Cultural Milieu Research Articles

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Squeezing Juice from the 'Fruits of the Caliphs:' Tastes, Contexts, and Textual Transplantation at a Late Medieval Egyptian Court

This article concerns themes of translation, movement, and context in its examination of the intentions behind the composition of Ahmad ibn ʿArabshah's (1389–1450) mid-fifteenth-century opus of animal fables and anecdotal advice literature, the Fakihat al-khulafaʾ wa mufakahat al-zurafaʾ (Fruits of the Caliphs and Witty Banter of the Stylish Folk). With some alterations, including the introduction of a substantial amount of historical material in its ultimate and penultimate chapters, Ibn ʿArabshah's Fruits of the Caliphs is primarily an expanded reworking of an earlier work, the thirteenth-century Marzban-nama (Book of Marzban) attributed to Saʿd al-Din al-Warawini. Like the Book of Marzban, the Fruits of the Caliphs is largely a collection of moralistic animal fables and anecdotes of wisdom, bound together within several smaller stories which comprise a larger framework story. The ten chapters of the Fruits of the Caliphs share much in common with the Book of Marzban although Ibn ʿArabshah completed significant re-writing of the original tales with historical asides, changed names, and observations unique to his own mid-fifteenth-century interpretation of the book. Because the work is primarily an Arabic translation of an earlier Persianate mirror, it proves challenging to analyze as an "original" work. Nevertheless, Ibn ʿArabshah attempted to modernize the book and in its Arabic form, update it for what we may assume must be a late medieval Cairene courtly audience. In addition to engaging with the curious title of the work and its latent meanings, this article contextualizes and explains the author's creation of the work in relation to his later career trajectory and rising reputation in the fifteenth-century Syro-Egyptian cultural milieu.

Tiresome or Pamphleteering? The Use of Periautologia in Libanius of Antioch’s To Those Who Called Him Tiresome (Or. 2)

The study of periautologia (“self-praise”) in Ancient Greek literature has been somehow overlooked even though its presence is felt in numerous works. The absence of the analysis of periautologia is even more remarkable in the case of the works composed by the sophist Libanius of Antioch given the autobiographical nature of most of his speeches. Thus, in this paper I surveyed the use and the purposes of periautologia in one of his speeches—Or. 2, To those who called him tiresome—in order to ascertain which rhetorical and literary strategies were deployed by Libanius. The sophist’s concern with losing his influence in the cultural and political milieu of the end of the fourth century AD contributes to explain the frequent use of periautological passages in his Or. 2.

Chen Yi by Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards

Reviewed by: Chen Yi by Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards Peng Liu Chen Yi. By Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards. (Women Composers.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. [264 p. ISBN 9780252043543 (hardback), $110; ISBN 9780252085444 (paperback), $28; ISBN 9780252052422 (e-book), price varies.] Glossary, list of works, notes, references, index. Writing a book about the life and music of Chinese American composer Chen Yi is not a simple task, largely because of the composer’s intercultural and transnational life experiences and the musical amalgamation instantiated in her over 150 compositions. Succeeding in such a task requires scholars to possess not only an extensive analytical knowledge of two seemingly divergent musical systems—modern Western compositional techniques and traditional Chinese musical genres and aesthetics—but also a deep understanding of the complicated political and cultural milieu that shapes Chen Yi’s identity. Therefore, the publication of Chen Yi, an illuminating book by American scholars Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards, is by no means a small accomplishment. As the fifth and latest volume in the Women Composers series published by the University of Illinois Press—as well as the only one featuring a non-White composer so far—Chen Yi presents a captivating narrative of the composer’s career and highlights her unique musical identity through concise and insightful readings of nearly thirty selected works. Though lim -ited in its scope due to the series’s general goal of providing “short, readable books about women composers,” Miller and Edwards’s examination of Chen Yi’s life journey and compositional strategies is quite informative and revealing, drawing on current scholarship, the authors’ own research and analysis, and their extensive interviews with Chen Yi, conducted in 2015 and 2016. As an overview of the composer’s music, Chen Yi naturally devotes the majority of its content to an analysis of Chen’s works, bookended by a biographical chapter and a concluding chapter on the political and social issues that influence Chen Yi and her music. In their chronological discussion of Chen Yi’s life in chapter 2, Miller and Edwards place the composer’s unusual musical journey within the broader contexts of history, politics, and pivotal [End Page 230] musical institutions. As the authors note, Chen Yi’s early musical training was almost exclusively Eurocentric until Mao’s “down-to-the-countryside” mandate during the Cultural Revolution, when she was relocated to a small village and had chances to play “revolutionary tunes . . . adapted from folk material” and “embellish the simple tunes with ornamentation” (pp. 14–15). Her taste for traditional Chinese music was further enriched while playing violin in the orchestra of the Guangzhou Beijing Opera Troupe for yangbanxi (“model operas,” or modernized Beijing operas with new plots, character development, staging, and instrumental accompaniment) from 1970 to 1978. Chen Yi not only learned some Chinese instruments, like pipa, jinghu, and ruan, but also gained serious compositional experience by writing music for the opera troupe’s orchestra. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chen Yi received professional training as a composer in two institutions: the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing (1978–86) and Columbia University in New York City (1986–93). While the former provided Chen Yi a solid foundation in Western compositional techniques and exposure to various types of traditional Chinese music, the latter expanded her knowledge and reinforced her musical identity under the particular influence of Chou Wen-chung’s wenren (ancient Chinese philosopher-artist) spirit. After her doctoral studies at Columbia, Chen Yi’s career as an international composer was officially on the rise, from her three-year residency at the Women’s Philharmonic, where she first became aware of gender inequity in her field, to a transitional period at the Peabody Conservatory, and finally to a tenured position as professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC), which she has held since 1998. Rather than giving a prose narrative of Chen Yi’s career since her appointment at UMKC, the authors choose to highlight selected honors, awards, commissions, and major performances at the end of the chapter. This four-page list only heightens admiration for Chen Yi’s remarkable artistic accomplishments and...

The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross

Reviewed by: The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross Camden Burd (bio) Keywords Transcendentalism, Social history, Intellectual history, Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Community The Transcendentalists and Their World. By Robert A. Gross. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pp. 864. Cloth, $40.00.) Robert Gross invites us back to Concord, Massachusetts in his latest work, The Transcendentalists and Their World. The title should sound familiar. It echoes his similarly named and Bancroft Prize-winning work, The Minutemen and Their World, published in 1976.1 In many ways, the book feels like a sequel. The Transcendentalists and Their World bears the hallmarks of new social history (rebuilding community profiles, outlining the divisions among group members, tracking ideas, economic shifts, cultural influences, generational change). Gross even notes that the work "began as an investigation into how the close world of the Minutemen, with its communal ethic and its inclusive institutions, gave way to the individualistic society of the Transcendentalists" (xx). The book links local happenings to this broader intellectual movement by arguing that broader social transformations were already underway by the time Emerson and Thoreau began their scribbling in Concord. Through painstaking research, Gross tracks a fracturing community in order to better [End Page 670] understand how, and why, Transcendentalism took root in this New England village. In order to understand the Transcendentalists, Gross argues that we must understand Concord in the decades leading up to 1830s. In doing so, we discover a village brewing with the cultural, social, economic, political, and intellectual milieu that would eventually develop into a movement. By 1825, villagers closed the door on the old-style political presumptions of the Federalists and embraced the new democratizing spirit of republicanism. The momentary pause in political strife was replaced with religious schism as the long-standing First Parish Church experienced a wave of dissent from congregants seeking a more conservative approach to worship. Communal bonds continued to break away as the industrial revolution and the market economy chipped away at long-standing social norms. Roads and railroads connected Concord to larger markets. Commercial agricultural, industrialization, and professional specialization—the hallmarks of the burgeoning capitalist economy—all took root in Concord during the 1820s. Forests fell; creeks and rivers were dammed; debt and distrust bloomed. Ideas also spread on commercial networks. School reform, the temperance movement, and Anti-Masonry all found a welcome audience in Concord whose residents came to embrace the promise of individualism and self-improvement. The Concord of the early nineteenth century was a village questioning traditionalism, transformed by the marketplace, and immersed in new ideas about politics, education, and the individual. Ralph Waldo Emerson arrived in Concord at a time when the community seemed to be fracturing under pressure from these new commercial and social forces. He, himself, was looking for change. Like many around him, Emerson was growing disinterested with traditional religious philosophy and soon took interest in the Transcendental reform movements that spread within the ranks of Unitarian clergy. Concord was an ideal place for him to evaluate New England and track its anxieties—all while finding a ready market for his ideas in nearby Boston. "Concord did not make Emerson a Transcendentalist," Gross makes sure to clarify, "but if afforded ample resources with which to illustrate and apply his observations of New England life" (385–86). His essay and speeches on education, individualism, and self-reliance were infused with inspiration from local debates. Though the origins of his new philosophy could be traced to German roots, Emerson's version of Transcendentalism was deeply local—reflecting a community at the crossroads of change in the second [End Page 671] quarter of the nineteenth century. Perhaps less surprisingly, Gross tracks the local influences of Henry David Thoreau's ideas. "The civic spirit and religious vision that Puritans had bequeathed to the Minutemen and thence to the leaders of Concord in the new republic were the seedbed in which the native's son vision of ecology of germinated" (608). Even Thoreau's conception of nature, a proto-ecological philosophy for man and the natural world, was the culmination of experiences with local environments, community residents, and cultural processes. In Gross's retelling...

Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne by Sophie Reyer

Reviewed by: Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne by Sophie Reyer Andrew B. B. Hamilton Sophie Reyer, Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021. 281 pp. Was Stefan Zweig a good writer? Hardly any question of literary merit seems to elicit such polarizing opinions among readers of German as this one. Now, eighty years after his death, we are still echoing the ambivalence of Zweig's contemporaries—and from the author himself. This ambivalence is near the root of the fascination Zweig exerts over his many readers. For Zweig is remembered at once as a man, as a symbol, and an author: his image is the embodiment of an entire cultural milieu characterized as much by cosmopolitan elegance as by impotence in the face of epochal violence. The best works on Zweig produced in this century have been creative or idiosyncratic works that understand the uncertain bonds connecting the [End Page 78] man, the work, and the persona that derive from this his curious place in cultural memory. Such films as Maria Schrader's Vor der Morgenröte (2016) and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) concern themselves more with how Zweig is seen and remembered than how he was or what his books are like. George Prochnik's unconventional biography The Impossible Exile (2014) frames much of its narration through the lens of Zweig's rising and falling literary reputation. To this constellation, we can now add Sophie Reyer's novel Stefan Zweig: Die Entfernung der Sterne. Reyer has taken on quite a challenge, for while Zweig's life offers an abundance of material, any novelization of the author's life is obliged to compete with Zweig's own autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern, which for all its flaws remains one of his best-loved works. Indeed, it is from this work that so much of his persona is derived. It is hard to imagine any work of Viennese nostalgia supplanting its status. A number of approaches to this problem are possible. A twenty-first-century reader might expect a critical eye toward Zweig's rosy image of the Habsburg world. But Reyer's approach is at once more naïve and more creative than this. Reyer's work spans forms and genres, including fiction, poetry, theater, and performances of various kinds; in fact, this novel was performed as a Hörspiel at the Landestheater Linz in 2021. Its writing is characterized by clipped sentences in the present tense. The chapters are short and bear almost childish titles: "Muter: Geburt," is the first, "Sterben" comes near the end, and in between we find, for instance, "Das erste Buch" and "Krieg." Zweig's life, in Reyer's telling, is a series of set pieces presented with estranging simplicity. The very un-Zweig-like opening sentence reads: "Es ist in einem Kaiserreich, in dem alles beginnt. Denn jede Geburt ist ein Anfang der gesamten Welt" (7). A scene that might have been an emotional climax is written with jarring understatement. This is how the Zweigs decide to go ahead with their plans for a double suicide: "Ich würde gerne aufhören, jetzt!" sagt Stefan an einem Morgen im Februar. Es ist lange geplant, Lotte weiß Bescheid. […] "Ich würde gern damit aufhören," wiederholt Stefan. Pause. "Denkst du, es wird aufhören, wenn wir aufhören?" fragt Lotta da. [End Page 79] "Woher soll ich das wissen," meint Stefan. Dann schweigt er für einen Moment. "Aber schlechter kann es nicht werden, oder?", fragt er und streicht ihr übers Haar. (273) It goes on like this, and the reader will know how it ends. There is a deliberate refusal here to fulfill the promise of the promotional material on the back of the book, to answer the question: "Wie ist es möglich, dass ein derartig großes literarisches Talent im Exil Suizid begeht?" Likewise, the reader's understanding of what kind of book this ought to be is destabilized by such inscrutable gestures as including footnotes at the end of the first four chapters, reading simply, "Vgl.: Stefan Zweig: Die Welt von Gestern." Omitted here are page numbers, which might suggest a...

Almgren 236 Fibulae from Poiana (Romania)

Among the numerous Early Roman fibulae discovered at Poiana (Galaţi County, Romania) there are also some specimens of the Almgren 236/237 type, also called Norican-Pannonian fibulae (Germ, Doppelknopffibeln). Three of them (figs. 1 and 2) are still preserved today in collections from Tecuci and Bucharest. Three other specimens were probably lost during 2nd World War, but their existence is attested by Radu Vulpe’s sketches drawn in his field journals (fig. 3). One fibula was discovered in the funeral pyre of the “Movila Hartop” tumulus in Poiana (fig. 2/2). All the others come the protohistoric settlement on the “Cetăţuie” site, but their contexts were insufficiently documented. The Almgren 236/237 type fibulae from Poiana exceeds the number of similar specimens found so far in other sites dated before the conquest of Dacia by Trajan on the territory of today Romania (fig. 4). The presented fibulae from Poiana indicate the close cultural contacts with the Alpine provinces in the early period of Roman Principate. The typological and chronological framing of the fibulae from Poiana are deficient due to their fragmentary state of preservation. However, the reception of Norican-Pannonian fibulae in local cultural milieus since the Augustus-Claudius time is suggested by a local imitation on silver discovered in the Remetea Mare hoard (fig. 5).

Rethinking English as Medium of Instruction Policy in Multilingual Classrooms

This paper reports the results of a study that unpacked teachers’ experiences and challenges adopting EMI policy in the public schools’ multilingual classrooms. Building on a phenomenological design, we selected two primary level teachers purposively and collected data through in-depth interviews. Drawing upon the thematic analysis and interpretation of the data, the study revealed that teachers perceived EMI as a tool for achieving English language proficiency for the students and a means for the public schools to compete with their private counterparts. Contrarily, EMI in the public school’s multilingual classrooms was found to be practised just as slogan and insufficient for effective students’ participation in classroom learning. Since EMI leads multilingual learners towards monolingual direction, it has posed problems to both the teachers and students due to the low English language proficiency. The study implies that the EMI policy in the lower grades of public schools should be implemented considering the linguistic and cultural milieus of the students.

Multiple identities: Young Bedouin professionals challenging their socio-cultural Representations

ABSTRACT The desire of a minority group to integrate into society on equal terms with the majority is often expressed through the first-generation university degree holders of children sent by their parents to the schools of the majority group. The present study describes the multi-identities of Bedouin men and women who studied in the majority education system, a Jewish public school with Hebrew as its language of instruction with a different ethnic, religion, political, and cultural milieu. From the perspective of the theory of social representations, the findings point to a variety of strategies that Bedouin students have utilized in refusing to perform stereotypically minority identities. They force us to reframe their identities showing that they are capable of adopting emancipated representations to create a space in accord with the changing nature of Bedouin society. From their retrospective view, we learned that men built a space that combines representations of what we call “both worlds” while women found themselves managing multiple identities, conflict between roles, social relationship and life stages. The contribution of the research lies in the in-depth understanding of the interpersonal processes associated with social experiences of minority students in their own land (not immigrants), showing how they develop, adopt, and retain multiple identities, straddling social borders.

Affectivization of borders in the digital sphere: migration-related online narratives in Argentina

ABSTRACT The topic of borders is an active research area in Lotmanian studies. Starting from this scholarship, the article aims to open up fresh possibilities for interpretation of Lotman's spatial-driven theory, making it dialogue with the cultural affect studies and the current communication-focused research on the digital sphere. This theoretical framework underpins the case study covered in the essay, that is, the linguistic analysis of online narratives on migration during the COVID-19 pandemic – a prolonged situation of high-intensity relational affect in which emotions played a pivotal (agentive) role in the perception of a widespread and multidimensional crisis. Argentina is the cultural milieu of socio-semiotic scrutiny, in which distant reading and close reading cross-pollinate each other.

Challenges in simultaneous validation of mental health screening tools in multiple languages: Adolescent assessments in Hausa and Pidgin in Nigeria

BackgroundWith growing global recognition of the need to address mental health, a key challenge is determining who needs mental health services. Most self-report screening tools were developed in English-speaking high-income settings, and this cultural milieu influences the types and content of items, the manner in which items are asked, and the options for responding to items. Approaches have been developed for transcultural translation and validation. However, these approaches are typically applied in one language at a time, which is of limited utility in linguistically diverse settings. MethodsTo address challenges in cross-cultural validation, we undertook a unique process of simultaneously validating tools in two languages in Nigeria. Through this dual-language validation, we explored how cultural and contextual differences may influence what is considered valid for a mental health tool. We validated the Depression Self Rating Scale, Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS), and Disruptive Behavior Disorders Rating Scale with a community sample of 330 adolescents aged 12–17. Validity was assessed in Hausa and Pidgin, two languages commonly spoken in Nigeria. Clinical psychologists used the Kiddie-Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia to establish caseness. ResultsMost items had good discriminant validity, except on the CPSS, on which only 8 of 17 items discriminated by caseness. Findings indicate the influence of culture (e.g., linguistic differences in translatability of items) and context (e.g., items that reflect experiences of hunger or foodborne illness; different PTSD caseness by language might reflect differential trauma exposure between populations). We also identified items that operated differently between languages. ConclusionWe identified shortcomings in cross-cultural validation procedures with regard to determining whether language, context, or or other differences influence performance of items. For future validation efforts, we recommend systematically collecting information on context and stressful/traumatic exposures as a way to contextualize interpretation of the validity findings. AcronymsDepression Self Rating Scale (DSRS), Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS), Disruptive Behavior Disorders Rating Scale (DBDRS), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), Conduct Disorder (CD), Area Under the Curve (AUC), Diagnostic Odds Ratio (DOR), Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The stakes of religious fundraising: economic transition and religious resurgence in Irish Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism

ABSTRACT What impacts does the transition from a land-based to predominantly cash-based economy have on the fundraising strategies of religious institutions? What new opportunities does it present and what moral debates and dilemmas does it prompt? What is at stake? This article explores these questions through examples from two very different contexts: the Irish Catholic Church in the nineteenth century and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in late twentieth century to early twenty-first century Amdo (northeast Tibet). In both cases, political and religious oppression, poverty, and crisis presaged periods of both religious resurgence and significant economic shift that had profound effects on religious funding models, as well as the debates they generated. By bringing these cases into dialogue, this article identifies common themes and patterns beyond the specificities of religious tradition and cultural milieu that usually frame analyses of religion and economy. Building on these insights, we suggest a framework for conceptualising religious fundraising that explains why it is often a site of contestation where ideas about religion and economy are (re)produced and played out, without assuming that religion and economy are separate ontological categories.

Contextual effects on students’ achievement and academic self-concept in the Nordic and Chinese educational systems

BackgroundThe current study investigates school contextual effects on students’ academic self-concept and achievement, that is, peer socioeconomic effect and big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), in four Nordic education systems (i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) and selected Chinese education systems (Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang). The two school contextual effects are studied simultaneously to negate the confounding effects of student and school socioeconomic status (SES), academic self-concept and academic achievement. The study focuses on the following research questions:Are there differences in the between-school variation in school SES composition, academic self-concept and reading literacy across the Nordic and selected Chinese education systems?What are the sizes of peer SES and BFLPE in the Nordic and Chinese education systems?Are there any differences that can be observed between the 2000 and 2018 data for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the first two questions for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and Hong Kong?MethodsUsing PISA 2000 and 2018 data from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (in 2018 only), a multiple-group two-level structural equation modelling was applied to estimate the school contextual effect.ResultsThe current study indicated that school academic and socioeconomic segregation intensified over the two decades in most of the studied countries. This finding lays the groundwork for understanding the two schools’ contextual effects. School SES compositions positively affected students’ academic achievement, while average school achievement negatively affected students’ academic self-concept. Given that students’ academic and socioeconomic composition has become more homogeneous within schools, the contextual effects were more pronounced. However, variations across diverse education systems were also notable.ConclusionsThe current study adds evidence of the school contextual effects regarding the peer SES effects and robustness of the BFLPE, considering the nested structure of the data and diverse cultural milieu. We argue that these diversities reflect the varying extent to which educational reforms were introduced in different countries, here as oriented to marketisation, privatisation and choice. These reform actions have changed the composition of students at schools and school culture, which moulds individual students’ cognitive and noncognitive development.

On [Be]coming in Boystown

This article is about trans-, gender, sexuality, and fantasy and their mutual materialization through uses of technology and contact with the bodies of others. I aim to theorize the relationship between trans- and fantasy—my transness and my fantasies—especially as I struggle to find their realization in a cultural milieu that insists upon limited and fixed identity categories, categories that I argue thwart desire. I explore the relative lack of attention to trans- desire and sexuality in academic work and in public and political discourse and argue for the importance of attention to the erotic in understandings of trans-. Thus, I complicate notions of (mis)recognition that characterize many post-structuralist theorizations of trans- subjectivity in favor of centering the erotic. I tease out threads of my own fantasies and their materialization as they were realized in one weekend trip to Boystown in Chicago. Ultimately, my aim is to open more discursive space for considerations of trans- fantasies and sexuality and to argue that it is crucial for us to pay more critical attention to fantasies and their fulfillment in our consideration of what it means to be trans-, indeed, what it means to become a gendered and sexual body at all.

«Ch’ëo dica gli gradi e la vertute». Una canzone filosofica di Nicolò de’ Rossi e le sue fonti

This article proposes an analysis of the philosophical canzone, Color di perla, by Nicolò de’ Rossi of Treviso. Written in the first quarter of the 14th century together with a commentary in Latin by de’ Rossi himself, the canzone is the first work that opens the well-known manuscript, Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 3953. The first section of the manuscript contains an interesting collection of texts that all share the common theme of virtue, and it had probably been compiled as a gift and sort of ‘admonition’ for Guecello Tempesta, de’ Rossi’s noble patron. Color di perla has for some time now been recognised as being a reply to Guido Cavalcanti’s celebrated canzone, Donna me prega, which is also present in the manuscript. Through a systematic study of the Latin commentary and its sources, this article aims first of all to clarify the philosophical scope of de’ Rossi’s ‘mystical’ interpretation of ‘true love’. In so doing, not only will the analysis provide a deeper understanding of Nicolò de’ Rossi’s position in relation to Cavalcanti’s canzone, but it will also shed further light on de’ Rossi’s relations with the cultural milieu of his time, in particular in his earlier years in Bologna, where the law faculty held close ties with the Dominican order.

“What Really Happened?”: The Life and Death of Olivia Coombs

“What Really Happened?”: The Life and Death of Olivia Coombs

New Testament Contextualization and Inculturation in Nigeria

The New Testament was written to the audience of the Graeco-Roman world of which the authorial intentions were crystal clear to the then audiences. There is the temptation of eisegesis in the application of the text to the Nigerian context which of course differs in many ways to those of early societies. Consequently, there is the need for the New Testament to be ‘more at home’ within the Nigerian cultural milieu and worldview for it to be relevant to the Nigerian culture. The New Testament was written within a specific context and it needs to be decontextualized from the Graeco-Roman culture and re-contextualized to suit the Nigerian Context and culture for proper contextualization and enculturation to occur. Inculturation is a term that is also applied to denote a progression of engagement between the Christian Gospel and specific cultures. The term is proposed conceptually both to defend the integrity of the Gospel and to encourage understanding to numerous cultural contexts. The method adopted in this study is a theologico - analytico method which emanates from the application of the methods and concepts of late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy (Wood, 2021). African inculturation theology is in essence a contextual theology that pursues an agenda to make the Holy Gospel far more meaningful within diverse cultural milieus. In this article the milieu is Nigeria. This type of theology has an important religious aim, which is essentially to make the Gospel all culturally embracing to non-Europeans. Without a contextual theology serving any missionizing activity it is difficult to make the gospel message totally understandable in any particular context. It makes it harder to motivate people to deeper faith and to equip ministers more faithfully and effectively to preach the gospel.

Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America by Damien B. Schlarb

Reviewed by: Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America by Damien B. Schlarb Ariel Silver Damien B. Schlarb Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiv + 252 pp. In his reading of the Book of Genesis in The Beginning of Wisdom (2003), Leon Kass is guided by philosophia, the love and pursuit of wisdom. He quickly acknowledges that scripture is not often read in this manner, especially by scholars of the Bible, whose training in higher criticism has led them to focus more on textual sources and the "sensibilities and prejudices of an ancient people" (2). These source critics read the Bible much as do literary critics—as literature more than as an aid to wisdom. Melville was neither a biblical scholar nor a literary critic, but in his elegant new book, Melville's Wisdom, Damien Schlarb contends that Melville seeks to demonstrate through his literary work that the Hebrew Bible can be read in a "reflective and philosophic spirit" (Kass, Leon R. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 2) and that this manner of reading is modeled on the wisdom literature found within the biblical text. In his effort to recover the language and ethics of biblical wisdom, Schlarb asserts that Melville charts a course between the "Scylla of epistemological deadlock and the Charybdis of moral relativism" (20), leading him to theological as well as cultural insight. Literature begins to function as a new form of exegesis, which Melville deploys to try to deeply understand both the biblical text and the religious culture emerging in the midst of modern life. This spirit of philosophia animates Melville, and leads him, through the wisdom literature of the Bible, to what Schlarb calls the "hermeneutics of contemplation" (19). Like Ahab circling the leviathan, drawing ever closer, numerous scholars have sought to apprehend the acute nature of Melville's relationship to the Bible. This search began in earnest after World War II with the publication of Melville's Use of the Bible (Nathalia Wright, 1949) and Melville's Quarrel with God (Lawrance Thompson, 1952), works devoted to the ways in which Melville read biblical prose and poetry. Later works attended more to the religious, political, and cultural milieu informing Melville's biblical interpretations. The [End Page 108] more recent religious turn in literary studies has deepened this search and made it both more incisive and more expansive. In Melville's Bibles (2008), Ilana Pardes seeks to bring together these two previous strains of scholarship on Melville and the Bible: his reading of biblical texts and his reading of cultural contexts through his literary oeuvre. Melville's Bibles focuses principally on Moby-Dick, as does Jonathan A. Cook's Inscrutable Malice (2012). Where Pardes sets biblical texts and characters in Moby-Dick in conversation with multiple modes of biblical exegesis in antebellum America, Cook focuses more on the moral and religious questions which animate Melville's engagement with biblical sources. Melville's interrogation of theodicy—the attempt to reconcile divine justice with the presence of evil—leads him directly to Job. The omnipresence of Job in Moby-Dick points to Melville's interest in biblical wisdom, a genre that informs not only Job, but also Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. In Melville's Wisdom, Schlarb expands beyond Job and Moby-Dick to uncover the ways in which Melville works out his epistemology of skeptical devotion through the body of wisdom literature. At a time when the emerging modern world sought to both affirm and displace religious culture and the language of scripture, Melville discovered in the wisdom texts of the Hebrew Bible a contemplative approach that could lead to syncretic knowledge apart from either the dogma of religion or science. Having discovered that both superstition and empiricism are irredeemable, Melville looks instead for an approach that can respond to his inexhaustible call for inquiry and introspection. Wisdom, grounded in experience and reflection, transcends explanatory systems to arrive at its own moral vector: ambiguity and multiplicity. As Schlarb explains in his discussion on the Book of Job: "What remains in the wake of religious and scientific fervor...

The Sense of Belonging in the Context of Migration: Development and Trajectories Regarding Portuguese Migrants in Luxembourg.

The sense of belonging can be defined as a highly subjective and dynamic feeling of acceptance, inclusion, and connectedness to a specific contextual entity. Perceiving belongingness to others is positively related to psychological well-being, happiness, or higher self-esteem. The present contribution examined how the sense of belonging to spatial, social, and cultural entities evolves over the migration process of Portuguese first-generation migrants and their second-generation offspring residing in Luxembourg. The current study drew on the qualitative content analysis of ten semi-structured interviews, carried out with ten Portuguese migrant family dyads (one parent and one adult child per dyad). The results affirmed that the sense of belonging showed to be a complex and multi-faceted concept and highly shaped by specific contexts. The initially unfamiliar Luxembourgish context became a familiar setting and even a "home" over time. While the older generation presented noticeable belongingness to Luxembourg as a homeland, their affiliation to the Luxembourgish community and culture remained rather low. Simultaneously, they preserved a high connectedness to the Portuguese culture as well as to fellow Portuguese migrants living in the Grand Duchy. The younger generation expressed a much more pronounced attachment to Luxembourg, since they perceived belongingness to the Luxembourgish spatial, social, and (multi)cultural milieu. In addition to this, a certain affiliation to the Portuguese culture and language could be discerned. Although some factors, which might have contributed to this evolution, could be identified in the present study, one can assume that there are significantly more that have not been addressed yet.

The ghost of Hernán Cortés: the colonial heritage in the Americas in the Cold War and post-Cold War era

In this article I explore a range of approaches to the colonial heritage (or colonial heritages) in the Americas in both their popular and academic iterations during the Cold War and the post-Cold War era. Overall, I argue that the most obvious elements of the Hispanic colonial heritage are cultural and linguistic, as well as various forms of economic dependence and high levels of socio-economic inequality. Economic dependence and social inequality remain a central, if now diffuse, Hispanic colonial heritage, as does the diverse cultural and linguistic post-colonial milieu that is the New World. Over three decades out from the end of the Cold War, the cultural complexity, shifting economic contours and geographical diffusion of the Hispanic colonial heritage is more apparent than ever at the same time as (contrary to several recent accounts) it hangs no heavier over the present than the Anglo-Protestant colonial heritage; nor should either be deployed to do too much heavy lifting as far as explaining contemporary developmental outcomes is concerned.