Origin Myths Research Articles

Traditionalist Catholicism: The Case of the Society of Saint Pius X in Argentina

Based on the case of the Society of Saint Pius X which I studied ethnographically for my undergraduate thesis, I aim to understand how traditional identity is constructed within this particular sector of Catholicism. As will be seen throughout the text, it is through various educational instances of different kinds and levels of formality and through sociability that certain notions about sexuality, expected family models, and gender roles are transmitted, based on specific moral values. Additionally, a sort of myth of origin is constructed to reinforce the idea of an ‘everlasting’ Catholicism. The Mass ritual, besides synthesising all these elements, helps to remember the myth and reinforce belonging. According to the arguments of its members, this demonstrates a willingness to preserve the forms and maintain a specific order – that of tradition.

From Ancient Threads to Colonial Commerce: The Evolution of West Bengals Silk Industry from Mythical Origins to Independence

Silk production, or sericulture, has a rich history that is frequently eclipsed by its modern applications. Sericulture began in ancient China approximately 3000 BC and this was a well held secret until it spread to Korea, India and eventually the West through a variety of causes, including royal intrigue and missionary endeavours. By the Han Dynasty, silk had evolved from a luxury item to a valuable economic asset, impacting trade and culture throughout Asia and Europe. India's silk industry, as documented in ancient scriptures, progressed from early wild silk production in the Himalayan foothills to sophisticated mulberry sericulture by the 2nd century BCE. The Mughal dynasty improved Indian silk traditions by incorporating several weaving techniques and nurturing a thriving business in Kashmir and Bengal. From 1612 to 1858, the East India Company capitalised on Bengal's silk potential by building trading centres and using Piedmontese reeling technology to improve quality. Despite initial hurdles, Bengal silk became a major export commodity, but colonial policies and technological shifts eventually led to its demise. Silk output fell dramatically after independence due to a variety of economic and geopolitical issues. This article investigates the growth of India's silk industry, focussing on Bengal's key role and examines the effects of colonial control, technological advancements and the sector's trajectory up to Independence.

The origin myth of religious studies

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The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century by Amanda Reeser Lawrence (review)

The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century by Amanda Reeser Lawrence (review)

Imaginary and Symbolic Forms of Water between Spirit and Culture

Water is a theme connected to human and social development, not only biologically but also in terms of cultural and identity processes; surprisingly, studies that discuss water from a sociocultural/sociological perspective are scarce. The foundational role of water in the construction of social reality should be highlighted: as a matter of fact, thanks to it identity processes develop, and the realisation of the relationship between human beings and the environment, and between culture and nature, occurs. The relationship with water as a primordial substance tied to the roots of existence pertains to the physiological as well as the historical development of societies. Historically, societies see the presence of water in their territories as an indispensable element for establishing the foundations of civilisations, and a central criterion for setting the bases of development. With regards to the management of territorial resources, it should be noted that, although water is a primary resource, it is not available everywhere. Humans had to struggle to secure reliable water sources, using techniques derived from millenary knowledge systems, which enabled individuals and communities to live and survive in times of abundance and scarcity, tumultuousness and poor health. Past narratives and ethnographies related to traditional communities link symbols to history, productive forms, and material constraints due to the physical factors of the environment. Water is a foundational element of the cosmogonic and theogonic myths that governed the evolution of ancient genealogies and epistemologies. For its intrinsic virtues, water is considered a living and beneficial force: it is hard to find another substance that can at the same time wash away guilt, eliminate impurities, refresh and reinvigorate weary souls, and promise renewal and existential rebirth. Starting from these premises, the essay deals with the theme of water, a humble substance with complex implications, considering the foundations of culture, and analyzing the natural element from a sociological perspective with reference to myths of origins, naturalistic philosophical conceptions, and imaginary, up to and including aspects related to religiosity, to get to the roots of identity.

Inhabiting Adamancy: Contributions Toward a Queer Feminist Theology

This article seeks to demonstrate that the myth of creation, written in Genesis, originates in the history of the different technologies of power. Judaism, in the myth of origin, established a hermeneutic with ontological status on the creation of man. This has severely affected the theological work of sex–gender diversity groups, including feminist and queer theology. Since the myth of origin has been one of the foundational narratives of the history of Christianity, it is the theological matrix where the binary oppositions are constructed: man-woman in which a cis-heteropatriarchal theology of the texts is articulated.

A hypothesis-based hop microbiology laboratory module testing the plausibility of the mythical origin of the India Pale Ale.

As one of the most famous fermented drinks in the world, beer is an especially relatable topic for microbiology courses. Here, we describe a short and easily adaptable module based on the antibacterial properties of hops used in brewing. By the 15th century, beer recipes included hops (the flower of the Humulus lupulus plant) as a bittering agent and antimicrobial. By the 19th century, the highly hopped Indian Pale Ale (IPA) became popular, and a modern myth has emerged that IPAs were invented to survive long ocean voyages such as from Britain to India. With that myth in mind, we designed a hypothesis-driven microbiology lab module that tests the plausibility of this brewing myth-namely that highly hopped beers possess enough antibacterial activity to prevent spoilage, while lowly hopped beers do not. The overall design of the module is to test the antimicrobial properties of hops using petri plates containing varying concentrations of hop extract. The module includes hypothesis generation and testing related to bacterial physiology and cell envelope morphology (hops are not equally effective against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria) and to mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance (as beer spoilage bacteria have repeatedly evolved hop resistance). Pre- and post-assessment showed that students made significant gains in the learning objectives for the module, which encourages critical thinking and hypothesis testing by linking microbial physiology and antimicrobial resistance to an important and topical real-world application.

Kodumaalt lahkumise põhjuste kajastumisest Abhaasia eestlaste rändenarratiivis: kurja mõisniku kuju

When adapting to a new host country, one of the most important issues is social belonging – the question on what basis people feel a sense of belonging. This is a question of group identity. Group identity is based on the group’s shared history and especially on myths of common and special origins. In the narratives of the Estonians of Abkhazia, the main reason for emigration is the difficult economic conditions in the old homeland. These stories are recorded in the written memories and village chronicles of the inhabitants of the Estonian settlements in the Caucasus, which date back to the 19th and 20th centuries, but they can be heard orally even today, because the stories have been heard from parents and grandparents. Both in earlier writings and in today’s oral presentations, the conditions in the old homeland of Estonia are depicted as poor, sometimes quite unbearable. An important figure in these stories is an evil and arrogant German landlord who oppressed the ancestors of the settlers. The first chapter of the article shows the historical background of the confrontation between the Estonian peasants and the German landlords in Estonia and how it was at least partially realized as an emigration movement under the influence of the peasant laws of the 19th century. The topic of the evil landlord was taken by the Estonian settlers to the settlements in Caucasus – these were stories told from personal experiences with the landlords. The formation and transmission of stories from generation to generation as founding narratives was facilitated by the opposition between Estonians and Germans in the Estonian national discourse. The second chapter focuses on the texts that reflect landlord-peasant conflicts in Estonia at the time of emigration – the texts of the leading figures of the national awakening movement in the school- and history books. These texts also influenced the developing identity of the Estonian colonists. The article then discusses the stories about the evil landlord told in various Estonian settlements on the Black Sea coast and finally the meaning of these stories in the formation of social belonging.

Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and Flux

Medieval Chinese thinkers conceptualized ancient bronzes in anthropocentric terms—as mute, inert objects that required the engagement of a perspicacious human subject for their value to become apparent. They also regarded bronzes as animate things that had the capacity to act independently of direct human manipulation, and they situated bronzes within frameworks of material vitalism that parallel many aspects of the “new materialism” associated with contemporary theorists like Karen Barad and Jane Bennett. This article interprets both of these understandings as containment strategies designed to rein in and constrain bronze's ever-present capacity for liquefaction. As with other metals, bronze was forever oscillating between solidity, in the form of discrete, functional objects, and liquidity, as a mutable substance of tremendous potency. Both states spawned different metaphors. Tracing this tension between solidity and liquidity, from the casting of the Nine Cauldrons and the origin myths of Chinese civilization through the medieval challenge of adapting a metallist currency regime to an expanding economy, this article explores how the cultural logics and natural tendencies of bronze were intertwined.

Injustice by design

ABSTRACT Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems.

Stillness and salvation: Reading Psalm 46 in its context

A society is significantly shaped by the myths it perpetuates. These myths serve as lenses for how its people see and make sense of the world around them. Myths, particularly origin myths like Enuma Elish, offer a perspective on the world that legitimates the way a society structures itself and responds to crisis, as opposing forces threaten to undermine its conception of order. This essay proposes to read Psalm 46 against the backdrop of Israel’s own origin myths which undergird and shape their own conceptions of order and in Psalm 46 are called to mind to bolster hope in the midst of crisis. This is argued on the basis of numerous literary parallels with the so-called ‘Song of the Sea’ in Exodus and the creation accounts in Genesis. In addition, parallels with First Isaiah suggest the likelihood of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem as the crisis to which the psalmist responds.

Examining everyday discourses of Black Lives Matter Oklahoma City

This ethnography of communication invokes the principle of dialogism from the Bakhtinian framework of discourse analysis and employs digital ethnography to examine the everyday discourses of the BLM Oklahoma City Chapter (BLM OKC). A total of 163 Facebook posts, informal interviews and two formal interviews of the chapter were collected and analysed. The analysis revealed that the discourses of BLM OKC on the local level align with the global level, that BLM OKC employs framing to facilitate sensemaking of the black experience – effectively challenging popular discourses in a way that frames and (re)frames the received chronotopes and origin myths of mainstream society. These findings in relation to police brutality and killings, race and discourse of nostalgia are discussed.

A baby to save their marriage: Little Alexander (1981) as USSR-GDR ‘family therapy’ by way of historical wish fulfilment

ABSTRACT In sustaining the myth of the GDR as a people’s democracy resulting from the anti-fascist war of liberation led by the Red Army and supported by local communists, Soviet internationalist ideology effectively appropriated the scriptural idea of mercy towards ‘the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow’ as a shared basis for the German and Soviet nations’ cultural unconscious. Using film as a medium of historical wish fulfilment, this ideology strove to conceptualise ‘we-ness’ as a response to the external imperialist threat, and a counterpoint to the likewise archetypal attitude towards ‘women and little ones as spoils and plunder’. This article centres on the joint Soviet-GDR film Little Alexander (1981), set in 1945, but clearly intended to convince Germans in 1981 of the advantages of remaining within Soviet-style socialism. In the film, orphanhood and surrogate parenthood reinforce – via the evocation of transnational biblical and mythological storylines – the GDR’s origin myth, retroactively resolving the issue of post-war German national identity via the Soviets’ ‘adoption’ of and ‘cohabitation’ with East Germany. But this unavoidably evokes a comorbidity of issues related to the flailing 30-year USSR-GDR ‘marriage’ that no ‘family therapy’ would repair.

Family as a System in Crisis in Christoph Ransmayr’s Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr and Marina Carr’s Phaedra Backwards

As a part of the UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature installation research project, which is being carried out at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek and is financed by the Croatian Science Foundation (https://askins21.ffos.hr/english/),1 this paper focuses on two contemporary plays of Western European literature: Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr (2010), written by the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr, and Phaedra Backwards (2011), by the Irish playwright Marina Carr. In both plays, the authors use the original myths of Odysseus and Phaedra, reimagining them in a contemporary context in order to show the universality of their experiences, but above all to comment on the society and especially the family as a system marked by crises and conflicts instead of heroic deeds. In this light, the analysis focuses on the text and context within which the state of society and the family are explored. The research is primarily based on the sociological reflections on the system, crisis, and family, drawing on the theoretical approach of the German sociological theorist Niklas Luhmann and focusing on society and social systems. In the selected plays, the family as a specific type of system is examined as well as its dynamics in relation to social changes. In addition to the examination of thematic, compositional, and genre features of the plays, the comparative analysis will reveal their differences and similarities regarding several aspects: the self-concept in context of the family as well as the causes, manifestations, and consequences of the crisis. In other words, its effect on thecharacters and their transformations will be explored.

Materializing the Flow of Emotion: The Interface between Sound and Body in The Lifted Veil, Romola, and Daniel Deronda

Abstract This article argues that the representations of hearing play an essential role in mediating emotion, sympathy, and (anti)communitarian process in Eliot’s fictional works. I look at moments when the interface between sound and body communicates socialization or marginalization: in The Lifted Veil (1859), sound highlights the vulnerability and passivity of the individuals as opposed to the external world; in Romola (1862–63), while Baldassarre’s resistance to sound reveals his isolation, Romola’s vibration to sound communicates a more complex relationship between individual and community—though sound symbolizes historical changes that transform her into an outlier, it also connects her with her community by evoking the past. Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), indicates the limitations of hearing and exposes the boundary of sympathetic vibration—by using hearing to foreshadow, legitimize, and manipulate the characters’ destinies, Eliot touches the mythical origin of emotion and puts it at the center of (anti)communitarian process.

The post-memory of the Armenian genocide and the myth of origins in Antonia Arslan’s works

This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about “Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures” based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the specific case study concerning Antonia Arslan. The project originates from two concerns: the first one being the awareness of the loss of poets and writers’ long-lived faith in the creative power of the artistic gesture, a widespread belief before the two world wars, and the second one consisting in a reflection on a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially in the case of the narration of traumatic experiences such as wars, genocides, migrations and displacements of people, which have taken place in Europe during the 20th Century [Neohelicon, 2004(1), Migratio et litterae].

Finish—Spare the Shame: Realism of Hellish Quart and Alt-Sarmatian Ideology

This article provides in-depth analysis of Hellish Quart: a fighting game set in 17th century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and cherished for its realism, vis-a-vis Neosarmatian ideology of the Polish alt-right: the current iteration of centuries-old origin myth of Polish nobility. While we do not consider the game a willing participant in the proliferation of Alt-Sarmatian ideas, we claim the pervasiveness of Sarmatism within Polish national identity makes it difficult not to consider the conservative approach to national history a “realistic one.” In this article, we present the shortened history of both Sarmatian myth and the special place sabre-fighting occupies in Polish culture, and utilize them to understand ideological entanglement of the “realism” offered by Hellish Quart regarding the vision of the past and the mechanics of combat.

Den konservative revolusjonen – i Thorleif Schirmer sitt forfattarskap

Abstract This article asks if the phenomenon of the Conservative Revolution had exponents in rural western Norway in early 20th century. It sheds light on Thorleif Schirmer (1877–1941), a teacher and writer. Schirmer elaborated his ideology with radical and conservative rhetoric, influenced by German literature and politics. He presented a cyclical understanding of culture. To secure its existence, nations should revolutionize its mythical origins. Antisemitism fuelled his theories. The positive reception of Schirmer’s writings, indicates conceptual resemblance between the Scandinavian folk and the German Volk.

Alevi narratives on Authority, Genealogy and Law

In recent years, various empirical qualitative studies on Alevi traditions have been conducted in Turkey. In these interviews, individuals belonging to the Alevi faith community have shared various Alevi narratives about God and creation and the transmission of just order and norms. Based on these narratives, this article undertakes the task of presenting the origin myths of Alevi law in the present and analyzing them. Likewise, this article attempts to read and analyze Alevi law in the context of the German and Austrian law.

THE RATIONAL CONCEPT IN EXPLAINING THE WORLD STRUCTURE IN ANCIENT CHINESE AND ANCIENT GREECE MYTHOLOGY

Humanity has a long history of exploring the mysteries of the universe and the world, and myths were the first interpretations of the origins of the world and natural phenomena by primitive ancestors. Ancient Chinese and ancient Greek mythology both arose during childhood in human development, and myths from this stage reflect the poetic understanding of the structure of the world by the first people of ancient societies. The myth of the world's origin mainly includes the beginning of the universe and the origin of all things. Famous Ancient Chinese myth about Pan Gu and Ancient Greek myth about Chaos contain the understanding of the world’s beginning from Eastern and Western civilizations. The study argues that differences between both myths are mostly structural. Analyzing the differences in the archetypes of thought and the characteristics of the concept of rationality as well as discussing similarities of those myths, it is proved that both creation myths greatly influenced the culture of the opposite parts of the World. They formed similar understanding of the world development as the moving from chaos to order and at the same time creating linear (West) and curvilinear (East) types of thinking, as well as heroic (West) and harmonious (East) understanding of the man-nature opposition.