Origin Myths Research Articles

Genesis and Exodus as Conceptually Independent, Competing Origin Myths?

Abstract Against Konrad Schmid’s thesis that the pre-P ancestral and Exodus traditions existed as competing origin myths that were conceptually independent from each other, this article argues that this conceptual independence is difficult to prove in the context of the ancient Israelites’ oral-written culture. Moreover, societal negotiation about the past should not be misconstrued as a sign of traditions’ conceptual independence. Competition between origin stories, or selective emphasis on one story over another, does not indicate their conceptual independence.

From the “Beginning”: Anglo-American Settler Colonialism in New England

In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States.

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’sAusterlitz

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

Crônicas de Rachel de Queiroz e a cidade de Goiás

This paper investigates the urban imaginary created by the writer Rachel de Queiroz about the Town of Goias, observed through some of her journalistic chronicles that contemplate this theme, published between 1948 and 1988. It is proposed to study her familiar and insightful look at the city, although external, originated in the fact that this is the birthplace of her second husband, Oyama de Macedo. For this, Cultural History is used as a theoretical and methodological support, exploring the complex relationships between history and fiction and addressing the concept of urban imagery, from the speeches and images linked to Goias reflected by the author. In this context, the perspectives of theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, Roger Chartier, Sandra Pesavento, etc. are analyzed. This basis aims to justify the use of literature as a historical source, also supported by a brief biographical investigation about the author, in order to allow for a better contextualization of her writings. It is also noteworthy that the absence of research with this thematic and theoretical focus, articulating the work of Queiroz and the Town of Goias, aroused interest in this investigative field, above all, by enabling the reach of differentiated approaches. Finally, it appears that the Vilaboense imaginary constructed by the author is quite coherent and complementary to that verified in the existing bibliography, consolidating it. In it, local conflicts between past and present are repeatedly observed, the cultural and natural wealth of its heritage and its inhabitants, the effects of the secular geographic isolation of the region, the traumas left by the transfer of the capital in the 1930s, the bandeirante Anhanguera as original myth, among other themes.

Destabilising myths of origin: Collaborative storytelling and biopolitical communities in Wajdi Mouawad's Le Sang des promesses

This article analyses how diverse communities are formed through storytelling and mythmaking in Wajdi Mouawad's theatrical tetralogy, Le Sang des promesses (1999–2009). Mythic origin stories, which Mouawad's migratory characters collect and share on their journeys from one community to the next, draw individuals from their pasts on stage to act out the events from each narrative. Mouawad thus reveals how the theatre can serve as an ideal venue for spectators from diverse backgrounds to gather and experience the various conditions many migrants face. Drawing on Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory of communitas and Lévi-Strauss's structuralist analysis of myth, this article argues that collaborative storytelling and mythmaking allow Mouawad's migratory characters to cross various types of borders and form unexpected communities that defy barriers of time and space.

Narrative and nuclear weapons politics: the entelechial force of the nuclear origin myth

AbstractThis paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.

Переходные обряды в додинастическом и раннединастическом Египте

Mythopoetic thinking operates on a binary principle, classifying all the phenomena of the macro- and microcosm. The opposition between cosmos and chaos, in other words, between life and non-being, was fundamental. Spaces assimilated by culture, an ordered world, symbolized by various images: a pillar, a mountain, a temple, a dwelling, was conceived as the center of the universe, which was opposed by chaos that threatened order. These ideas about the world order were actualized in the sphere of ritual, designed to preserve the order created in the first times by the ancestors and gods. The repetition of the original myth in the ritual was supposed to restore, renew the world order in the cyclical movement of time. This applied both to the general Egyptian holidays, such as the New Year, and to the initiations that members of society took place at one stage or another of the development of Ancient Egyptian culture. Transitional rites had two aspects: age and social. When passing the initiation, the members of the collective increased their social status, became initiated, moving from adolescence to marital relations, increasing their status in the collective. A special position was occupied by leaders and kings, who confirmed their high position in society during the holiday sd. Funerals were also considered transitional rites. Transitional rituals united ideas about such opposites as life and death, which was equated with the loss of a person's previous social status. An indispensable attribute of rituals was sacrifice, and not only bloody of animals, but also sacrifice with ancient ritual objects during the construction of temples on the site of ancient sanctuaries. Notable examples have been associated with the kings in charge of the prosperity of Egypt.

Depth of Field: Disorienting the “Ethnographic Gaze” through Zeme Naga Realms

Depth of Field: Disorienting the “Ethnographic Gaze” through Zeme Naga Realms

Deep History and the Pitfalls of Periodization

The essay reconceives Deep History as a type of origin myth best understood in the context of its own time, and as an intellectual project with methodological strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on insights from the history of science, Latin American studies, and Indigenous theory, I challenge the Eurocentric periodization of human history (and pre-history). Finally, I conclude with suggestions for collaborative ways that historians in particular can engage in multidisciplinary conversations about time, narrative, subjectivity, and authority.

Mission Critical: Caremark, Blue Bell, and Director Responsibility for Cybersecurity Governance

If the potential for Caremark liability hangs like the sword of Damocles over corporate directors of Delaware corporations, then that sword has been considerably more secure than that of the original myth. For decades, Chancellor Allen’s description of a Caremark claim as “possibly the most difficult theory in corporation law upon which a plaintiff might hope to win a judgment” held true. Caremark claims that survived a motion to dismiss were for decades few and far between. That changed in 2019. In the space of little over a year, Delaware courts have allowed five Caremark claims to survive in the corporation context and one claim to survive in the limited partnership context. The thread holding that sword is beginning to look more like the single horse hair of myth. The scope and likelihood of Caremark liability are matters of considerable interest and concern for directors. Under most circumstances, a board simply doing its job poorly is relevant only to the directors’ duty of care and protected by the business judgment rule, exculpatory provisions under Section 102(b)(7), and advancement and indemnification. Failure to monitor under Caremark, however, is a breach of the duty of loyalty. A breach of the duty of loyalty is not protected by the business judgment rule. It cannot be exculpated. And it cannot be covered by indemnification. 2019 marked an abrupt shift in Caremark in application, if not in theory. In June of that year the Supreme Court of Delaware (“Delaware Supreme Court”) reversed a decision by the Delaware Court of Chancery (“Chancery Court”) dismissing a claim against the directors of Blue Bell Creameries, Inc. (“Blue Bell”) under Caremark. Within a little over a year, the Chancery Court would sustain Caremark claims in four cases. In Clovis, the Chancery Court sustained a Caremark claim against directors of a pharmaceutical company who allowed the company to misrepresent the clinical trial success of one of its three drugs. In Hughes, the Chancery Court sustained a Caremark claim against directors of a Chinese company incorporated in Delaware that suffered from severe and pervasive accounting issues. In Teamsters Local, the Chancery Court sustained a Caremark claim against directors of a large pharmaceutical company who allowed an indirect subsidiary to essentially operate a criminal enterprise. And in Boeing, the Chancery Court sustained a Caremark claim against directors of an airplane manufacturer who did not pay attention to safety issues. Cybersecurity has become just such a mission critical risk for large corporations. This Article makes four key arguments. Black letter Caremark doctrine has not changed, but it is newly reinvigorated and the risks of Caremark liability for directors is greater than just a few years ago. Future Caremark liability will be centered on failure to provide board-level oversight of mission critical risks. Cybersecurity is mission critical to effectively all large companies today. The risk of Caremark liability can be mitigated by taking a few simple steps to ensure that the board is addressing cybersecurity. This Article is the first to make these arguments together and the first to make the final argument.

Re-Thinking a Matrilineal Myth of Healing: Tuareg Medicine Women, Islam, and the Market in Niger

Abstract This article explores the changing metaphoric logic and contextual uses of a mythical-historical popular religious account of matrilineal origins of herbal medicine women among Tuareg in northern Niger. Medicine women both reproduce and modify this origin myth’s motif in their Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, traditionally ranked, and semi-nomadic communities, where many have faced religious, socioeconomic, and political upheavals challenging local women’s material wealth and symbolic/cultural capital of authoritative medico-ritual healing. How is medicine women’s healing legacy evoked and re-interpreted in encounters with Qur’anic healing and western biomedicine, as impacted by recent religious debates, neoliberal structural adjustments, droughts, sedentarization, and political violence? The Tuareg data offer fresh perspectives on how religion and economy co-produce each other in some contexts, but contradict each other in others. More broadly, this article critically disrupts categories of sacred and secular, tradition and modernity, and brings mythico-histories into discussions of intertwining religious and economic idioms, practices, and infrastructures.

Host Plants Association with Longhorn Beetles of Food Value: Traditional Knowledge of the Guaraní as Cultural Identity Keepers

The study of plant-insect interactions and how cultural groups perceive and manage them constitutes one of the interests of ethnoentomology. This work describes the association between host plants and longhorn beetles (Order: Coleoptera; Family: Cerambycidae), an important food among the Guaraní peoples of the province of Misiones, Argentina. Different management methods of host tree species are analyzed in order to promote the rearing of larvae for edible use. We also discuss a story about the mythical origin of cerambicids relayed by the Ava Chiripa Guaraní community. We reflect on the importance of the local worldview in the maintenance of ancestral practices, such as the cultural tasks involved in slash-and-burn agriculture and the intimate knowledge of biological relationships between the cerambycids and their woody host plants.

JUNG’S CONCEPT OF ARCHETYPES IN FEMINIST REVISIONIST MYTHOLOGY, IN THE CONTEXT OF M. ATWOOD’S PENELOPIAD AND M. MILLER’S CIRCE

The article deals with the concept of archetypes by K. G. Jung in the context of M. Atwood’s The Penelopiad and M. Miller’s Circe, which represent feminist revisionist mythology tradition. The study focuses on exploring the transformation of the Jungian archetypes of the figures of Penelope and Circe in Atwood and Miller’s novels. The author argues that while in original myths Penelope and Circe represent the archetypes of Mother and the feminine representation of Wise old man, in the novels Penelope’s archetype transforms into Mask, and Circe starts representing Mother archetype. The author comes to the conclusion that such transformation is a result of Atwood and Miller’s dealing with feminist agenda as well their attempt to present different sides of female experience, making mythological figures closer to real women.

Milton, Marvell, and the Amorous Theology of Vegetables

ABSTRACT In the mid-seventeenth century, vegetarianism acquires both a new political energy and a new philosophical narrative of origins. Andrew Marvell's and John Milton's contemporaries across the political spectrum are increasingly invested for differing reasons in an Eden in which plants and people nourish each other in innocence. Marvell in “The Garden” builds on this narrative, imagining a Paradise in which fruits offer themselves to the speaker in a strenuous and sexualized consumption. Milton in Paradise Lost partly adopts Marvell's vegetarian passions, as his Eve both loves and eats her amorous Edenic garden. Both Marvell and Milton, however, distance themselves in different ways from any direct correlations between Eve's vegetarian cuisine and the innocence of Eden. Although both poets invoke the vegetarians' myth of origins, they also avoid some of the correlative theories of gender and purity with which that philosophy was often elided.

Spirou’s Origin Myth and Family Romances

This article focuses on the narratives of Spirou’s origins and backstory from Rob-Vel to Feroumont and Bravo, examining his progressive departure from the Tintinesque adventure paradigm. The Freudian notion of family romance, developed by Marthe Robert into the figures of the foundling and the bastard, is key, as it thematises the hero’s origins and early life in a domestic sphere. This motif, absent in Tintin, occurs in Spirou as Rob-Vel’s artistic creation becomes origin myth, and post-Franquin ‘naturalised’ conceptions give the character a family, a childhood, and related memories. The article examines how Spirou’s family romances, however small and allusive, create a connection between adventure and the domestic sphere and how this contributes to reinventing the Tintinesque model of adventure in contemporary bande dessinée.

Christ, Santa Claus, Doctor Deliverer: For Carolee Schneemann

Abstract This essay attends to the force of aggression in Carolee Schneemann's work, emphasizing the conflicts in the artist's representation of enjoyment, knowledge, and truth in her own body, with a focus on Up To and Including Her Limits (1973–76) and the underexplored text “Anti-Demeter: The More I Give the More You Steal” (1994). Addressing how the latter presents an origin myth for the artist, the essay underscores Schneemann's struggle over questions of genealogy, alliance, influence, and debt. On the question of debt, particular attention is given to its quality of ambivalence on terms of sexual difference, especially for father figures perceived as models of artistic expressivity, and the mothering body as a body of prohibition, labor, illness, and death. Examining the negation of the body, the role of aggression and violence, and the critique of the bind of “male fantasies” in Schneemann's work, the essay proposes a shift in feminist art historiography and its projections on Schneemann the artist. The essay asserts Schneemann's tale as a cautionary and self-reflexive one for those who come after, the would-be-daughters, who would negate the body, the struggle, the art yet again for the myth, in a time ripe for myth, in the wake of the artist's passing.

Cube Fest 2022

Cube Fest 2022

On Utopus’ uterus: The colonisation of the body and the birth of patriarchal utopia in Thomas More’s Utopia

Following European exploration of the Atlantic, origin myths could now be projected onto a possible future and ‘undiscovered’ lands. Often the island proved the most suitable design for these projections to ensure the ‘perfection’ of the community and avoidance of corruptive external influences. These novel conceptualisations envisaged new social constructs to explain human nature, however, they continued to be overtly patriarchal. Gender essentialism and colonisation of the female body was an integral part of reproducing traditional utopian imaginings. Thomas More’s Utopia exemplifies this archetypal gendered conceptualisation of the ideal island society where female education serves to reinforce patriarchal structures and women are essentialised in terms of their fertility. This paper addresses the relationship between the geography of Utopia and the insularity and confinement of women as dominated ‘matrixial entities’ which is further reinforced by utopian cartography. In this context, I assert that the process of colonisation and islanding unsettles the immutability of these patriarchal constructs and exposes the dystopian origins of Utopia.

Attractive Sources. Tax Havens’ Emergence: Mythical Origins versus Structural Evolutions

The article proposes a new interpretation of the development of tax havens in the 19th and 20th centuries. Few historians have addressed this issue, and the long-term narratives over the evolution of tax havens remain unconvincing and rely on several misconceptions and anachronisms. The article first examines the supposed origins of tax havens before the First World War. It contradicts the idea that the modern history of tax havens began during the financial globalization of the Belle Epoque. Indeed, movements of capital flight caused by taxation became significant only from 1914 onwards due to the rise in taxes in warring countries. The second part of the article thus focuses on the development of tax havens during the interwar years by demonstrating how offshore centres already played a crucial role in the functioning of the gold exchange standard in Europe at the time – a fact that financial history has overlooked. Finally, the article analyses the revival of the offshore economy that occurred after a period of decline from the end of the 1950s onwards. It challenges the thesis that this resurgence was deeply driven by decolonisation and highlights the process that connected the financial liberalization in rich countries to the regeneration of tax havens. This article provides the first serious long-term perspective on this subject based on extensive investigations into archives. As such, it offers a significant contribution to economic history.

«Вакцинирование» vs «чипирование»: триггеры эсхатологической мифологии в условиях противоэпидемических мероприятий

The coronavirus epidemic and anti-epidemic measures, such as quarantine restrictions on social activity, wide use of disinfectants, requirements for the use of personal protective equipment, as well as changes in church liturgy, rituals and sacraments lead to the creation of medical conspiracy myths. This article analyses two most important conspiracy mythologemes that are formed as a result of a conspiracy interpretation of the epidemic: the vaccination mythologeme and the microchipping mythologeme. The author proceeds from the assumption that modern eschatological conspiracy myths are based on the original non-eschatological myth, which provided a rational non-religious hermeneutics of epidemics. The eschatological version of the vaccinophobic conspiracy myth is formed on the basis of a non-eschatological conspiracy as a result of medical conspiracy theories merging with the modern version of the technophobic myth. The invariant core of the latter consists of mythologemes and mythotheologemes that interpret modern technologies within the framework of eschatological semiotics. As a result of convergence, these mythologemes form a single mythotheological complex, which, in turn, becomes a trigger for a new eschatological mythology. The paper analyses the semantic structure of this mytho-theological complex, its semiotic features, pragmatic potential and reasons for its popularity. The research was carried out within the framework of a semiotic and hermeneutic study of mythological discourse applying the method of categorical semiotics. As illustrations the author used fragments of original texts posted on conspiracy websites devoted to eschatological issues.