European Influence Research Articles

INTERLINGUAL COMMUNICATION IN THE MAGHREB COUNTRIES

The article is devoted to the problems of the interlingual relations in Maghreb, and it considers the factors contribute to the transformation of language processes and analyzes the consequences of European influence in the countries of the North Africa. The article is devoted to the actual current problem of Arabization in Arab countries. Being insufficiently explored this theme is a subject of study for orientalist-arabists in all over the world. The article is devoted to the bilingualism phenomenon and to the peculiar linguistic revival in Maghreb. This view will be interesting for linguistic, Arabic studies and ethnolinguistic specialists. In conclusion it reveals the basic principles of the relevance of this article and brings conclusions.

Widespread reforestation before European influence on Amazonia

An estimated 90 to 95% of Indigenous people in Amazonia died after European contact. This population collapse is postulated to have caused decreases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at around 1610 CE, as a result of a wave of land abandonment in the wake of disease, slavery, and warfare, whereby the attendant reversion to forest substantially increased terrestrial carbon sequestration. On the basis of 39 Amazonian fossil pollen records, we show that there was no synchronous reforestation event associated with such an atmospheric carbon dioxide response after European arrival in Amazonia. Instead, we find that, at most sites, land abandonment and forest regrowth began about 300 to 600 years before European arrival. Pre-European pandemics, social strife, or environmental change may have contributed to these early site abandonments and ecological shifts.

Burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (1808) and the Ensuing Discussion about the Reconstructıon (Archival Study)

In the early 19th century, great developments overshadowed the history and the future of Jerusalem in particular and Palestine in general. The most important of these events was the increase in foreign influence in Jerusalem and the great powers' efforts to find a foothold there. The rising European influence came after the French campaign against Egypt. This French campaign warned European countries about Jerusalem’s importance, and European countries began to compete to influence that city. These countries considered the denominations in Jerusalem as a means of achieving their goals, using each country as an excuse to protect the followers of a sect in Jerusalem by taking advantage of the weakness the Ottoman State experienced. One of the European rivalry results supporting the Christian denominations in Jerusalem was the escalation of the conflict between them, which later led one of these denominations to burn the Holy Sepulcher’s Church. This incident can be regarded as the beginning of a new era of conflict and competition between the European countries over the Ottoman State in general and Jerusalem in particular, hidden behind the Christian denominations in Jerusalem. The Ottoman Empire’s policy handled this incident by not taking any side directly. Instead, it limited itself to conducting investigations by reviewing and examining the documents owned by each denomination. The state resorted to forming many committees of Ottoman personalities as well as figures from the competing denominations. By relying on the initial documents drawn from the Ottoman Archives, this study aims to reach the truth of the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the reasons that led to this fire, and an attempt to trace the conflicts that followed the fire and the Ottoman State’s policy in dealing with it.

European football televisual spectatorship and social identity in Eldoret, Kenya

ABSTRACT In the recent times, European football has become popular in the Sub Saharan world. Most studies have explored what is perceived as the European cultural influence on local societies and cultures and attributed this to the improved global media technology. Some studies have also explored what is described as new and innovative socio-cultural patterns of fandom. This article examines one particular social trend: the construction and performance of elite social identity. It examines the interplay between local processes of performing social identity and European football televisual spectatorship (EFTS). The argument has been made that in Eldoret, EFTS has been appropriated in a local process of social identification. This is part of a long-term ethnographic study but which narrows down to EFTS experience in one place, Sunjeel Restaurant, and examines the experience of a social group that developed in the context EFTS experiences here. The article uses aspects of Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space and Bourdieu’s concept of cultural fields to describe the social contexts in which this group emerges and how it adapts EFTS to its larger project of performing the identity as members of an elite social category.

Where Music Resides: Educational and Artistic Institutions, Nationalism, and Musical Debates in Nineteenth-Century Athens

The article details the institutional, political and cultural conditions in nineteenth-century Athens, in relation to the reception and development of Western opera and Greek ecclesiastical music. Through the examination of important institutions such as the Theatre of Athens and the University of Athens, the article compares the popularity of Italian opera with the underdevelopment of institutions for education in church music, it analyses the impact of limited musical education in the country, and explains how the absence of musical policy –either for Western music or the Greek-Orthodox chant – resulted in music turning into a token of local cultural resistance against Western European influence.

The historical geography of Azemmour: environment and empire on the Moroccan Atlantic coast

ABSTRACT This article examines the social history of the Moroccan city of Azemmour and its hinterland during the two decades straddling the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912. The town’s unique geographic location–near the hubs of European expansion in Casablanca and Mazagan, along a major river, proximate to the coast but without a port – shaped its economic development during the period of rebellion and French conquest. Its physical and political geography foreclosed maritime trade activity but its isolation from the Mediterranean sea-lanes opened up other opportunities to townspeople and helped to create a micro-region with the town at its centre. The years before 1912 were marked by the rapid expansion of European influence in neighbouring regions; Azemmour remained on the margins of these processes. After 1912, French development projects overlooked traditional sources of income for Zemmouris, effectively relegating the town to the margins of the Moroccan economy.

Etiology of early hearing loss in Brazilian children

IntroductionHearing loss etiology depends on the population studied as well as on the ethnicity and the socio-economic condition of the analyzed region. Etiological diagnosis contributes to the improvement of preventive measures and to the early identification of this deficiency. ObjectiveTo identify the etiological factors of hearing loss and its prevalence in a tertiary hospital in southern Brazil, to verify the frequency of mutations in GJB2 and GJB6 genes, and to correlate the degree of hearing loss with the etiological factors of deafness. MethodsThis prevalence study involved 140 children with bilateral sensorineural or mixed hearing loss. Medical history, physical examination, audiometry, and evoked auditory brainstem response were conducted. Imaging and genetic examinations were also performed. ResultsEtiologies and their prevalence were as follows: (a) indeterminate causes, 31.4%; (b) conditions related to neonatal period, 22.1%; (c) genetic, 22.1%; (d) auditory neuropathy, 10%; (e) other factors (cortical malformation, intracranial hemorrhage, and internal ear malformations), 7.9% and (f) congenital infections, 6.4%. Within the genetic cases, ten homozygous and seven heterozygotes of the 35delG mutation were identified, besides two cases of rare variants of GJB2: p.Try172* and p.Arg184Pro. One case with homozygosis of del(GJB6-D13S1830) was found. Regarding severity of hearing loss, in 78.6% of the cases the degree of hearing loss was profound and there were no significant differences when comparing between etiologies. ConclusionThe number of indeterminate etiologies is still high and congenital CMV infection may be a possible cause of undiagnosed etiology for hearing loss. The predominance of etiologies related to neonatal conditions and infectious causes are characteristic of developing countries. The most prevalent mutation was 35delG, the main GJB2 gene, probably because of the European influence in the genotype of our population.

Ancient Burial Mounds as a Symbolic System

Analysis of early dates and stratigraphy of burial mound complexes (the second half of the V millennium BC) led to the conclusion, that they are not directly related to the burial embankment, but relate to complex monumental structures — sanctuaries. The sanctuaries preceded the burial mounds in chronological aspect, and they functioned for a long time without creating an embankment above them. The part of sanctuaries had astronomical reference points and were connected to calendar-zodiac symbolism. Sometimes burials were carried out on the territory of sanctuaries; these burials had sacral nature. These were flat burials and the mound above them were not erected. Burial mounds above the sanctuaries began to appear after burials of later epochs were carried out in sacral places (not earlier than 38/37 BC.). These mounds erroneously are associated with flat burials or ground sanctuaries. The dating of burial mounds by the dating of sacral flat burials (or by the dating of «pillar sanctuaries») mistakenly depreciated the dating of appearance of the first mounds in the Steppe Black Sea region and Transcaucasia. The separation of these complexes in time and space (the flat ground sanctuary and the burial mound itself) allowed drawing conclusions about the existence of this sanctuaries in 45—40 BC. The burial mounds appear later, their installation in the place of sanctuaries is connected with the sacral nature of the place. Throughout Europe, barrows appear almost simultaneously, in 38/37 BC, although in different cultures. It is possible to assume the Central European and Lower Danube influence on the formation of ideological ideas of the Steppe population. In particular, the phenomenon of sanctuaries of the Middle Eneolithic may have originated under Central European influence. It obviously had structural similarities with other complexes built in accordance with the movement of the celestial luminaries in the late Neolithic of Central and Atlantic Europe. The appearance of sanctuaries can be attributed to the circle of archaeological evidence of the interaction between the world of early farmers of Southeast and Central Europe and the "steppe" world of the pastoralists. The barrows of the Black Sea and Caucasian steppe are synchronous with European burial mounds, and their ancientization and equation with the dating of sanctuaries is erroneous.

State, Constitution, and Parliament: Three Axes of the Spanish Constitutional Debate of 1931

This article aims to elucidate the relationship between the ideas of state, constitution, and Parliament in the Spanish constitutional debate of 1931. It argues that Members of Parliament (MPs) made a valuable contribution when understanding the relevance of this interrelation in terms of political philosophy and legal theory. From a methodological perspective, this study pays attention to the arguments of MPs in the course of the constitutional sessions which took place between August and December 1931. In doing so, it portrays the ideological differences of left-wing, centrist and right-wing parties in that constituent assembly. In the first section (“European influences on the Constitution of 1931”) the intellectual links with interwar trends of public law, administrative law and European constitutionalism are highlighted. The second section (“Constitution and Parliament according to Spanish representatives”), shows the meanings given to this nascent constitutional democracy by MPs. Despite their ideological differences they were in favour of strengthening Parliament and the Constitution as a prerequisite for safeguarding democracy. The conclusions resume the argumentative thread, that is to say, that the regime, a democratic republic, was understood by a large majority of MPs as the confluence of three conditions founded on doctrinal and conceptual exchanges from interwar European constitutionalism: the acknowledgement of parliamentary sovereignty, the legal and administrative revamping of institutions, and state intervention in the economy.

Cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale): Possible applications in dermatology . .

The potential uses of medicinal plants are far from exhausted, and one of the most important tools in the study of medicinal plants is the rescue of traditional knowledge, which, in Brazil, combines Indigenous, African, and European influences. The rich Brazilian ethnobotany, associated with the greatest biodiversity in the planet, constitutes a promising field of studies, albeit rather neglected in the medical community. The investigation of Anacardium occidentale applications in dermatology from the bibliographic survey of the specialty found the following activity: antileishmanial, anti-ophidic, antibiotic, antityrosinase, and antifungal in vitro. Studies associating A occidentale and dermatology in medical literature seem incipient, and there is a lack of studies in humans. In vitro studies are useful as an initial step, but they are irrelevant if they do not develop into viable formulations that can be tested in humans.

EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA NO CONTEXTO DO HIGIENISMO NA REVISTA DE EDUCAÇÃO E ENSINO NA PRIMEIRA REPÚBLICA NO PARÁ (1891 - 1893)

O presente trabalho aborda o estudo da Educação Física no contexto do desenvolvimento das práticas higienistas no estado do Pará no período de 1891 a 1893. Como objetivo, buscamos analisar o conteúdo dos artigos sobre educação física na Revista de Educação e Ensino (1891 - 1893), na intenção de mapear como a disciplina é abordada e quais influências estrangeiras interferiram nas propostas metodológicas estipuladas para a educação dos corpos. A metodologia utilizada baseia-se na análise documental e levantamento bibliográfico nos termos sugeridos por Melo (2018) e França (2011). Para a realização desta pesquisa, as fontes foram levantadas na seção de obras raras no Acervo Digital da Biblioteca Arthur Vianna. A Revista de Educação e Ensino, fundada em 1891, tinha como fim a publicação de temas relacionados à educação no Pará, os documentos no acervo referem-se aos anos de 1891 a 1895; para a pesquisa foram analisados artigos entre os anos de 1891 a 1893, selecionados da coluna “Educação Physica”. Em nossas análises, inferimos que a coluna da revista paraense mostrava métodos e técnicas a serem adotados na educação; os exercícios deveriam ser direcionados ao desenvolvimento do corpo e intelecto do aluno e apresentava influências europeias sobre a temática.

Interrogating Shipping Data to Illustrate Patterns of External Connectivity and the Rise of European Influence in the Tongan Archipelago (1770–1885)

ABSTRACT Seemingly arcane records of shipping, derived from shipping lists published in newspapers and ship’s logbooks and notations therein, can be interrogated in geographical, chronological and typological terms. This paper presents a fully referenced dataset of 1,584 visits by vessels to Tongan waters between 1616 and 1884 which is now available for analysis by interested parties. Example analyses presented in this paper show how the compilation and analysis of shipping data, canvassing the presence, and to some extent movement, of European vessels in Tongan waters, can illuminate large-scale changes in contact and trade.

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton (review).

Reviewed by: Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton Jethro Hernández Berrones (bio) Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico By David S. Dalton. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Pp. 248. In Mestizo Modernity, David S. Dalton examines the role of technology in the construction of the national Mexican identity after the Mexican Revolution and throughout the twentieth century. Analyzing theater plays, murals, films, and novels, the author exposes the contradictions of the project of post-revolutionary governments to create a mix-raced, mestizo, population that adopted and adapted technology in order to become part of a modern nation and a modern world. Theoretically sophisticated yet with deeply engaging examples, the analysis explains that writers, painters, and filmmakers viewed the incorporation of Western science and technology as a tool that redeemed Mexicans through mestizaje. The author uses the concept of technological hybridity to expand the work on the intersections of science and culture in Latin America that other culture studies scholars such as Pilar Blanco, Joanna Page, Ruben Gallo, and Andrew Brown have developed in the last two decades. Technological hybridity equates the entities and characters represented in Mexican literary and visual productions with Donna Haraway's cyborgs—entities defined by human-machine interactions, and the resulting mestizo modernity with a post-human society. Through this lens, the author shows that post-revolutionary discourses on mestizaje embraced ideas about human-machine identities half a century before scholars theorized about them. If Haraway's cyborg promised to denaturalize—and therefore escape from—the issues of human identity, Mestizo Modernity shows the limits and complexities of this liberatory promise. Cyborgs and post-humanist perspectives in the post-revolutionary culture represented an internal imperialistic project to colonize the indigenous at the same time that the resulting mestizos resisted external imperialistic forces. The key element of this analysis is that mestizo cyborgs and post-humanism reframed indigenous Mexicans in oppressive ways that still offered spaces for resistance through the technologically-mediated selective preservation of traditional indigenous values against some colonial forms of oppression centered around class, race, and gender. The four chapters trace instances of technological hybridity chronologically, from the elitist cultural space of literate government officials to more popular, visual forms of art that could reach illiterate, Spanish-speaking Mexicans. José Vasconcelos' theater play Prometeo Vencedor describes the transformation of an indigenous proto-humanity into a celestial/cosmic [End Page 1268] post-human race through technological and racial hybridity. José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera embraced Vasconcelos' view in contrasting ways. While Orozco's Cortés y la malinche and La conquista de México aligned technology with the Catholic Church, European influences, and male domination to transform and subjugate the indigenous population, Rivera's Panamerican Unity and Mecanización de la tierra emphasized the role of indigenous spirituality and women to balance technologies' potential harms. Emilio Fernández's films María Candelaria, Río Escondido, and The Torch centered social progress on a technologically hybrid body. In them, immunized cyborg and mestizo virgins mediated between traditional racial, gender, socioeconomic structures and modern ones. These women, for instance, raise their voices publicly to challenge local strongmen while still performing the domestic roles of housewives and teachers. El Santo films epitomize the official government discourse of mestizo modernity. Carlos Olvera's novel Perdidos en el espacio criticized nationalist state discourses of the 1950s and 60s. Displacing colonizing efforts from the Earth to other planets allows Perdidos to equate global with national imperialistic efforts. Controlling Martians with devices that speak multiple languages, Central mexicans become one, post-human society with the Martians, where Martians can only talk to themselves, and the state can only listen to them when mediated by technology. Dalton's elegant analysis demonstrates the power of cyborg and post-humanism theories to explain the key role technology had in framing the bodies of twentieth-century Mexico's national identity. This analysis will fascinate scholars and graduate students. Undergrads interested in Mexican culture will enjoy the interpretation of visual art and performances through this lens. The book's theoretical framework will help historians, sociologists, and visual and literary...

In the Orality / Aurality of the Book

The paper examines the role of language in the constitution of a common identity through its liturgical use at the Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint Andrew in Edinburgh (Scotland). Open to moving populations, the parish holds a rather multinational character (with people of 30 different nationalities). It is a place of worship for populations that consider Christian Orthodox Culture as part of a long established collective identity (i.e. Russian, Rumanian and Greeks) and converts that are recently received in its context (including a considerable number of locals). Based on ethnographic research (long periods of observation and interviews), archival work and theoretical contextualisation, the paper will examine the atmospheric materiality of the written text as performed by the readers, the choir and the clergy. This sound-scape is an amalgamation of different kinds of reading: prose, chanted prose, chanting, antiphonic, depending on where at the Liturgy is specifically read. The language of the book is performative: the choreography and its symbolisms perform the words of the texts and vice versa. Adding to this, the use of at least four different languages in every service and two different Eastern Orthodox chanting styles (Slavonic, Byzantine) in combination with European influences (reflecting the unavoidable compromisations that the transposition from style to style and language to language involves) expresses in the most tangible way a practising religious inclusivity that has been carefully cultivated in this parish. Through closer examination of literary transformation processes, I suggest the important role of liturgical language in the creation of communal space-times that negotiate the ideas of home and belonging in a new land.

Lapidary Art of the Altai and the Urals of the Late 18th — 19th Centuries: The Russian Cultural Phenomenon and European Influence

The study of Russian stone-cutting art remains an important and urgent task of contemporary Russian art history. It is necessary to take a fresh look at this direction of Russian decorative art and find out whether Russian stone-cutting art is an internal phenomenon, or it is based on European borrowing. This article refers to works of stone-cutting enterprises of the Urals and the Altai, i. e. Yekaterinburg and Loktevsk Manufactories, which worked exclusively at the order of the Cabinet. In the late eighteenth century, there was a system for ordering stone products in Russia. To do this, they formed sets of “samples” of natural ornamental stone from Russian deposits and compiled albums of product projects. When sending an order to the factory, they attached a sketch and indicated the number of the stone which the product was to be made of. A complex analysis of Russian stone-cutting art testifies to the fact that it followed European fashion, traditions, and technology. European specialists were invited to Russia in order to organise stone-cutting production. Also, travellers brought elegant artworks made of decorative stone by European masters. By the late eighteenth century, stone-cutting production had come a much longer way in Western Europe than in Russia. The production of works of art made of stone was carried out in Italy, France, England, Sweden, and other European countries. Russian commissioners wanted to obtain similar items, and the masters imitated and reproduced European originals. When comparing designs of decorative vases, one can see an undoubted influence of European analogues. However, if there is an obvious similarity to their decorative design, Russian masters are characterised by the ability to reveal the unique aesthetic properties of the material. At the first stage, the influence of European masters was not to be argued, but later on, Russian stone-cutting art began to acquire its own unique features, although it developed along the lines of the dominating pan-European stylistic trends.

The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era ed. by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis

Reviewed by: The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era ed. by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis Jonathan Hayes The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, eds. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 255 pp. A critical consensus defines the era of Hollywood filmmaking between 1967 and 1974 as the Hollywood Renaissance, a brief period of relatively unmatched creative cinematic output made possible by the end of both the classical studio system of filmmaking and the restrictive censorship of the decades-old Production Code. That consensus is as follow: Led by a younger generation of directors inspired by the auteurs of European art cinema, the films made during this era were groundbreaking for the American film industry due to the creative freedom filmmakers had to portray sex and violence on screen and to tell stories that would be more appealing to a new generation of filmgoers. Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, editors of The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era, observe that the films of this period have "been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarly (and also of popular) writing" (xiv), and it is against this scholarship and journalism concerning such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969) that the collection's editors and contributors provide revisionist accounts. The volume opposes the grand narrative that characterizes the Hollywood Renaissance as led by American auteurs who were uniquely disruptive cinematic revolutionaries, a framework established by scholarly and popular histories including Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. The revisionism of Krämer's and Tzioumakis's volume centers on industrial and commercial practices, creative participants other than directors such as film editors, actors, sound designers, and producers, and the science fiction photorealism created by the team of visual effects artists on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It also shifts attention away from traditional accounts of the Hollywood Renaissance that focus on white male directors and protagonists, and instead examines dimensions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and intersectional politics that have been largely ignored in existing scholarly and popular studies. Each of the volume's thirteen chapters focuses on a film taken as a case study. Justin Wyatt in his essay on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? notes that the 1966 film is not usually considered in discussions of the Hollywood Renaissance, yet it "truly paved the way for the Hollywood Renaissance" (13). Wyatt examines how the private relationship and public personas of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fueled audience interest in the film, which launched a new mode of American filmmaking–"the American art film"–with its psychological realism advanced by Haskell Wexler's intimate cinematography and the screenplay's frank language adapted from Edward Albee's successful play, which directly resulted in new MPAA President Jack Valenti's decision to review and eventually abandon the Production Code. Melis Behlil examines the reciprocal influences of European cinema and American cinema on the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, focusing on MGM's distribution deal for the Michelangelo Antonioni-directed Blow-Up (1967) as setting the stage for the Italian director's work on Zabriskie Point, which the financially struggling studio financed: "By giving complete freedom to Antonioni, the studio was hoping to gain credibility with the coveted youth segment" (155). Behlil describes several waves of European influence on American studio cinema from the 1920s and 1930s onward in order to show that studios had always employed European creative talent in order to "garner prestige" (150) and that the European-influenced stylistic innovations of Hollywood Renaissance films followed this longstanding commercially driven pattern. Other contributors re-evaluate the contributions of creative artists other than directors. Editors, visual effects teams, sound [End Page 52] designers, and actors take center stage in many of the volume's essays, including Warren Buckland's piece drawing on the memoirs and interviews of film editors to examine their contributions to American cinema's new look. Buckland analyzes the work of Ralph Rosenblum on...

British Project in Palestine: Colonial “National Home”

Mandatory Palestine proved to be a unique example of an attempt to create a “national home” within the framework of the colonial system. The present article aims to analyse the combination of the national and the colonial in the implementation of the “home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, as well as the role of cultural-religious narratives in the mindset of both the British administrators and the Zionist settlers. The research is based on British official documents and archive materials, as well as on the memoirs of Jewish settlers in Eretz Yisrael, some of which are introduced into the Russian academic circulation for the first time. Many British politicians viewed the return of the Jews to their historical homeland as a specific noble mission, which fit both into the framework of “Christian Zionism” and the notion of the civilizing nature of imperial colonialism. Palestine, along with its religious and cultural significance, was at the same time playing a thoroughly practical strategic role, and in that sense served as a highly convenient “foothold”. The British politicians and administrators perceived the Zionists as loyal agents of European colonial influence in the Middle East region. Based on the conducted research, the author reached the following conclusions. Even before ethnic confrontation in mandate Palestine intensified, some representatives of the British Empire anticipated that the Jews would not be a loyal minority, always ready to act in the Empire’s interests to the full extent. The main finding of the research is that despite the superficial similarity between the outlooks of the European Zionists and the official representatives of the British Empire, their perceptions of Palestine and their aims and purposes there were fundamentally different. On the one hand, the notions of the leaders of the Zionist movement about Eretz Yisrael were indeed in many respects close to the positions of British politicians and administrators. Jewish nationalism emerged under the influence of European ideas and concepts, and even orientalism influenced it to a certain degree. On the other hand, the Zionists perceived the Europeans as situational allies, therefore their interests coincided only in the short-term perspective. The idea of the national revival of the people of Israel in its historical homeland played a key role for them. This laid the foundation of the new Jewish identity, which also included multiple elements of religious traditions and legal bases of Judaism.

The Historical Geography of Croatia: Territorial Change and Cultural Landscapes by Borna Fuerst-Bjeliš and Nikola Glamuzina

Reviewed by: The Historical Geography of Croatia: Territorial Change and Cultural Landscapes by Borna Fuerst-Bjeliš and Nikola Glamuzina David S. Hardin The Historical Geography of Croatia: Territorial Change and Cultural Landscapes. Borna Fuerst-Bjeliš and Nikola Glamuzina. Historical Geography and Geosciences. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2021. Pp. xviii+203, 6 black & white illustrations, 59 color illustrations, endnotes. $169.99, hardcover, ISBN 978-3-0306-8432-7. $169.99, paperback, ISBN 978-3-0306-8435-8. $129.99, eBook, ISBN 978-3-0306-8433-4. One would be hard-pressed to find a nation-state that has been the product of as many outside forces as Croatia. Waves of human settlement from the Paleolithic to the Indo-European invasion to Greek and Roman expansion to South Slavic immigration to Ottoman displacements and Austro-Hungarian settlement programs created a cultural mosaic that would only be unified independently twice, once in the tenth century and again in the twentieth century. Throughout most of its history, it has been on the edge of dividing lines and a shatter belt between competing kingdoms, city-states, and empires that each redrew the external borders, trade patterns, road networks, and landscapes. There have been English-language histories of Croatia, but no historical geographies until now. Coauthors Borna Fuerst-Bjeliš and Nikola Glamuzina have done a commendable job of peeling back the many layers of the Croatian historical-geographical onion in The Historical Geography of Croatia: Territorial Change and Cultural Landscapes. The book is divided into ten chapters, with an introductory geographical overview and nine time periods: Prehistory (Paleolithic through Indo-European invasion), Antiquity (Greeks through late Roman Empire), Early Middle Ages (collapse of Roman civilization through Slavic colonization), High Middle Ages (rise of distinctive regions through the first independent Croatian state), Ottoman Conquest (Slavonia under Ottoman control and depopulation through refugee migrations and the coming of the Vlachs), Early Modern Era (Ottoman decline and creation of the Military Frontier through the rise of the Republic of Ragusa), Spatial Impacts of Industrial Development within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Austro-Hungarian rule and the coming of railroads and industry through a Croatia proper under a Ban's rule and the first great emigration waves), Croatia under South Slavic Political Associations (post–World War I Yugoslav monarchy through the latter years of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), [End Page 97] and Stepping Out of the Past—Developmental Tendencies of Croatia since the 1990s (Post–Homeland War through the present). The authors point out three important cultural aspects of Croatia: its Western orientation; Catholicism; and the inland/littoral divide. So while Croatia may have been fragmented and absorbed by larger external forces down through the centuries, beginning with the division of the Roman Empire in 395 CE, Croatia has remained on the western side of the divide between eastern and western Europe. Though incursions from the east (Ottoman Empire and subsequent population resettlement) did occur, Croatia remained an outpost of western European culture, maintaining use of the Latin alphabet and adhering to the Roman Catholic faith, while their neighbors to the east adopted the Byzantine Cyrillic alphabet and Eastern Orthodox Christianity or Ottoman Arabic script and Islam. The Dinaric Alps form the principle cultural divide within the country, and for several centuries the littoral slope was the focus of settlement and development by waves of colonizers, primarily of Mediterranean orientation (Rome, Venice, Austria). The interior (Pannonia) flourished under Roman control but remained a quiet agrarian region dominated by central European (Hungarian) influence for much of its history. Like the rest of Europe, Croatia also developed smaller regional identities that can be fiercely held and sometimes manifest as political parties. One remarkable aspect of Croatian historical geography that seems to recur in several different periods is the nearly complete obliteration of the cultural presence of in situ groups by invaders. Indo-Europeans erased the Neolithic Vučedol culture in Eastern Slavonia; Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian forces wiped the landscape clear of each other's cultural presence in Western Slavonia. The Pannonian interior—the most prosperous of Rome's provinces in what is now Croatia—wasn't immune as the border defenses collapsed: Early all the elements of the...

The use of "soft power" by leading European countries and EU structuresto influence internal processes in third countries

The use of "soft power" by leading European countries and EU structuresto influence internal processes in third countries

Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions ed. by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan & Erich Poppe

Reviewed by: Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions ed. by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan & Erich Poppe Matthieu Boyd (bio) Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan & Erich Poppe. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. ISBN 978–1–78683–343–3 (cloth), e-book formats available. 432 pages. £75 (e-book £34.99) / US$100. The Arthur of the Welsh (Bromwich, Jarman, & Roberts 1991, henceforth AoW) was hailed as a landmark book, and was followed, in due course, by seven more Arthurs in the Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages series co-published by the University of Wales Press and the Vinaver Trust. Now the series has come full circle with Arthur in the Celtic languages (henceforth AiCL), which is both much more and slightly less than a second edition of AoW. That is, AiCL should happily join AoW on everyone’s bookshelf, but it is not clear that it can entirely replace it, given AoW’s continuing value for the history of scholar-ship. Nor would AiCL seem to entirely replace the other single book that has so far been the closest thing to it, the special volume (xxi) of Arthurian literature on Celtic Arthurian material (Lloyd-Morgan 2004). For each chapter of AiCL, there will be earlier work that comes to mind—often by the same authors—that is similar and perhaps goes into significantly more or less detail, including chapters of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Arthurian literature edited by Helen Fulton (2009). AiCL brings almost all of this together in one place and makes a few significant revisions; and instead of the ‘Celtic origins’ framing in Fulton’s Companion, here the Celtic literatures take center stage. The introduction to AiCL mentions some of the developments since AoW that justify revisiting the Welsh material. The Cornish, Breton, and Gaelic coverage, of course, is mostly new to the series, and wonderful to have in this convenient form. [End Page 251] AoW did discuss saints’ lives, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and related prophecies, for which the primary reference would now be the chapters by Andrew Breeze, Siân Echard, and Julia Crick in The Arthur of medieval Latin literature (Echard 2011). AoW also started with a brief inquiry into the historical Arthur, which has fallen by the wayside in AiCL in favor of approaching Arthur from the outset as a literary and cultural phenomenon. AiCL opens with Nerys Ann Jones on ‘Arthurian references in early Welsh poetry’ (see her more extensive treatment in Jones 2019), John Bollard on ‘The earliest Myrddin poems’, and Jenny Rowland on ‘Trystan and Esyllt’. The Welsh Triads, meanwhile, show up not in this earliest round of texts, but in a later section on ‘Influences and re-compositions’, which reframes them as an evolving corpus showing European influence, as opposed to primordial lore. The ‘native Welsh’ tales Culhwch ac Olwen and the famously undatable Breuddwyd Rhonabwy are covered by Simon Rodway and Catherine McKenna respectively, and benefit from the singular focus: these chapters not only situate the stories, but ask important questions about what they are saying. There follows a section on translations and adaptations into Welsh: Katherine Himsworth discusses Brut y brenhinedd, the Welsh version of Geoffrey of Monmouth; then there are chapters on Owein, Geraint, and Peredur. These are treated independently in AiCL: the usefulness of grouping them together as ‘the three romances’ is considered and rejected at 113–114. The respective chapters—by Regine Reck, Poppe, and Lloyd-Morgan—highlight specifics of the adaptation from the corresponding romances by Chrétien de Troyes and related shifts in theme and values. A topic mentioned only briefly here (111–113, in Poppe & Lloyd-Morgan’s overview ‘The first adaptations from French. History and context of a debate’) is the problem of Celtic influence on Arthurian literature in French and English. A common view prior to AiCL (see, for example, Hellman 2014) has been that, even if the Welsh adaptations show influence from Chrétien, they also reflect the source material Chrétien had to work with. Since The Arthur of the French (Burgess & Pratt 2006) did not go into...