Form Of Barbarism Research Articles

ESTADO, AUTORITARISMO E LUTA DE CLASSES

The set of articles published in this issue of Revista Katalysis are embedded in the relations among state, authoritarianism, and class struggle. It is a timely and necessary combination of articles to reflect on the current concerns and challenges. The articles have a strong connection with pulsating realities in different parts of the world, focusing on dimensions and trends that face the understanding of contemporary capitalism and its living forms of barbarism. From the point of view of the Latin American continent, the texts resume the socio-historical, economic, political, and cultural determinations that characterize the dependent nature of the particular processes at the origin of contemporary capitalism, drawing attention to the references that find its criticism in the totality of social life.

Transhumanism as Barbarism

In this article, we will consider how the alterity is transformed into a new form of barbarism in the context of the increasingly accentuated development of human bio-enhancement technologies. If in the beginning, barbarism was by excellence the otherness, the stranger, the unknown, today we have to deal with a strange approach were the human is transformed and adapted to the consumerism market. In this way, as we will see at the beginning of the article, barbarism never breaks from civilization, but remains not beyond the city and even more not over humanity itself. It is important to know that barbarism doesn't have just a negative perspective but has an approach within all the unknown things that are viewed as skeptical or with disregard. Next, we will talk about transhumanism as a transition to the otherness, quite to the unknown as barbarism. In this way, we will see that the perspective of evolution throws us into the paradigm of barbarism, in the sense that not everything new is necessarily innovative, as not everything old is outdated.

SARDISMOS: A RHETORICAL TERM FOR BILINGUAL OR PLURILINGUAL INTERACTION?

In his poem ‘The Last Hours of Cassiodorus’, Peter Porter has the Christian sage ask: ‘After me, what further barbarisms?’. Yet, Cassiodorus himself accepted, even valorized, at least one form of barbarism that had been rejected by earlier rhetoricians: sardismos (σαρδισμός), the mixture of multiple languages in close proximity. In its earliest attestation, Quintilian classified it as a type of solecism (Inst. 8.3.59). By contrast, five centuries later Cassiodorus in his Commentary on the Psalms used the term three times to praise the mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Latin in the Latin Psalter. This reversal, from vice to virtue of speech, illustrates some significant changes in attitudes toward language and multilingualism that developed as Christianity reshaped Roman literary culture. For one, Christian preachers, modelling themselves on the plain style of the Gospels, embraced forms of speech that had been regarded as low and stigmatized. In the words of Augustine (In psalm. 36, Serm. 3.6): ‘better you understand us in our barbarism than to have been deserted in our eloquence’ (melius in barbarismo nostro uos intelligitis, quam in nostra disertudine uos deserti eritis).1 Secondly, Hebrew now entered the linguistic consciousness of the Roman literary elite as one of the three languages of Scripture. Even if in-depth knowledge remained rare, it was worthy of being mentioned alongside Greek and Latin, just as it had appeared with them in the inscription on Jesus’ cross (Luke 23:38, John 19:20). Lastly, linguistic variety itself came to be positively valued since it reflected the diversity of a church coming together out of many peoples. Commenting on the bride's appearance in Psalm 45, both Augustine and Cassiodorus saw the variegated adornment of her robe as a reference to the diversity of Christian languages.

Bullying, Prejudice and Barbarism

Among the many kinds of violence at school, bullying is one of the most important subjects. This phenomenon consists of intentional physical and psychological violence directed to a specific person, who is considered fragile and inferior by the bully. Thus, bullying provides short and long term negative consequences to all involved, and is presents as potentially related to denial and rejection of others. Therefore, this research analyzes the conceptual limitations of bullying by utilizing Critical Theory as its main theoretical framework—more specifically the ideas of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer about education, emancipation, and prejudice. Lastly, it denounces the naturalization of bullying at school, and the alienation to the concept, revealing it to be a new form of barbarism that remains today.

Indians, Cannibals, and Barbarians: Hernán Cortés and Early Modern Cultural Relativism

The little-known body of texts written by humanists in the wake of Christopher Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean (1492–93) draws upon classical and ecclesiastical teachings in regard to political existence and Christian evangelization to set forth a nuanced understanding of the difference between pernicious and innocuous forms of barbarism. Although both forms of barbarism are grounded in deficiencies, these texts laud the inherent goodness and perfectibility of the peoples who were subsequently called Indians, in contradistinction to the ferocity, cunning, and obstinacy of those instead dubbed cannibals. Consideration of this body of writings not only undercuts the simplistic claim that Europeans discounted the humanity of America's natives; it also elucidates both how certain markers of intelligence and civility informed strategies of conversion or subjugation and why societies of Indians held such an attraction for utopian thought.

Tragedy Made Flesh

This essay examines how Du Bois’s critique of global political economy proceeds as a critique of American constitutionalism in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Analyzing how Du Bois reworks a set of Marxian concepts—phantasmagoria, fetish, and transubstantiation—toward a theory of the “new imperialism,” Powers argues that Black Reconstruction subverts a triumphal narrative of American constitutionalism as exceptionalism by undoing the temporality of legal progressivism that sustains it. Writing against a generation of historians who treated Reconstruction as an anomalous deviation from an American constitutionalism thought to embody the realization of immanent reason at the end of history, Du Bois demonstrates that the forms of barbarism, custom, and status posited as prior in this telos of constitutional progress to be products of the American juridico-political regime. Through examining the ways in which the Constitution operates as a fetish that doubly posits a fiction of race war as an alibi for its own lawlessness, and a fiction of world-historical lawlessness as an alibi for empire, Du Bois punctures a doctrine of race that phantasmagorically distorts human capacity for both juridical and phenomenological modes of recognition.

Acid violence: a burning issue in Bangladesh

Acid violence is a barbaric form of violence in Bangladesh. Acid violence also called acid throwing or vitriolage, is defined as the act of throwing of strong corrosives on face and body of a person with the intention of causing permanent disfiguration, intense pain, scarring and sometimes blindness. All of these injuries are considered as ‘grievous hurt’ under section 320 of B.P.C (Bangladesh Penal Code). For the last few years it is on the rise in both urban and rural areas of Bangladesh. The perpetrators are mostly men and adolescent boys. The overwhelming majority of the victims are women and many of them are girls and young females. Recently, however, there have been acid attacks on children, older women and also men. These attacks are often the result of family and land dispute, dowry demands or a desire for revenge due to failure in love affairs or marriage proposals. It is considered as one of the extreme forms of repression and violation of women’s right. This review article is aimed to focus on the present situation of this barbaric act of vengeance against women and young adolescent girls with regard to frequency, causes, long term consequences and creating public awareness on the issue by tightly regulating the sale and transport of acid as well as enacting harsher penalties for perpetrators. Data collection is based on information from Dhaka Medical College hospital, One Stop Crisis Center (OCC), Acid Survivors’ Foundation, Naripokkho Action Aid and several Dhaka based organizations. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/imcj.v7i1.17744 Ibrahim Med. Coll. J. 2013; 7(1): 18-20

European Desires and National Bedrooms? Negotiating “Normalcy” in Postsocialist Poland

Only a few years ago rights of sexual minorities in Poland caused not only national controversies over what democracy means, but also gained international attention, visible in demonstrations in front of embassies in Berlin and London, wide media coverage, and protest letters to the Polish prime minister by the Helsinki Foundation of Human Rights as well as Amnesty International and the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA). Several Polish politicians were repeatedly cautioned for their extreme conservative stance on homosexual issues and homophobic remarks as well as criticized for the prohibitions of the so-calledMarsz Równości(Equality March), the Polish version of the Christopher Street Day (usually known as Gay Pride Parade) as being against the standards of democracy and human rights. Finally, and in particular as a reaction to the various remarks of Polish politicians, a resolution against homophobia was submitted to the European Parliament in January 2006 and passed in June 2006. Despite the resolution, the then Polish minister of education, Roman Giertych (League of Polish Families, or LPR), caused another great stir at the European Union (EU) conference of ministers of education in Heidelberg, Germany, on March 1, 2007, when he stated that brochures on sexuality education published by the Council of Europe that contained information on homosexuality and homosexual relations were to be prohibited in Polish schools. In the same speech, he rebuked societies that allowed abortion on social grounds and called abortion a “legal crime” and a “new form of barbarism.”

The death penalty: UN victory puts total abolition within our grasp

On 18 December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly voted for a moratorium on executions as a step towards the total abolition of capital punishment. The eradication of capital punishment has been spectacular in the last three decades and over 135 countries have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice. The end of the death penalty may be in site. Amnesty International argues that this outmoded and barbaric form of punishment belongs in the past and looks forward to a world free from state judicial killing. Two weeks after his 18th birthday in 2006, Sina Paymard was taken to the gallows to be executed in Iran. As he stood there with a noose around his neck, he was asked for his final request. He said that he would like to play the ney – a Middle Eastern flute. Relatives of the murder victim, who were there to witness the execution, were so moved by his music that they agreed to accept the payment of diyeh (blood money) instead of retribution by death, as is allowed under Iranian law. The noose was removed and he was taken down from the gallows. Sina Paymard was granted a stay of execution while his family and his victim's family negotiated payment of diyeh. Although Sina Paymard remains today under sentence of death in Reja'i Shahr prison in Karaj, his story offers a rare glimmer of humanity in the brutal world of state killings. Sina Paymard's story is unusual. Iran executes hundreds of people every year.

Putting the Community into Organizational Science: Exploring the Construction of Knowledge Claims

Like Weiss, I too dislike some of the postmodern writings on organizations. I too worry that shallow works given even more shallow and opportunistic readings can have negative social consequences. But I also recognize that most of Weiss's concerns are not unique to postmodern writings. Many of the problems he discusses could also be descriptive of work from different conceptual and methodological stances. Statistics are often contrived and misleading. Ethnography has at times aided colonization. Both social and physical sciences have at times produced bad theories and been put to very negative uses. Some early postmodernist theorists, Christians, and scientists, were Nazis, and elements of each of their fundamental conceptions could be co-opted to support this particular form of barbarism. This potential utilization, however, does not lead for me to a blanket condemnation of postmodernism, science, ethnography, religion, or statistics. Devotees of each have used their special understandings to fight tyranny. Both postmodernism and science also draw on fundamental conceptions that are productive, enable open choices, and help us see through the masters and ideologies of a particular time and place. I am less interested in blame than in finding what each can contribute. I look to an ongoing community discussion that helps us to do the best we can to sort out the good from the bad, and I hope that the current set of essays helps stimulate a positive dialogue.

Justices William J. Brennan, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall on capital punishment: its constitutionality, morality, deterrent effect, and interpretation by the court

Justices William J. Brennan, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall are the only members of the United States Supreme Court who categorically opposed the death penalty for the duration of their tenure. Both wrote a large number of intellectually provocative opinions which examined a wide range of legal and moral arguments frequently raised concerning capital punishment. This book is a meticulous examination of their opinions which not only amplifies their constitutional philosophy but also explores the evolving questions on capital punishment which were presented to the Court. The opinions of Brennan and Marshall were extremely cogent and quite consistent in their approach to the death penalty. Both maintained that the death penalty is unconstitutional and a barbaric form of punishment which has been arbitrarily inflicted based on racial and ethnic bias. This book examines their opinions within the larger context of arguments generally put forward both in support of, and opposition to, the death penalty. The text of this book originally appeared in its entirety in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, vol.8, issue #1(1994).

The Social Sciences Today

The changes taking place in our society are fundamental and dramatic. Essentially what is happening is a change of the social order. No matter how many attempts are made to gloss over this process by reference to the notion that social formations do not exist, that neither socialism nor capitalism existed or currently exist, but only general civilization, one cannot avoid reality. The reality is that the system, at whose head and base was a totalitarian party and state, where state ownership prevailed and the population was leveled and essentially constituted one class (it was in this sense that the term "the state of all the people" was used), is being replaced by another, perhaps pluralistic order, with a mixed economy and differing forms of ownership. This is the best case. In the worst case, capitalism will be restored, and in its most barbaric form.

Technological Studies and the Curriculum in Higher Education

constitutes intolerable ignorance in a person who holds a college degree is a perennial question in higher education. Over time, any particular answer loses its adequacy with changes in the knowledge required for competent participation in society and alterations in the significiant beliefs and values of a culture. Various institutions of higher chose the late 1970s as the acceptable time for elaborating a contemporary answer. They began their inquiry by reexamining the studies required of undergraduate students. Two of the most publicized inquiries were the reviews of general requirements conducted by the faculties of Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. Many other institutions, however, have also undertaken similar reviews of their curricula (The Chronicle of Higher Education 1978a-c). Among the various issues at stake in the proposed revisions is the amount of time given to preparation for entry into an occupation as compared with the time allocated to liberal or humanistic studies. obvious instrumental worth of technological studies argues for their inclusion in a curriculum. But since time and resources are limited, any attention given to technology reduces the time available for the humanities. Hence, in devising a curriculum suitable at the college level, a decision has to be made on the extent to which career preparation and vocational training are appropriate norms for arranging studies. following statement is typical of the way this issue is currently posed: The growing realization that technocratic-specialist is the key to elite occupational positions in an advanced industrial society has raised serious questions about the claims to legitimacy of older norms of American higher education (Schaffer 1978, p. 411). defenders of the older norms, however, see yet another form of barbarism in technological studies. Thus, in a recent collection of essays on the curriculum in higher education, a professor of English asks, What can be done to counteract the further technologizing of higher education? (Marx 1975, p. 12).