Interpreters Of Culture Research Articles

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Re-conceptualizing volunteer tourism organizations roles: A host perspective

While volunteer tourism organizations (VTOs) remain important intermediaries in the practice of volunteer tourism, questions remain on the role they play in serving the interests of host communities. This paper explores the role(s) of VTOs in a rural volunteer tourism hub in Ghana from a host community perspective using a phenomenological inquiry. An integrated framework of Critical/Institutional Analysis and Development (C/IAD) was used to examine host community experience with VTOs' role. Data was collected through focus group discussion and in-depth interviews with 43 residents of Asebu - Ghana. The study revealed that while VTOs act as facilitators and interpreters of local culture, issues of over-regulation and protectionism isolate guests from the host as well as rob some host of any meaningful socio-economic benefits and interactions.

Intercultural Communication in Practice: An Integration of the Intercultural Approach in the Algerian EFL Classroom

Twenty-first century foreign language pedagogy has strongly insisted on the promotion of the fifth language skill that combines language and culture in a harmonizing fashion. Many foreign language educators have reached a high level of awareness about the need of developing intercultural competence. Yet, despite such awareness, it remains unclear to many of them just when and how this can be integrated in their classroom practice. Hence, this paper tends to suggest a functional course design that demonstrates the implementation of the intercultural approach through operational techniques, tasks and lesson plans for the purpose of developing learners’ linguistic and intercultural communicative competence (knowledge, skills, attitudes) in the Algerian EFL classroom. The courses also aim to raise students’ cultural awareness, to train them on how to deal with cultural diversity in and outside the classroom by making them active analysts and interpreters of the target culture as well as their native one, and more importantly to develop attitudes of openness, curiosity, empathy, non-judgmental thinking and prevent cultural shocks, misunderstandings, stereotypes and prejudices. The proposed intercultural pedagogy aims to make some of the ICC issues accessible and manageable to EFL practitioners, as it tries to answer questions in both practical and principled ways.

Raça e evolucionismo, as Ciências Sociais no Brasil: querela entre Sílvio Romero e Manoel Bonfim em torno da herança portuguesa na formação brasileira.

Sílvio Romero juntamente com Manoel Bonfim foram dois importantes intérpretes da cultura brasileira. Dialogando com teorias à época concebidas como a última verdade científica, os dois escritores analisaram o Brasil e pensaram seus problemas, propondo sua superação. Com uma visão minuciosa possibilitada pela gama de autores da crítica moderna, Sílvio Romero buscou esquadrinhar a cultura brasileira tendo por base as leis orgânicas, ao passo que Manoel Bonfim, embora conhecesse alguns teóricos que influenciaram o bacharel, fugiu ao determinismo, trazendo as causas do atraso para o campo político, econômico, da cultura no geral. Vivendo momentos conturbados de um Brasil moderno que estava por vir, os dois escritores acima de tudo refletem problemas maiores que os de uma obra literária, expõem os problemas do país, suas causas e apontam a “melhor política” para o novo Brasil.

Building Professional Competences of English Language Teachers

This article is devoted to the problem of building professional competences for the teaching profession. The paper highlights four main groups of professional competences: cultural and linguistic competences, linguistic and didactic competences, social and educational competences, professional and educational competences. It presents a brief summary of key skills a person should possess to be a competent foreign language teacher. Foreign language teachers should act as professional inheritors, critics and interpreters of knowledge and culture when teaching students. They also have to be able to communicate clearly in the language of instruction, using correct grammar, in various contexts related to teaching. Moreover a foreign language teacher should adapt his or her teaching to the needs of students with various disabilities, integrate ICT in teaching activities, cooperate with school staff, parents and students in pursuing the educational objectives, collaborate with the teaching team in developing programs and projects when teaching students. The article attempts to identify learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and the subject content with view to developing the competences targeted. The study can help in designing and modelling the educational process within the frameworks of the competence approach.

Early childhood care and education in a consumer society: Questioning the child–adult binary and childhood inequality

Like many globalised urban cities, Singapore is a consumer society – a social system shaped by the production and consumption of commodities. Through a cultural studies framework, this article utilises ethnographic data of children’s peer culture to raise questions about the child–adult binary and developmentalism that tends to govern educational thought and practice in Singapore. Drawing from the talk and action of a group of 4- and 5-year-olds and parent interviews, this article sheds light on how a group of preschoolers and their families actively wrestle with similar processes of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ within a consumer society, albeit in their own terms. In creating a peer culture of shared experiences, the children exchange personal facts and knowledge of cultural symbols, inadvertently including and excluding certain peers in such dialogues. This investigation reveals children’s creative appropriation of their family’s consumer culture in the process of connecting with peers. I pursue an argument emphasising the need for adults to acknowledge and respect young children as interpreters of societal culture and as agents in their own learning; to rethink assumptions of young children as ‘innocent’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘incompetent’, and adults as ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘in control’.

Children as Interpreters of Culture: Producing Meanings from Folktales in Southern Ethiopia

Children as Interpreters of Culture : Producing Meanings from Folktales in Southern Ethiopia

Manipulating the Next Generation: Translating Culture for Children

Translators are interpreters of culture; they are the ones who make a source text and the culture that informs it available to a target readership, and they therefore have a certain amount of power over the readers. This is doubly the case when it comes to children's literature, as children do not always have the ability to recognise in what ways a text is being manipulated. Since adults write, edit, publish, translate, purchase, and teach literature for children, they are thus the ones who construct culture for them. The works adults choose to translate and how they do so can reveal what they think is appropriate or important for children, and why.When texts have culture-specific features, translators, whether for adults or children, have to consider the target audience. One major issue here is whether the readers will recognize or should learn about these aspects of the source culture. This is, in essence, the question of domesticating versus foreignisation, or, put another way, whether to bring the reader to the text or the text to the reader. In my studies of children's literature, I have found that translators tend to domesticate or change more than they would for adult readers, and this creates a very different, perhaps even manipulative, reading experience for the target audience. Since children's literature and its translation can be said to be a power play between adults and children (Rose 1993, p.2), the question then is: 'In what way adults (ab)use their power?'.

Argument, Evidence, and Engagement: Training Students As Critical Investigators and Interpreters of Rhetoric and Culture

When students first arrive on campus, even at academically elite institutions, it is highly unlikely that they come with the recognition that all academic writing is argument-based and that all knowledge claims require substantiation. They have often been educationally and culturally conditioned to grant authors too much authority, and for the most part they are quite aware of their position in the knowledge hierarchy. While harshly critical of their own logic leaps, sloppy support, organization flaws, and other cardinal sins, most students are reluctant to acknowledge similar failings in any established author, particularly one assigned by their professor. It is rare, then, that they see themselves as the audience being addressed or as an audience even worth addressing, much less as one that an author is actively attempting to persuade to believe or to act in a certain way. Pedagogically, I have been hesitant to organize argument courses around familiar public debates (capital punishment, drug policy, etc.) for two main reasons. First, these debates tend to produce sides too sharply drawn and arguments too obviously and clearly formulated. Students may choose sides solely because of their emotional response, their perception of which side will be easier to defend, or their sense of where the teacher stands. Second, and more significantly, to restrict the scope of an argument course to explicit debates is to neglect the relationship between argument and knowledge production, a relationship that pervades academic writing across the disciplines but is rarely acknowledged.

Aesthetic Experience in Constructivist Museums

Psychical Distance is dead, and Significant Form is in hiding.1 Not that many people care about such arcane aesthetic concepts anymore. This is an era of constructivist meaning-making, dynamic human engagement, and in-yourface social relevance. For American art museums it is a vertiginous period of conflicting goals and identity crises. As interpreters of culture, art museums have had to face tidal waves of revisionist history, postmodern narratives, political correctness, and critical and contextual zealots. As authenticobject oriented institutions, art museums must struggle to remain viable in a techno-culture where virtual worlds proliferate and the veracity of reproduction technology has connoisseurs doing double-takes. As exhibition-oriented institutions, art museums compete with the entertainment industry's special effects teams who continue to up the ante in order to capture a jaded public's attention. As educational institutions, art museums puzzle over how to provide active learning opportunities in an essentially passive hands-off environment. The term paradigm shift has been leveraged so often in attempts to explain the state of art museums that the phrase has become passe. What has become of aesthetic experience amid all the confusion? In the galleries and passageways of art museums aesthetic experience is still referred to with a sense of sacred commitment. And like many things sacred, the concept of aesthetic experience remains largely enshrouded by a mysterious veil of ambiguity. Traditionally it has been taken on faith that people who love art should be left alone to love the artworks, and that the quality of the museum experience will be high provided that the quality of the artwork is high. Unfortunately, the assumption has proved unreliable, that if museum visitors are given sufficient exposure to high quality art, they are inevitably swept up in the indescribable epiphany of an aesthetic experience

The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (review)

Over twenty years ago, in The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson wrote memorably of the "mirage" leading many interpreters of culture astray, "the vision of a moment in which the individual subject would be somehow fully conscious of his or her [social] determination [...] and would be able to square the circle of ideological conditioning by sheer lucidity and the taking of thought" (283). Readers of Victorian Studies will have seen a [End Page 198] recent article by Amanda Anderson ("The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency," Victorian Studies 43 [2000]: 43-65) testifying not only to the staying power of such alluring chimeras but to the efficiency of their adaptive mechanisms under evolving theoretical paradigms. Operating on the same principles, the book under review carries out a scrupulously nuanced reassessment of the problems and promises of detachment in both Victorian and contemporary critical contexts. At a time when claims of disinterest are automatically discounted, "situated knowledges" are at a premium, and the idea that a work of criticism makes an "intervention" has acquired the status of cliché, The Powers of Distance offers the rewardingly paradoxical thesis that cultivated detachment can itself foster vital interventions into shared ways of life, and that we undervalue its powers at our peril.

Museums as Interpreters of Culture

(1993). Museums as Interpreters of Culture. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society: Vol. 23, Cultural Democracy, pp. 127-135.

Re-writing America: Vietnam authors in their generation

In Re-Writing America, Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors and are now recognized as major literary interpreters of American national life and culture. These writers - including Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Winston Groom, David Rabe, John Balaban, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson and Frances Fitzgerald - have applied in their later efforts many of the hard-won lessons of literary sense-making learned in initial works attempting to come explicitly to terms with Vietnam. Beidler argues that the Vietnam authors have done much to re-energize American creative writing and to lead it out of the post-structuralist impasse of texts as endless critiques of language, representation and authority. With their direct experience of a divisive and frustrating war, these writers in many ways resemble the celebrated generation of poets and novelists that emerged from World War I. Like their forebears of 1914-18, the Vietnam generation has undertaken a common project of cultural revision: to re-write America, to create an art that, even as it continues to acknowledge the war's painful memory, projects that memory into new dimensions of mythic consciousness for other - and better - times.

W. R. Bascom and the Ife bronzes

Opening ParagraphIn 1938 an African building a house in the city of Ife, the cultural capital of the Yorubas and the mythical cradle of Yoruba civilisation, came upon an extraordinary cache of ancient Nigerian bronzes. In all, at least fifteen bronzes were uncovered in 1938 in a compound only 100 yards from the palace of the Oni of Ife. These bronzes were to prove of great historical and artistic significance. Until that time only two other bronzes had been unearthed in the Yoruba area, and one of those had disappeared, leaving Nigeria only a single original and a replica. In the disposition of the priceless new finds there ensued a tale of intrigue, prevarication, outraged nationalism, and narrow-minded ethnocentricism that drew into its maelstrom the British colonial government of Nigeria, the US Consulate in Lagos, and the USA's Department of State. Although the Ife bronzes, which today reside in a handsome if small museum in the city of Ife, are not so well known as, for example, the Elgin marbles or certain other antiquities taken from the Third World, the controversy surrounding their removal from Nigeria and their eventual return was filled with the same emotion and employed the same arguments heard today over the rightful location of national cultural treasures. The Nigerian dispute is made all the more poignant in that one of the major protagonists was not a money-seeking antiquities dealer, but a young American anthropologist destined to be one of the most astute and sympathetic interpreters of Yoruba culture.

Music talent, and performance: a conservatory cultural system

A provocative, perceptive study of the cultural dynamics of classical music in American society, Music, Talent, and Performance describes music as aa metaphor of the society in which it takes place. Author Henry Kingbury, a conservatory-trained pianist and music educator turned anthropologist forgoes the traditional ethnomusicologist approach of looking at a non-Western musical culture to focus on the field of an American conservatory. The result is a penetrating look at the distinction between teaching music and the nurturing of musicality. Kingsbury offers an innovative anthropological analysis of the western notion of talent and its cultural character, noting that many non-western societies have no such concept. Furthermore, he examines various contexts in which music is produced, experienced, and evaluated. His discussion includes the dynamics of orchestra rehearsals in the conservatory, master class lessons with a distinguished performer-pedagogue, the ritual characteristics of solo recitals, and an interpretive analysis of stage fright. Ultimately, Kingsbury argues that music is highly shifting and indeterminate in meaning, a concept that has important implications for all interpreters of culture and for the artists themselves.

Historia do Futuro (Livro Anteprimeiro) (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 343 Ant6nio Vieira. Historia do Futuro (Livro .4nteprimeiro). Critical edition with commentary by Jos6 van den Besselaar. Portugiesische Forschungen der G6rresgesellschaft, series 3, vol. 3, pts. I & 2. Mtinster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1976. 2 vols. Pp. xl + 282, iv + 264. DM, 178. Antonio Vieira, S.J. (1608-97) was perhaps the major figure in the Portuguese Restoration of 1640. Through his influence protection was given to merchants of Jewish descent whose goods were otherwise liable to Inquisitorial confiscation. Commerce was the backbone of the reign of John IV, the first king of modern Portugal. The Jesuit's motives grew out of a theory of history that attracted learned attention in his time. The preliminary part of his unfinished work, called historia do Futuro, is its most comprehensive statement. This work has been purged of all the abridgments and corruptions of earlier editions and has also been given an exhaustive learned commentary by Professor Besselaar, one of Europe's most distinguished interpreters of Portuguese culture. Vieira's Historia is about things in apocalyptic literature, both canonical and noncanonical. Of the latter the verses of the sixteenth-century cobblerprophet Bandarra are most notable. There is a whole genre of Portuguese literature about the supposed return of King Sebastian, whose death in battle was fatal to Portuguese sovereignty. In 1580, Philip II of Spain became king in Portugal. According to Vieira, both canonical Scripture and Bandarrist apocalyptic received historical fulfillment in 1640 when the Portuguese people overthrew the Hapsburgs in Europe's first bourgeois revolt. The philosophical assumption here is that when one understands history it is because the institutions of speech are, in apocalyptic at least, causally related to things. The nexus of thought and things is not necessary but contingent, since apocalyptic applies to things in the Portuguese liberating themselves from Spain. Indeed, any causal nexus of thought and things must be contingent upon thought and speech being related in a causal way. The absolute cause of things cannot be a necessary cause, allowing for the freedom of man in the light of his knowledge of things. In Christian thought, God causes intellectual beings by first causing them to know and so acts contingently with respect to their acts. The claim in the Historia that seems to underlay its elaborate arguments from Scripture is novel, I believe. It is that there is an element in the history of the Portuguese Restoration that is a principle of understanding a universal relation in things. Thus Vieira seems to be attempting to break new ground in giving an explanation of the traditional belief that such a relation exists, only in historical terms. Understanding the likeness between things of thought and sense is distinctive of wisdom in Christian thought. Descartes attempted it in the Meditations. But Vieira's methodology is very different. Vieira considers the three estates of the restored Portuguese commonwealth in terms of the traditional three elements of salt, viz., air, fire, and water, wherewith the fourth, earth, is preserved from corruption.' Fused into one, the Portuguese church, nobility, and people fulfill the Scriptural dictum "You are the salt of the earth." Crucially, the meaning of the bonding of elements is not in the ordinary language of physics but in that of apocalyptic. Speech about water in the context of apocalyptic is speech about things observed by sense; not just in the imagination of the seer, but also by the eyes of those who see the things spoken of by the seer as history. Such are the eyes of the common people of apocalyptic times, whose awareness of their contingent position in history is evident in the latter-day sovereignty they enjoy in that universal kingdom revealed in messianic prophecy. Such was the kingdom of modern Portugal in Vieira's eyes. ' Obras Escolhidas, 12 vols. (Lisbon: Sa da Costa, 1951-54), t0:208. 344 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Vieira saw this sort of self-awareness marking the impending end of the historical mission of the Church. John IV was the "hidden king" of Bandarrist prophecy. The Iberian people were temporal vicars of Christ in recognition of which the popes had given the Portuguese a universal mission? The refinement of the Portuguese idiom Vieira undertook...

From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction by C. L. Sonnichsen

Reviews 259 begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the dis­ appointments that were Martin Eden’s before he succeeded — which were mine before I succeeded. . . . ” London often drew heavily upon his own experiences for his work, and there are excerpts from Martin Eden and John Barleycorn, two auto­ biographical works in which he wrote candidly and passionately about the frustrations, heartbreaks, and rewards of writing for a livelihood. If you haven’t read them, Walker’s selections from the books are enough to make you hasten a trip to the local library. The collection also contains a broad and perceptive foreword by How­ ard Lachtman, who has three books in the making on London. Dr. Lachtman shows the unfamiliar side of the Jack London persona; he strips away much of the myth surrounding the man and offers a candid look at a writer who has all too often been dismissed or overlooked by critics of American literature. Interest in London has increased markedly since the publication of a volume of letters in 1965, and Dale Walker’s jewel of an anthology is a welcome addition to a steady stream of serious works on London that have appeared since that time. The reading public is finally beginning to realize that London was much more than a skillful writer of yams about howling wolf-dogs in the frozen wilderness of the Klondike and nautical adventures on the open seas. SAL NOTO, Cupertino, California From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction. By C. L. Sonnichsen . (College Station and London: Texas A & M University Press, 1978. 201 pages, $9.95.) From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction is a gathering of eleven essays by C. L. Sonnichsen. Almost all of the pieces have been published previously, one as long ago as 1943; most were written in the late 1960s and in the 1970s (two appeared originally in WAL). Sonnich­ sen, who was the first president of the Western Literature Association and currently is editor of the Journal of Arizona History, easily ranks as one of our most distinguished interpreters of Western culture. Not surprisingly, then, his collected “thoughts” on the Western novel turn out to be well worth pondering. The breadth of Sonnichsen’s reading in Western fiction is astonishing. Have you ever read George Gilman’s Valley of Blood or Robert J. Seid- 260 Western American Literature man’s One Smart Indian or John Reese’s Sure Shot Shapiro? Sonnichsen has. These and hundreds of other well-known and little-known books are marshalled as supporting evidence for the author’s thesis — a thesis that sews together the otherwise disparate essay into a handsomely stitched gar­ ment. Briefly, Sonnichsen’s contention is that Western novels “are mirrors which faithfully reflect our assumptions and prejudices.” The “social his­ torian,” he continues, reads these works “not for what they tell him about the subject matter, but for what they tell him about the reader.” Sonnich­ sen’s approach is provocative and, more importantly, productive. He clearly demonstrates, for instance, how Western fiction works as a barometer of evolving popular attitudes toward Indians and Mexican-Americans; he also shows how it mirrors the American reading audience’s insatiable appe­ tite for ever more exotic forms of violence and ever larger doses of explicit sex. The preponderance of the books Sonnichsen employs as evidence scarcely registers on the literary Richter scale. These works are mostly, as the author says, “horse operas, shoot-em-ups, hayburners . . . oaters.” Such formula fiction, however, is especially useful in abstracting popular beliefs since it is aimed at readers interested in entertainment — that is, readers who prefer not to have their settled convictions disturbed. If Sonnichsen is a witty and reliable guide through the dimly lit cellar of the subliterary, he is, unfortunately, not so helpful in making us (even within the strict limitations imposed by his thesis) understand the significance of more “serious” Western novelists. His perspective on the likes of Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and William Eastlake seems to be hampered by too narrow a focus on one topic — sex. The author’s remarks on these writers — and on some lesser lights, whom he calls...

Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture

Captains of Consciousness offers a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the twentieth century. For this new edition Stuart Ewen, one of our foremost interpreters of popular culture, has written a new preface that considers the continuing influence of advertising and commercialism in contemporary life. Not limiting his critique strictly to consumers and the advertising culture that serves them, he provides a fascinating history of the ways in which business has refined its search for new consumers by ingratiating itself into Americans' everyday lives. A timely and still-fascinating critique of life in a consumer culture.

Gabriel Marcel-Fragments Philosophiques 1909-1914 (review)

88 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Modem Indian Thought. By V. S. Naravane. (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964. Pp. xiii + 310. Foreword by ttumayun Kabir.) This is an excellent introduction to the most influential modern thought and thinking of India, and meets a need felt by many European and American students who desire to have accurate information on how modern Indians have adapted their ancient traditions to their modern education without falling either into traditionalism or rebellion. Humayun Kabir says truly in his Foreword : "There has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in Indian life and thought in recent years. Gone are the days when Indian philosophy was confined to esoteric studies by disapproving theologians. Today the art and culture, the economics and politics, the social structure and traditional customs of India find eager and sympathetic students throughtout the world." Naravane's volume is a fine response to this awakened interest. In addition to an intelligible account of the ideas of the men whose thought he portrays, the author gives many biographical details and references to the great body of literature, little of which is familiar to Western readers. Naravane is evidently himself a genuinely modern Indian thinker, so that his exposition is intelligible to a modern mind that may find the ancient classics unintelligible. Only minds of the first magnitude for modern India have been selected, and with two exceptions , these are the men whom one expects to find in a book devoted to modern Indian thought, for they have aroused the world-wide interest mentioned by ttumayun Kabir: Ram Mohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Radhakrishnan. The two who are usually omitted and whom we are delighted to find in this great company are Ananda Coomaraswamy and Muhammad Iqbal. These two are less closely identified with Indian life than the others. Coomaraswamy, coming from Ceylon and living most of his life in England and the United States, is nevertheless one of the major modern interpreters of Indian culture and writes of the classic traditions not as something foreign to him or relevant only to an age gone by, but with the kind of critical appreciation which only a modern mind with a classical Indian culture can command. Iqbal is now often dismissed as important only for Pakistan, whereas he deserves to be read along with Tagore and Aurobindo as a modernized son of India. Thus, the volume achieves a fine balance as well as a richness of detail. It is good for both reading and studying. The notes, by the way, are important for both reader and student. HEEBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, CaliJornia Gabriel Marcel-Fragments Philosophiques 1909-1914. Introduction par Lionel A. Blain. (Louvain-Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, Paris (Vie): Editions Nauwelaerts. Pp. 116. Philosophes Contemporaina-Textes et Etudes.) This volume contains a number of essays written by Gabriel Marcel between 1909-1914 preparatory to his doctoral thesis. The Rev. Lionel A. Blain of Our Lady of Providence Seminary, Warwick, Rhode Island, assembled these texts out of the original copybooks after having written his own doctoral dissertation (1959) on "The notion of proof of God's existence in the early writings of Gabriel Marcel." Marcel has provided the booklet with a Preface and also added an epilogue. In it he declares that "the irrefutable character of faith--when it is perfectly authentic--obtruded itself on him at a time when he could not in all honesty consider himself as a believer. He then adds that "It is in this fact that the paradox lies which confers on these texts a certain interest and which allows him to envisage them as existential avant la lettre, although this expression is still absent from the pages." This means to him that "existential" thought is already apparent here. The essays concern principally "absolute knowledge," the participation of thought in Being, the theory of such participation, the foundation of values, the question of personal immortality, and the unverifiable. They show how Marcel, dissatisfied with idealistic philosophy past and present (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), abandoned its "intellectualism" to espouse a theory BOOK REVIEWS 89 of intuitive participation in ultimate reality, akin in ways to the theory of intuition of his...

Modern Indian Thought (review)

88 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Modem Indian Thought. By V. S. Naravane. (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964. Pp. xiii + 310. Foreword by ttumayun Kabir.) This is an excellent introduction to the most influential modern thought and thinking of India, and meets a need felt by many European and American students who desire to have accurate information on how modern Indians have adapted their ancient traditions to their modern education without falling either into traditionalism or rebellion. Humayun Kabir says truly in his Foreword : "There has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in Indian life and thought in recent years. Gone are the days when Indian philosophy was confined to esoteric studies by disapproving theologians. Today the art and culture, the economics and politics, the social structure and traditional customs of India find eager and sympathetic students throughtout the world." Naravane's volume is a fine response to this awakened interest. In addition to an intelligible account of the ideas of the men whose thought he portrays, the author gives many biographical details and references to the great body of literature, little of which is familiar to Western readers. Naravane is evidently himself a genuinely modern Indian thinker, so that his exposition is intelligible to a modern mind that may find the ancient classics unintelligible. Only minds of the first magnitude for modern India have been selected, and with two exceptions , these are the men whom one expects to find in a book devoted to modern Indian thought, for they have aroused the world-wide interest mentioned by ttumayun Kabir: Ram Mohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Radhakrishnan. The two who are usually omitted and whom we are delighted to find in this great company are Ananda Coomaraswamy and Muhammad Iqbal. These two are less closely identified with Indian life than the others. Coomaraswamy, coming from Ceylon and living most of his life in England and the United States, is nevertheless one of the major modern interpreters of Indian culture and writes of the classic traditions not as something foreign to him or relevant only to an age gone by, but with the kind of critical appreciation which only a modern mind with a classical Indian culture can command. Iqbal is now often dismissed as important only for Pakistan, whereas he deserves to be read along with Tagore and Aurobindo as a modernized son of India. Thus, the volume achieves a fine balance as well as a richness of detail. It is good for both reading and studying. The notes, by the way, are important for both reader and student. HEEBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, CaliJornia Gabriel Marcel-Fragments Philosophiques 1909-1914. Introduction par Lionel A. Blain. (Louvain-Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, Paris (Vie): Editions Nauwelaerts. Pp. 116. Philosophes Contemporaina-Textes et Etudes.) This volume contains a number of essays written by Gabriel Marcel between 1909-1914 preparatory to his doctoral thesis. The Rev. Lionel A. Blain of Our Lady of Providence Seminary, Warwick, Rhode Island, assembled these texts out of the original copybooks after having written his own doctoral dissertation (1959) on "The notion of proof of God's existence in the early writings of Gabriel Marcel." Marcel has provided the booklet with a Preface and also added an epilogue. In it he declares that "the irrefutable character of faith--when it is perfectly authentic--obtruded itself on him at a time when he could not in all honesty consider himself as a believer. He then adds that "It is in this fact that the paradox lies which confers on these texts a certain interest and which allows him to envisage them as existential avant la lettre, although this expression is still absent from the pages." This means to him that "existential" thought is already apparent here. The essays concern principally "absolute knowledge," the participation of thought in Being, the theory of such participation, the foundation of values, the question of personal immortality, and the unverifiable. They show how Marcel, dissatisfied with idealistic philosophy past and present (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), abandoned its "intellectualism" to espouse a theory ...