Naming practices and cultural meanings of supernatural beings in Banjarese society: An onomastic and linguistic anthropology study

Does the Hebrew Bible refer to demons? Remarkably, the standard answer to this question has remained rather stable: although there are indeed traces of demons, there is no evidence of the sophisticated type of demonology that is found in Akkadian texts. While this may be true, a more fundamental point remains unanswered. Did the ancient Near Easterners view demons in the same way as modern scholars do, as intrinsically evil beings who deliberately choose to engage in malicious activities contrary to the wishes of the governing deity? Here the answer must be negative. The present article examines the issue of demons in the Hebrew Bible through an evaluation of an Akkadian subordinate supernatural being called rābiṣu, the root of which is shared by [inline-graphic 01] (rōbēṣ) in Gen 4:7, which is routinely thought to denote a demon. Akkadian texts indicate that the rābiṣu is a neutral being that is nothing other than a current of wind dispatched by the deities to perform certain duties. This point not only informs the use of [inline-graphic 02] (rābәṣâ) in Deut 29:19 but also permits a connection with [inline-graphic 03] ("spirit of God") and [inline-graphic 04] ("spirit of YHWH"), both of which are occasionally qualified with [inline-graphic 05] ("evil"). The evidence demonstrates that, like the evil associated with rābiṣu, the [inline-graphic 06] attributed to a divine [inline-graphic 07] actually references its mission and not its moral standing. Therefore, demons as inherently evil subordinate supernatural beings did not exist in the ancient Near East. They are, rather, divinely articulated verdicts handed down as judgments in response to human transgressions.

ABSTRACTChildren in many African societies have meaningful names – unlike their Western counterparts, whose names are primarily labels. In Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, and many other cultures, namegivers traditionally chose personal names that pointed to a range of people and circumstances that were relevant at the time of the child's birth. These highly individual or unique names were part of particular social frameworks that have long been evolving with Western acculturation. Like the social frameworks within which they are embedded, naming practices are in the process of change.This article investigates change in Zulu naming practices as a reflection of wider social changes. Taking historical accounts as the source of traditional namegiving, an analysis of rural, farm, and urban names shows quantitative and qualitative differences in naming practices. Contemporary names differ significantly from traditional ones, and provide evidence that the world view within which names are given is in the process of redefinition. (Anthropological linguistics, naming, South Africa, Zulu)

Identity is entirely a social construction and cannot exist outside cultural representation and acculturation because identity is within the social and cultural environment. In the context of tradition, identity is related to the position and social position of the community. Dreadlocked children are believed to have more daring personalities than humans who are destined to have normal hair. This phenomenon is not limited to dreadlocks who live in Dieng. Several cases were also found in individuals who had direct descendants of the Dieng population, even though they were domiciled outside the Dieng area. This research used Cultural Identity Theory and city branding. What is their social identity? How does the ritual transformation of dreadlocks contribute to the activation of Dieng's brand as a tourist destination? This study employed the constructivism paradigm and analysed systematically meaningful acts socially, especially on the dreadlocks in Dieng, Central Java. The methodological approach is qualitative. The informants are six parents, public figures, and officials. The result shown: For the people of Dieng Plateau, the number of dreadlocked children correlates with people's welfare. The greater the number of dreadlocked children, the better their welfare. The misunderstanding is that the dreadlocks are special, smart, hyperactive because the dreadlocks are guarded by supernatural beings. Related to tourist destinations, the local government uses it as part of a cultural tourism destination that is economical in purpose.

This chapter extends the ongoing relevance of Bon by considering the belief in the fluidity of five life elements and their centrality to Golengpas’ everyday lives. It offers ethnographic insights into the complex local cosmology/pantheon and people’s strong beliefs in a deep shamanic worldview. It looks at people’s beliefs about the idea of soul loss and the centrality of five life elements—mana-like substances that inhabit Tibeto-Burman imaginations—which as the foundation of a successful life can be easily threatened by the supernatural beings that make up the complex local cosmology. The chapter suggests that the underlying idea of soul loss and the shamanic mythos constituting the world of various classes of supernatural beings give the Bonpos an upper hand over the lay Buddhist priests in relation to dealing with illnesses believed to be caused by untamed entities, who are independent of Buddhist priests.

In his fairy tales, Oscar Wilde represents his ideological worldview by engendering anthropomorphised characters who would respond to Wildean didactic and Christian values. While the major literature on Oscar Wilde's fairy tales concentrates on moral values, social inequality, the concept of beauty, and Victorian consumer culture, this article investigates Wilde's perception of Victorian culture and nature through Ecocritical lenses. Wilde, I argue, draws a strict line between culture and nature, and his representations of culture are elevated, majestic, and alluring while his nature is demeaning, grotesque, and distasteful. Wilde only cherishes the aspect of nature which has become both semantically and physically domesticated and naturalised. The Garden becomes an epitome of naturalised nature which uniquely responds to cultural values. Furthermore, through exploring some tales from both The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), and A House of Pomegranates (1891), I suggest that Wilde's anthropomorphised characters are of less value in comparison to his human characters. Lastly, I elucidate how trespassing culture proves to be fatal for the Dwarf who represents pristine nature.

Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death: Monstrous Males/Fatal Females examines representations of the supernatural dead to demonstrate shifts in the manifestation of gender. Including readings of East Asian detectives/cyborgs, Iranian vampires, and African zombies, among others, This collection offers a multi-faceted look at myth, legend, and popular culture representations of the gendered supernatural from a broad range of international contexts. The contributors show that, as creatures pass through the liminal space of death, their new supernatural forms challenge cultural conceptions of gender, masculinity, and femininity.

Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death: Monstrous Males/Fatal Females examines representations of the supernatural dead to demonstrate shifts in the manifestation of gender. Including readings of East Asian detectives/cyborgs, Iranian vampires, and African zombies, among others, This collection offers a multi-faceted look at myth, legend, and popular culture representations of the gendered supernatural from a broad range of international contexts. The contributors show that, as creatures pass through the liminal space of death, their new supernatural forms challenge cultural conceptions of gender, masculinity, and femininity.

Jinns are an important part of Arabic culture and have been weaved into the texture of the Arabic language and literature; however, the overlap between the different classes of Jinns and the various interpretations of the entities mean that the translator is faced with the problem of non-equivalence when translating Jinns into another language. Taking this into account, the aim of this study is to determine the strategies used in the translation of four different classes of Jinns in Naguib Mahfouz’s Layali Alf Layla into English. To conduct the study, the Arabic lexical items are extracted, listed, and described in the light of their cultural and linguistic background. Their counterparts in the English translation, Arabian Nights and Days, are also located and discussed, taking into consideration their cultural and linguistic background. The pairs are then compared in order to identify the relationships between the corresponding items and to examine the translation strategies employed. The strategies for dealing with non-equivalence as proposed by Baker (2018) are used as a framework for analysis. The results show that the translator employed the use of strategies such as translation by a cultural substitution, a related word, a less expressive word and omission when rendering the supernatural beings into English. T he study concludes that understanding the nature of the Jinns in the source text and the different levels of meaning carried by each supernatural being can assist the translator in finding the most suitable equivalent in the target language for the different classes of Jinns. Keywords: Jinn; Arabic literature; Naguib Mahfouz; literary translation; translation strategies

New Nordic Mythologies

As displayed by several myths and legends, water is a powerful means of destruction and reconfiguration of natural and human landscapes. This is especially evident when a flood is sent by god(s) or supernatural beings to punish sinful people and corrupt cities. Generally, this kind of catastrophe brings about the disappearance of a whole human community and the resulting transformation of a certain place. However, it may also happen that one or few persons, because of their piety or righteousness, are spared by the divine anger, sometimes along with their houses or something else. The present work starts from a discovery on the field of a local legend concerning Lake Varano, a coastal body of water in the Gargano peninsula (Apulia, Italy). According to this legend, Lake Varano would be the outcome of an ancient flood, sent by God to punish a prosperous and corrupt city, Uria, once flourishing in the place of the lake. Just like other more famous floods, this local flood is meant to mark a transition between an evil past, embodied by the sunken Uria, and a good present, embodied by a little church, formerly the house of the only survivor, Nunzia, a pious woman. As part of the broader corpus of flood narratives, this legend and the other ones here considered distinguish themselves as featuring a lake, which physically and symbolically shapes and connotes the religious, historical and geographical identity of a local community. Starting from Lake Varano’s origin legend, a structural and thematic analysis is conducted on a number of similar legends, in order to identify, classify and understand a particular category of narrative folklore, characterized by a significant interplay between water (flood- and lake-lore), history (ancient cities vanished), religious beliefs (retributive gods) and moral principles (evil and good). Eventually, such a comparative work will lead back to Lake Varano’s legend, because of the peculiarity of its heroine; unlike all the other survivors, who are passively rescued from a flood, Nunzia plays indeed an active part in the drama, thus resulting a co-author, with the flood, of a local place-making, that is the main concern of these legends.

Brian Leiter is familiar to virtually every philosopher in the English-speaking world and beyond. He is especially well known for his widely read blog, Leiter Reports, and even more for his compilation of the Philosophical Gourmet—a hugely popular and influential ranking of philosophy departments throughout the English-speaking world. Philosophers with no connections to his fields of expertise have become acquainted with him through his admirable efforts in the foregoing ventures. Though Leiter has occasionally written in other areas of philosophy, his main fields of expertise are Nietzsche, legal philosophy, and meta-ethics. Within those fields (especially the first two), his work has been prominent and much esteemed. The volume under review deals only occasionally and passingly with Nietzsche, but it covers Leiter’s other two areas of specialization. While most of the book focuses on legal philosophy, its final few chapters—especially the antepenultimate and penultimate chapters—concentrate principally on meta-ethics. Each of the nine chapters in the book has been previously published, but Leiter adds quite a bit of new material: a short Introduction, a Note on Indeterminacy, and two substantial Postscripts. Throughout, his prose is splendidly lucid, and his arguments are forcefully and piquantly presented. Readers who dissent from some of his philosophical stances (as I do) will profit greatly from engaging with his vigorously articulated lines of reasoning. Leiter is an incisive and erudite philosopher with whom disagreements are stimulatingly worthwhile. What unifies the various chapters in the book is Leiter’s strongly naturalistic philosophical outlook. According to his naturalistic credo, the causally efficacious entities and forces (and the relationships among them) investigated and confirmed by the natural sciences are the only things that are real. Nothing else partakes of reality. Excluded by his criterion for reality, quite rightly, are supernatural beings such as ghosts and witches and deities and fairies. Much more controversially, his criterion for reality excludes non-natural things such as moral values. The nine chapters of Leiter’s book are divided into three clusters, each of which consists of three chapters. The first cluster focuses on Legal Realism and on general jurisprudential

Manuscript illuminations are the early forms of traditional Nepali paintings. Manuscript illuminations are the miniature paintings found in the manuscripts, the handwritten religious texts and treaties on ethics. Such paintings tell the mythical stories in visual form. Some manuscript illuminations present the characters and events in such a way that they tell moral stories using visual medium. Sometimes, the contents appear in the form of fable. The animals are personified, for they act and behave like a human being. In some cases, the visual narration is allegorical in the sense that one set of characters, setting and events stand for other characters, place and activities. Although some characters are animals and supernatural beings, they reflect on this world, human beings and objects in the world. Such paintings explore real world, human experiences and moral values through strange, unusual and de-autometized art forms. The paintings attempt to create moral order in the then contemporary society. This article traces such issues and themes in narrative paintings found in manuscripts like Vishnudharma, Shivadharma, Devimahatmya, Pancaraksa, VesantaraJataka and Hitopadesa.

Foundational linguistic anthropological theories of community, identity, and multimodality, among other topics, offer invaluable insights into communicative practices on social media. Phenomena on social media also require researchers to continually adapt and update these theories—which were first conceptualized before social media became integral to everyday life—to account for the unique communicative possibilities afforded by constantly evolving digital technology. Like anthropological studies in in-person contexts, anthropological studies of language and culture online vary in scope, theoretical framing, and methodological approach depending on their central topics of inquiry. Social media can be studied within a primarily in-person ethnographic project as one of many sites of communication for members of a community in addition to (or overlapping with) contexts such as work, school, and the home. Social media can also be studied as primary sites of analysis through digital ethnographic approaches, typically focused on the communication patterns within a network or community of social media users on a single platform. Linguistic anthropological perspectives on social media are necessarily interdisciplinary, informed by scholarship in related fields including sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, communication studies, and media studies. To this interdisciplinary understanding linguistic anthropology contributes a unique perspective attuned to the details of linguistic structure and the ways language and culture are mutually constitutive.

Native speakers traditionally occupy a special position in foreign language teaching and learning because their language use is norm-providing. In linguistic studies they are crucial as informants because they decide whether an utterance is correct or incorrect. Although Esperanto as a planned language aims at facilitating international communication by means of a common second language, there are also people who speak this language as a mother tongue, a fact that has recently received growing attention both within and beyond the Esperanto-speaking community. The phenomenon deserves attention because it throws light on the character of the speech community, and especially on questions of language loyalty and speaker identity. In addition, the use of Esperanto as a family language stimulates the development of the language. However, the status of Esperanto native speakers cannot be equated with the status of native speakers of an ethnic language both because of their limited number and also because Esperanto is only one of their mother tongues among several. Above all, native Esperanto speakers do not decide on the standard of the planned language.

REVIEWS625 Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality. Ed. by Charles L. Briggs. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 7). New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. ii, 248. $49.95. Reviewed by James Stanlaw, Illinois State University Most anthropologists and linguists would agree that narratives are critical devices that can be used to establish social organization, convey values, reify power structures, and solve disputes. Few would also deny that conflict, on any number of levels, is part of our daily lives. But as Charles Briggs, the editor of this volume, says, conflict and narrative have usually been treated in relative isolation (3). This collection of essays—which grew out of a special session of the American Ethnological Association meetings in 1988—is an attempt to examine them together linguistically in an ethnographic context. In a long introduction, B sets a theoretical grounding for how narrative might sustain, create, and mediate conflict. In essence, this is a review essay of about 175 sources examining most of the critical literature through about 1994. But more than that, B, in lucid detail, discusses how ideology articulates with hegemony, how power meets with resistance, as well as how symbols, icons, and indexes operate in discourse and metadiscursive practices. The logic behind why the following eight papers are presented is clearly stated. The book's first chapter is Donald Brenneis's discussion of conflict resolution using talanoa 'gossip' and pancayat 'mediation' in an East Indian community in the Fiji Islands. The former is raucous, quick, and entertaining while the later is staid, formal, and deliberate. Gossip holds people together through a kind of friendship diat is often difficult to achieve in this 'perilously flexible social world' (47) while formal mediation sessions reinforce the egalitarian sense of community where everyone has the right to have their say. Besides helping to resolve specific disputes, these two narrative devices extol culturally salient models of discourse and behavior. In the second article, Ellen Basso examines Taugi, me trickster figure of me Kalapalo of central Brazil. Tricksters—who are both mythological culture heroes and clowns who violate the most sacred of social taboos—are found throughout the world's societies, particularly in indigenous America. They have long been objects of fascination for anthropologists and psychoanalysts alike. By considering tricksters as 'narrativized selves' (54) we can see how Taugi creates his ambiguous persona through his self-referential discourse (by such means as not using evidential particles in his speech). In the book's third chapter, Michael Herzfeld discusses the creation of 'honor among thieves' in a society of sheep-poachers. He explores a number of narrative and linguistic devices some highland villagers in Crete use to suggest that they have no choice but to resort to thievery, even though they may be quite cognizant of the legal and moral sanctions they have violated. This moral ambiguity is compounded when two moral codes—that of the village and that of the nation-state (which share a partially common rhetoric)—can be played off one another. The fourth entry takes us to that most exotic of field sites, the American dinner table. In this article, Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor describe the kind of talk that often occurs between parents and children over the evening meal as the events of the day are related to other family members. One particular form of discourse—what the authors call 'detective stories'—is seen as being 'co-narrated' by both speaker and listeners. A detective story here is one where some participants feel there is missing information critical to the plot or the motivation of the characters. In Lieutenant Columbo-like fashion, an interrogator may persist in seeking information beyond the initial version of the story, which (at least in some sense) could be considered already complete. For instance, in one example given, a young girl describes her incredulity at a classmate only getting a detention for an infraction (lifting up her dress in front of the boys) that she felt should have merited at least a suspension. However, on closer questioning by her brother, it turns out the girl has also had a detention in the past—a fact that for obvious reasons...