Curious Tale Research Articles

Lessons from Kipling and Rao: How to Re‐Appropriate Another Culture

This brief study will examine Anglo‐Indian Rudyard Kipling and Indo‐Anglian Raja Rao's, attempts to re‐appropriate a foreign culture in terms of their own wills. The novelist Rao's conviction of India's position as the origin of all Western culture, alongside Kipling's own curious tale of a tribe of distant “Englishmen” rediscovered in Northwest Afghanistan, both offer examples of attempts to re‐describe and ultimately re‐locate radically different cultures within the authors' own more familiar vocabularies. How does this cultural re‐appropriation take place, and what happens to the author's parent culture when something as radically ‘other’ as an Afghan tribe or a medieval French heresy is suddenly and unexpectedly re‐incorporated into the ‘family’? The often unsettling consequences of this operation are considered as they manifest themselves in both texts in similar ways, advancing the possibility that cultural‐appropriation affects the appropriator as much as the appropriated. And so strong is the inclination that is rooted in Mankind to the Love of their Country, that some learned and witty Men … have used great Art and Industry to represent them with such advantage to the World, as though Paradise were but another Name for their native Country. Bishop Stillingfleet1

David Played a Harp: A Free Man's Battle for Independence (review)

Nowadays, way too many of society's "victims" are mere poseurs. Not Ralph W. Johnson, who was at once victim and beneficiary of possibly the most eccentric practice ever to take root in the Jim Crow era. What a curious tale! For Ralph Johnson was a black man who spent his entire adult life as proprietor of a whites-only barbershop. This is not to say that his was a unique situation, but what is exceptional is his ability to tell a riveting story doubtless familiar to many another black barber who either owned or worked in an establishment that catered only to the white trade.

‘What's in a name?’ The curious tale of the office of high commissioner

Members of the Commonwealth do not use the title ‘ambassador’ for the heads of diplomatic missions which they send to one another. Instead, they use the title ‘high commissioner’. This article firstly examines how the office of high commissioner emerged to meet the representational needs of states owing allegiance to a common sovereign. Secondly, it explains why the office survived the transformation of the British empire into the modern Commonwealth of sovereign states. Thirdly, the article considers the factors that continue to make the office appealing to its holders and a diplomatic asset to their states.

Regeneration and the curious tale of gender blindness

The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) is a key social‐economic regeneration instrument in the UK delivered through partnerships of cross‐ sectoral organisations with local communities. The article discusses recent research which found that women’s needs and capabilities were largely ignored in SRB. The reasons stem from widespread “gender blindness” characterised by familiar gender‐neutral motifs which deny the salience of gender as a variable through which human life and inequality are experienced. Gender blindness was additionally supported by social processes and institutions which have emerged from shifts in public policy and political change since the 1980s. The gender blindness of the late 1990s is described as a new manifestation of discrimination and its curiousness is that it is evident in a policy context which gives high priority to combating social exclusion.

The Curious Tale of Atlas College

Atlas College, a liberal arts institution, was founded during the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time the Board of Trustees adopted as the school's motto the maxim of the Roman poet Juvenal, mens sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body.” The saying attracted little notice over the years, but several decades ago a recently appointed member of the board complained at a Trustees' meeting that, while attending a reception to greet members of the faculty, he had found to his dismay that the school's professors were not physically well‐conditioned, most appearing either scrawny or corpulent. “How,” he inquired of his fellow Board members, “can these individuals exemplify the ideals of our College, if they fail to display soundness of body?”

Lobbying Incentives and the Pattern of Protection in Rich and Poor Countries

In seeking to explain why poor countries tend to choose policies that tax agriculture relative to manufacturing while rich countries do the opposite, archetypical parameters for a poor agrarian economy and a rich industrial one are inserted in a computable general equilibrium model to simulate the medium-term effects on income distribution of policies that distort the relative prices of tradables. The model includes a non-tradables sector and intermediate inputs, realistic features that ensure even greater skewness in the distributional effects of protection than simpler models suggest. The magnitude of the results helps explain the tendency for countries to change gradually from taxing to subsidizing agriculture relative to manufacturing as their economies develop. The paper draws out the implications of the analysis for agricultural and trade policy reform in the 1990s.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Oriental Motifs in the Alexander Romance

Over the centuries, the fabulous adventures of Alexander the Great have become as prominent in art and literature as his historical achievements. Medieval artists in particular are frequent sources of depictions of the hero in such adventures as the search for the water of life, the flight into the air in a basket borne by eagles, the descent into the sea in a diving bell, the interview with the talking trees of India and the visit to the dwellings of the gods. Familiar as these episodes are—or were—it is easy for us to forget how completely new a thing they represent in the tradition of Greek prose writing. With the decipherments of cuneiform some one hundred years ago, a number of scholars concluded that they could not have been developed entirely within the Greek tradition, and posited direct influence from one or more Babylonian or other near eastern sources or traditions to explain the occurrence in Greek literature of these curious tales. Despite the antiquity of these arguments, they have been accepted without examination by many more recent writers on the Alexander Romance.

A JAPANESE SAILOR'S RECORD OF SOUTH KALIMANTAN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

This paper presents the account of a unheard-of adventure of Magotaro (or Magoshichi), an eighteenth century Japanese sailor from the port of Karadomari, in Southeast Asia. Although the records of Japanese castaways have been tagged simply as 'curious tales', the author contends that the record of Magotaro's adventures throws valuable insights into the history of region and thus "worthy of consideration".

The complete engineer

IZAAK WALTON'S whimsical book, “The Compleat Angler,” opens with a debate between a hunter, a falconer, and an angler on the merits of their favorite recreations; and it goes on to describe in loving detail the arts of luring the wily trout with worm, or fly, or frog. The reader is beguiled along the way by many curious tales of nature's ways, as the description of a salmon leap:

American Views of the Past

Mostly, the past has been for men a strange country. Remote and inaccessible, its existence is accepted but not important. Known through the curious tales of occasional observers, it is meaningful only to the extent that it affords those who regard it reflected images of their own society.The first Americans were little occupied with the past. Although they read history, and wrote it, it was the history of their own times; the term in the seventeenth century referred more often to contemporaneous events than to those that had receded out of the memory of living men. Indeed, in a universe in which divine Providence interceded directly in the affairs of men, there was little purpose to the quest for antecedents; behind every action was the same ultimate cause.

Art. I.—On the restoration of an Ancient Persian Inscription, analogous to those at Behistun

The beginnings of ancient history too often contain a large admixture of legendary or fabulous ingredients; and the difficulty of discriminating between truth and fiction is greatly increased in those cases where the annalist derives his information from statements or documents conveyed in a language with which he is imperfectly acquainted. The critical historian is obliged to content himself with conjectures, more or less arbitrary, unless he can fall back upon authentic monumental records which he is enabled to interpret. This solid basis has at last been supplied, in the case of early Persian history, by the inscriptions which Colonel Rawlinson has deciphered and explained, and I propose in the following paper to make these memorials available for the correction of a curious tale respecting the great Darius.