Contemporary Usage Research Articles

Реконструкция строительной истории подмосковной усадьбы Демидовых в Алмазове

The currency of the topic covered in the article is not only the necessity of national cultural traditions revival, but also the possibility of applying the restored historical objects in modern life as multifunctional cultural and touristic complexes. At present, this is one of the most prospective tendencies in tourism, entertainment industry and educational programmes. The revival of historical estates and cultural traditions is nowadays insuffi ciently used but inexhaustible source for economical and cultural development of Russian regions. Attracting investments allow preserving ancient buildings in future. The Demidovs’ estate “Sergievskaya dacha” in Almazovo (belonged to the Demidovs, the Ural owners of mines and metallurgical works) is an object of historic and cultural interest of Federal signi cance and it is of great scientifi fi c. educational and architectural value. To date the published information about the estate is laconic and sometimes contradictive.The results of historic and architectural researches based upon detailed study of literary materials and especially archives are offered in the article. All building stages of the estate are considered. Unique unpublished drafts of demolished and not erected (because of a disease of the owner) buildings and elements of landscape architecture, which form an entity of the whole complex, have been discovered by the author.The scienti c importance of researches carried out by the author consists of the fipossibility (to the great degree of trustworthiness) to reconstruct the building history of the whole estate complex.The volume of the obtained information allows to speak of the possibility of the estate restoration and to work out the project for its new contemporary usage as a museum of the noble family way of life. This will encourage the development of tourism in the region and draw the attraction of investments in order to preserve the estate.

Social networking sites in a customer communication based on author’s own research

Abstract A role of social media in a communication process with a contemporary customer is systematically increasing, which is reflected in a size of marketing budgets allocated to this objective. Hence, people have always shared their opinions, remarks, and feelings, and social networking sites are perfect space for that purpose. Brands, which will understand the social media essence and lead a narration with their customers in a creative way, have an opportunity to last longer in their awareness. However, it is worth to consider what the customers expect and what they are inspired by which makes them active in social networking services.

Tours et détours: le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine par Catherine Khordoc

Reviews 233 this form of mysticism. Hadley Wood considers spirituality in Mme de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves, and sees the novel’s central concern as the tension between virtue and the court. She contends that the Princess’s struggle and its resolution would have a clear religious resonance for Lafayette’s contemporaries. Joanne M. McKeown considers four novels by eighteenth-century female authors, whose characters face overwhelming problems on the domestic front. Those who are able to bear their situation do so by turning to God, either through what McKeown calls ‘home-based spirituality,’or by entering the religious life.These authors thus refute Diderot’s reliance on reason. Kelsey L. Haskett examines two of George Sand’s novels in which religion plays a transformative role in human affairs. She demonstrates Sand’s search for spirituality in Indiana and her quest for social reform in Le compagnon du Tour de France. In another essay, Haskell focuses on the spiritual undercurrents of Marguerite Duras’s works.She observes the longing for spiritual transformation that inhabits many of Duras’s characters, which is manifested in personal transformation and often expressed as identity reversal,death,or metaphorical rebirth.Simone Weil’s writings are often paradoxical: she rejected organized Judeo-Christian religion, but was deeply influenced by Christian mysticism.Anne M.François traces Weil’s endeavor to establish her own theological system, as well as critical reactions to Weil’s writings. Susan Udry focuses on the importance of the domestic sphere in Malika Mokeddem’s La nuit de la lézarde. Mokeddem depicts Nour, the main character of the novel, as a deterritorialized subject and creates a new space for Nour, a domestic space, within which to reshape her identity. Haskett and Nelson’s fine introduction gracefully unifies the diverse collection of writings in this well-conceived volume, which provides some important clues regarding the evolution of spiritual thought in French literary expression. Saint Louis University Kathleen M. Llewellyn Khordoc, Catherine. Tours et détours: le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine. Ottawa: PU d’Ottawa, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7603-0778-0. Pp. 272. $29,95 Can. This study examines the Babel myth in five works, L’Algarabie (Jorge Semprún), Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique (Francine Noël), Ainsi parle la tour CN (Hédi Bouraoui),Babel-Opéra (Monique Bosco),and Tambour-Babel (Ernest Pépin). These texts published in French since 1981 reflect a more general acceleration in the use of the myth in the media, literature, and the arts in recent decades, asserts Catherine Khordoc. She provides many examples in her introduction of explicit and subtle references to the Tower of Babel. The increased interest in the myth manifests a coming to terms with the consequences of global cultural and linguistic plurality in a world that is “postmoderne, postcoloniale et transnationale” (20). Khordoc reviews the mainly pejorative interpretation of the biblical myth as punishment for man’s hubris and/or as the source of linguistic confusion resulting in human disharmony. Despite common manifestations of the myth, Khordoc shows that contemporary usage provides more nuanced versions, including the notion that multiplicity of languages does not necessarily imply a malediction. The novels under scrutiny all rely on specific reference to the Babel myth, and all are products of authors from diverse cultures who use French as a vehicle of expression. Khordoc’s first chapter is devoted to a helpful review of the transformation of the myth from the biblical story in Genesis to contemporary representations. Even if the reader is not familiar with the novels in Khordoc’s study, this chapter offers a comprehensive overview, easily applicable to other texts referencing the Babel myth. Two Babelian references are suggested immediately in the title of Semprún’s novel: translation and confusion. Khordoc explains that agarabía is a Spanish word of Arabic origin, signifying“confusion,”rendered in French form in the novel’s title. This framed novel takes place in Paris, an example, as Khordoc notes, of the metonymic associations of the Tower of Babel with the city or metropolis. The novel’s complicated structure is an example of...

Usually White, but Not Always Great

The social presence of African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson reflects one of the most controversial social and media issues of the early twentieth century. Accordingly, the journalistic taglines “white hope” and “great white hope” stand out among the most socially significant legacies of the Johnson controversy. This study traces the genesis and use of these idioms from 1908 through today. Its findings illustrate how these historical phrases have become clouded with misunderstanding, and contemporary usage often is inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading. Most significant, white-hope phraseology predates the Johnson controversy by more than a century. Moreover, the boxing moniker “Great White Hope” was not emphasized during Johnsons era; rather, it reflects 1960s phraseology that journalists interposed onto a historical artifact. The study's archaeological orientation offers historians a more complex understanding of how, for more than a century, news and commercial interests have exploited these phrases to advance troublesome agendas.

Impact of Product Variety on Supply Chain in Fast Fashion Apparel Industry

Contemporary customers change their product preferences rapidly and are inclined to purchase only what they need or want. In response, the companies need to increase their product variety to improve market share and remain globally competitive.Apparel industry, viewed as one of outstanding economic engines in history, has been radically evolving over the past 25 years due to retail consolidation, globalization and e-commerce. Challenges specific to fast fashion apparel industry include tremendous product variety and very short product life cycles. In such environment, it is of high importance to effectively manage trade-offs between variety benefits and inventory and/or other costs arising from variety increase. For a category of apparel variants differentiated by some attributes such as color, style or size, detailed modelling is required to investigate the effect of product variety on performance of an apparel supply chain. For this reason, the System Dynamics methodology, a simulation and modeling technique developed specifically to address the long term and dynamic management issues, is adopted in this study. The focus of the proposed model is on the interaction between physical processes, information flows and managerial policies of the apparel supply chain in order to create the dynamics of the variables of interest such as product variety, inventory, backlogs, costs and profit.

Empirical Study of Level of Customer Service at Commercial Banks

In the contemporary customer centric scenario, the main driver of banks’ success and endurance is satisfying the ever increasing demands and expectations of the customers. To assess the customer service standards in banks, this paper is a study of the level of customer service attained by scheduled commercial banks with respect to the guidelines issued by the Reserve Bank of India. The objective is to find the key challenges and gaps in fulfilling the customer needs based on a comparison of initiatives taken by the public sector, private sector and foreign banks. Keeping in view the banker-customer interface on a regular basis, the authors have studied the customer (bank) attributes of satisfaction vis-à-vis the guidelines given by the regulator. Samples have been collected through questionnaires with respect to 16 attributes and the data has been interpolated in variant terms.

Dėl kai kurių lietuvių kalbos linksnių ir prielinksnių vartosenos atvejų kodifikacijos

The present article is related to analysing several cases of the relationship between usage of cases and prepositions with the norms indicated in the syntax booklet “Language Advice”. The article is a discussion regarding some normative evaluation aspects regarding the usage of the preposition “greta” (next to) having the meaning of exception (exclusion), usage of the adjectivised instrumental case in constructions with the verb “(pa)virsti” (to turn, to become, to grow, to get) and some cases of the postposition “dėka” (with the help of). Utmost attention is paid to discussion of (non)normative evaluation of some constructions including usage of the said cases and prepositions that are doubtful in some aspects, their presentation in normative sources and further prospects related to further codification of the said cases. The article is based on vast empirical materials: examples from the “Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian”, the Internet and other texts related to contemporary usage.

FILM HERITAGE AND THE CINEMATIC COMMON

This essay addresses the absence of the image in recent theories of the common by outlining a concept of the cinematic common. A “specter” of this common is identified in the contemporary discourse of film heritage. Here, the cinematic common begins to come into view as a living archive of communicative and cognitive procedures embedded in the networks of immaterial labor. In order to develop the cinematic common further, particularly in relation to the contemporary usage of Marx's concept of the “general intellect,” the essay presents an analysis of Harun Farocki's experimental film Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik [Workers Leaving the Factory] (1995). In a final section, film heritage is re-theorized in order to present the cinematic common in a prognostic capacity as part of the revolutionary project of the multitude.

Wackernagel's Looking Glass: The Mirror Principle and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian Adjectival Long-Form Allomorphy

This paper is a comprehensive investigation of the historical rise and contemporary usage patterns of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian adjectival long-form allomorphy (ALFA). ALFAs include the sets of the genitive and dative/locative case allomorphs, -og/-oga and -om/-ome/-omu, respectively. First, from my diachronic research, I find the sudden inclusion of ALFAs in Croatian grammars shortly following the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850. This evidence, coupled with the early attestation of ALFAs in Old Serbian (Belić 1969), as I claim in Pennington 2010, suggests that ALFAs may have been brought to Croatian dialects via Serbian refugees who fled westward to escape Ottoman (and Muslim) rule. From my synchronic research, I find a clear correlation between a preceding preposition and the addition of long-forms to pronominal adjectives. I link this phenomenon to the similar requirement for full form pronouns following prepositions, given the high level of semantic and syntactic features shared by pronouns and pronominal adjectives (see Sugamoto 1989). Finally, taking into account the general Indo-European trend to place pronouns and other “stressless” elements in the second position in a sentence found in Indo-European languages (à la Wackernagel 1892), and moreover, applying Mark Baker's Mirror Principle (1985), which is a statement on the regularity in the similarity of independent syntactic and morphological derivation processes to one another, I claim that ALFAs arose historically and continue to persist (even in Serbian) as extra syllables that may nor may not still have an anaphoric component (in the absence of a following noun) but most certainly serve to create a bi-syllabic form for pronominal adjectives when following stressless prepositions, an analogical extension of the sentential Wackernagel's Law to pronominal adjectival prepositional phrases. While in Serbian this rule is limited to pronominal adjectives, in Croatian it has been analogically extended to the adjectival class as a whole.

On the powers of powerful knowledge

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to explore and clarify the idea of ‘powerful knowledge’ as a sociological concept and as a curriculum principle. The paper seeks to clarify its conceptual basis and to make its meaning and the arguments it implies, less ambiguous and less open to misunderstanding. This will enable us to suggest some of the research and policy options that it opens up. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the origins of the contemporary usage of the concept in the sociology of education and its explains its roots in the often neglected sociology of knowledge of Emile Durkheim. We draw from Durkheim the idea that ‘powerful knowledge’ is differentiated and specialised knowledge and trace this argument through the work of Vygotsky and, in more detail, of Basil Bernstein. Following Bernstein's analysis of the different forms that specialised knowledge can take, we consider the curriculum implications of the view that some forms, the STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, are ‘intrinsically more powerful than others’. We indicate the limits of this argument and in the final section suggest how the idea of powerful knowledge can be more broadly conceived to include the arts and humanities.

In murky waters: a disentangling of corruption and related concepts

Corruption is not what it used to be. While corruption used to imply a wide variety of morally dishonourable acts [15], with the passage of time a conceptual shift has occurred which has considerably narrowed the scope of what is commonly meant by the term. Specifically, contemporary usage refers to a set of actions of a distinctly material character which was not always shared by older conceptions [65]. Partly for this reason, disagreements still abound as to what corruption really is–not to mention the related issue of how it should be measured. As a topic of scholarly inquiry, corruption has a long history. Even disregarding the public discussions on the topic, from ancient Greece to early 20th century American muckrackers, works of scholars such as Huntington [26], Rose-Ackerman [52], and Heidenheimer [19] date back decades. Therefore, given persistent disagreement on the nature of the beast, it is understandable why some scholars have chosen to refrain from lengthy conceptual exercises. In his Institutional Economics of Corruption and Reform, Lambsdorff [41] notes that perhaps, like Weber’s ‘spirit of capitalism’, corruption needs no formal conception to be recognised when seen. However, though Lambsdorff is right in arguing that other problems concerning the analysis of corruption are equally pressing, the approach toward these other problems, save clear conceptions, risk becoming skewed in unpredictable ways. Too often, scholars conflate corruption with related but distinct phenomena such as patronage or clientelism to the detriment of both theoretical insight and empirical measurement. If theories are formed on the basis of interrelations among conceptual attributes as Goertz [16] argues, a proper conceptualisation of corruption is not only important for the study of both its causes and consequences–it is indispensable. Crime Law Soc Change (2013) 60:357–374 DOI 10.1007/s10611-013-9474-6

Become What You Are: Fi ra and the Discourse of Obstructive Social-Cultural Transformations

A conspicuous feature of the discourse on the boyāt-phenomenon in the Gulf countries is the prevalence of the Qur'ānic term fi ra [primordial nature]. This article seeks to elucidate why this might be the case. After highlighting theological lines of reasoning suggesting that this primordial fi ra can be ‘damaged’ and ‘obstructed,’ it focuses on contemporary usages of the term. It contends that references to fi ra often occur in the context of negotiation of or struggle against unwanted social-cultural transformations and as such can express indignation about the status quo. Considering that many contemporary usages of the term not only are a reflection on the influx of ‘things foreign’ that threaten ‘things authentic,’ but also belabor the notion of a ‘natural’ cosmic order, they often seem to serve the goals of several forms of conservative identity politics.

Contemporary English in the USA

<strong><strong></strong></strong><p align="LEFT">I<span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;">ndigenous and immigrant speakers from a variety of linguistic and sociocultural </span></span>backgrounds have in <span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: DejaVuSerifCondensed; font-size: small;">diff erent ways contributed to the development of presentday </span></span>American English, as have the geographical and social dimensions of thecountry. This paper provides a survey of contemporary usage of American English by describing and illustrating linguistic features documented for social and regional groups in the United States. The focus on variation in pronunciation, grammar, and meaning in American English highlights the diversity of dialects and styles in the U.S. as well as the centrality of sociocultural identities to language use. We group examples of variation according to the social and geographical factors that these features have been associated with in the literature: region, age, ethnicity, and gender. We note though that patterns of linguistic usage differ both within and across communities, with particular features used by diff erent social groups for shifting purposes. The examples here provide a snapshot of the kinds of variation observed in contemporary American English as we move into the 21st century.</p>

Managing customer misbehavior: challenges and strategies

Purpose– In this study the authors aim to explore the impact of customer misbehavior on frontline employees and managers and to elucidate the management tactics and strategies that managers employ in an attempt to minimize the impact of customer misbehavior on the workplace.Design/methodology/approach– Following a discussion of the research design and methodology employed, the findings of 88 in-depth interviews are presented.Findings– These data suggest that customer misbehavior impacts on frontline employees, managers, and managerial strategies. Three main effects of customer misbehavior on customer-contact employees are uncovered: physiological, cognitive, and attitudinal. These are connected with four main management challenges: conflicting pressures, recruitment and retention, counseling and motivation, and time expenditure. Finally, data analysis finds evidence of six main ways in which managers attempted to reduce or to alleviate harmful customer misbehavior: selective recruitment, changes to training and induction procedures, enhanced rewards, work-team design, increase counseling, and alterations to the servicescape.Practical implications– The authors recommend that practitioners undertake a misbehavior audit that explores not only the extent of customer misbehavior but also the mechanisms, systems, and procedures the organization has for identifying, recording, and attempting to minimize the effects of dysfunctional customer behavior.Originality/value– This study contributes insights into how customer-contact personnel and managers are both affected and cope with customer misbehavior. These insights are helpful for service managers faced with customer misbehavior and academicians interested in how employees respond to contemporary customers.

Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan by Setsu Shigematsu (review)

Reviewed by: Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan by Setsu Shigematsu Sherry Martin Murphy (bio) Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. By Setsu Shigematsu. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012. xxiv, 271 pages. $75.00, cloth; $25.00, paper. Scream from the Shadows is a historical analysis of the Japanese women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) that breaks new terrain in the interdisciplinary field of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. First and foremost, this work is an important intervention into an intellectual enterprise frequently accused of being dominated by the Western experience. Second, Shigematsu’s innovative methodological approach excavates past narratives and extends them into the present. In doing so, she enables Japanese feminists to talk across different time periods, articulating their worldviews and reflecting upon their goals, tactics, and accomplishments in their own voices. Third, her analysis of this period in Japan’s past recovers and outlines a political philosophy that offers theoretical tools to contemporary feminist debates crossnationally. In referencing a broad range of literature and using an assembly of methodological tools from across the disciplines, Scream from the Shadows is interdisciplinary research work at its very best. As gender studies programs continue a decades-long struggle to heed [End Page 441] Chandra Monhanty’s challenge to be mindful of longstanding accusations of privileging European and American feminism and to incorporate voices from the so-called “Third World,”1Scream from the Shadows uses the tools and vocabulary of this intellectual enterprise to claim center stage for the Japanese experience. Shigematsu describes Japan’s women’s liberation movement of the 1970s as “a particular incarnation of radical feminism, born from the cross-fertilization of genealogies of resistance both domestic and international” (p. xv). From the very beginning, she places the Japanese experience on equal footing and in conversation with feminists everywhere, making clear that it is not derivative of the Western experience. This work is a sharp and refreshing contrast to existing research that either views Japanese women as lagging behind feminist awakenings elsewhere or treats the case as singular. Scream from the Shadows, as a guide to key writings from the heavily documented ūman ribu movement, embraces feminist standpoint theory’s push to privilege women’s worldviews in knowledge production. Shigematsu carefully attends to how the authors of key movement documents were socially situated in ways that shaped their philosophical commitments while offering a method of reading and interpreting these artifacts of the movement for contemporary usage. Shigematsu introduces us to iconic figures of the movement such as Tanaka Mitsu, controversial as much for what she said as for being the media’s chosen figurehead for the movement. Activists such as Mori Setsuko and Yonezu Tomoko worked alongside and struggled against Tanaka to articulate their views so as not to become defined by the movement’s most well-known figure. The documented tensions within the movement yield a rich and comprehensive record for later excavation. In analyzing the archives of the movement and interviewing its activists, Shigematsu seeks to avoid “reproducing a developmental narrative” in order to “[excavate] the political meaning and relevance of the movement today” (p. xxvi). In doing so, she methodologically sidesteps social scientists’ reluctance to rely on informants’ recall of past events as a reliable data source by theorizing her concept of a translocational politics that disrupts existing hierarchies of knowledge production, time, and linguistic and national boundaries (p. xxiv). Shigematsu’s critical theorization of the movement’s archives and in-depth interviews converts the ūman ribu period into a continuous genealogy that is still being written in contemporary pursuits for transformative social change. In this way, the struggles and the lessons learned remain fresh and eminently relatable. While the roots of ūman ribu are in the New Left movement of the 1960s, it broke away and also distinguished itself from other Japanese women’s [End Page 442] movements that used the housewife identity as their glue. In questioning “the assumptions of the individual and validity of the logic of the law” (p. 29), ribu activists also highlighted the limitations of associating with dominant forms of liberal feminism developing in the West during...

Understanding individual risk perceptions and preferences for climate change adaptations in biological conservation

Abstract Too little attention has been paid to the psychological factors (e.g., beliefs and perceptions) that determine the acceptability of conservation measures, despite the fact that all conservation occurs within a social context. Climate change in particular will demand adaptation strategies that may be cognitively difficult to accept. We conducted a survey online (n = 312) to examine preferences and perceived risks associated with a set of proposed adaptation strategies in a sample of the public. Preferences for proposed adaptation policies were significantly and negatively correlated with perceived risk in every case. Preferences also exhibited widespread conservatism with the greatest acceptance for measures most similar to the status quo, while environmental worldview and emotions of fear and anger appeared to influence perceived risk and acceptability. These results suggest that conservation planning should include considerations for risk perceptions, and greater support for certain conservation measures may be generated by deemphasizing their perceived novelty and emphasizing their contemporary usage.

Descartes and Sunspots: Matters of Fact and Systematizing Strategies in the Principia Philosophiae

Summary Descartes' two treatises of corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy—Le Monde (1633) and the Principia philosophiae (1644/1647)—differ in many respects. Some historians of science have studied their significantly different theories of matter and elements. Others have routinely noted that the Principia cites much evidence regarding magnetism, sunspots, novae and variable stars which is absent from Le Monde. We argue that far from being unrelated or even opposed intellectual practices inside the Principles, Descartes' moves in matter and element theory and his adoption of wide swathes of novel matters of fact, were two sides of the same coin—that coin being his strategies for improving the systematic power, scope and consistency of the natural philosophy presented in the Principia. We find that Descartes' systematising strategy centred upon weaving ranges of novel matters of fact into explanatory and descriptive narratives with cosmic sweep and radical realist Copernican intent. Gambits of this type have recently been labelled as ‘cosmographical’ (the natural philosophical relating of heavens and earth in contemporary usage). Realist Copernican natural philosophers, from Copernicus himself, through Bruno, Gilbert and Galileo did this to varying degrees; but, we suggest, Descartes presented in Books III and IV of the Principia the most elaborate and strategically planned version of it, underneath the ostensible textbook style of the work.

Chemical characterisation of argillaceous sediments used for traditional pottery around Port St Johns, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

As part of a process to better understand aspects of contemporary zero electricity usage pottery-making and firing technology, in the Port St Johns region of the Eastern Cape Province, atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS), inductively coupled mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy were used to chemically characterise argillaceous sediments used in such traditional pottery. The results were compared with those obtained for commercial pottery in the nearby East London region. The major oxides and the following trace elements: Rb, Sr, Ba, Sc, V, Cr, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Y, Zr, Nb, Mo, Pb and Th were determined in the sediments used for both traditional and commercial pottery. The results depicted moderately altered and weathered sediments having chemical index of alteration (CIA) values of 56.99–82.14 and chemical index of weathering (CIW) values of 63.65–96.17. The K2O/Na2O values were 0.19–5.00 and the SiO2/Al2O3 values were 3.14–5.43. Concentrations of trace elements and particularly heavy metals were very low and unlikely to directly pose any human health risks. Diagnostic peaks in the FTIR spectra reflected Al-OH, Al-O and Si-O functional groups in the high frequency stretching and low frequency bending modes, which correspond to kaolinite, and quartz, smectite and muscovite interferences. Based on the results of the chemical analyses of the argillaceous sediments used for traditional pottery compared to those used for commercial pottery, it was found that there were no particular differences in their chemical attributes, thus revealing the soundness of indigenous knowledge pertaining to clay selected for ceramics praxis in the region.

How useful is ‘Religious Belief’ in the Anthropology of Religion?

the polysemy of the word’. It can simultaneously refer to an internal psychological state or a social claim about truth. Needham’s [12] Belief, Language and Experience is a cogent critique of the notion of belief through an examination of the lexical and ideational aspects of the term ‘belief’, arguing against the tacit assumption that this psychological category is a universal human capacity. Taking various uses of the term over time and context, he argues for its social and historical construction and notes that it covers a vast spectrum of commitments from doubt to certainty. In contemporary usage religious belief refers to the acceptance of a religious statement, and colours this acceptance with shades of emotion and loyalty which he likens to love and trust between lovers or friends. It cannot be used in cross-cultural analysis of non-western cultures on account of the fact it places the burdens of the term’s history and its emphasis on passion and dedication on their mental lives. He concludes that we should abandon the term and find a new terminology to replace it. Leach debated whether anthropologists can meaningfully comment on the inner psychological states of religious adherents [13]. Bielo [4] underscores the fact that belief reflects the Protestant models of personhood, emphasizing individualism, and demands right belief and seeks to speak it with the utmost sincerity.

Titles, Subtitles, and Intertitles: Factors of Autonomy, Factors of Concatenation

Common contemporary usage of the term intertitle reflects a misunderstanding of the function of title cards up to the early 1910s. Unlike the later role of intertitles as captions placed in between shots within scenes, early title cards were headings, either serving as titles of individual films (and initially presented as lantern slides) or as subtitles naming component scenes within longer individual films like Edison's Uncle Tom's Cabin . This use underscored the systematic alternation of scene and title and the autonomy of the scene.