bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Some Problems of African Urban Family Life: an Example From Kampala, Uganda, British East Africa
Authors: Gutkind Peter C. W.
Published: March 2007

It has been asserted that the African family is the “most significant feature of African society” and its “central institution.” (Phillips, 1953, p. ix) It has further been pointed out that African marriage is far more than a contract between two individuals but also represents the establishment of a link between two kinship groups. In this respect the payment of some type of wealth is an important part in the forging of a bond between the two kinship groups. Students of African sociology have paid great attention to the payment of cattle or money or other commodities as, perhaps, the most important aspect of the marriage contract. Not only has there been much discussion as to the best definition of this process but until relatively recently the exact significance of the “bride price” has not been too clearly understood. In part this was due to the fact that the wider implications of this aspect of the marriage contract were not understood. There was a tendency to view the payment of “bride price” as the key to the contractual relationship. We now know that this is not the case: in addition to the “bride price”—which is far more than simple barter-—other and equally important points of contact are established in ritual and economic and social affairs. In other words, marriage in African society is very much an integral part of the functioning of society as a whole. At one and the same time it establishes points of conflict and tension which are ritualized by a wide variety of sanctions, and leads to strengthening of the whole fabric of the society.
The Theory of Mass Society
Authors: Shils Edward
Published: March 2007

A specter is haunting sociologists. It is the specter of “mass society.” This phantasm is not of the sociologist's own making. The conception of mass society, that had its origin in the Roman historians’ idea of the tumultuous populace and its greatest literary expression in Coriolanus, is largely a product of the nineteenth century. In this epoch, it is a product of the reaction against the French Revolutions which ran from 1789, through 1830 and 1848, to 1871. Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, fearful of the inflammability of the mob in the presence of a heated demagogue—that demagogue was Louis Napoléon—came to envisage modern society, particularly modern democratic society, as tending toward an inert and formless mass, lying in brutish torpor most of the time and occasionally aroused to plebiscitary acclamation by a “great simplifier.” Tocqueville's critique of the absolutist ancien régime, centered on a vision of a society which has lost its framework of feudal liberty through the destruction of the autonomous corporations and estates on which it rested, is a cornerstone of that construction. The no-man's land between the absolute prince and the mass of the population became a field open to passion and manipulation.
The Political Background of the Religious View of Man in Ancient Greece
Authors: Crahay Roland
Published: March 2007

The history of religion has long and with some justification been under the tutelage of the positivists who have been content to line up witnesses, to catalogue rites and to compile an index of divine epithets—all this with great patience. But it is now being taken away from them, for it seems that it can no longer be confined to description; it must also make an effort to understand.

The subject is therefore evolving along several lines. Sometimes “the religious” is treated as a separate category and subjected to a kind of morphological analysis; sometimes it is viewed in the perspective of other social sciences like psychology and sociology. Each of these points of view is justified by itself to the extent that it agrees with the facts of the matter. But it also exposes the student of religion to the dangers of systematic exclusiveness and excessive generalization.
Myths, Cults and Livestock Breeding
Authors: Isaac Erich
Published: March 2007

That religion has a geographic dimension has long been recognized. Men like Alexander von Humboldt, C. Ritter, F. von Richthofen, F. Ratzel, V. de la Blache, and de Martonne repeatedly pointed to the interaction of landscape and religion. It must be admitted that in many cases the geography of religion became a study in the influence of environment upon religious conceptions, essentially of concern to the student of religion rather than to the geographer. On the whole, however, the geography of religion has concerned itself with the way in which religious conceptions work so as to modify the landscape, either directly or indirectly.
Symbols as Historical Evidence
Authors: Goodenough Erwin R.
Published: March 2007

In speaking of the value of symbols, I shall not go into the vexed problem of verbal symbols, but shall consider only symbols such as can be represented in sculpture or painting, visible forms; and in speaking of their value as historical data, I shall be concerned entirely with intellectual history, the history of ideas, of religion, Geistesgeschichte in general. Symbols can of course help in other ways. To find the recognized symbols of a special religion in an unexpected part of the world, such as Jewish symbols in Central China of a thousand years ago, at once suggests, indeed indicates, a contact between China and the Near East which must be taken seriously. Symbols on coins discovered in ancient sites similarly play an important part in identifying routes of trade. In these cases symbols become like heraldry, means of identification. My concern is much deeper, however, namely to ask whether the symbols of the past have much to tell us about the thoughts and ways of the people who used them.
The Classical Indian Dance and Sculpture
Authors: Vatsyayan Kapila Malik
Published: March 2007

Markandeya told King Vajra in the Vishnudhar-mōttara Purāna that he must learn the art of dance before he learned the art of icon making, and the art of music before he learned the art of the dance; he added that rhythm (tāla) was basic to them all. This story is significant from the point of view of the Indian Arts, since it points towards the inter-relationship of the arts not on the level of the aesthetic experience alone, but also that of technique.
In Search of Indian Theatre
Authors: Bhalla Madan Mohan
Published: March 2007

A national theatre is a representative, specific, and unique image of a community's ethos, and is created through the living idiom, the distinctive tone, and the particular form that a community evolves in its process of living. Whatever is dead, irrelevant or alien cannot be an attribute of a living national theatre. A vigorous theatre is always rooted in patterns of public behaviour. The moment an experience is severed from these patterns of public conduct, at that moment we knock out the dramatic tensions, and the generative action which define the quality of a theatre. The theatre, as an art, emerges out of vital social contexts and miraculously images a community's awareness, its identity, its potentials, and its particularity. If a theatre does not draw its nourishment from the detailed facts of life it remains a toneless and anaemic exercise.
Conflict as a Bridge Some Aspects of the Fiction of Modern India
Authors: Vatsyayan Sachchidananda H.
Published: March 2007

That the Indian approach to literature has always been different from the Western one would be a trite observation. To add that the Indian tradition distinguished literature, or more specifically poetry, from art, because the aims of the two were different would be correct but not sufficiently explanatory. To arrive at a fair appreciation of the predicament of the contemporary Indian writer who is heir to two incompatible literary traditions, it is most useful to compare the traditional or classical author-audience relationship in India with the one obtaining now and set the two in the perspective of historical development.
Romans Celts and Germans in Northern Gaul
Authors: De Laet Sigfried Jan
Published: March 2007

It would be foolhardy and fruitless to try to cover in a few pages all the aspects of the development of Celtic civilization during the period of Roman domination. In effect, the civilizations involved were extremely heterogeneous, and the contacts among them highly complex. This pageant of transfer, mutation, amalgamation and revival stretched over more than half a millenium and varied significantly according to time and place. Only a superficial observer, judging from a few broad common characteristics, would be so bold as to speak of a unified Celto-Roman civilization. In reality, the Celtic territory subjugated by the Romans comprised a good number of well-differentiated provincial civilizations : the civilization of Roman Galicia is not the same as that of Brittany, the civilization of Provence differs considerably from that of Northern Gaul, and the Danubian provinces, in their turn, are distinguished by certain characteristics which cannot be confused with those of Galatia or Cisalpine Gaul. Yet all these regions were inhabited by Celtic tribes at the time of the Roman conquest; the cultural divergences can be accounted for by variations both in the pre-Celtic substrata of these areas and in the way in which their inhabitants reacted to the contact of Roman civilization.
Buddhism and the Chinese Tradition
Authors: de Bary William Th.
Published: March 2007

Probably the most momentous experience in the contacts and mergings among civilizations in the Far East—one shared by China, Japan and Korea—is the introduction of Buddhism from India. This is, of course, a subject on which much has already been written, and even when narrowed to China alone its complexities do not lend themselves readily to summary treatment. Ideally one should have a clear conception of what “Chinese Buddhism” and the “Chinese tradition” represent before proceeding to discuss their interrelations. The most that we can hope for here is that by examining specific points of contact or friction batween Buddhism and the more articulate spokesmen of Chinese tradition some reciprocal identification may emerge.
Historical Origins and Literary Destiny of Negritude
Authors: Gérard Albert
Published: March 2007

Ever since the mediaeval quarrel over universais, there have invariably been minds for whom every general concept is a flatus vocis. And for many African intellectuals, the term “negritude,” introduced by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor around the years 1933-1935, is no more than just a word. Yet the mere fact that it came into being, even though it should have no intelligible content, is in itself significant. It is indicative of the same growing awareness that led to the struggle against racial discrimination and the liberation movements of colonial peoples. But a growing awareness of what?
Theism and Atheism
Authors: Horkheimer Max
Published: March 2007

Crimes committed in the name of God are a recurrent theme in the history of Christian Europe. The ancients practiced torture and murder in war, on slaves (who were supplied by the wars) and as a form of entertainment: the circenses. But in spiritual matters the emperors were relatively tolerant. If the Christians were singled out as scapegoats, it was because they did not yet at that time place the state above all else and still recognized something higher than the empire. But since Constantine in his unscrupulous way singled out Christianity from among the existing religions to fill in the cracks in his crumbling empire and elevated it to the state religion, Europe has stood under the sign of that doctrine and betrayed it again and again. If the words of the founder, his recorded will, his precepts had been put in practice instead of being interpreted by the scholars, neither the unified Christians of the middle ages nor the disunited Christians of the modern period would have had their splendid careers. Whatever teachings could have been taken over from the Old Testament, glory in battle was no part of it. Under the heathen emperors, the commandment to render unto caesar what was caesar's could bring Christians into conflict with the state and, when they rightly refused to observe it, to the cross. But the Christian emperors would have untertaken no wars of conquest, they would have named no tribunals to punish those who had offended against them. The victorious course of Christianity since Nicaea and especially since Augustine, which was not unlike the expansion of Buddhism since the reign of Asoka, sealed its pact with that worldy wisdom which it had originally professed to renounce. Its readiness for fanaticism, without which its ascendancy would have been unthinkable, testified to a secret and indomitable hatred for that attitude of mind for which its founder had earlier been put to death.
The Mystery of Reproduction and the Limits of Automatism
Authors: Ruyer Raymond
Published: March 2007

Samuel Butler sees the nightshirts of the master and the lady of the house drying on the line in the garden next door. The following year he notices that a small baby's shirt has been added. As a superficial onlooker he could be led to believe that the two large shirts have engendered the small one. We make a somewhat similar mistake, says Butler, in believing that the bodies of the parents have made the baby. The body of the baby has no more been made by the two grown babies, on whose pattern it is modeled, than the small shirt has been made by the two large ones… What makes the small shirt as well as the baby is something we know absolutely nothing about. In any case, it is always risky to “place” the organic lines of continuity or of “genidentity.” One risks taking the resulting and secondary forms for the constituent reality itself, the machines for the machinists, especially within the organism, where the machines and machinists are intimately bound together.
The Evolution of Grammatical Categories
Authors: Kuryłowicz Jerzy
Published: March 2007

If from the etymological point of view the term category denotes a class of objects sharing a common feature, under linguistic category we generally understand a class of linguistic units (chiefly words) sharing a common meaning or syntactical function, expressed by a common external (phonetic) form. Thus the words room-s, table-s, pencil-s, match-es, glass-es… are representative of the category of the plural number; (be) describe-d, contrive-d, share-d, found-ed, assert-ed… represent the category of the past tense. Forms like men, children, etc., on the one hand, (he) rode, went, etc., on the other, are also members of the category of the plural or past, respectively, in spite of the lack of the characteristic feature -(e)s or -(e)d, since functionally (i.e. as regards meaning) they lean upon the pattern of the productive -s and -d forms, thus:

the semantic difference between man and men (child and children) is the same as that between e.g. room and room-s, rendered by the sign -s versus zero;

the semantic difference between rides and rode (goes and went) is the same as that between describe-s and describe-d, rendered by the sign -d as against -s.
The Medical Model in Psychopathology
Authors: Weinstock S. Alexander
Published: March 2007

Psychotherapy and psychiatry have long been regarded as proper to the domain of medicine, both by their practitioners and by society at large. According to a statement issued by the American Psychiatric Association in 1958, “Psychotherapy is a form of medical treatment and does not form the basis of a separate profession.” Noyes and Kolb define psychiatry as “that branch of medicine which deals with the genesis, dynamics, manifestations and treatment of such disordered and undesirable functionings of the personality as disturb either the subjective life of the individual or his relations with other persons or with society.” Implicit in such definitions is the belief that the approach used by physicians in treating and investigating physical illnesses can be used by psychologists and psychiatrists in treating and investigating mental disturbances. Like many other psychiatrists and psychologists, we find this approach open to question.
On the Concept of Freedom
Authors: Horkheimer Max
Published: March 2007

Discussion of the concept of freedom in the history of philosophy differs radically from the actual historical struggles in which freedom was the goal. At least at first sight.

The theories of the philosophers appear to apply primarily to freedom of the will, to freedom in the metaphysical sense. According to St. Augustine, the church father whose concept of will is essentially the basis of Lutheran teaching, man, whose nature has been corrupted by the Fall, is by himself incapable of doing true good. All hangs upon divine grace. Man is powerless even to accomplish so-called good works. And inasmuch as grace is granted only to very few, faith alone can save one from despair. Faith is not based on logic or even reason; Luther often said that the beast reason should be displanted. The strength to act must come through faith. In everyday life men are capable of acting according to their resolves; their capability is expressed fully in their profession, in their private and economic existence, but it cannot gain them salvation. In practical life men are to some extent free, for here the state and economic order govern. One may serve the state and try to improve it. But this has nothing to do with eternal salvation. Temporal power may require obedience on earth, but it provides no passport to heaven.
The Steppe Zone in the Period of Early Nomads and China of the 9th-7th Centuries B.C
Authors: Prusek Jaroslav
Published: March 2007

I believe that in world history today the question of the interdependence and mutual relation of various cultural regions arises with renewed urgency. Against those tendencies which place racial, national and cultural complexes in sharp opposition and underline only antagonistic tendencies and conflicts between them, it is necessary to emphasize the basic continuity and uniformity of the development of the human race, and to realize that the world, despite all its complexity and variety, has unity. No human group exists in isolation, and the higher its culture, the more fertile and numerous are its relations with other cultures.
The Transformation of Strategy
Authors: Beaufre André
Published: March 2007

We live in an age of profound upheavals. Under the stimulus of technology, the tempo of historical evolution has been abruptly accelerated. In almost all fields, the old formulas are losing their value and we are forced to invent new ones. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the game of confrontation between human collectivities, where the changes have been so profound that players and observers find themselves baffled by the new and subtle forms of modern conflicts, just when important and urgent decisions must be made at every moment. The appearance of nuclear arms and the development of mechanized warfare on one hand, and the effectiveness of primitive forms of combat in the “wars of liberation” on the other, create a contradictory situation which seems so much the more without historical precedent that our notions about armed conflicts remain largely determined by the recent experiences of the two world wars. A radical revision of these notions is absolutely essential.
For an Asian History of Modern Asia
Authors: Chesneaux Jean
Published: March 2007

The history of modern Asia, at least in western countries, for a long time has been conceived only in function of European history. The question was to meditate on the “problem of the Far East,” which is to say on the conditions and objects of the intervention of great Powers in Asia. It consisted in granting privileges to European activities in Asia: missions and trading, military expeditions and diplomatic negotiations. Such a tendency is, for example, very clear in the otherwise notable works of authors such as H. B. Morse or H. Cordier; while the first had been in China for many years as officer of the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the second was the son of an agent of the Paris National Bank in Shanghai. Nevertheless neither of them knew any Chinese and they did not consider the use of that language any more necessary for an historian of modern China than it had been for a businessman residing in Shanghai concessions during the belle époque of the unequal treaties. The works they published are dedicated to the history of relations between China and the great Powers (Open Door, concessions and extraterritoriality, functioning of treaties), and are only marginally and occasionally interested in the deep movements of Chinese society and Chinese politics: Tai-ping, reformatory movements, social struggle.
The Oracle, the Ordeal and the Bet
Authors: Neveux Marcel
Published: March 2007

Any classification of games, no matter how determined and what principle of division is chosen, reveals an irreducible category: games of chance. This does not mean that this category is destitute of ambiguity. Because, after all, is it sufficient for chance to play a part in such recreational activity and thus transform it into a game of chance? We can investigate the nature of chance, the part it must play and the extent of its role. It is rather clear that in many games one can discern an element of chance, without this being enough to define these games as games of chance. The chess-player who develops a system of attack cannot take into account all the possibilities of his antagonist's reply. He is naturally inclined to speculate on a partially fortuitous future and to rely on a certain amount of “good luck: “ si fortuna iuvat. We have chosen a rather paradoxical example, since in such competition the best calculator is theoretically sure of winning or of stalemating. But in all human occupations, and therefore a fortiori in recreational activities, the indetermination of the future plays a role which can be lessened but not reduced to nothing. From this point of view, what game is not a game of “chance?” Without what sport commentators call “the glorious uncertainty of sport” which is simply the global name for a vertiginous number of unforeseeable factors, determined beyond doubt, but indeterminable in their totality, and so foreign one to another that they cannot be “integrated,” a match of rugby or tennis would have no spectacular interest. It would be the equivalent of an experimental verification.
The Dialectics of Abundance
Authors: Weisskopf Walter A.
Published: March 2007

It is customary to view the development of the Western economies as a straight line, leading from scarcity in the 19th century to affluence and abundance in the 20th. This interpretation neglects the dialectical reversal that took place and is taking place within a continuous development. The relative affluence and abundance of the Western economies is indeed the result of the economic system with all its institutions and its value-attitudes which emerged during and after the Industrial Revolution in the West. At the same time, this affluence was accompanied by a change in the character of its institutions, and especially also by a change in the underlying value-attitudes and in the style of life which it prescribes. The development was and is a truly dialectical one: the economics and psychology of scarcity and its institutions brought about an economics and psychology of affluence which is, in some respects, the antithesis of the economics and psychology of scarcity. This antithesis begins to undermine the institutional, psychological, and moral bases of the original system. A dialectical reversal is under way which shakes the foundations of our economic and moral order.
Comparative Stylistics: A Guide to the Art of Translation
Authors: Etkind Efim
Published: March 2007

The twentieth century has seen the appearance, one after the other, of interrelated sciences which go beyond the confines of specific scientific disciplines. For example, there is biochemistry, physical chemistry, and bionics. Within the humanities the science of stylistics also provides an example of a discipline closely related to other ones. In studying the synonymy of the means of expression (the word synonymy here being used in the broadest sense of the word) and above all synonymy in literary language, stylistics occupies a position midway between the theory of literature and linguistics. It is impossible to conceive of a theory of translation which would not take into account stylistics. The translator's role is not to create a new work, with everything that literary creation implies, that is to say, the indissoluble fusion of subject, ideas, esthetics, and images. The translator only recreates an already existing work, making use of processes which belong to another linguistic system. He transcribes the original into another system of signs which are determined by another historical, cultural, and literary context, and especially by another linguistic structure. The object of a theory of translation is not to develop rules and formulas for translators, but to systematize the most general aspects of the translator's work, to distinguish those aspects which lend themselves to analysis.
The Third Man: Scientific Popularization and Radio
Authors: Moles Abraham A. , Oulif Jean M.
Published: March 2007

Our society in the Far West is evolving toward a consumers’ society. The differences between social classes tend to be erased by affluence and by ways of life that are becoming more and more common to those on the highest as well as the lowest level of the social scale. Thus the idea itself of social class is tending to disappear. On the other hand, a new differentiation is emerging which is based on culture and the form that culture takes in a society nourished by the means of mass communication. We may suppose that in the society of 1990 human groups will be differentiated according to the tastes and aptitudes of each of their members.
Canaan and the Aegean Sea: Greco-Phoenician Origins Reviewed
Authors: Horon Adolpbe G.
Published: March 2007

No problem is more crucial in the history of the Old World than that of the relationship between opposite shores of the Mediterranean. We should like to approach it from a particular though historically central viewpoint: namely, from the connection existing between Canaan and the Aegean basin, or, in other words, between a Semitic Orient or Levant which the Greeks called Phoenicia, and a Europe which was the Occident, the region of Sunset, to the Near-Eastern Semites.
Mediterranean Trade Preceding the Crusades: Some Facts and Problems
Authors: Goitein Shelomo D.
Published: March 2007

Did the Crusades pave the way for the lively flow of Mediterranean trade so characteristic of the later Middle Ages? Or were the Crusades themselves made possible by the meteoric rise of international commerce in the eleventh century, which was accompanied by a similar increase in maritime trafic and naval power, subsequently providing the indispensable supply lines for the Christian warriors? If so, what do we know about the objects, scope and organization of that trade?
Ethnomusicology in Radio and Television
Authors: Pellizzi Francesco
Published: March 2007

The idea of this study stems from two considerations: on one hand Western civilization has brought the audio-visual recording and broadcasting media to such a level of technical perfection that it has become possible to collect and broadcast documents regarding primitive peoples even in the most difficult conditions; on the other hand ever-widening strata of the “civilized” world are interested in the products, attitudes and spiritual world of primitive peoples which these technical media are now able to make known to them.
The Sacred in Social Life: The Senufo Example
Authors: Holas B.
Published: March 2007

The rapid rhythm of material and psychic evolution that the non-industrialized (or insufficiently industrialized) societies of the African continent follow in this day and age inevitably outdates the writings of ethnologists at a similar tempo.

Nevertheless, the correctives that can be brought to bear on a vertical section often appear less considerable than the spectacular surface changes would have us presume. This is due, quite simply, to the remarkable resistance of the deep layers of the soul which conceal the obscure dynamic forces that model mentality or, if one prefers the expression, the ethnic personality.
A Science of Social Control
Authors: Davidson Basil
Published: March 2007

The trouble about discussing religion is that most of us are against it. Since Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo bullied into saying that the world was flat, rational and scientific thought about man and the world has known its enemy: God and the priests and all their works, the whole black cloud of canting obscurantists who have clogged understanding and persecuted knowledge for the sake of kings, popes, proprietors or other baleful fatherfigures clinging to their privilege and comfort at other mens'expense. If the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century did not go as far as Marx and Engels in affirming that “law, morality, religion are to (the proletarian) so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk just so many bourgeois interests,” they said much the same in their own context. They saw Christianity as a deplorable mystification, at best a mere vestige of primitive awe in face of the unknown, at worst an ingenious racket. Wrestling with it, they called for aid to “primitive religion.” There they found “a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity,” since “if primitive religion could be explained away as an intellectual aberration, as a mirage induced by emotional stress, or by its social function,” so too could “higher religion” and the path thereby cleared to that extent of historical lumber.
Cubism and the Fourth Dimension: a Myth in Modern Criticism
Authors: Richardson John Adkins
Published: March 2007

Everyone who has anything to do with modern art recognizes the importance of Cubism, an importance that goes beyond the quality of individual pictures and resides in their bearing on the entire tradition of the past. Cubism not only changed the face of art for all the coming generation, it did so with a suddeness unprecedented in the history of artistic innovation. All other movements of so extreme a character had taken at least the lifetimes of two or three artists to accomplish their aims. Cubism became at once the most influential movement on the continent; within a decade it had run its course and made its impact. Nothing in the arts can compare with it. Still, it is not altogether singular.
History and Present Problems
Authors: Stromberg Roland N.
Published: March 2007

A dream, or perhaps a nightmare, could conceivably haunt the historian's night, in which he imagines that by some chance the agencies in our society which pour forth largesse to subsidize research should undergo a startling conversion and, frightened by social problems or wearying of the senseless march of technology, permit themselves for a moment to doubt whether what our civilization needs most is more and more instruments of destruction, trips to the moon, ever faster and noisier airplanes, etc. Suppose in sheer desperation they turned to the historian for help? What would he answer? It is perhaps comforting to know that such a turn of events is all but inconceivable. Still, the mere thought leads one to reflect, and to remark how little systematic consideration is given to this simple and obvious question. What can historians and history contribute to the solution of existing political and social problems?
Art and Language
Authors: Weidlé Wladimir
Published: March 2007

What is art? —That which is common to all the arts. —But what do they have in common? —This (or especially this): their products invariably lend themselves to value judgements which stem from Aesthetics.

This reply, usually tacit but invariably understood, cannot, however, repress a further question, this time a rhetorical or an ironic one: and what does not lend itself to such judgements? The consensus omnium, acquired during the last two hundred years, can do no more than at best to mark an initial approach to the desired definition.
Economic Science, Public Policy, and Public Understanding
Authors: Adams Walter
Published: March 2007

The great achievement of “contemporary” economics has been the articulation, implementation, and public acceptance of the Keynesian revolution. The gestation period extended over some three decades, highlighted by these turning points: the publication in New York in 1936 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the enactment ten years later of the Employment Act of 1946, which formally acknowledged the government's responsibility for maintaining full employment; the official recognition in 1954 by a Republican Administration of its obligation to employ “Keynesian” weapons to fight recessions and depressions; and the statement in 1965 by the apostle of modern liberalism (John Kenneth Galbraith) that the “new economics” was the “new orthodoxy,” as well as the admission by the vicar of economic conservatism (Milton Friedman) that “we are all Keynesians now.”
Historical Knowledge and the Moral Lessons
Authors: Baczko Bronislaw
Published: March 2007

History is implied in the object, the same as in researches; it is that which partly creates it. The choice of the questions that arise à propos of long historical periods is neither fortuitous nor chaotic. One can discern tendencies that explain themselves on both the historical and sociological planes. In formulating his questions the historian adopts a point of view having itself a certain historic dimension. The different methodologies on the subject of the relative value attributable to such and such a type of problem do not only anticipate numerous aspects assumed by the historical processes of the past. They depend equally on the way in which history and the historian are wedged into contemporary life. The problems of history, the questions themselves that arise constitute a fragment of the history that makes them. History depends then on the future; on the specific correlations established between the present, the contemporary historical reality and the functions that history assumes at the moment, on the one hand, and the knowledge of the past, on the other hand.
The Oral Tradition as a Source of African History
Authors: Ki-Zerbo Joseph
Published: March 2007

If there is an obvious fact for the observant it is the proliferation of studies or popular writings on the history of Africa. The past of this continent has been abundantly assessed. And still, it is a long time since Egypt, who produced one of the oldest, one of the most dazzling civilizations of all time, has been known as being situated in Africa; but actually the renewal of interest does not concern that Africa, it concerns the interior, that which qualifies it to be called the “dark” continent. The non-Mediterranean Africa is the most studied, Why? First, because its peoples are in the process of liberating themselves. They are searching for their identity. They are trying, not without difficulty, to reassemble the scattered elements of their personality of which the past is one of the most important facts. Their history, which, up to now was only considered and studied as an appendix, like a piece of the history of another country, is being understood more and more from the point of view of an autonomy.
The Manifestations of Fashion as a Phenomenon of Social Psychology
Authors: Radar Edmond
Published: March 2007

The phenomena of fashion are inextricably mixed with an infinite variety of behaviours that challenges simple enumeration. A theory offers itself nonetheless in the form of an explicit description of the structures that support its evolution. Meeting the phenomena of fashion in their most disconcerting characters—their omnipresence, the paradox of an imitative behaviour that serves the prestige of the individual, their changes—we set ourselves to isolate the principles on which it works. Thus, in the course of investigation, we have been put in possession of an explanatory model of which it will be sufficient for us to verify if it regulates the other aspects under which fashion can appear. A model that is simple enough, because we propose to show that one has said everything that the manifestations of fashion can be when one has recognised there a manifestation of sociability, of imitative origin and playful character.
Ritual Clowns and Symbolical Behaviour
Authors: Makarius Laura
Published: March 2007

The first Satan presented a visage of dubious sex... Round his purple tunic, a serpent wound its iridescent body in the manner of a belt... From this live girdle hung shining knives and surgical instruments, alternating with phials filled with sinister fluids. His right hand clasped another phial—its contents glowing red, and carrying for label the odd words: “Drink; this is my blood, a perfect cordial...”

Baudelaire

Chosen by English-speaking anthropologists to designate the ritual buffoons discovered among the North American Indians, in Africa and in Oceania, the word “clown” is no misnomer. Our circus clowns are the descendants of these puzzling ceremonial figures,’ and it is perhaps thanks to their filiation to them (confirmed, as we shall see, by etymology) that our spleenish makers of laughter owe their fascination and their capacity to survive the vicissitudes of the stage. But we shall also see that in tribal society a clown becomes a clown only in a subsidiary way, the origins of this figure going back to a complex of causes having little to do with the jocularity assumed to be his unique purpose to arouse, but which overlays and conceals the true nature of his original role.

Translated by Raoul Makarius.
The Future of Sexual Revolution
Authors: Winthrop Henry
Published: March 2007

In Brave New World the ability of a woman to creep into bed with one man after another and to do so with enviable and breath-taking capacity, literally and figuratively, was regarded as an admirable and expected accomplishment. Unrestricted and uncritical promiscuity became the New Look in virtue. The only form of Original Sin—at least in the sphere of sex—was to enter into a relationship that expressed the classic sense of romance. This would have been a voluntary and protracted relationship in which a mutually satisfying, sexual relationship was criss-crossed with a chiaroscuro of shared values, sentiments, ideas and goals and, at the same time, was overlain with the mutual exploration, by both partners, of one another's fullness of being. Today, in Maslow's terminology, this kind of relationship between the sexes would be called B-Love, that is, Being-Love or the deep affection for the total qualities of the loved one and not solely her face and curvaceousness or his vigor and pocketbook. In Brave New World “love” consisted of sexual togetherness, that is, of free and frequent access to the opposite sex. Privacy, in this, the most intimate and potentially nurturant of human relationships, was taboo. A deep and focused affection—one capable of yielding a type of experience which can enable both men and women to transcend the limitations of their everyday being-in-the-world—was an aberration.
Of Work, Drugs and Revolution. the Revolt Against Time
Authors: Caloren Fred
Published: March 2007

Since the late middle ages man, in the “West,” has spent himself in one or both of two opposing activities. His life has been spun out either filling or killing time. The former we have come to call, commonly, work; the latter idleness. By whichever of these morally conflicting or complementary ways he has shaped his life, occidental man has made a single affirmation which unites both extremes: he has tacitly or explicitly affirmed that time is the framework of existence. The point of my paper is to attempt to show that this is no longer so. Evidence will be adduced to demonstrate that dimensions of existence, “categories,” more meaningful than time are now competing to displace it as the mould or form in which life is filled out with meaning. These currents of understanding, now increasingly evident, must necessarily be thought of as substitutionary and oppositional to that in which time was preeminent, because they place the emphasis on a perspective which greatly reduces the significance of time, indeed one which tends to eliminate it altogether, inasmuch as this is possible in a world still largely governed by sunrise and sunset, the process of aging, and so on. Time gained its ascendency in an epoch characterized by man's imperial conquest of nature, or his externalization, effected substantially, through reason and work. The shadow of time's eclipse can be made out where interiorization and assimilation of the objective world have become the predominant preoccupations. In three steps we shall attempt to look at 1) the characteristics of the epoch in which existence was circumscribed by time; 2) the revolt against time and its conditions as typified in the writings of J.-J. Rousseau; 3) some signs of the current growth of this trend in the West, or should I say more precisely, in the technical societies.
From Biomolecules To Psychology
Authors: Duchesne Jules
Published: March 2007

In the last fifteen years, biology has made such considerable progress that it arouses the highest hopes. But despite the importance of the discoveries, particularly in the field of molecular genetics, one must admit that much still remains to be done if life is to be appreciated as a whole, including superior organisms. However, research is facing the complexity of the problem with ever-increasing success, moving in a completely new direction, not simply on a cellular level, but on a molecular and atomic scale. It is this radical change in thinking methods that might perhaps enable the scientist of today to study hitherto out-of-the-way fields, albeit still from a highly speculative point of view, by giving him scope for new ways of thinking. This is particularly true of psychology which, it seems, has not as yet been the subject of reasoning on a molecular scale.
Some Aspects of the Indo-Mediterranean Contacts
Authors: Dandekar R.N.
Published: March 2007

Let me begin by defining my subject geographically and chronologically. For the purpose of this paper, by “Mediterranean World,” I have understood, on the one hand, the Levant which included Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent with Egypt at its western terminus, Syria-Palestine forming its western band, and Assyria-Babylonia constituting its eastern bow, and, on the other, Greece and Rome. By India I mean the Indian subcontinent. I shall deal with my subject roughly in four chronological periods, which, for the sake of convenience, I shall designate as Indo-Mesopotamian period, Indo-Anatolian period, Indo-Hellenistic period, and Indo-Roman period.
Genoa: an Example of Mediterranean Towns in the Middle Ages
Authors: Heers Jacques
Published: March 2007

The great imperial or royal cities of the medieval Mediterranean world were, by their nature, active centres of commerce; in them all the different cultures of the maritime countries, and, often, of those from the ultramontane regions, or of countries beyond the deserts, met face to face. Thus, for example, flourished Cordova, Constantinople, and Palermo.

In Genoa, the consequences of the meetings of the different cultures were not dependent on political power, nor on the extent of empire, nor on the personality or vagaries of any particular sovereign. The town was not a great administrative centre, nor was it a centre of intellectual or religious activity. Although a beautiful town, well built in solid stone, and endowed with imposing palaces, Genoa was not even the centre of a particularly active artistic life. The cultures met because of the very nature of the city, its essential functions. Genoa is a merchants' city, open to distant cultures uniquely by virtue of trade.
Knowledge and Attainments in the Mediterranean
Authors: Gabrieli Francesco
Published: March 2007

In a book which appeared some thirty years ago under the title: The Future of Culture in Egypt, our learned friend Taha Husein put forward a seductive thesis which was as hard to accept in toto as it was to reject: the relation of the culture, literature and science of his country to the West, or more exactly to that Mediterranean culture which is the meeting-point of East and West. Ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic, even the Arab and the Moslem, all subscribed to this “Mediterraneanism,” to coin a phrase, instead of being linked purely and simply to the East, where a scholarly and traditional attitude delighted in classifying it. This abrupt turn to the West is quite justified as far as the Hellenistic period of the country is concerned; but with regard to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Fatimids and the Mamelukes, and without under-estimating its ties with the other Mediterranean countries, one cannot overlook all the aspects which linked it to the Near East, to Babylonian Mesopotamia, to the Arabia of Mahomet, and to the Persia of the Abbassids. But the merit of this paradoxical book, as is often the case in Taha Husein's work, is its vigourous insistence, albeit in a manner which is too rigid and exaggerated, on this undeniable fact: the unity of Mediterranean culture in Antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, although this is contrary to the opinions of Henri Pirenne, which, beyond the differences of religious creed and political allegiance, of language and custom, touches the intellectual heart of man, touches, as it were, his mental predicaments, touches a common spiritual patrimony. More than in literature and art, this “common” quality (or community) is well illustrated in the appreciation of knowledge, in the study and elaboration of knowledge down the centuries.
Modernity and Evil: Some Sociological Reflections On the Problem of Meaning
Authors: Smith Anthony D.
Published: March 2007

It is often said that religious disaffection is largely the result, not so much of intellectual doubts, as of the experiential sense of the world's suffering and injustice. Much of the Enlightenment polemic revolved around the problem of the theodicy and, according to a survey of the attitudes of German proletarians in 1906, the majority's religious disbelief appeared to stem from the failure of religious systems to cope adequately with the “‘injustice’ of the order of the world.”

In the same essay, however, Weber distinguishes three radical attempts to answer the problems posed by the world's imperfections. These, he claimed, “...give rationally satisfying answers for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit, the Indian doctrine of Kharma, Zoroastrian dualism, the predestination decree of the deus absconditus. These solutions are rationally closed; in pure form, they are found only as exceptions.”
The Role and Place of Music in an Industrial Society
Authors: Friedmann Georges
Published: March 2007

Before entering the vast subject that I have determined upon, I must at least make a rapid sketch of the contemporary environment in which we are to place the role and position of music.

The title of the article mentions “industrial society,” an expression often used to designate and compare societies which have evolved economically. But it is necessary to go further and deeper: for the phenomena which are typical of the world today, such as mass-production and consumption, mass communications (or mass media), and mass culture, all these phenomena with which music in our time is confronted, are characteristic of a technical civilisation whose chief traits are found in all industrial societies, not only the Western European and North American, but also the Eastern collective ones.