of production defined by the commercial marketplace. Becker's particular site of inquiry concerns what one could argue is the quintessential "folk" culture of the United States-central Appalachia and its handicrafts. In particular, she takes the period between 1930 and 1940, the heyday of the "handicraft revival," to examine the relation among the national marketplace for traditional goods, the definition of tradition, and the justifications for the creation of what amounted to an industry of craft production in the mountains. Along the way the reader is presented with a fascinating, grounded history of the emergence of romantic attraction to the idea of preindustrial life and culture, the relation of those views to arguments about national identity, and attempts to reform and revitalize the economically underdeveloped mountains without losing their particular "traditional" culture. What makes Selling Tradition most interesting, in my view, is that Becker refuses to treat this history as simply one of exploitation. Although the products of the craft industry were driven by the commercial market and therefore often had little relationship to "traditional" styles or modes of production, and conditions of labor were difficult, Becker shows the mountain producers of handicrafts-primarily women-participating in the marketplace as a way to earn money and support families that were having trouble surviving economically in depression-era Appalachia. The book begins with a good discussion of the notion of "folk" in America, and its ties to ideas of tradition and authenticity in the larger context of national identity and industrial anxiety. Her critical overview of models for analyzing folk culture in a modern world is astute. Defining "tradition as a symbolic construction," Becker argues that "we must concentrate, therefore, on the contexts in which particular traditions and folk groups were constructed, unraveling their specific histories" (39). Besides setting up her own study, the chapter also makes for a useful introduction to the history of the emergence of the folk/modern dichotomy in the United States, essential to a critical folkloristic perspective. …

Abstract: From a faculty perspective one of the most constructive ways to conceptualize service-learning is to refine the pedagogically purposeful metaphor "service as text" (Morton, 1996; Varlotta, 1996). Unfortunately, service-learning's own theory is insufficiently developed to explicate this metaphor. Therefore, a related theoretical framework--interdisciplinary theory--is, for two reasons, an appropriate choice: (2) 1. Interdisciplinary theory introduces an assortment of terms--"partial," "full," "narrow," and "broad"--that can help faculty contemplate and, ideally, answer the question: What type of service text should be utilized in this course? Faculty may assign, for example, a one-time or short-term project, dubbed a "partial" text; or, they may expect students to uphold an ongoing service commitment, labeled a "full" text. Additionally, faculty may require a "narrow" service text in which all students work on related projects at the same agency, or "broad" texts in which each student works on a unique service project. 2. Interdisciplinarians utilize terms like "multidisciplinary," "crossdisciplinary," and "interdisciplinary" to describe and differentiate various types of disciplinary integration. Because service itself is not a discipline, interdisciplinarity's terminology--one that reflects the integration of disciplinary perspectives--is not completely transferable to service-learning. When service is configured as a text, however, the prefixes of interdisciplinarity's terminology ("multi," "cross," and "inter") can be affixed to the root word "text" to answer the question, How will the service text be meaningfully integrated with other course texts (e.g., films, books, journal articles)? A cross-textual course, for example, will integrate the service text more fully than a multitextual course but less fully than an intertextual one. This paper does more than simply raise the pedagogical questions that too few have posed. It uses interdisciplinarity to offer viable answers. What Types of Service Texts are Feasible? Interdisciplinary theory can help faculty conceptualize at least four types of service texts. Two types of service texts may be described by invoking the "broad" and "narrow" rhetoric of interdisciplinarians Van Dusseldorp and Wigboldus (1994), the other two by employing the "full" and "partial" terminology of William Newell (1998). Broad or Narrow Service Texts For Van Dusseldorp and Wigboldus (1994), a "broad" interdisciplinary course pulls together a wide range of disciplines. An example of such a course is one that draws from a liberal arts discipline like philosophy, a natural science like chemistry, and a social science like anthropology. Such a diversity of disciplines entertain a broad range of inquiries, coin and utilize a broad variety of terms, and construct a broad assortment of arguments. A "narrow" interdisciplinary course, on the other hand, pulls together a more related set of disciplines. An example of this type of course is one that draws from three natural sciences, e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics. Though service itself is not a discipline, interdisciplinary terminology can provide service-learning instructors with two important options in course design. First, faculty may choose to design and teach a "broad" service-learning class in which individual students or student groups are engaged in very different types of projects. In a broad class, faculty may allow each student to choose a unique service-learning project, or cluster students in groups and assign a different project to each group (e.g., one group of students may be working with homeless men at a local shelter, a second may be volunteering at a YWCA's outreach program that assists survivors of domestic violence, and a third group may be supervising after school programs at a junior high school). To determine whether or not to use a broad approach to service-learning, faculty might consider some of the pros and cons associated with this approach. …

Abstract: Youth cannot be understood without examining elderhood, and age more generally. Among the Tuareg, Islamic religious rituals and liturgical music tend to be identified with the "aged" (those with children of marriageable age), and these are symbolically opposed to secular popular musical performances classified as "anti-Islamic," which are identified with "youth." These images comment upon long-standing concerns with marriage, courtship, sexuality, and descent, but they are also increasingly being translated into concerns of cultural autonomy, as local youths struggle for cultural survival in conflict between Tuareg and the central state. I analyze three types of popular musical performance and the instruments featured in them, and show how their age-related imagery, commentary, and interaction express changing intergenerational relationships. These concerns, however, do not fall into a binary of "old" and "new," or align with any one age group; rather, they suggest shifting associations of agentive power and questioning of "tradition" by youth and aged in diverse contexts. These data on age symbolism in Tuareg popular musical performances suggest more dynamic, nuanced formulations of "traditional," "modern," and "global" in anthropological theory. [Africa, Tuareg, aging, performance, globalization]

Abstract: The subject of this work is controversial, but its message is simple: the study of UFOs merits the serious attention of the intellectual establishment. Advocating credibility for this much-maligned field of research, historian David Jacobs and his coauthors highlight some of the key events, issues, themes and theories surrounding this elusive and complex subject. Whether interplanetary tourists, interlopers from a parallel universe, or mere misfirings in the brain, UFOs and "aliens" permeate popular culture. They have made the covers of "Time", "Life", and the "New York Times Book Review"; garnered CNN coverage; turned up on "Larry King Live" and other high-profile talk shows; attracted large audiences for TV's "X-Files" and "Roswell", and for films like "ET", "Independence Day", "Men in Black" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"; and swamped the Internet with thousands of websites and discussion groups. Despite this pervasive presense, few scholars have been willing to study the perplexing phenomena behind these cultural signifiers. Wary of a field that seems tainted by suspect methods and outlandish theories, many have logically stayed away. The relative lack of academic participation, however, creates a vicious circle that prevents the development of standards that would attract greater academic participation and, thus, credibility and funding for the field. Meanwhile, the phenomenon, rather than fading from public awareness, continues to grow and evolve. In response, this volume provides a kind of primer for scholars, skeptics and others uneasy about investigating this field. Its authors examine the nature of UFO "evidence"; discuss the methodological debates; incorporate research from science, history, mythology and psychology; and highlight the reactions of the government and military from the Cold War to the present. It also brings together three bestselling authors - Jacobs, Budd Hopkins and Pulitzer Prize-winner John Mack - widely known for their writings on the highly controversial "alien abduction" phenomenon.

Abstract: "Quasi-memories," necessarily presupposing a distinction between an "experiencing" and a "remembering" person, are considered by Parfit and Shoemaker as necessary and/or sufficient criteria for personal identity. However, the concept of "q-memories" is rejected by Schechtman since, according to her, neither "content" and "experience" can be separated from each other in "q-memories" ("principal inseparability") nor can they be distinguished from delusions/confabulations ("principal indistinguishability"). The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate that, relying on a neurophilosophical approach, both arguments can be rejected. Neuropsychological research shows that "contents" of memories are classified according to the accompanying psychological state such that the same "content" can be classified either as auto- or heterobiographical by the respective "experience." Since "content" and "experience" can be separated from each other, the argument of "principal inseparability" must be rejected on empir...

Abstract: What constituted a mulatto by our law? ...Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom.... If emancipated, he becomes a free white man, and a citizen of the United States.... Thomas Jefferson (from a letter dated March 4, 1815, Monticello) WITH THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND THE RISE OF TRANSNATIONAL, GLOBALized capitalism, a new "cultural war" has erupted in the United States, an ideological-political conflict symptomatic of the interminable crisis of liberal democracy. I am not alluding here to Samuel Huntington's "war of civilizations," the replacement of class struggle with the clash between the Islamic/Confucian axis and a monolithic Western dispensation. If by "culture" we mean the "public, standardized values of a community" that mediate the experience of individuals (Douglas, 1966: 39), the war involves antagonistic sets of norms, values, and beliefs expressed in institutionalized symbolic and discursive systems open to differing critiques and interpretations. The existing maps of meaning that make the world intelligible, maps objectified in patterns of social organization and relationship, are being discarded, reformed, invented, and reviewed in an accelerated process today. In any case, history has not ended with the demise of utopia and the triumph of the free-market neoliberal gospel. What has flared up is the long-buried antngonism between polarized worldviews or frames of knowledge-production. In academic and intellectual circles, we observe the confrontation of two irreconcilable positions: one that claims the priority of a "common culture," call it liberal or civic nationalism, as the foundation for a democratic solidarity of citizens; and another that regards racism or a racializing logic as inherent in the sociopolitical constitution of the United States, a historical ground undercutting the universalist or cosmopolitan rhetoric of its proclaimed democratic ideals and principles (Perea, 1998). Attempts to mediate the dispute, whether through the artifice of a "multicultural nationalism" or a postethnic cosmopolitanism (Hollinger, 1998), have only muddled the precise distinctions laid out by the various protagonists. Multiculturalism, inflected in terms of cultural literacy, canon revision, the debate between Eurocentrism versus Afrocentrism, and so on, has become the major site of t heoretical and philosophical contestation. A drive toward uniform standards informs the goal of Establishment thinkers who seek to mediate contradictory paradigms in the "culture wars." The noted literary critic E.D. Hirsch gained a certain notoriety by producing his Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988; second edition, 1993) premised on the notion of a common knowledge or collective memory as a necessary requisite for a "truly functional literacy." The literate national language and culture on which "the unity and effectiveness" of the nation-state depend, despite its avowed conservatism, needs to be transmitted in the schools to insure "national communication" among a diverse population divided by ethnicity, party affiliation, generation, locality, and so on. This communication among "strangers," Hirsch argues as he explains in "The Theory Behind the Dictionary," repudiates conventional interpretations and provokes us to revise our liberal resistance to a traditional curriculum: We help people in the underclass rise economically by teaching them how to communicate effectively beyond a narrow social sphere, and that can only be accomplished by teaching them shared, traditional literate culture. Thus the inherent conservatism of literacy leads to an unavoidable paradox: the social goals of liberalism require educational conservatism. We only make social and economic progress by teaching everyone to read and communicate, which means teaching myths and facts that are predominantly traditional (1993: xv). …

Abstract: It often seems that the various disciplines are like city-states, each with excellent plumbing, excellent standards governing the width of the pipes, the depth of the threads, the valves, the fixtures, the nuts and the bolts, so that internally each system works very well. But when you want to make connections at the borders, things start to break down. Nowhere is this clearer than in the effort to adapt terms and concepts (even the term "concept" poses problems of translation [1]). Complicating matters is the fact that the further a discipline is from physics, the likelier it is to tolerate a plurality of usage for any single term. Within literary study (a field very far from physics) there is, for example, no general agreement regarding terms like "narrative," "plot," "literature," "discourse," "representation." This lack is not necessarily a fault, but a sign of how the complexity of literary study requires a certain degree of play at this level of study. Efforts to establish a Prussian order in the term inology of literary study can do more harm than good. Nonetheless, terms bring with them ways of thinking, and it is the impacted nature of these ways of thinking that leads to infra-structural breakdowns at our disciplinary borders. It is possible that we will eventually achieve some kind of protocol for pan-disciplinary exchange that will allow us to connect with each other meaningfully. But I would like to suggest also, in this essay, that sometimes the shock of leaping borders and suddenly seeing your old familiar terms from a new disciplinary perspective can be salutary precisely because the differences of field are so great. This essay focuses on two terms, "narrative" and "literature," that have enjoyed a long and happy coexistence in humanist discourse. My argument is that, when looked at in terms of the cognitive operations they involve, these terms appear to be separated by a deep conceptual difference. Probing this difference may give some indication of where we might start to work in trying to match literary and cognitive understandings. At the same time, it shows how simply by trying to cross disciplinary borders we can give vigorous new life to old terms. Put briefly, the conceptual difference between narrative and literature, when understood as cognitive operations, is a kind of puzzle that goes like this: where narrative can best be described as a platform, literature can best be described as a set of toggle switches. To older generations, this may look like a mixed metaphor, but in the age of the computer, it works. A platform is something that persists in time, supporting a host of other operations that are carried o ut on top of it. A politician can stand on a platform and do many things (for example, give speeches) that may have little to do with the platform he or she stands on. In computers, a platform doesn't stand, it runs, but the deep concept is the same. While the platform is running, other operations can be performed on top of it. Many of these operations are controlled by toggle switches. They are either on or off, but the platform keeps running. I. Narrative As terms in the humanistic disciplines, "narrative" is more secure than "literature." We are usually pretty sure that we know it when we see it. And this goes for most of us, humanists and non-humanists alike. As soon as he came up, he leaped from his own horse, and caught hold of hers by the bridle. The unruly beast presently reared himself on end on his hind legs, and threw his lovely burden from his back, and Jones caught her in his arms. (Fielding 195) This is, in all its parts, "the telling of an event" (the commonest definition of narrative). It is discourse that lets us see that something happened. And if most of us are pretty clear about obvious examples of narrative like this, many (though perhaps not most) of us are also pretty clear about what is not narrative: The critic, rightly considered, is no more than the clerk, whose office it is to transcribe the rules and laws laid down by those great judges whose vast strength of genius hath placed them in the light of legislators, in the several sciences over which they presided. …

Abstract: The article attempts to provide a conceptual framework for the discussion of the liturgical music of the East-Ashkenazi Jews. It discusses why our commonly accepted categories such as "prayer," "speech," "sacred," "music," "art" cannot be applied, as separate categories, to East-Ashkenazi culture. The article discusses this issue by "fusion groups," conceptual categories that fuse categories that are commonly thought of as being distinct and separate. This fusion means that aspects listed as belonging to one fusion group appear in the practice of the religious Jews as an indivisible whole. For instance, in the traditional context, melody is not an additional element but part and parcel of the text, inseparable from it and inconceivable without it, and vice versa: text is inconceivable without its melody. Similarly, meaning is not separable from a transcendental state, and neither meaning nor religious state is separable from the actual performance of the text with melody. Thus melody does not "express" meaning—it becomes one with it. These ideas are explained and illustrated by documents coming from the sacred written sources as well as from the practices observed and the opinions received from informants during twenty years of fieldwork projects.

Abstract: What is history and how do we learn about it? How has our understanding of history changed and developed over the years? How do historians and students actually go about "doing" history? In an engaging and entertaining style, this accessible "how-to" manual introduces readers to the theory, craft, and methods of history and provides a series of "tools" to help anyone read, research, and understand the past. The first half of the book is a stimulating overview of the key elements of history - evidence, narrative, judgment - that explores how the study and concepts of history have evolved over the centuries. The second half guides readers through the "workshop" of history. Unlocking the historian's "toolbox," it reveals the tricks of the trade, offering concrete examples and practical advice on the study, comprehension, and communication of history. The book covers myriad historical tools, including documents, sources, footnotes, arguments, bibliographies, chronologies, and many other items. It also examines professional ethics and controversial issues, such as plagiarism, historical hoaxes, and conspiracy theories. Brief and illuminating, and filled with fascinating historical information and stories, The Historian's Toolbox will inspire students and teachers alike as it cuts through the jargon and explains simply the "why," "what," and "how" of history.

Abstract: The Original Torah: The Political Intent of the Bible's Writers, by S. David Sperling. Reappraisals in Jewish Social and Intellectual History. New York/London: New York University Press,1998. Pp. xiv + 185. $40.00. The generating insight of this interesting and provocative book is that because "the authors of the Torah set their tales in times and places far removed from their own," its stories "are best described as allegories, narratives contrived to describe a second order of meaning from what they present on the surface" (p. 8). According to Sperling, the allegorical reading is not an option but a requirement "because [the Torah] cannot be read historically," critical scholarship having demonstrated that "nothing in the Torah is historical." It is this involvement with the results of historical critical study that differentiates Sperling's method from other, more traditional modes of allegorical reading. "I find myself secularizing Paul," he writes with reference to the use of typology in 1 Cor 10:11. "The things that supposedly `happened' were `symbolically recorded for us,' that is, if we understand `us' to be the earliest and primary audiences of the writers of the Torah" (p. 9). Sperling not only secularizes Paul; he also stands the apostle's method on its head. Whereas Paul, like all ancient allegorists, sought to show the applicability of the narratives beyond their own time, Sperling consistently and univocally restricts their meaning to the situation in which they were composed and, moreover, insists that the political function of the texts is their sole meaning. His reduction of significance to the realm of politics is so thoroughgoing that he can even assert that "[w]hen contemporary readers try to discover the ancient agenda, they are, in fact, coming closer to understanding [YHWH]," since "[YI-IwH] always stands for the agenda of the individual writer" (p. 136). In each of the six studies that comprise the core of the book, Sperling's method is twofold. He first demonstrates the lack of historicity in the pentateuchal narrative under discussion and then correlates the narrative with a later political situation that he thinks unlocks its real meaning. In chapter 3, "The Allegory of Servitude in Egypt and the Exodus," for example, he builds upon the absence of evidence for an origin of Israel outside Canaan and for an Israelite enslavement in Egypt to argue that these notions constitute the "ideological statement" of a group of dissident elements" in Late Bronze Age Canaan (pp. 47, 52). Pharaoh's imposition of corve (mas) on Israel for his forced-labor projects (sebel, Exod 1:11) thus does not refer to "institutions of subjugation in Egypt proper" at all. Rather, it is an allegorical representation of Israel's "withdrawing from the Egyptian system [of political domination in Canaan] . . . as a withdrawal from the land of Egypt itself" (p. 56). The "inspiration for the Israelite ideologues" lay in the arrival from abroad of Aramaeans and sea peoples (Amos 9:7; p. 57). Similarly, chapter 4 argues that the covenant of Israel with YHWH is properly understood as "the religious expression of the mundane cultic and military union of different groups that had merged to form the people of Israel" (p. 71). The fifth chapter develops multiple points of connection between Abraham and David, some of them novel and some not, in order to present the Abrahamic narratives as subservient to the political needs of David and his dynasty. The patriarch's covenant with Abimelech in Gen 21, for example, "serves as an apology for David's pact with the Philistines" (p. 89). On the basis of Jeroboam I's association with Penuel (1 Kgs 12:25), the site of Jacob's struggle with a divine being (Gen 32:23-33), Sperling maintains in chapter 6 that "Jacob serves here as an allegory of Jeroboam" (p. 93). But the same chapter sees the Joseph story, too, as "a thinly veiled allegory" of Jeroboam I, the northern king whose ascent to power was foretold by a prophet and who, like Joseph, "had been protected by Pharaoh and risen to great power under the ultimate protection of [YHWH]" ( 1 Kgs 11-12; p. …

Abstract: By using ancient texts, medieval documents, philological observations, and archaeological artifacts, scholars have reconstructed a prehistorical world and religion. The people who upheld this culture have been named, inter alia, "Indo-Europeans", "Aryans", "Japhetites" and "Wiros". Yet, these people have not left any texts, no artifacts can with certainty be ascribed to them, nor do we know any individual "Indo-European" by name. Despite this, scholars have, with help from daring historical, linguistic and archaeological reconstructions, persistently tried to reach the ancient Indo-Europeans in hopes of finding the foundations for their own culture and religion. The main hypothesis of this thesis is that these pre-historical peoples have not occupied modern man because they were important as historical agents, but because they were, with the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think". The interest in "the Indo-Europeans", "the Aryans" and their "Others" — which latter group has at times been described as Jews, Savages, Orientals, Aristocrats, priests, matriarchal farmers, martial pastoralists, French liberals, and/or German nationalists — was (and still is) motivated by a wish to construct alternatives to those identities given by tradition. The study of the Indo-Europeans, their culture and religion, has been a way to produce new concepts, new identities and thus an alternative future. Chapter 1 describes how the concept of an Indo-European entity evolved during the 18th and 19th centuries out of speculations on the identity of different people mentioned in the Bible, out of the discovery of similarities between Indic and European languages, and out of romantic ideas about race and Volk. Chapter 2 deals with the first paradigm in the Indo-European studies, the Nature-Mythological school, and its relationship to Christianity, anti-Semitism and liberal-bourgeois mentality. Chapter 3 discusses the "primitivization" of the "Indo-Europeans" that developt at the end of the 19th century due to nationalism and vitalistic philosophy. Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between the study of Indo-Germanic or Aryan religion in the Third Reich and Nazi ideology. Chapter 5 treats theories that were created as alternative to Nazi scholarship by fascist, Catholic scholars. That chapter also deals with the developments in the study of Indo-European religion and culture during the last half of the 20th century

Abstract: The present study addresses the problem of a simplistic historical interpretation of the sobriquetsin the pesharim. An alternative approach is advocated taking its beginning in perceiving themessage in the pesharim as primarily an ideological vindication of the Qumran community, theYahad. The role and function of the sobriquets comes in this context close to the phenomenonknown as nicknaming. A comparison is made with similar biblical designations, e.g. "king ofthe South" and `king of the North" in Daniel 11, Pompey in the Psalms of Solomon, "Babylon"in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, "the synagogue of Satan" and "the womanJezebel" in Revelation. On the basis of these analogies it is concluded that such inventedepithets are derived from biblical concepts and expressions. However, there is no intention ofsecrecy when designing such epithetsIn the case of three categories, namely sobriquets of enemies, honourable sobriquets andsobriquets of rulers, these designations are to be understood from a biblical angle and from theperspective of the Yahad. Thus "the Wicked Priest" has failed to fill his obligation as a priestand has become instead a physical danger towards the community. "The Man of the Lie", withhis second name "the Spreader of the Lie" imposes a direct authoritative threat against theYahad. Likewise "the Seekers of Smooth Things". This group has received its epithet mainlyfrom their alleged alliance with the ruling power in Jerusalem. Together with "Ephraim", "Manasseh", "the House of Peleg " "the traitors" and "the House of Absalom", the two latter, designations belongs to a sphere of groups and factions, which left the realm around the Yahad.The key to the meaning of their designations is betrayal. "The Teacher of Righteousness" is thedesignation of the founder and inspirer of the Yahad. This title reflects his crucial functions forthe Yahad. "The Doers of the Torah" designates the faithful adherents to the Teacher. Both theKittim and the Angry Lion are godly authorised retaliators of the wicked within the own People.A consequence of the investigation is that the sobriquets cannot be one-sidedly understood as anhistorical cipher. Even if the epithets originated in an historical situation, their primary functionis to evaluate different characters and groups.

Abstract: Jesus told the Pharisees that they should "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's," Mr. Singer reminds us. He argues that, today, the wall of separation between church and state is probably the best way to ensure religious freedom in the U.S., protecting both secular and religious worlds. IN SEPTEMBER 1999, the Kappan published a special section on "Religion and the Schools." Essays by Gilbert Sewall, Elliott Wright, Thomas Lickona, and Warren Nord argued in favor of expanding the influence of religion in public education.1 While the authors' positions appeared reasoned and reasonable on the surface, I contend that they are fundamentally flawed by unstated or unconsidered assumptions and by selective historical references. The arguments presented by these authors can be seductive in a society undergoing continuous - and sometimes disruptive - demographic, technological, and cultural change. I believe the appeal of these essays underscores the importance of maintaining the legal barriers that separate church and state in the United States. Gilbert Sewall, guest editor for the special section, established its direction in his opening article, "Religion Comes to School." He makes three broad statements about advocates of the separation of church and state. He accuses "freethinkers and separationists" of seeing the "Christian religion" as a "cultural artifact, possibly a sinister one"; he argues that "the accumulated religious wisdom of the centuries" and the "sense of personal meaning and purpose" it engenders are "marginalized in progressive education"; and he charges that anti-religionists "seek to suffocate an important part of human life that elevates, dignifies, ritualizes, and often defines the human experience." According to Sewall, the overwhelmingly positive contributions that religious beliefs can make to education in our society and "religion's motivating role in defining a moral life" are feared, marginalized, denied, or suppressed by secular forces. Sewall's support for an infusion of religious education and values into the public school curriculum is based on his belief that "the religious impulse of appreciation and respect for human and earthly life, built on the foundation that we are all agents of God and divine creations, is no longer venerated in public schools" and that, as a result, "religion no longer provides a model of character and virtue for all young people. . . ." However, this is a one-sided version of the role religion has played in history and of what constitutes religious values. In the millennium that has just passed, organized religious movements in the West and around the world have been responsible for the torture and murder of heretics, the expulsion and enslavement of nonbelievers (e.g., the Spanish Inquisition and the Atlantic slave trade), and the mutilation and oppression of women (e.g., in parts of the contemporary Islamic world). They have turned their backs on genocide (e.g., in Turkey and Germany), collaborated with brutal dictators (e.g., throughout Latin America), supported colonialism and imperialism, participated in religious wars (e.g., the Crusades, Islamic jihads, wars on the Indian subcontinent), encouraged group suicides (e.g., Jonestown), and actively silenced dissenters. These religious actions and the values they represent cannot simply be dismissed as unfortunate, peripheral, or outdated. They permeate today's headlines. The day I started writing this article, the New York Times discussed an order from the Vatican that forced an American priest and a nun to stop their ministry to homosexuals and people with HIV/AIDS because they were not emphasizing the official church position that homosexual acts are "'intrinsically disordered' and evil."2 An open and honest appraisal of the role of religion in U.S. and world history may discover that the reason "our secular society diminishes religion's motivating role in defining a moral life," as Sewall claims, has nothing to do with misguided court decisions that foster the separation of church and state. …

Abstract: In her study of travel writing and transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt describes "contact zones" as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination--like colonialism, slavery; or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (4). In the United States, the region of Appalachia has been such a "contact zone," beginning with the arrival of the mining companies in the late nineteenth century. From Appalachia's earliest sustained representation in Mary Noialles Murfree's fiction, the "contact zone" has involved what Pratt terms "copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (7), between the travelers, politicians, journalists, and corporations who have come into the Tennessee mountains from outside and the people who live there, Judith Fetterley and I have identified Murfree's mountain fiction as regionalism, a term t hat unlike "local color," we argue, establishes itself as a site of critique. [1] In Pratt's terms, regionalism locates its narratives within a contact zone, leaving open the possibility for critique by way of autoethnography, narrative that emerge from indigenous or regional subjects and that may challenge readers' preconceptions about those subjects. As Pratt writes, "if ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations" (7). Regionalist texts maybe autoethuographic or they may involve a narrator sympathetic to misconstruals and misrepresentations of regional people who attempts to locate herself, as does Murfree's narrator in In the "Stranger People's" Country (1891), in a middle ground. In this middle ground, the contact zone of Murfree's regionalism, her narrator "encounters" the preconceptions outsiders have toward her Appalachian mountaineers and self-critically positions herself as sympathetic. Aware that urban readers view Appalachians as strange, she takes up the "stranger people's" standpoint as her own and explores her own relationship to that standpoint. Set several decades after the Civil War during the period of the entrance of mining interests into Appalachia, In the "Stranger Peapie's" Country becomes Murfree's most complex intervention into the outsider-insider binary that characterizes the regionalist's approach to them mountaineers. In the essay that follows, I will trace Murfree's novel as her attempt to interv ene into that binary in various ways, including considering evidence of early Indian tribes that predated the Cherokee, exploring conflict between science and legend concerning who has control over the remains of these Indians, representing tensions in Appalachian politics that emerged with the arrival of outsiders into the region, and constructing the novel itself as a contact zone between outsider narrator and the characters who inhabit the mountains. In addition, we can read In the "Stranger People's" Country as Murfree's preservation of the mountaineers in the way she advocates keeping cultural distinctions alive through linguistic variation, protects in her narrative the secrets of Tennessee antiquities, and argues against intrusion into the lives of her characters. In such a reading, Murfree becomes one of the originators of Appalachian studies, a field that scholars and activists have developed since the 1970s and that retrospectively offers useful directions for our attempt to reread Murfree's fiction for our own time. [2] In an essay on Appalachia, David Whisnant cites television shows popular during the 1970s--Hee Haw, Green Acres, and The Beverly Hillbillies--as evidence of "gross insensitivity to the feelings of Appalachian people, to their spiritual and material needs, and to the richness and vitality of their culture," describing the media as "agents of a broader pattern of cultural imperialism" (129). …

Abstract: "World Uterature" has occupied an ambiguous, contradictory, or perhaps merely flexible position in the decades-long controversies over canon and curriculum. Certainly there is no single canon ofworld literature, nor is there likely to be one. As Brandt Corstius has shown in studying canons around the world, different countries always give special weight to their own or famuiar traditions (6). In the American curriculum, world literature is both mainstream and marginal: on the one hand, it is part of a firmly situated dominant tradition, its "window on the world"; on the other, it is a sign ofdefinitive difference from that tradition. CoUege surveys ofWestern "world" literature and Western civilization have flourished since the time ofWorld War I, when they were offered as an introduction to other cultures that also strengthened the common anchor in Western tradition; they were not introductions to global literature (LawaU 8). Modern courses, responding to the discrepancy between the image of"world" and a syUabus Umited to Western tradition, have either broadened their horizons toward global coverage or, retaining their original scope, have reserved the term "world Uterature" for a second semester that conveys the rest of the world to students emerging from the Western survey. In either framework, competing possibilities remain; the same canonical books may be interpreted as "world- class," illustrating universal values and common humanity, or as proving, through increased attention to context, an "otherness" that chaUenges universalist assumptions. Still another academic format—one that focuses on individual and cultural differences, and has an immediate pragmatic aim— presents a range of diverse (usually modern) selections that ulustrate ethnic, social, gender, and class variations. Such courses, also titled "world Uterature" and situated as part ofthe new "multicultural" curriculum, are especially popular in modern high schools aware ofthe need to facilitate communication inside a diverse audience (Massachusetts Department ofEducation 76-78). The emphasis on communication through Uterature, rather than on the commemorative study of canonical works, recalls J. W. Goethe's exchange-oriented definition of world Uterature. In 1827, the German author coined the term "world Uterature" to describe a process ofreading across national boundaries that was cultural as much as it was literary. Reading a French review ofhis own work, he was struck by the possibility of seeing one's own image mirrored in another cultural vision and subtly transformed by different habits of mind. Goethe subsequently proposedthat contemporary writers—"the Uving, striving men ofletters" —write with a transnational audience in mind, read each other's work

Abstract: In this volume, a distinguished group of philosophers aims to offer fresh insight into Platonic studies. Combining research with analysis, the authors present 14 essays on various dimensions of Plato's thought. Most of Plato's dialogues are examined, from such Socratic texts as "Protagoras", "Euthyphro" and "Crito" to the allegedly late "Sophist", "Statesman" and "Laws". Several essays explore specific philosophical problems raised in a single Platonic dialogue. Some offer in-depth analysis of one dialogue - for instance, the volume includes two very different but highly provocative essays on "Timateus". Others pursue a topic or theme that runs throughout a number of dialogues, and others speak about the Platonic heritage and the thought of ancient philosophers who regarded themselves as faithfully preserving and transmitting the doctrines of their master. The major subject divisions of philosophy are covered, with considerable attention being paid to issues of Platonist methodology.