Instances Of Influence Research Articles

Conceptualisation of Sustainability

Metaphors are language phenomena commonly used as tools of persuasion, as evident in different kinds of public discourses, most notably in political addresses. They are particularly potent in this respect because they function on the principle of connecting the logical with the emotional. This persuasive role has also been attested in media reports, usually employed for the purposes of framing and the creation of a specific narrative. The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical and methodological account of metaphor choices related to sustainability and restoration, as issues related to climate change, made by the contemporary media and the perceptions formed by repetition and reinforcements of certain kinds of imagery present in their choice. An additional purpose is to understand which information sources, and possible instances of influence and leverage, could be of importance in terms of the media reporting on sustainability-related issues. Therefore, the paper offers novel conceptual and analytical guidelines for future research in the field of sustainability communication.

Everyday Life of the Russian Nuns in the Holy Land at the Time of Changes in the Middle East, 1940s–1950s

This study aims at providing an overview of the everyday life of Russian nuns in Palestine after World War II. This research encompassed the following tasks: to analyze the range of ego-documents available today, characterizing the everyday life and internal motivation of women in choosing the church jurisdiction; to identify, on the basis of written sources, the most active supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate to examine the nuns’ activity as information agents of the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet government; to characterize the actors influencing the everyday life of the Russian nuns in the context of the creation of the state of Israel and new borders dividing the Holy Land; to present the motives and instruments of influence employed by the representatives of both secu-lar and church diplomacies in respect to the women leading a monastic life; to describe consequences of including the nuns into the sphere of interest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR; to show the specific role of “Russian women” in the context of the struggle for securing positions of the USSR and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the region. The sources for the study were prodused by the state (correspondence between the state authorities, meeting notes) and from the religious actors (letters of nuns to the church authorities, reports of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, memoirs of the clergy). By combining the methods of micro-history and history of the everyday life with the political history of the Cold War, the study examines the agency of the nuns — a category of women traditionally unnoticeable in the political history. Due to the specificity of the sources, the study focuses exclusively on a group of the nuns of the Holy Land who came under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patri-archate. The majority of the Russian-speaking population of Palestine in the mid-1940s were women in the status of monastic residents (nuns and novices) and pilgrims, and in the 1940s–1950s, they were drawn into the geopolitical combinations of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, staffed with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, becomes a key institution of influence in the region. This article shows how elderly nuns became an object of close attention and even funding by the Soviet state. The everyday life of the nuns became directly dependent on the activities of the Soviet agencies and Soviet-Israeli relations after the arri-val of the Soviet state representatives. At the same time, the nuns became key participants in the inter-jurisdictional conflicts and began to act as agents of influence in the region. The study analyzes numerous ego-documents created by the nuns themselves from the collection of the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the USSR Council of Ministers. The study shows how nuns positioned themselves as leading a monastic life in the written correspondence with the ROC authorities and staff of the Soviet MFA. The instances of influence of different secular authorities on the development of the female monasticism presented here point to promising research avenues for future reconstruction of the history of women in the Holy Land based on archival materials from state departments, alternative sources should also be found. The study focused on the life of elderly Russian nuns in the Holy Land and showed their activity in the context of the geopolitical transformations in the Near East in the 1940s–1950s.

A Neglected Chapter. Courtly Fiction of the Kamakura Period

T mHE reputation of the works of fiction composed during the Kamakura period in the tradition of Heian monogatari JtK is by no means high. Few scholars are attracted to what seems to be a barren field, certainly when compared to the gunki monogatari _6$zM (martial tales), or setsuwa monogatari d=6$tK (anecdotal writings) of the same period, and even they are likely to opine that the later examples of courtly fiction are so greatly indebted to Genji Monogatari Mi$o as to be little more than copies. Every instance of influence from Genji Monogatari on these works has been painstakingly traced, but the extraordinary dissimilarities are generally passed over in silence or stated without comment, as if the scholar was rather embarrassed to discover that not everything could be explained in terms of imitation. No doubt it is frustrating to deal with works of literature that are known, even before they are read, to be inferior to Genji Monogatari. The incomplete state of the texts of some of the best monogatari of the Kamakura period also makes it difficult for the rare enthusiast to claim that his particular discovery is almost as good as Murasaki Shikibu's AiYn masterpiece. Other problems of a more technical nature are involved when discussing the courtly fiction of the Kamakura period. The surviving texts are not dated, and it is therefore not always clear whether a particular work should be assigned to the Kamakura period or to the late Heian period. There are two external sources of information about the dates of courtly fiction of this period, Mumyo Zoshi tw'f ('The Tale Without a Name'),1 a discussion of various monogatari by a group of unidentified ladies, written about 1200, and Fuyo Waka Shiu AR % (or Fuyoshu), a collection, compiled in 1271, of poems that originally had appeared in monogatari. A work mentioned in Mumyo Zoshi must have been written by 1200; if not cited in this work but quoted in Fuyoshu, it was presumably composed between 1200 and 1271. This is at best a