bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Origins
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

Life places gentleness within us originally and comes from further than living memory. Gentleness appears on the edges of life, death, and pain. Gentleness invents an expanded present.
Taking Care
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

Care is necessary in human and animal development. Embracing the other’s vulnerability means that the subject cannot avoid recognizing his own fragility. This acceptance is a force; it makes gentleness a higher degree of compassion than simple care.
Intelligence
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

Gentleness is primarily an intelligence; one that carries life, that saves and enhances it. If gentleness can have the intelligence to comprehend violence, it can undo it. There will always be nobility in gentle power, as in equestrian arts.
Potential
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

Certain things are destined to happen according to a principle intrinsic to their nature; they will be called: potential. The movement of life is to bloom or decay, there is no indeterminacy. Aristotle identified power as the ability of a being to grow into his becoming. This force of metamorphosis was approached by philosophers, including Spinoza and Nietzsche, in several ways. Gentleness may be an activation of the sensitive within the intelligible.
The Sensory Celebration (I)
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

Gentleness is an occasion for sensory celebration. Gentleness has many affinities to light as well as touch, music, and image. Refinement coincides with gentleness, particularly in craftsmanship.
“Master and Man,” by Tolstoy
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

This chapter tells the story of “Master and Man” by Tolstoy, emphasizing the role of gentleness in the interaction between the master and his servant. Gentleness operates in the very location of authority and appears precisely where it is least expected. This type of gentleness is Christ-like. Nothing will be known of the spiritual struggle or the surrender.
Sublimation
Authors: Dufourmantelle Anne
Published: September 2018

Is gentleness a form of sublimation? Sublimated desire requires that the very place from which it comes be abolished. From this perspective, gentleness culturally sublimates the violence and brutality of our most archaic animal reflexes. As power, gentleness is not sublimation in the sense of a life drive that strives to always preserve the conditions of its own fulfilment. What it sublimates is the very access to the living—a gentleness drive?
Philosophy’s Gigantomachia over Life and Being
Authors: Naas Michael
Published: September 2018

Following the claim made by Jacques Derrida in one of his last books that the great “gigantomachia” of Western philosophy is not that between forms and particulars, being and becoming, but that between being and life, the preface argues that Plato’s Statesman is the perfect dialogue for testing out this claim. Motivated by questions internal to Plato scholarship but also, and even more importantly, by the great emphasis put on the question of life in recent continental philosophy, the preface argues that a close reading of Plato’sStatesman can help us not only to rethink Plato’s philosophy through the question of life but use Plato’s thinking of life to rethink many of the questions regarding life, bare life, biopolitics, and so in, in contemporary philosophy.
The Lifelines of the Statesman
Authors: Naas Michael
Published: September 2018

Chapter 1 looks at Plato’s attempt, in the opening pages of the Statesman (257a–267b), to discover the essence of the statesman through the method known as diairesis, that is, through the philosophical exercise of drawing lines. While it might seem that these lines between not only various species of natural beings (especially human and animal) but different kinds of man-made objects or activities (such as statesmanship) are merely conventional, the dialogue demonstrates that they are in fact already drawn in nature and that the discourse that follows them must be just as natural, indeed just as organic, as the objects they try to define (the logos as zōon). In addition to asking about the place where Plato draws the line between life and its others, human life and its others, the chapter interrogates Plato’s repeated use of animal metaphors to characterize the very method of philosophy—the dialogue as hunt, diairesis as animal sacrifice, Platonic forms as “natural species,” and so on.
The Measure of Life and Logos
Authors: Naas Michael
Published: September 2018

Chapter 4 examines Plato’s distinction between two forms of measure (relative measure and the measure of the mean) and the values of life they ultimately embody or represent (274e–287a). In the Statesman, Plato comes to see—and perhaps for the first time in his dialogues—that all production and, perhaps, all life actually depend on this measure of the mean, a notion that Plato had certainly used or deployed in dialogues before the Statesman but never commented on or analyzed as such. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this measure of the mean for logos or discourse, whether that discourse be merely rhetorical or, as in the Statesman itself, philosophical.
The Life of Law and the Law of Life
Authors: Naas Michael
Published: September 2018

This chapter analyzes a large swath of Plato’s Statesman (287b–311c) in order to ask, with “Plato’s Pharmacy” in the background, about the Stranger’s claim that law—and especially written law, since writing is the essence of law—is at once inferior to rule without law and yet, in a world without divine rulers, absolutely necessary for human governance. This chapter returns to many of the insights from Chapter 2 on the myth of the two ages, since what that myth demonstrated was the desirability and yet impossibility of an age in which a truly divine being rules over human beings and the concomitant necessity of trying to imitate that age through laws. Once again, we see that what is at issue in the relationship between the two ages, as well as in the relationship between a regime without law and a regime with it, are two different valences or valuations of life—the values of pure life, fecundity, spontaneity, and memory, on the one hand, and the values of death in life, forgetting in memory, and sterility in fecundity, on the other.
Conclusion: Life on the Line
Authors: Naas Michael
Published: September 2018

The conclusion argues that there is in Plato, in addition to the undeniable tendency shown in the previous chapter to think life in terms of life itself, that is, in terms of a Platonic form of life, another countervailing tendency, a less “Platonic” conception of life that is operating always in the margins of Plato’s dialogues, a notion of life that needs to be thought along the lines of what Jacques Derrida began calling in an as-yet-unpublished seminar of 1974–75 life death. The chapter suggests that what a Derridean reading of the Statesman and other dialogues on the question of life reveals is the necessity of thinking life otherwise, that is, life neither as bare, biological life, nor as real, spiritual life, as life itself, but as life death, that is, as a life that must always be woven together with and thought always in relation to death. Life death, it is claimed, is what the philosophical and religious tradition of the West has had to forget or repress in order for something like life itself to emerge, that is, a life completely detached from any life that is actually lived.
The Secularization of the Lyric: The End of Art, a Revolution in Poetic Language, and the Meaning of the Modern Crowd
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

The Introduction sketches the alteration of lyric’s place in the nineteenth century. Poetry, which had been a primary purveyor of wisdom and consolation for a relatively homogenous society grounded in Christian belief, becomes a print commodity confronting a society in which contending beliefs—including beliefs in rationalism, science, and progress—have rendered naïve belief and the forms of wisdom and consolation that might attend it unavailable to writers like Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson who were acutely attuned to their times and sensed the hollowness of the discourses around them. They did not abandon lyric, but modernized it. The end of art—as Hegel put it—as the primary vehicle for belief or spirit does not mean the end of lyric but a proliferation of poetic practices and a turn from the conveyance of meaning to the interrogation of language and received ideas, a revolution in poetic language evident in the work of these three U. S. poets, which puts them near the advent of modernity in poetry.
Poe’s Posthumanism: Melancholy and the Music of Modernity
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on Poe’s debts to Sappho and to Petrarch and the ways in which his lyrics and tales assume and transform these traditions. Poe emerges not only as modern but as a post-humanist, despite his debts to the humanist tradition in the arts. Despite his exploitation of traditional forms of prosody, Poe becomes an origin of modern poetry in his insistence that poetic effect depends upon the materiality rather than the meaning of language, the musical elements of the signifier, rather than the meaning or abstraction of the signified. In this way he negotiates a critical relationship with art and a popular relation with the literary marketplace.
Poe and the Origins of Modern Poetry: Tropes of Comparison and the Knowledge of Loss
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

One way in which Poe turns the traditions of poetry toward modernity is through his manipulation of tropes of comparison. Metaphor and simile often figure in the recovery of lost, beloved objects in Western poetic traditions as old as Petrarch or arguably as old as the Song of Songs. Poe alters the tenor of these tropes so that rather than recovery from loss they figure loss itself. This modernizes traditions of consolation and alters the traditional tropes of Western poetry to reflect the pressures of Poe’s secular age.
Whitman’s Poetics and Death: The Poet, Metonymy, and the Crowd
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

Where Poe focuses his poetics on tropes of comparison, Whitman depends almost completely on metonymy, the realistic trope of mere material contiguity. Metonymy in his famous catalogues figures both the distancing of his poetry from conventional meaning and the presence of the heterogeneity of the crowd of potential readers. These readers, who constitute the secularity of the age and figure in the poet’s challenge to death and his eroticization of the world, also constitute the possibility of his survival as a voiced presence and a dispersed voice in the future crowd he so often imagines.
Whitman and Democracy: The “Withness of the World” and the Fakes of Death
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

Extending the reading of metonymy in the previous chapter to enchain the figure of the reader as the future presence of Whitman’s poem, this chapter also considers Whitman’s vexed relationship to particularity and to the ethics of democracy in a secular age. I argue that this remains an ethics of alterity not identity, an ethics of the surface and of the limits that surfaces pose when considering alterity. Whitman emerges as the poet of democratic problematics rather than the simple singer of democracy or the word en masse. The modernity of his voice emerges in his consistent refusal to allow meaning to reduce alterity, an alterity that in a secular age is the primary fact of what William James called the withness of life.
The Poet as Lyric Reader
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

In contrast to the dominate strain in the new lyric studies, this analysis of Dickinson’s relationship to the dominant modes of poetic and sentimental discourse of her era reveals that as a poet, she not only demands but enacts a form of lyric reading, a foregrounding of the ironies and waywardness of language rather than a dependence on its capacity to mean. In this way, Dickinson, for all her apparent piety, enacts the unavailability of naïve belief in a secular age, and, for all her retirement from the world, she manifests the presence and pressure of the modern crowd of readers and the altered place of literature.
Dickinson’s Dog and the Conclusion
Authors: Michael John
Published: September 2018

As a way of capturing the continuing strangeness of Dickinson’s poetic practice and her revolutionary relationship to dominant modes of discourse in her time and ours, this chapter explores the relationship of her poetry to romantic theories of fragmentation and to Freud’s notion of the shaggy dog story, a form of Witz that exists primarily to lead its reader astray and to which the only response is the enjoyment of passing the story on. In this way, Dickinson comes close to the limits of what lyric can do with language at the limit of signification and assumes a prominent place as a modern secular poet.
Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History
Authors: Goetschel Willi
Published: September 2018

Freud’s Moses and Monotheism engages in a critical examination of the function of deferred action for the construction of narratives of tradition. This paper explores how Freud’s study illustrates its line of critical inquiry by simultaneously acting out its central contention by the way Freud deals with the carefully controlled presence of Heine, a key source for Freud’s conflicted study of Moses and Jewish tradition.
Freud’s Moses: Murder, Exile, and the Question of Belonging
Authors: Schwab Gabriele
Published: September 2018

This chapter traces the manifold rewritings, transgenerational legacies and histories of reception of the Moses story. Focusing on Freud’s main interpretive moves in Moses and Monotheism, it analyzes his scrupulous attempts to provide evidence that Moses was of Egyptian origin as well as the connections he then makes between patricide, imperialism, and monotheism. Freud’s insistence that the Jewish people not only murdered Moses, but also added a symbolic double murder with the archival erasure of his Egyptian origins, is informed by Freud’s intense personal transference at a time when he felt haunted by the political upheavals that led to his own exile. His scrupulous forensic work to reinterpret the Moses archive is thus, paradoxically, designed to counter this double murder and facilitate a work of psycho-political reparation. The essay concludes by evaluating Freud’s theory in light of the new imperialisms and fundamentalisms of his/our time.
A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly Suspended Attention
Authors: Segalovitz Yael
Published: September 2018

This chapter argues that Moses and Monotheism invites its readers to approach it in a state of “evenly-suspended attention,” the mindset that Freud recommends his colleagues practice in the therapeutic scene. This method of reading is contrasted with the prominent one in the discipline of literature, namely, close reading. Developed by the Anglo-American New Critics around the time of Moses’ publication, close reading depends on what Freud terms “deliberate attention.” This chapter further demonstrates that reading Moses in a state of evenly-suspended attention is understood by Freud to require an act of faith in one’s unconscious or internal alterity. It concludes with a call for a reevaluation of what a Freudian or psychoanalytic reading is typically understood to mean in the humanities. That is, while Freud is conventionally thought of as the optimal close reader, Moses suggests otherwise.
Clinical disparity of elevated serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels among the working population of Taipei, Taiwan
Authors: Sun Chi-Te , Kuo Shih-Yu , Chiu Wei-Hsiu , Chen Ming-Chih , Tung Tao-Hsin
Published: September 2018

Purpose: To explore sex variations in the prevalence and factors of high serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) level among the working population in Taipei, Taiwan.Methods: This study included 8,351 healthy adults (5,247 men and 3,104 women) who admitted to a teaching hospital voluntarily for a physical examination in 2009. The definitions of occupations include computer and mathematical occupations, architecture and engineering occupations, community and social service occupations, sales and related occupations, office and administrative support occupations, and production occupations. The age distribution of $\leq$ 29 yrs, 30-39 yrs, 40-49 yrs, and $\geq$ 50 yrs were 22.5\%, 36.8\%, 23.5\%, and 17.2\%, respectively. Fasting blood samples were drawn using venipuncture and participants were interviewed with a structured questionnaire.Results: The overall prevalence of high serum ALT level ($\geq $ 40 U/L) was 17.1\%. After stratified the data according to age into four age groups ($\leq$ 29yrs, 30-39 yrs, 40-49 yrs, and $\geq$ 50 yrs) , the men participants revealed a higher prevalence of high serum ALT levels for all age groups than the women participants. Bases on multiple logistic regression models, for the men, the significant factors were associated with high serum ALT level and included age (OR = 0.96, 95\% CI: 0.95-097), BMI [no matter whether overweight (OR = 2.45, 95\% CI: 1.99-3.02) or obese (OR = 4.02, 95\% CI: 3.22-5.03)], hypercholesterolemia (yes vs. no, OR = 1.25, 95\% CI: 1.05-1.48), hypertriglyceridemia (OR = 1.25, 95\% CI: 1.04-1.50), high FPG levels (OR = 1.48, 95\% CI: 1.05-2.09), high AST levels (OR = 26.71, 95\% CI: 19.00-37.54), hyperuricemia (OR = 1.48, 95\% CI: 1.25-1.76), high ALP levels (OR = 1.20, 95\% CI: 1.00-1.45), and high glutamic acid transaminase levels (OR = 4.31, 95\% CI: 3.61-5.14). For the women subjects, the statistically significant factors that were associated with high serum ALT level included BMI [no matter whether overweight (OR = 3.53, 95\% CI: 1.87-6.67) or obese (OR = 4.32, 95\% CI: 2.26-8.23)], high AST levels (yes vs. no, OR = 38.49, 95\% CI: 21.45-49.28), high BUN levels (yes vs. no, OR = 1.66, 95\% CI: 1.03-2.29), and high glutamic acid transaminase levels (yes vs. no, OR = 9.87, 95\% CI: 5.79-16.83).Conclusion: In conclusion, the clinical problem of elevated serum ALT level is important in the working population. Many subjects are asymptomatic and the diagnosis of high serum ALT level should be considered with sex, age, hyperuricemia, high AST levels, high ALP levels, high glutamic acid transaminase levels, and metabolic risk factors in mind.
Quando a literatura encontra a música: reflexões em torno dos diálogos intertextuais em "Lisboaleipzig 2: o ensaio de música", de Maria Gabriela Llansol
Authors: Valentim Jorge Vicente
Published: September 2018

Apresenta-se, aqui, uma proposta de leitura da obra Lisboaleipzig 2: o ensaio de música (1994), da escritora portuguesa Maria Gabriela Llansol, procurando observar os diálogos intertextuais estabelecidos entre a sua efabulação ficcional e as técnicas composicionais do músico alemão Johann Sebastian Bach. A partir da observação de elos ordenados entre estas duas instâncias discursivas, objetiva-se uma reflexão que contemple o fenômeno da intertextualidade como recurso criador.We present here a reading proposal for Lisboaleipzig 2: O ensaio de música (1994), by the Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol, trying to observe the intertextual dialogue established between his fictional work and the compositional techniques of the German musician Johan Sebastian Bach. From the observation of sorted links between these two discursive instances, the objective is a reflection that addresses the phenomenon of intertextuality as a creator feature.
Um projeto de comunicação ideal através de olhares descentrados em Lídia Jorge e William Faulkner
Authors: Hampel Juliana Florentino
Published: September 2018

Este artigo pretende analisar a relação de intertextualidade existente entre os romances O som e a fúria, de William Faulkner, e O vento assobiando nas gruas, da escritora portuguesa Lídia Jorge, a partir do ponto de vista de narradores marginais, anormais e veiculadores de processos de enunciação considerados ineficientes. A saga familiar, a loucura e a incomunicabilidade são temas apresentados por meio de um foco narrativo dificultoso, responsável por representar o alcance de um projeto comum de comunicação ideal em ambos os autores, promovendo a empatia do leitor com pontos de vista descentrados e novas possibilidades de visão de mundo.This article aims to analyze the relation of intertextuality existent between the novels The sound and the fury, by William Faulkner, and O vento assobiando nas gruas, by Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge, from the point of view of marginal and insane narrators, with ineffective enunciation processes. Furthermore, it can be seen in the approach of both stories that embrace familiar saga, craziness, and communicative failure, presented by them, an effort to reach a common project of ideal communication, encouraging reader’s empathy with decentralized views and new possibilities of existential examinations.
De Zumbi à Fênix – a condição da teoria literária hoje
Authors: Barzotto Leoné Astride
Published: September 2018

Resenha de O lugar da Teoria Literária, de  André Cechinel (org), Florianópolis: EdUFSC; Criciúma: Ediunesc, 2016.
A intrínseca relação entre texto e imagem em “Mineirinho”, de Clarice Lispector
Authors: Yokoyama Adriana , Tavares Enéias Farias
Published: September 2018

O resgate visual, decorrente de uma das ações dos sentidos e recuperada pela memória, pode desencadear sensações diferenciadas em relação a uma imagem específica. Calcado nesta afirmativa, o estudo pretende abordar a visão da escritora Clarice Lispector, ante a morte do bandido carioca Mineirinho e a reconstrução deste fato, em sua crônica, a partir dos relatos e descrições jornalísticas, bem como da imagem de Mineirinho morto, veiculada por alguns jornais da época, na arquitetura de seu discurso que associa, de maneira distinta, a relação análoga entre texto e imagem. Para alcançarmos esta compreensão, somos conduzidos a explorar, através dos mecanismos da linguagem, os processos comunicativos que vão auxiliar a construção dialógica existente entre a produção do discurso literário e sua relação com os recursos psíquicos da memória, em sua atuação de resgate e captação das informações/ imagens, resultante das inúmeras sensações provocadas pela brutalidade das ações, aliadas ao impacto do registro fotográfico do corpo de Mineirinho cravejado de balas. Nesse sentido, as teorias de Mikhail Bakthin (1997), Roman Jackobson (2003), G. E. Lessing (1998), Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (1984) sobre as teorias de Freud e Alfredo Bosi (1974) irão constituir as bases mais específicas de nossa pesquisa.
A metrópole em obras: literatura e fotografia na figuração da imagem da cidade moderna no periodismo da belle époque tropical
Authors: Salgado Marcus Rogério Tavares Sampaio
Published: September 2018

O objetivo do presente artigo é oferecer um estudo sobre o modo como a fotografia (mais especificamente, o cartão postal) desempenhou papel preponderante na construção da imagem da Capital Federal como metrópole moderna entre os cronistas da chamada belle époque tropical. Para tanto, passaremos em revista os números da revista Kosmos publicados entre 1904 e 1905, por ocasião da inauguração da Avenida Central, marco simbólico do projeto de reurbanização encetado pelos poderes públicos naquele momento histórico.
Retrato de um inquietante vestido: quase objeto?
Authors: Gama-Khalil Marisa Martins
Published: September 2018

O artigo esboça algumas relações entre a arte literária e a fotografia por intermédio do conto “Vestido de fustão”, do escritor José J. Veiga. Na coletânea intitulada Objetos turbulentos, em que se insere o referido conto, em todas as narrativas as coisas são alçadas a um lugar de destaque, quase exercendo a função de personagens das tramas. Essa valoração dos objetos é realizada, na maioria dos casos, através de recursos que se aproximam da focalização da fotografia, uma vez que a imagem do objeto se projeta de modo central, detalhadamente, como a poetizar o instante de sua captação, revelando o punctum ao seu espectador/leitor. Os objetos desvelam situações insólitas, problematizando as práticas de subjetivação/objetivação, nas quais os sujeitos se encontram enredados. Buscaremos demonstrar que os objetos insólitos, por serem perspectivados como punctum, obedecem a um processo de rostificação, processo esse de que decorre a ambiência fantástica nas narrativas em que se inserem, e por essa razão eles se tornam turbulentos ou quase objetos. Para a análise tomaremos como suporte especialmente os estudos de Roland Barthes e Gilles Deleuze.
Literatura infanto-juvenil africana no Brasil: um levantamento bibliográfico
Authors: Paz Demétrio Alves
Published: September 2018

O objetivo do presente trabalho é analisar algumas obras de autores dos Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (PALOP) destinadas ao público infanto-juvenil publicadas em nosso país. Nos PALOP há, atualmente, dois sistemas literários bem estabelecidos: Angola e Moçambique. O primeiro conta com uma preocupação com a cultura e a literatura muito forte após a independência, em 1975. A União dos Escritores Angolanos (UEA) e o Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco (INALD) incentivaram e promoveram a publicação de obras destinadas à formação de um público leitor infanto-juvenil. Em Moçambique, o mesmo papel coube à Associação dos Escritores Moçabicanos (AEMO). Notamos que nomes já consagrados no gênero nos PALOP como Gabriela Antunes, Dario de Melo e Cremilda Lima não foram publicados aqui. Contudo, nomes conhecidos como Mia Couto, Ondjaki, José Luandino Vieira, José Eduardo Agualusa e Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, por exemplo, são autores que têm obras disponíveis em nosso país. Assim, os jovens leitores brasileiros têm acesso à obras de qualidade em que cultura africana aparece na visão de escritores dos PALOP. Pretendemos, portanto, refletir sobre algumas dessas produções, a fim de as contextualizar e, principalmente, atestar a relevância dessas obras, pouco conhecidas em nosso país.
Modeling Strategic Location Choices for Disadvantaged Firms
Authors: Zhuang Hejun
Published: September 2018

This paper models how a firm’s capability relative to that of the other firm affects his location choice in the marketplace. Weaker firms strategically avoid head-to-head competition with stronger ones. When the capability gap is small, weaker firms randomly visit the core market of competitors (the “dodge” strategy). By doing so, they can trigger competitors to leave the demands of boundary markets in order to defend their core markets. When the capability gap is medium, they focus their resources on niches to fight for survival (the “niche” strategy). These strategies differ from those of stronger firms, which defend on core markets when the capability gap is small and build new markets when the capability gap becomes larger. Results show that those location choices can be understood using game theoretical models – the Hotelling model and the Colonel Blotto game. The paper’s results also explain the empirical observation that small businesses are more likely than large firms to make radical investments in R&D.
Presence of Contrarian Profits in the Jordan Stock Market
Authors: R. Elhaj Malik , Chowdhury Shah
Published: September 2018

Since the late 1980’s academicians have confirmed the presence of various forms of return regularities in stock returns. Two most well-known return regularities are contrarian and momentum profits. This paper – using monthly data for the period 2000 through 2016 – examines the presence of both contrarian profits and their sources in the Jordan stock market. The paper uses the methodology of Lo and MacKinlay (1990) and Jegadeesh and Titman (1995) to examine the presence of contrarian returns as well as the sources of such returns. Unlike other emerging markets where strong contrarian profits are found, Jordan market shows relatively weaker presence of contrarian profits. Moreover, time-series pattern – which is related to specific factors, is considered the main source of contrarian profits.
How Does Corporate Governance Affect Bank Performance? The Mediating Role of Risk Governance
Authors: Leone Paola , Gallucci Carmen , Santulli Rosalia
Published: September 2018

This paper aims to investigate how bank governance (board size, board composition, ownership structure) affects performance (ROA), by considering the mediating role of risk governance (presence of a risk committee, the number of meetings of the risk committee in one year, the risk committee size, the percentage of independent directors in the risk committee, and the presence of a chief risk officer). A sample of 31 Italian listed banks is examined over a ten-year period (2008-2017), in order to delineate the changes in corporate governance structure and to catch the effects of the current national and European regulations followed to the financial crisis. Hypotheses are tested by applying a mediation analysis according to the causal steps procedure. The main findings suggest that risk governance fully mediates the corporate governance-bank performance relationship. Specifically, we find that the board size is positively related to the presence of a risk committee and to the number of meetings. The percentage of independent directors on board is positively related to the percentage of independent directors in the risky committee and, in turn, has a positive effect on performance. Finally, the presence of institutional owners is positively related to the presence of a chief risk officer and, thus, to bank performance. Summing up, banks with wider and more heterogeneous boards of directors have better risk management-related corporate governance mechanisms and reach higher performance levels.
A History, Several Stories, and a Dramatic Narrative: L’Honneur d’un Capitaine [A Captain’s Honor], a Film by Pierre Schoendoerffer
Authors: Saldanha Álvarez José Maurício
Published: September 2018

The film L’Honneur d’un Capitaine (1982), directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928–2012), is the media option chosen to address the dramatic accounts of one French colonial soldier’s struggles to rehabilitate his memory.

Objectives: Instead of writing a story essay or a novel, since he was a gifted author, he preferred to play the soldiers' drama in a film.

Result: As a fictional account, however, L'Honneur recovers the past in images imbued with the status of plausibility.

Conclusion: By taking advantage of his enormous experience as a documentary filmmaker, Schoendoerffer produces scenes of a brutal conflict and gives them great authenticity.
Protestanten verenigd voor of door de staat?
Authors: Creemers Jelle
Published: September 2018

Protestants united for or by the State? Negotiating the contours of a recognized religion in Belgium (1999-2002)

This article aims to give insight in negotiations which took place from 1999 to 2002 between diverse Protestant parties in Belgium and which resulted in an enlargement of the recognized Protestant religion. This enlargement primarily served free Evangelical churches, as it allowed them to share in the benefits consequent to official recognition by the state. The article describes their strategic choices in view of full state recognition and highlights the active role played by the ‘neutral’ Belgian state in the negotiations that took place concerning this recognized religion.
De C van CD&V
Authors: Beke Wouter
Published: September 2018

The ‘C’ in CD&V. The Flemish Christian Democratic Party (CD&V) and its Christian values

The Flemish Christian Democratic Party was founded in 1945. In its so-called ‘Kerstprogramma’ (‘Christmas Program’), the ‘Christelijke Volkspartij’ (Christian People’s Party, CVP) cut ties with the explicitly religious character of its direct predecessor, the Catholic Bloc. Nevertheless, the party remains to find its inspiration in Christianity. This article will discuss non-exhaustively how Christian values still remain an important guideline to the Christian democratic discourse of CD&V, based on three pillars rooted in Christianity: trust, love of one’s neighbour and respect for human dignity.
God blijft in Nederland
Authors: Castillo Guerra Jorge E.
Published: September 2018

God remains in the Netherlands: a national research into church formation among Roman Catholic migrants

The first national research into church formation among Roman Catholic migrants in the Netherlands dates from the year 2006. Since then many changes took place within these communities. However, there is not a single institution that collects their addresses and data. Policymakers, scholars or journalists do not have access to recent information. Based on questions about their development and composition, this article updates information about these church communities and places them in a broader historical context. One of the most significant findings in this article concerns the stability of their regular parishioners, that contrasts with the national trend in Roman Catholic Church, which is constantly dealing with a declining amount of members.
Culture and its Creators – Challenges and Financial Issues
Authors: Kaczmarek Stella , Posłuszna Joanna
Published: September 2018

Culture and its creators are the driving force of social development. The paper presents the history of financing the culture over the last three hundred years and looks at the cultural policy adopted in Poland. Traditional and modern forms of supporting cultural activities are also discussed therein, also the situation of artists on the labour market in Poland and the possibilities of future change. The fundamental questions asked by the authors are: what is the future of financing cultural activities in Poland?; how important is culture in contemporary society?; will systemic changes be introduced? The aim of the paper is to provide answers to these questions through analysis of sociological sources and reports on the current situation of artists in Poland, and to highlight the dynamics of financing culture and its creators.
Being an artist: a profession or a vocation? Socially engaged art by Joanna Rajkowska
Authors: Kulig Regina
Published: September 2018

The problem of the condition of artists in Poland is rarely addressed in public debate, which is particularly surprising in the world of growing disproportion between rapid development of the art market (the number of galleries, rising prices of auctioning) and still financially unstable and difficult situation of artists. The paper attempts to look at the economic and social status of Polish artists through the analysis of the artistic work of a Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska who tries to find her position in the socio-economic system, without giving up her creative activity. At the end of the paper the author will try to answer the question whether socially engaged art can bring about major changes in the system of financing art.
Legal comparative analysis of the Roman societas and the contemporary civil law partnership in Polish and German law
Authors: Małozięć Cezary August
Published: September 2018

The paper presents legal comparative analysis of the Roman societas and the contemporary civil law partnership in Polish and German law. The author analyses the origins and essence of a civil law partnership, then describes similarities and differences of internal and external relations between the partners of a civil law partnership. The analyzed sources are: the Institutes of Gaius, the Digest of Justinian, and Polish and German Civil Codes. The author stresses that the structure of the contemporary civil law partnership in Polish and German legal systems is still very similar to the Roman societas, mainly because of its common origin.
Refugees, migrants and stateless persons in international law
Authors: Słapczyński Tomasz
Published: September 2018

In the paper the author attempts to describe the issue of refugees as a very important problem in international law, a problem which generates profits e.g. a rise in human capital, as well as losses e.g. costs, for the countries involved. The balance depends on the policy of a given country, whether this country is able to capitalize on the human capital or whether it is only counting costs. Sometimes obligations resulting from international law are not sufficient to convince societies that accepting refugees is the right decision. The paper will focus on how, with appropriate legislative tools, the united world can help people who are in danger. The author will also pose a question whether enough is being done, or whether the scope and methods currently in use should be amended. The paper discusses the issue of refugees from the perspective of various organizations involved i.e. global institutions like UNHCR, European Union institutions, non-government organizations (NGOs) and contains a review of relevant legal acts such as the Treaty of Lisbon, the Geneva Convention etc. The author also touches upon the practical side of the refugee policy execution in various countries.
The evolution of the concept of supervision over bank activities against the background of experiences of selected European countries
Authors: CHAJDA Michał
Published: September 2018

The subject of considerations is the legal issue of the optimal model of supervision over the functioning of credit institutions. Normative regulation models in selected European countries have been presented with particular reference to the solutions applied in German legislation. Two basic banking supervision systems were identified: institutional type and functional type. Institutional type supervision is exercised by one supervisory institution which deals with irregularities in the functioning of all entities performing bank activities. It has been adopted in Switzerland and in Poland. In this system, the supervision is entrusted to one entity. Functional supervision is exercised, by several supervisory institutions acting jointly, each has their unique statutory competences. The experience of the recent financial crisis indicates a greater effectiveness of the first type of supervision and the need to deepen further the cooperation between national supervision in cross-border activities.
The Labor of Care
Authors: Francisco-Menchavez Valerie
Published: September 2018

Anchored in the experiences and lives of Filipina migrants and their families in the Philippines, the main objective of this book is to make visible all of the forms, roles and definitions of social reproductive labor and care work required in the maintenance of the transnational family; demonstrating just how many people are uniquely affected by migration and separation. A second aim is to critically explore current neoliberal moment under which families are forcibly separated and the reconfiguration of the functions, operations and definitions of family in and through the very neoliberal mechanisms that disperse them around the globe--labor migration and technology. Although a significant literature on transnational families exists, this book brings the scholarship up to date on the technological advances that enables intimacy for transnational family members. Additionally, the sociological analysis in this book delves into the emotionality that comes with care work in migration and separation. The transnational Filipino family, as the unit of analysis, shows that care work is shared between migrant and the family they left behind, albeit unevenly. Further, it considers the shifts in gendered work and expectations (for men and women) and it includes fictive kin and extended family to redefine the membership and function of a socially relative dynamic of “family”. Broadly, this book is about the labor of care engaged by families who are enduring and thriving in conditions of forced migration and separation.
The Paleo-American and Archaic Periods in Yucatan
Authors: Andrews Anthony P. , Castellanos Fernando Robles
Published: September 2018

This chapter reviews the growing evidence of human presence in the Maya area during Late Paleo-Indian and Archaic times. By the end of the Archaic, around 2500-2000 B.C., agriculture had spread throughout much of the Maya area, possibly accompanied by the first semi-permanent settlements. During the Early Preclassic, around 2000-1500 B.C., if not earlier, the first permanent farming settlements appear. The search for preceramic sites on the Yucatan peninsula has not been very successful and in northern Yucatan the earliest permanent settlements with ceramics do not appear until the early part of the Middle Preclassic period, ca. 1000-900 B.C.
The Cunil Complex
Authors: Sullivan Lauren A. , Awe Jaime J. , Brown M. Kathryn
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides an overview of recent data pertaining to the first settled villages in the Belize River valley. The authors highlight the known Preceramic data from the region and suggest that sedentary villages appear at the beginning of the Preclassic, possibly as early as 1200 B.C. The Cunil phase pottery, first documented at the ancient site of Cahal Pech, represents the earliest ceramics found in the Maya lowlands. Long distance trade items such as obsidian, marine shell, and greenstone are associated with Cunil phase pottery, suggesting that these early villages were participating in a larger interaction sphere. As population grew over time in the Middle Preclassic period, interaction with neighboring regions increased leading to a more uniform ceramic tradition.
Middle Preclassic Maya Shell Ornament Production
Authors: Hohmann Bobbi , Powis Terry G. , Healy Paul F.
Published: September 2018

Extensive archaeological investigations at the site of Pacbitun, a medium-sized Maya center located in west-central Belize, have revealed the large-scale production of marine shell ornaments during Middle Preclassic period (900-300 B.C.). Non-local marine shell and the restricted nature of its distribution indicate that some degree of control may have been exerted over the production and/or distribution of marine shell or the finished shell products. The sheer quantities of shell working debris in the site core of Pacbitun suggest that these ornaments were intended for intra- or extra-community exchange. Two different scenarios are presented to account for the quantity and spatial distribution of Middle Preclassic shell and shell working materials at Pacbitun and in the Belize River valley.
The Genesis of Maya Complexity in the Northwestern Region of the Yucatan Peninsula
Authors: Castellanos Fernando Robles , Gallareta Teresa Ceballos
Published: September 2018

In this chapter the evidence for the rise of social complexity in the Maya area is reviewed and re-considered in light of recent evidence provided by the authors and their colleagues in the northern Maya lowlands. A detailed analysis of Middle Preclassic ceramics is presented as well as analyses of the monumental architecture of Poxila and Xocnaceh. The ceramics indicate a rapid dispersion of Maya-Yucatecan groups in the northern lowlands during the Middle Preclassic. The authors also argue that Xocnaceh and Poxila provide evidence of emerging regional statehood during the latter part of this period.
Naranjo, Guatemala, a Middle Preclassic Site in the Central Highlands of Guatemala
Authors: Arroyo Barbara
Published: September 2018

This chapter looks at the ritual practices at Naranjo in the central highlands of Guatemala and the relationship of these practices to Kaminaljuyu and its neighbors during the Middle Preclassic (800-400 B.C.). It uses the findings of the Naranjo investigations as a reference point, focusing on ritual practices that involved landscape and sacred geography, the use of monuments, and dedication rites for constructions. Naranjo is a critical place in the development of social complexity that dominated the Maya highlands during the Middle Preclassic. It is likely Naranjo served as a regional pilgrimage center allowing Middle Preclassic society to highlight cohesion between the sites of the region.
Rising Tide, 1739–1840
Authors: Mulrooney Margaret M.
Published: September 2018

To understand race, place, and memory in modern Wilmington, North Carolina, we must travel back to the city’s beginning. Four of the community’s defining characteristics emerged in the colonial period and had coalesced by 1840 to produce a collectively constructed sense of place. Among them are a kind of geographical, river-based boosterism; deference to a group of elite, founding families; and pride in a localized “Revolutionary” heritage. Flowing beneath, through, over, and around these three qualities was a repressive system of race relations. This fourth trait has never been adequately acknowledged. Even now, the city’s long history of white-directed violence against blacks is still too often suppressed, considered aberrant, or blamed on deviants and outsiders. In fact, racist violence was a way of life, a tradition essential to the creation and maintenance of white supremacy. And whiteness, more than anything else, determined whether and how a resident belonged to the civic body.
Slack Water, 1880–1920
Authors: Mulrooney Margaret M.
Published: September 2018

A biracial Republican-Populist coalition gained power over state and local governments in the 1890s, and North Carolina’s Democratic Party responded with a vicious white-supremacy campaign. Meanwhile, a small group of old-time, elite, white businessmen launched what they called the “Wilmington Revolution” to end “Negro Domination” at the local level. Mulrooney contends that the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup d’état were not aberrant events in the city’s history; rather, the instigators consciously replicated old patterns of behavior as a way to resolve mounting conflicts over race, place, and memory. Grounded in local elites’ interpretations of the 1770s and 1860s, the Wilmington revolution of 1898 occurred after lynching emerged in the 1880s as a spectacle of organized racist violence, while the mass media (newspapers, popular fiction, advertising, film) were shaping a national color line, and before southern progressives crafted their coherent vision of a modern, economically diversified, and racially segregated South.
Introduction
Authors: Kristan-Graham Cynthia , Wren Linnea
Published: September 2018

The introduction discusses the importance of Chichen Itza as a Maya capital, hub of a trading network, and home to a unique art tradition. Landscape is a unifying theme, and its geographical, philosophical, and theoretical associations are explored. Some chapters focus on recent archaeology of Chichen Itza and related sites in Yucatan while others offer new interpretations of the Castillo-sub, Osario, Mercado, and Upper Temple of the Jaguars. Each chapter is summarized, with specific attention paid to points of interconnection between chapters, historiography, chronology, visual culture, social interaction, ritual, rulership, and the disciplines of archaeology and art history.
In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl
Authors: Smith J. Gregory , Bond-Freeman Tara M.
Published: September 2018

This chapter investigates how the rise of Chichen Itza impacted small towns and villages in the vicinity. An analysis of ceramics, architecture, obsidian, and other classes of data at these communities suggests that the degree to which they embraced the Feathered Serpent ideology and its associated political economy prevalent at Chichen was highly variable. In some cases, towns were tightly integrated into the Chichen political economy, but others appear to have been only indirectly connected. The data indicates that Chichen Itza had different strategies in dealing with its smaller neighbors, and it is likely that some local leaders chose to interact with Chichen because of opportunities to obtain trade goods like obsidian that this city provided.