Isn’t It Iconic? A Brand History of Medicare

ABSTRACTStudies on collective memory have recently addressed the distinction between cultural and communicative memory as a way to understand how the source of a memory affects its structure or form. When a groups’ memory is mediated by memorials, documentaries or any other cultural artifacts, collective memory is shaped by cultural memory. When it is based mostly in communication with other people, its source is communicative memory. We address this distinction by studying two recent events in Argentinean history: the 2001 economic-political-social crisis (communicative memory) and the 1976 coup (cultural memory). We also examine the political ideology and the type of memory involved in collective memory. The memory of the studied events may occur during the lifetime of the rememberer (Lived Memory) or refer to distant events (Distant Memory). 100 participants responded to a Free Recall task about the events of 2001 in Argentina. Narrative analysis allowed comparing these recalls with our 1976 study. Results show: 1) Cultural memories are more contextualised, more impersonal and less affective. 2) Communicative memories are more personal and affective. Study shows how collective memory form changes when it has a different prevalent source.

This study examines settlement ritual practices in the Honam region from the Proto– Three Kingdoms to the Three Kingdoms period (1st century BCE to 6th century CE), based on an analysis of 110 excavated settlement sites. Focusing on building, dwelling, and abandonment rituals, the research investigates the life-cycle structure of ritual practices as well as their regional and chronological variations. Archaeological features and artifacts that can be interpreted as having ritual significance were identified through an integrated analysis of contextual relationships, repetitive patterns, and material characteristics. The results indicate that building ritual practices—such as pit deposits, hearth offerings, and settlement boundary rites—appear most frequently and played an important role in the formation and stabilization of residential spaces. Dwelling ritual practices consist of household-level everyday rituals involving special pottery, including miniature vessels and figurative pottery, as well as community-level ritual practices conducted in large buildings and open plazas. These patterns suggest the coexistence of household-based belief practices and collective ritual practices within settlement contexts. Abandonment ritual practices are relatively rare and are interpreted as reflecting a combination of non-ritual relocation and neglect, ritual practices that are archaeologically difficult to detect, and limitations in the available excavation data. Clear regional differences are observable. The Seomjin River basin is characterized by household-centered everyday ritual practices, whereas the Yeongsan River basin shows a predominance of complex, community-based ritual practices. In contrast, evidence related to ritual practices in the Mangyeong River basin remains limited. These variations are understood as the outcome of multiple interacting factors, including natural environments, subsistence systems, settlement scale, external exchange networks, and local traditions. Chronologically, settlement ritual practices exhibit a phased development marked by initial formation, regional stabilization, and subsequent reorganization associated with broader political changes. By integrating household- and community-level ritual practices within settlement contexts, this study provides an empirical framework for understanding how ritual practices were embedded in everyday life in ancient societies and offers new insights into the regional diversity and historical transformation of Mahan society in the Honam region.

The article examines gender stereotypes and speech aggression in political discourse, reflecting generalized judgments about the qualities and properties inherent in men and women, and the differences between them in the modern information society. This study is devoted to gender differences in the manifestation of aggression in political television debates, thereby revealing gender differences in aggressive behavior, stereotypes and features of linguistic manifestations, as well as communicative strategies present in the speeches and television debates of female and male politicians. This article analyzes the problems of gender stereotypes in the modern information society, the academic significance of which is associated with the need to study the factors of political culture and discourse. In this sense, the analysis of the nature of political power, its resources and methods of its legitimacy have not been sufficiently studied in terms of the role of political, social and cultural discourse in maintaining gender stereotypes and the gender agenda of the modern information society. In social terms, the relevance of the problem is associated with the need to study those resources of political power that do not involve open violence, but, nevertheless, act as an effective means of social control and a tool actively used, in particular, in political struggle. The implementation of a political analysis of the role of gender stereotypes in the modern information society involved studying their properties, content and functions, identifying the conditions and reasons that allow them to act as a factor in political relations and social inequality.

This study reveals the strength non-governmental organizations as a place for recalling cultural memory and cultural rituals. In this study, the theories about the tightness of cultural memory to its cultural environment, and the non-governmental organizations through the cross-border travel and the possibility of blending with the existing cultural symbols are described. The Turkish Cypriot French Cultural Association, which has been active in Northern Cyprus for 34 years, has been presented with a historical view, but the symbolic cultural rituals of the living legacies of French culture have been addressed through civil society organizations. While the subjects of cultural memory and collective memory are often referred to politics, non-governmental organizations with contributions to culture are often ignored. In the light of these conceptual debates a wide range of cultural memory and symbolic cultural rituals have been discussed. As a concrete assessment of all these information and discussions, the Turkish Cypriot French Cultural Association's French symbolic cultural rituals are the main objective of the study. In this context, the analysis of French cultural symbolic rituals in Northern Cyprus has been demonstrated by using visual text analysis technique and content-analysis technique. As the information and documents are obtained, the Turkish Cypriot French Cultural Association as a well-established non-governmental organization in Northern Cyprus has demonstrated its importance as a cultural memory venue.

Research on collective memory has long distinguished communicative memory—interpersonal transmission through everyday interactions—from cultural memory, which is maintained by institutionalized rituals, symbolic practices, and annual commemorations. Yet existing empirical and theoretical work lacks a unified computational framework capable of simulating how these two channels interact to shape memory evolution over time. This paper proposes an AI-assisted agent-based modeling paradigm that models the dual structure of communicative and cultural memory and allows researchers to simulate the dynamic propagation, reinforcement, and decay of collective memory. We implement this framework in the context of war memory influenced by annual anniversaries. A small-world social network is populated with agents endowed with demographic and personality attributes. Communicative memory spreads as agents decide whether to discuss the anniversary with neighbors, and these decisions are generated by a large language model so that inter-agent variation approximates realistic human reasoning. Cultural memory appears as a daily exogenous activation process, with intensified activation on the anniversary date. The simulation shows that the model reproduces empirically observed features of real-world commemorative dynamics: sharp annual memory peaks, regular decay between anniversaries, and the amplification role of interpersonal clustering. Results demonstrate that integrating AI-driven decision-making with dual-channel memory structures produces realistic trajectories of collective remembrance. This approach offers a new methodological path for computational memory studies and contributes a flexible modeling paradigm that can be extended to disasters, pandemics, political events, and other domains where collective memory evolves through intertwined interpersonal and institutional processes.

From the standpoint of the cultural approach, the cultural memory of the city is a complex space for storing, transmitting and updating the cultural meanings of the city (events, dates, legends, myths, famous personalities, places, etc.). The scientific interest in its research is explained by the fact that the cultural memory of the city is a symbolic resource capable of determining the urban reality, identifying the present and future of the city. The presence of current and potential layers gives the cultural memory of the city the property of mobility, which makes it necessary to artificial support the city cultural meanings and, on the contrary, opens up the possibility to update their repertoire in the urban space. This function is performed by the practice of urban commemoration as a means of forming the cultural memory of the city. Since the cultural memory of the city is a socio-cultural construct, there-fore, the role of urban commemoration increases, which, through the actualization of episodes of the past, determines what to remember and how to perceive cultural meanings. The identification and analysis of urban commemoration practices can be carried out on the basis of studying the specifics and conditions of broadcasting commemorative information, through an in-terdisciplinary synthesis of available fragmentary studies. Thus, a variety of urban commemoration practices should be presented using the following typology: a) visual and verbal practices; b) emotion-al and cognitive practices; c) institutional practices; d) performative practices; e) symbolic practices. Separately, it is necessary to highlight the practices of urban commemoration, which purposefully shape the cultural memory of the city and are directly related to the memorial culture of the city, which sets the contours of the social policy of memory. The general condition of commemorative practices is communication, which provides the process of structuring cultural memory itself. It is in the process of communication that symbolic marking of the cultural meanings of the city is carried out through the transformation of individual memories into collective ones, as well as through the cultivation of the city memory fragments (actual or latent). In the era of the information society, a special communica-tive role belongs to the media as a powerful generator of cultural meanings that accumulates com-memorative practices. Becoming a part of the media field, a fragment of cultural memory can acquire a certain value, become famous, get a peculiar assessment and interpretation. The presented typology of practices of urban commemoration and the revealed features of their representation in the urban environment are primary in nature and are an attempt to unite separate studies into a single continuum, thus creating the conditions for a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of the city cultural memory formation.

Large volumes of textual data are produced every day as a result of the growth of social media and online news sources, providing important insights into how the public thinks about political parties, leaders, policies, and events. The uncontrolled political comments on social media can cause various harms to society like- riots, rebellions, extra-judicial killing, mob justice, etc. So, analysis of these comments is crucial for the well-being of societies and states. For a low-resource language like Bangla, which has complexities and subtleties of political discourse, a comprehensive dataset to identify political discourse could be very beneficial. To attain this objective, we have built a comprehensive dataset named ’BanglaPSA’ that consists of 5048 political comments. Our approach began with the application of classical Machine Learning (ML) models. To enhance performance, we developed an ensemble classifier by combining ML models through soft voting. We then advanced to transfer learning by employing pre-trained transformer models. Among all, BanglaBERT achieved the highest performance with an accuracy of 94.26%, which represents the state-of-the-art in this domain. Our work demonstrates how transfer deep learning can enhance sentiment analysis for political comments accurately, enabling real-time analysis of public opinion trends.

Moments of ritual reveal symbolic meanings, reinforce boundaries of the social group, and tie actors to one another. Because rituals are so important to social life, ethnographers must be attuned to both institutionalized and everyday rituals of their sites. However, methodological literature rarely discusses how everyday rituals should be treated during data collection, analysis, or presentation. We use data from two ethnographic sites—a yoga studio and training for health care volunteers—to illustrate the challenges of observing others during rituals and making sense of our own experiences of rituals, especially given varying levels of participation and resistance to rituals. We argue that greater reflexivity, especially of embodied experiences, is needed when studying everyday rituals and provide methodological recommendations for improving ethnographic study.

Previous articleNext article No AccessFocus on Political SocializationSocialization As and Through Conversation: Political Discourse in Israeli FamiliesRivka RibakRivka Ribak Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 41, Number 1Feb., 1997 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447416 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1997 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Meytal Nasie, Aurel Harrison Diamond, Daniel Bar-Tal Young Children in Intractable Conflicts, Personality and Social Psychology Review 20, no.44 (Jul 2016): 365–392.https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868315607800Dafna Lemish, Rotem Pick-Alony Inhabiting two worlds, International Communication Gazette 76, no.22 (Oct 2013): 128–151.https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048513504165Hannelie Otto, Lynnette Fourie Media-usage patterns and political knowledge of NWU students: The 2009 election, Communicatio 37, no.33 (Nov 2011): 398–421.https://doi.org/10.1080/02500167.2011.629477Timothy Wai Wa Yuen, Yan Wing Leung How an Advocacy NGO Can Contribute to Political Socialization: A Case Study in Hong Kong, Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 9, no.33 (Sep 2010): 209–220.https://doi.org/10.2304/csee.2010.9.3.209Rivka Ribak CHILDREN & NEW MEDIA, Journal of Children and Media 1, no.11 (Feb 2007): 68–76.https://doi.org/10.1080/17482790601005181Phillip L. Hammack Identity, Conflict, and Coexistence, Journal of Adolescent Research 21, no.44 (Jul 2016): 323–369.https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558406289745Rivka A. Eisikovits Perspectives of Young Immigrants from the Former USSR on Voting and Politics in Israel, Theory & Research in Social Education 33, no.44 (Sep 2005): 454–475.https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2005.10473291Cynthia Gordon ‘Al Gore’s our Guy’: Linguistically Constructing a Family Political Identity, Discourse & Society 15, no.55 (Sep 2004): 607–631.https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926504045034Rivka Ribak, Joseph Turow Internet Power and Social Context: A Globalization Approach to Web Privacy Concerns, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 47, no.33 (Sep 2003): 328–349.https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4703_2

The article is devoted to the specifics of the use of linguistic influence techniques by the American mass media involved in the bipartisan political discourse. The article provides an overview of research related to the confrontation in political discourse, as well as the direct involvement of the media in political processes. The conclusion is made about the bias of many modern media and their use of manipulative techniques to influence the audience. A brief historical summary is given of the two main opposition parties in the United States, the history of their emergence and the ongoing confrontation since then. The news releases of the pro-Republican Fox News channel (hosted by Jesse Watters) and the prodemocratic MSNBC (hosted by Jen Psaki) devoted to the re-election of Donald Trump were selected as the material for the analysis. The study uses the classification of communicative strategies in political discourse by O.L. Mikhaleva, as well as the «classic» American list of manipulative influence techniques. The article makes use of general scientific methods, descriptive method, method of discursive analysis, contextual analysis, interpretive method, methods of comparative analysis. The author comes to the conclusion that none of the presenters adhered to the standard of impartial news broadcasting, on the contrary, both actively used communication strategies in order to influence the public. The article describes the similarities and differences in the choice of manipulative tactics and techniques by opposition commentators, most of which are aimed at denigrating the opponent. The same political event is given a diametrically opposed assessment by media representatives, which makes it difficult for the voter to make a choice. The analysis of political confrontation discourse in American entertainment television shows seems promising in terms of further research of this topic.

The article is devoted to the specifics of the use of linguistic influence techniques by the American mass media involved in the bipartisan political discourse. The article provides an overview of research related to the confrontation in political discourse, as well as the direct involvement of the media in political processes. The conclusion is made about the bias of many modern media and their use of manipulative techniques to influence the audience. A brief historical summary is given of the two main opposition parties in the United States, the history of their emergence and the ongoing confrontation since then. The news releases of the pro-Republican Fox News channel (hosted by Jesse Watters) and the prodemocratic MSNBC (hosted by Jen Psaki) devoted to the re-election of Donald Trump were selected as the material for the analysis. The study uses the classification of communicative strategies in political discourse by O.L. Mikhaleva, as well as the «classic» American list of manipulative influence techniques. The article makes use of general scientific methods, descriptive method, method of discursive analysis, contextual analysis, interpretive method, methods of comparative analysis. The author comes to the conclusion that none of the presenters adhered to the standard of impartial news broadcasting, on the contrary, both actively used communication strategies in order to influence the public. The article describes the similarities and differences in the choice of manipulative tactics and techniques by opposition commentators, most of which are aimed at denigrating the opponent. The same political event is given a diametrically opposed assessment by media representatives, which makes it difficult for the voter to make a choice. The analysis of political confrontation discourse in American entertainment television shows seems promising in terms of further research of this topic.

David Rando's meticulous and thought-provoking Modernist Fiction and News nevertheless begins with a somewhat misleading title. Rando is less concerned with specific news sources or the publication history of little magazines, and much more interested in “the news” broadly conceived in opposition, and apposition, to modernist literature. Rando's main interest is the important ways in which literary output in the early twentieth century—he concentrates on works appearing in the 1930s—reacted to and against the proliferation of newsprint in the space of the “media ecology,” building on Mark Wollaeger's 2006 Modernism, Media and Propaganda.Literature, according to Rando, both appropriates and questions the methods used in popular newspapers, using techniques like “nearness” and “delay” to open up an anecdotal space within the story itself. Rando draws heavily on Benjamin's writings about the modes of experience to lay out his argument; Benjamin also gets the very first lines of the book: “Every instant brings us news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. The previous sentence is adapted from Walter Benjamin's statement in his 1936 essay, ‘The Storyteller’; I have substituted ‘instant’ for ‘morning’ and perhaps that is modification enough to make Benjamin's idea absolutely contemporary” (1).The idea of contemporaneity saturates this book, and Rando is at pains to stress the relevance of his comments about the relationality of literature and newsprint to current times: “Modernist novelists are … the first tentative denizens of the information age who responded creatively, and thus, for us, importantly, to a media environment and public orientation toward experience that has by now become quite naturalized” (23). Nearness, contiguity in time and space on multiple levels, is an important thematic concern: there is first the nearness of a page of newsprint, where each story bears little or no relation to the one contiguous to it except a random simultaneity; contrasted to this is the nearness engendered by Benjamin's idea of the anecdote, where authorial specificity “shocks” the reader into an immediate awareness of events in a way that the newspaper never can. In other words, the physical nearness of news stories on the printed page paradoxically results in a distancing and flattening of affect that, for Rando as for Benjamin, is a problem addressed through literature: “[M]odernists perceived a growing distance between news reporting and lived experience, and they developed and honed narrative techniques and an experimental resolve that made nearness and experience defining values. Improving on what the newspaper promised but failed to do, modernist novelists hoped not just to ‘make it new,’ but also to ‘make it near’” (18).To this end, Rando devotes his attention in this slim volume to a “limited” set of literary texts that includes Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Dos Passos's U.S.A., and Stein's three major autobiographical works, as well as the many references to Benjamin's writing, especially from The Arcades Project (20). He invokes Derrida's Archive Fever to theorize about the simultaneous acts of recording and repression involved in modernist literature's desire to be a better record of the times than newsprint could be. Rando's bibliography is both current and theoretically rigorous, and his revisiting of critical texts like Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide (1987) revitalizes older works that have already had an important impact on the field of modernist studies.The chapter titled “Nearness” begins Rando's exploration of literary space and Benjamin's understanding of experience. Beginning with the division between erfahrung and erlebnis, Rando explains that the move from the former toward the latter parallels the move from anecdotal, personal storytelling toward nuggets of information for immediate consumption, that is, the news. In this light, modernist fiction's use of the newspaper both as raw material for plot and also as props within stories, becomes a resistance to the assimilative, easy-to-consume nature of news media. Reading Woolf's “The Mark on the Wall,” Rando shows how the narrator's opening refusal to date the story “reclaim[s] an experience in time and an experience of time … [that] will form the antithesis to the newspaper's homogenous, empty time, which is held off until the very end of the story” (40). Narrative twists are tied up with formalist experiments, so that we might identify in Woolf's stream of consciousness style “a sustained fantasy that explanations and facts can be indefinitely suspended, that one might dwell in illegitimate freedom, be released from the illusion that knowledge must be cobbled together from facts, and be exempted from the compulsion to live in the world clocked and charted by homogenous, empty time” (43).Rando suggests that if newsprint can be thought of as the “conscious,” linear, all-inclusive archive, then modernist literature becomes the “unconscious,” immediate, experiential one, working with and against its other, simultaneously imitating its methods even while it questions its claims to superiority and truth. Fiction becomes not simply contra facts but a more invidious version of them. It demands that readers substitute the idle act of empathy, which comes from reading news, for the shock caused by the “pathos of nearness” brought on by anecdotal literature.In the chapter entitled “Scandal,” Rando takes on Finnegans Wake and stresses its anecdotal nature as “a space where experience can emerge with a striking and unexpected intimacy not found in a newspaper, and where history that threatens to become abstract can concretize on a human scale not often found in traditional historiography” (53). Rando's comments on Joyce vis-à-vis Dante recalls some more recent work,1 but avoids convergences between Joyce criticism and genetic criticism.2 Benjamin's idea of the “pathos of nearness,” so central to Rando's own argument, comes from the former's “First Sketches,” for the The Arcades Project, and is itself therefore a tacit invitation to further consider literary revisions as an avenue for criticism. Although Rando does not develop this insight, his work perhaps provides fruitful avenues for further inquiry.In any case, Rando begins his chapter on Joyce and scandal with a discussion of HCE's “incident” in the park and draws on the work of other literary critics, Margot Norris and Wollaeger among them, to point out that the book “embarrasses the desire of news to extract reportable events from personal experience [and brings] scandal from the distant spheres of news into the intimate space of readers” (62). While this part of the chapter might sound familiar to those who have already spent time with the Wake, the second half uses the 1922 murder case against Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson and builds on the work of previous critics to demonstrate how Joyce's book of the night can be read as a series of “nested books” (72), the stories within stories loosely contained by the overarching text. The adulterous romance between Bywaters and Thompson nests inside the description of Paolo and Francesca, which is itself framed in the playacting between Glugg (Shem) and Issy, and the passage ends with one finger pointed outward, implicating the audience, with one word of sympathy: “Sowouyou.”3 Rando is best when he stops to dwell in close reading a single paragraph or even a line, and his claim that in each nested story “there exists a moment of pathos in which reports and events fall away and leave unframed experience in their stead, experiences that creep up and spring upon swooning observers” (71) is entirely convincing.Rando's obvious enjoyment in the complexities of Stein and Joyce that open his book poses some danger to the rest of the volume: subsequent texts seem to pale in comparison. He faces this problem in the third chapter, where the discussion of Dos Passos's trilogy is prefaced by the observation that the liquidation of character in the Wake is only one of the ways in which modernism tries to clear a space for itself in the media ecology. Dos Passos “writes characters right on the edge of the news” in a story that has been called “plotless, or propelled forward only by historical circumstances” (74–75). Thus, “[i]f Finnegans Wake denies all abstract contexts that would remove experience from its human scale, then Dos Passos's strategy is much the opposite … characters are seen from [a] great height, almost as mere side effects of news and history” (77). This examination of character leads Rando to deeper insights about language and nationhood that are closely tied to his opening injunction that we look to the modernists' “public orientation toward experience.” In a passage that can equally be read as literary criticism and political commentary, Rando notes, “For Dos Passos, the powerful continue to pervert the radically and distressingly malleable language of America for the purposes of domination, while the powerless seek to reinforce and rebuild the language of freedom upon which America was said to be founded” (86). Linking power, language, and the media ecology together, Rando concludes that “we see different strata of power productively engaged in struggle and disputation of the same single language, in the same way that Dos Passos self-consciously sculpts his narrative out of the common language and media space he shares with the news” (94).Rando's final two chapters, “Identity” and “War,” concentrate on Stein's autobiographical works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas certainly, but more so Everybody's Autobiography and Wars I Have Seen, to show how the anecdotal form is used masterfully to break conventions of autobiographical writing as well as news reporting, so that one is “transformed from the empathetic newspaper reader to one who experiences a pathos of nearness” (111). These two chapters function like mirrors to each other, the first explaining Stein's pains to find an autobiographical mode that has no ending, and the second contrasting war news stories to assert the central truth about war, that it is made up of “endings of all kinds—of stories, of lives, the war, and, finally, Wars I Have Seen itself” (120). It is chiefly and most fruitfully in this last chapter that Rando turns to Derrida's ideas about archive fever, the simultaneous recording and suppressing of experience with which a testament like Wars necessarily engages. Again, Rando brings up the thorny relationship between news media and works of fiction that are forced to share the same media ecology, and shows how War both uses and abuses the techniques of reportage (one of the ironies of a book focused on “being existing,” or lived experience, is that it was marketed as war reportage when first published in 1945, and Rando dwells on the deliciousness of this). If Everybody's Autobiography is a book that is concerned with showing the hollowness of an always-already completed authorial “I” engaging with its own past, War, to Rando, is primarily concerned with ending, a (to quote Benjamin) “Messianic cessation of happening.”4 Of course, in the clash between the “real” and created worlds, there can be no ultimate contest, and Rando considers that fact: “Practically nothing can finally distinguish modernist fiction from news. The privileged sphere of the ‘literary’ is now everywhere and nowhere. The purview of news is finally everything. Between Stein and [war reporter Ernie Pyle] … there is little besides the ability to end, arrest, or stand still that can distinguish them. But it may be that this is no small difference in the age of endless information” (137).Rando's very last chapter is a brief statement he calls “Coda: Make It Now” in which he argues emphatically for the need to presume that “modernism matters most right now, and always has” (143). He cites recent work by Keith Williams and Patrick Collier, as well as Wollaeger, to assert that one must read modernism's questions and comments as relevant to our current perceived crisis in the news media. One cannot resist the rightness of his assertions—I wonder how many modernists would deny that they, at least, find the issues brought up by modernist writers relevant to their own daily, lived experiences. But Rando desires to reach beyond the literary reader, to the socially conscious and politically active one, the reader of works like Tom Fenton's Junk News: The Failure of the Media in the 21st Century (2009), which title he quotes as an example of how relevant modernist anxiety about news media is to the present day. This desire to “make now” some of the most obtuse works of modernist fiction to the field of cultural studies best further commentary. Rando's call to “make it now” strikes most powerfully in an example that he includes in his introduction but never revisits: Toni Morrison's refashioning of the real-life tale of Margaret Garner in Beloved. This novel, as opposed to Finnegans Wake or Everybody's Autobiography, say, is an example of a book that can equally be found in a small lending library or book club as in a classroom or literary investigation. It thus best demonstrates the political angle that Rando is at pains to stress: that the techniques of struggle used by fiction writers against the influence of news media can fruitfully be adapted by contemporary writers as well. Morrison's book is the best example of how Rando's conclusions about Woolf's resistance to reported time, Joyce's flirtations with scandal and immediacy, Dos Passos's refusal of historical determinacy through characterization, and Stein's ambivalence about beginnings and endings might all usefully and accessibly be applied to break the chains of constant and never-ending RSS feeds.Ultimately, this book provides a small Benjaminian shock of warning: it does not do to be glib about the shortcomings of hard-nosed commercial news media. Its strength, however, is when it ignores this larger context and concentrates on the playful, erudite reworkings of ordinary life that make up so much of modernist literature.

In this article, the author proposes to use the concept of 〞superimposed images〞 to analyze the symbols of Saisiat pa∫ta'ay ceremonial song and dance then discusses the possible reasons for the distinctiveness of these symbols. 〞Superimposed images〞 are not equivalent to Victor Turner's 〞multi-vocality.〞 If they were, they would then instead be expected to be embedded in one or several correlated ritual symbols and could thus still belong to 〞a single image.〞 Among overlapping phenomena in an ethnic group's cultural symbols and memories, the author distinguishes 〞superimposed phenomenon〞 and 〞overlaid phenomenon.〞 The phenomenon of 〞super imposed images〞 emphasize the overlap of transparent images of disparate time and space. Each of the 〞superimposed〞 images is visible and maintains its quality, though at anyone time or the other, one image may be stronger than the other due to time order, specific events, or unstable oral legends. The grand Saisiat pa∫ta'ay (ceremony for the legendary little people ta'ay) has a set of well-organized, intricate, and meaningful songs. Through the analysis of the structure, rules, and expressions of these songs and dances, and especially the interpretation of the stabilized 〞text〞 of the sung words, the author discovers the presence of 〞superimposed images〞 of the little people 〞ta'ay〞 and the thunder lady 〞koko yo'cew〞. We have enough evidence to infer that in Saisiat cultural memory the prototype of pa∫ta'ay was a harvest ceremony, which took the form of offerings to the thunder lady 〞koko yo'cew〞 who brought millet to the Saisiat people but was forced to leave.

This paper reports on a particular aspect of a larger ethnographic study of nursing culture in an intensive therapy unit (ITU), accomplished through participant observation over a 12-month period, followed by interviews with 15 nurses. The paper suggests that the ITU environment is perceived as 'dangerous', its dangerousness stemming from the ambiguity of its patients' conditions. Drawing on anthropological concepts of liminality, pollution, anomaly and breaching of boundaries, the paper identifies various ambiguities inherent in ITU patients' conditions. It then explores the ways in which these anomalies are managed through sequestration and other ritual and symbolic practices. Notwithstanding the undoubted scientific reasons for particular nursing practices, the paper argues that there are also ritual and symbolic elements serving other more complex purposes, both protecting patients and staff and symbolising the highly valued phenomenon of keeping patients safe. The paper identifies a contradiction inherent in nursing work in this locale inasmuch as rituals and symbolism coexist with technical and research-based elements of nursing care.

This article presents a comprehensive study of Gobeklitepe (in Turkey), one of the most significant Neolithic sites, whose discovery has reshaped our understanding of early human social and ritual practices. By synthesizing recent interdisciplinary research and employing both traditional excavation techniques and advanced scientific analyses, the study reexamines the site's architectural marvels—characterized by intricately carved T-shaped pillars and enigmatic symbolic motifs—as evidence of complex communal and ceremonial activities. The findings challenge the conventional "agriculture-first" paradigm by suggesting that ritual and symbolic practices may have been foundational to societal organization well before the advent of agriculture. Moreover, the integration of environmental studies with cultural and technological perspectives provides a nuanced interpretation of the interplay between subsistence strategies, environmental dynamics, and symbolic expression during the Neolithic period. Ultimately, this research contributes to a broader discourse on the origins of social stratification and the evolution of organized religion, highlighting the transformative role of ritual in early human innovation.