Modern Notion Research Articles

Ancient Greek Nomos and Modern Legal Theory: A Reappraisal

Recently, two books have appeared that venture to re-investigate modern legal theory's ancient Greek underpinnings. In both books, the notion of nomos plays a central role. Firstly, Thanos Zartaloudis has published a remarkable study in which he delves into the manifold meanings of that ancient Greek word. Zartaloudis offers us an extraordinarily rich analysis of the polyvalent forms and uses of nomos from the age of Homer up to the days of Socrates – the classical period in which nomos would finally come to acquire its sense of an enacted legal norm (‘law’) or binding social convention (‘custom’). Secondly, nomos is of central importance in Johan van der Walt’s recent book on the intertwined modern notions of liberal democracy and the rule of law – referred to by Van der Walt as the concept of liberal democratic law. For Van der Walt, the analysis of ancient Greek nomos and its long and tortuous reception history in western thought is crucial for a proper understanding of what the modern concept of liberal democratic law entails and how it could be saved for the future.

“The Only Way Out Is In”: Transcending Modernity and Embracing Interconnectedness in Gary Snyder and Kenneth White

It seems that in order to overcome the current ecological crisis we need a new (global?) narrative. If the narrative of “progress” that has functioned as one of the Western cultural myths is linked to the notions of modernity and Enlightenment, then perhaps we need a new vision of modernity and “enlightenment.” This change might become part of a paradigm shift associated with a new view of ecology and the natural world, as proposed by Thich Nhat Hanh, the father of engaged Buddhism in the West. This paper aims to show how Gary Snyder and Kenneth White, two like-minded world-renowned poets and environmental activists, contribute to a new cultural paradigm: transmodernity. The non-dualism and Eastern philosophy that White and Snyder find valuable represent a rejection of Western modernity, and its cult of progress and telos. The emphasis will be placed on the importance of the Hua-Yen Buddhist philosophy, centred upon the metaphor of “Indra’s net,” and the ways in which it informs Snyder’s and White’s writing and Earth-centred activism. Snyder’s Buddhist anarchism is nowadays, more than ever before, intertwined with deep ecology. White’s radical geopoetics is becoming more and more popular, showing that the paradigm is shifting. As I will argue, the impact of “Indra’s net” on the dynamics of this gradual process is undeniable.

The Shrine of Baba Hassan Din, Lahore

In an age when the practice of traditional and sacred arts has fallen almost entirely out of fashion, we should ask what relevance these forms of expression have now when so much of art is driven by the notion of modernity. Relevance being a concept centered around what is normal, this article looks at an example of traditional Islamic architecture built in our contemporary age, seeking to re-establish what was once considered normal. The example cited is the shrine of Baba Hassan Din, designed by the architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz and built by the engineers Rizwan Qadeer and Shahid Niaz.

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Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss

Reviewed by: Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss Jeremy Phillip Brown Boaz Huss. Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality. Translated by Elana Lutsky. Oxford Series in Western Esotericism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 200 pp. Boaz Huss has made original contributions to research on medieval Kabbalah, the long reception of the Zohar, North African Kabbalah, new religious movements, contemporary Kabbalah, and Jewish spirituality. Mystifying Kabbalah, which runs the gamut of Huss's research agenda, is ably translated by Elana Lutsky from Huss's 2018 Hebrew monograph, The Question of the Existence of Jewish Mysticism: The Genealogy of Jewish Mysticism and the Theologies of Kabbalah Research. The title of the Hebrew original drives from a 1906 letter written by Martin Buber, in which the grandson of the Maskil Solomon Buber made a fledgling argument for "the [mere] existence of Jewish mysticism." The letter is an apt point of reference for a book dealing with the "invention" of Jewish mysticism. Synthesizing several articles composed by Huss going back at least as far as 2007, Mystifying Kabbalah examines the discursive formation of Jewish mysticism as a modern category of analysis, an approach that finds inspiration, per the author's express claims, in the work of Talal Asad, Russell McCutcheon, and Timothy Fitzgerald. Huss's project is comprised of five main trajectories: (1) a genealogy of the modern construction of mysticism, which, per Huss, is based upon universalist presuppositions of a theological order, presuppositions congenial to imperialist sponsorship; (2) a reconstruction of how modern Jewish scholars, with Buber and Gershom Scholem in leading roles, assimilated this construction of mysticism [End Page 427] when casting Kabbalah and Hasidism as "Jewish mysticism" to promote Jewish national consciousness; (3) a daring account of how persevering in their use of a putatively uncritical category has served the interests of the author's own teachers and colleagues; (4) an analysis of how the scholarly construction of "Jewish mysticism" has nourished contemporary spirituality; and (5) a methodological indictment of the category, which seeks to liberate research on Kabbalah and Hasidism from its subordination to "Jewish mysticism." The book is structurally analogous to the conceptual genealogies of other scholars who have leveraged foundational interventions in the study of religion, such as Karen King's 2003 What Is Gnosticism?, or more recently, Daniel Boyarin's 2018 Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. In this sense, the analytical mood assumed by Huss fits, like the modern concept of mysticism itself, within a broader historical moment of scholarly discourse. It is a moment, however, dedicated to exposing how broadly organizational categories of research are constructed in historically and epistemically contingent ways. To further qualify Mystifying Kabbalah's relationship to previous scholarship, the book is much indebted to the methodology modeled by Wouter Hanegraaff's 1998 New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Huss also takes a similar approach to Steven Wasserstrom's 1999 Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos, but does not invoke this watershed critique of mystocentrism in the History of Religions. One criticism of this otherwise dynamic book is that it operates with a thin concept of theology. While Huss is precise in pinpointing many reasons that the category of Jewish mysticism is wrongheaded (perhaps the most urgent reason being that it generates artificial affinities in the comparative phenomenology of religion), exposing the tacit assumptions of research as "theological" does not in itself articulate the ideological limitations of scholarship. Critical theologians who are certainly practiced in the kind of genealogical analysis offered here may find this line of argumentation inadequate. Similarly, Huss supposes an automatic correlation of theological research commitments with apologetical tendencies. He claims, for example, "The relative lack of criticism toward Kabbalistic androcentrism and misogyny is connected to the theological paradigm of research, which demands an empathetic approach to the research data and glorifies Jewish mysticism as a liberating force in Jewish culture" (96–97). This claim is not just unpersuasive because theology is supposed to determine apologetical outcomes, but also because the research conditions in which the paradigm of "Jewish mysticism" prevailed have produced...

The evolution of modern notions about bladder cancer

The review details the evolution in the researchers perspective of bladder cancer over the past five decades. The history of the study, pathogenesis, etiology, and the clinical significance of urinary bladder are briefly discussed. The review presents currently prominent theories regarding the pathogenesis of urinary bladder neoplasms and the foundational research in this field. The article briefly discusses the molecular changes the development of bladder cancer and studies of the urine microbiome during oncogenesis

Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I: Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad [A history of Latin American science fiction: From its origins to modernity] ed. by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares (review).

Reviewed by: Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I: Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad [A history of Latin American science fiction: From its origins to modernity] ed. by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares David S. Dalton (bio) Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I: Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad [A history of Latin American science fiction: From its origins to modernity] Edited by Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G. Kurlat Ares. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2020. Pp. 507. Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana I reevaluates the role of science fiction (SF) in the Latin American canon. Arguing that SF literature was common in a region that has long used literature to negotiate its relationship to science, technology, and modernity (pp. 10–11), the authors situate SF at the heart of nation-building projects (p. 14). The volume addresses the conspicuous lack of scholarly attention to SF through a transregional approach that interrogates the place of SF in the national letters of an array of Latin American countries. The collection of chapters hits the sweet spot between identifying new material, providing a theoretically rich analysis, and advocating for a more inclusive history of the region's SF. Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado's chapter juggles these tasks especially well. He cites key foundational studies in Mexican SF (Ross Larson, María Bermúdez, Ramón López Castro, and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz), but he focuses primarily on identifying SF (and proto-SF) authors who wrote from the colonial period into the present. His rich analysis shows that Mexico's SF has long responded to its cultural referent. Nineteenth-century literature after independence followed a utopian schematic that lurched between optimism and pessimism as writers grappled with questions of national identity. His discussion of Nervo is especially valuable because it establishes this wellknown author as a trailblazer in Mexican SF. Fernández Delgado's discussion of postrevolutionary SF is equally interesting, particularly as he situates authors like Eduardo Urzaiz, José Urquizo, and even José Vasconcelos as SF letrados who used literature to interrogate different aspects of the present. I especially appreciated Fernández Delgado's emphasis on popular literature (and film) from the 1940s into the 1960s. As his chapter masterfully shows, Mexico's SF—especially when one expands the canon—provides an invaluable lens from which to gauge national development. Emily Maguire's chapter also embodies the volume's project as it traces Cuban SF from the nineteenth century to 1938. She begins by challenging those who would separate the concept of SF from "literature" more generally. In the Cuban case, SF (and texts that can be approached as SF) has been a natural genre from which to interrogate notions of national identity and modernity. Her discussion of Francisco Calcagno's En busca del eslabón: Historia de monos is especially important. The novel's decidedly [End Page 1227] racist narrative centers on a group of Cuban and U.S. doctors who travel to the Brazilian Amazon, Africa, and the South Pacific to find the "missing link" between humans and simians. The novel dialogues with Jules Verne and English-language authors of the time period (pp. 216–17), but it also engages the scientific discourses of the day, particularly those of anthropology, Darwinism, and even phrenology. Maguire's discussion of Juan Manuel Planas's alternative history, La corriente del Golfo, highlights how Cuban SF authors have adapted the popular texts of their day to their own context. The novel's imaginative premise—Cuban rebels almost defeat Spain during the war for independence through scientific means (though they ultimately fail and the United States still intervenes)—alludes to the possibility for SF to imagine a preferred timeline from that of the present. In interrogating the role of SF in all Latin American countries, the book even discusses those cases where SF has been almost nonexistent. In his chapter, Hebert Benítez Pazzolano notes that, unlike the rest of the region of the Río de la Plata—which boasts some of the earliest cases of SF in all of Latin America—SF never enjoyed significant diffusion...

Subjectivity in flux: Contextualizing Don DeLillo’s White Noise

The idea of the subject as a construct, of various external influences, was not new to the cultural and literary circles in the 1980s when DeLillo published White Noise. In the second half of the twentieth century, post-structuralist and postmodern theories unsettled the established ideas of the humanist tradition like the concept of the subject. The idea that the subject is constituted by external factors posed a challenge to the modernist notion of the subject as authentic and independent consciousness. Influenced by post-structuralist and postmodern theories, novelists in post-war America, especially during and after the 1980s, portrayed their protagonists (the subjects) as textual constructs rather than authentic heroic figures we often find in modernists’ works of art. DeLillo engages with technological developments and sociocultural changes in post-war America and explores how such developments/changes influence an individual’s subjectivity. Critics have described Jack Gladney, the protagonist of White Noise, as a late-modernist displaced to negotiate the postmodern landscape. This study, which is purely of scholarly interest, attempts to show how Gladney vacillates between the notions of modernist authentic subject and the de-centred postmodern subject created textually. This article also attempts to explore how DeLillo’s fiction engages with the idea of the subject during the 1980s.

Redefining Addiction: A Modest Proposal

This opinion article highlights two recent articles that argue we need new terminology to address the modern notion that addictive behaviors fall along a continuum. Terms such as preaddiction or unhealthy drinking help highlight the early stages of addiction and reduce the morbidity and mortality of addictive disorders.

Martha Nussbaum and Aristotle on Distributive Justice and Equality

Abstract This article gives a detailed analysis of Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ and her claim that it is a genuinely Aristotelian contemporary po-litical philosophy. The paper examines how Nussbaum bases her ‘capabilities approach’ on human nature and questions her assertion that both Aristotle’s account of human nature and her own approach are not metaphysical. In order to analyze the normative dimension of Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’, this article focuses on Aristotle’s doctrine of distributive justice and equality. It shows how Nussbaum adopts and modifies this doctrine in an egalitarian way and demonstrates that her reading and appropriation of it is problematic. With reference to contemporary literature on Aristotle’s Politics, the article criticizes how Nussbaum assimilates Aristotle’s political philosophy into modern values and notions, laying out six primary reasons supporting the thesis that Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ cannot be regarded as an Aristotelian one.

Hermann Kantorowicz’ Concept of Legal Science and the Social Role of Legal Scholarship Today

Hermann Kantorowicz was a great legal scholar, who taught not only in Germany, but also in the United States, at Oxford and at Cambridge. His work bridges the intellectual divide between the common and civil laws not just because of his cosmopolitan biography, but also because of the exceptional breadth of his academic interests. In Germany, Kantorowicz has always been known best as a leading figure of the free law movement ( Freirechtsbewegung). This paper focuses instead on Kantorowicz’ idea of legal science. There are at least two reasons why Kantorowicz’ contributions to the issue are worth re-reading today. On the one hand, he discussed these questions in a manner which engages deeply with philosophical scholarship, relying primarily on concepts developed by Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Max Weber. On the other hand, Kantorowicz developed his ideas of legal science wholly independently of nineteenth century (or contemporary) programmes to re-construct the law in the form of a fully rational, internally coherent system. In this respect Kantorowicz’ ideas fit in well with modern, more fluid and complex notions of law and multi-layered legal systems.

Oceanic bellies and liquid feminism in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique

ABSTRACT Winner of the 2003 Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque, and translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, Fatou Diome’s 2003 novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique [ The Belly of the Atlantic, 2006] plays on the image of the Atlantic as an oceanic belly. This article explores the usefulness of the black Atlantic epistemology (Glissant 1990, Gilroy 1993) as a site for imagining the production of diasporic space, alongside the critique that ‘by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Masilela 1996, p. 88). Through Diome’s novel, I explore how this intersects with a feminist project of rendering visible the spatialization of difference, through an engagement with the geographies of domination. Borrowing from Zymunt Bauman’s (2006) notion of liquid modernity, I therefore propose ‘liquid feminism’ as a framework that relates the globalised oceanic mobilities of African migrants to the structures of patriarchal domination which render black women’s lives ‘ungeographic’ (McKittrick 2006). I start by exploring the geographic sensibility of Diome’s poetics, including her use of the language of geography and her personification of the Atlantic Ocean. I then analyse how her portrayal of a geulwaar matriclan subverts the notion of Western feminism as rescuing African women who are trapped by ‘tradition’. Finally, I explore Diome’s notion of ‘geographic suicide’ as associated with the reflexivity of African women as modern subjects a site for the ‘affective mapping’ (Flatley 2009) of diasporic identity. Ultimately, the article illustrates how Diome’s feminist re-imagining of the black Atlantic centres Africa and Africanness, combating the temporal dislocation that fixes the continent as a space that is lost in the originary moment of rupture of the Middle Passage.

Wrinkles in Time: Old Age, Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth‐Century Germany

AbstractThis article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It shows that the great nineteenth‐century debate about the elderly was not about industrialisation, labour, health or social policy. It was a debate about time. The cultural understanding of the elderly changed because the culture of temporality did. The focus on futurity and the youth around 1900 is well known, as modern Germany became convulsed with imperial fantasies and electric urban life. This had, it turns out, negative repercussions for older Germans. No longer the accretions of a long past of wisdom and experience, they were identified instead with their short future of corporeal decline and death. The social attitude towards older people is therefore related to the broader social attitude towards time, history and change: a finding that might apply in other times and places, including our own.

Bangkok middle-class spectatorship and social realist media: contesting modernity through visualizing Muslim minorities

ABSTRACT Since the escalation of violence in the three southern border provinces of Thailand began in 2004, the body of literature on Thai Muslims has grown, with newer works offering fresh insights into the deep-rooted conflict. That said, scholarly works gauging the interplay between media portrayals of Muslim minorities and ideological works are surprisingly scarce. To fill the gap, this article examines social realist media, namely films and a music video, produced in the 1980s. Drawing on visual culture and Thai postcolonial studies as theoretical underpinnings, it seeks to illuminate the interplay between Bangkok middle-class spectatorship and Muslim minorities by framing them within Thailand’s postcolonial context. The findings show that visual references to Muslimness are made to connote inferiority vis-à-vis the supposedly modern Bangkok middle class. The article argues that, in the 1980s, the visuality of Muslimness enabled the newly formed Bangkok middle classes to forge a superior visual subjectivity while perpetuating ‘Muslim others’ as a group in need of development by the aforementioned middle class. Furthermore, emerging from the postcolonial world, visuality became a site of struggle in which the emerging classes contested the notion of modernity that had hitherto been exclusively intertwined with the elites.

Zones of Privacy in Letters Between Women of Power: Elizabeth I of England and Anna of Saxony

The present article explores how women of power engaged in diplomatic efforts via forms of epistolary privacy by analysing private letters between Elizabeth I and Anna of Saxony in the late 1570s and early 1580s. Through a close examination of how their exchanges moved from very public matters to more personal requests, the authors show how early modern notions of privacy offered strategic communication prompts that could be used effectively by women in political negotiations. The intersection between these zones of privacy with the very public matters being addressed in Elizabeth’s and Anna’s epistolary exchange makes explicit how noble women could develop their own private politics, becoming active agents of diplomacy even in periods of extreme religious and political turmoil through personal connections within female noble circles.

The French Left and the Politicization of Environmental Issues

The meeting between the left and ecology was belated, shocked and temporally differentiated. There were three different kinds of behaviours towards ecology, those exhibited by the opponents, the followers and the pioneers. The intersection of three parameters explains this typology: the relation of these organizations to the notion of modernity, the relation to Marxism, and the notion of revolutionary optimism.

Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer

Reviewed by: Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde by Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer Maki Kaneko (bio) Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde. By Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer. Brill, 2020. xii, 181 pages. €104.00, cloth; €104.00, E-book. The last two decades have witnessed the significant growth of English-language scholarship on 1950s and 1960s Japanese avant-garde art. Spearheaded by Alexandra Monroe's 1994 landmark exhibition/publication Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, in the early twenty-first century many scholars published must-read books, catalogues, and articles on post-1945 Japanese avant-garde art, including Reiko Tomii, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Midori Yoshimoto, Ming Tiampo, and Miriam Sas. Particularly foregrounding Japanese avant-gardists' active interactions and negotiations with their Euro-American counterparts, their studies have effectively illuminated the central roles played by those "non-Western" artists in the post-1945 contemporary art scene and thereby posed a significant challenge to the Euro-American-centric notion of modernism and avant-gardism. This collection of scholarship thereby sets firm ground for the study of post-1945 Japanese art vis-à-vis the so-called global art history, whose most recent outcome can be found in the 2019 traveling exhibition Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, while inspiring young and mid-career scholars to further complicate and diversify the narrative of the postsurrender art of Japan.1 [End Page 426] Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer's first book, Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde, is the most recent member of this league of scholarship and fully demonstrates that the study of 1950s and 1960s Japanese art is far from exhausted. The book focuses on the avantgarde calligraphers' collective Bokujinkai, or People of the Ink, which was founded by five young Japanese calligraphers in 1952 and attained significant recognition in Western Europe and the United States through to the 1960s. While the Bokujinkai is not at all an unknown group, previous studies focused almost exclusively on its de facto leader Morita Shiryū (1912–98) and on Inoue Yūichi (1916–85), arguably the most radical member of the group. Bogdanova-Kummer's book is the first study in English to holistically investigate this avant-garde calligraphy group through its membership, network, formal experimentations, and guiding philosophies from its formation to its "conservative turn" in the 1960s. By centrally focusing on the Bokujinkai's strategies, efforts, and struggles for the internationalization of calligraphy with the notion of the "transcultural" advocated by the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsche as its key framework, moreover, Bogdanova-Kummer sets the goal for her book to "change the perception of transcultural constellations in postwar abstract art" and further challenges the Eurocentric account of avant-garde art "not only in regard to geographies, but also in terms of the art forms and communities involved" (p. 3). The uniqueness of this study lies in the author's attempt to position calligraphy, "an often overlooked and culturally specific art form" (p. 9), at the center of the early postwar transnational interactions of Japanese and Euro-American avant-garde artists. Oscillating between art and letter, rooted in the Sino-Japanese cultural tradition, and deemed to be conservative, calligraphy was significantly disadvantaged in proving its relevance to Euro-American art at that time. However, the author insists, precisely because of this disadvantageous position or marginalization, the Bokujinkai's "success" in the international art arena invites our scrutiny; its bold strategies toward the challenge of bridging calligraphy and abstractions, and the limitations encountered in doing so, reveal "the complex mechanisms that drive the art world's politics of inclusion and rejection, as well as the conflicting historiographies of the postwar avant-gardes as perceived in Japan, Europe, and the United States" (p. 146). Based on this fascinating proposal, Bogdanova-Kummer details the Bokujinkai's trajectory through six main chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 present, in the author's words, the "macro-level sociopolitical contextualization" (p. 23) and "micro-level study of the community of avant-garde calligraphers" (p. 37), respectively. Together with the [End Page 427] introduction, which includes an extremely important survey of pre-1945 modern Japanese calligraphy, the first two chapters provide the reader with key...

OVID'S HERMAPHRODITUS AND THE MOLLIS MALE

Figures of intersexed individuals perhaps representing the minor Greek deity Hermaphroditus became, for reasons that are not entirely clear, strikingly popular in Roman sculpture and wall painting in the latter half of the first century CE. Depicting a fully bisexed human body, these figures have resulted in competing interpretations regarding their purpose, meaning, and effect. As it happens, we also have a text from the Augustan period that purports to explain not only the origin of the intersexed Hermaphroditus, but the production of future bisexed individuals, in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 4. When discussing the sculptures and wall paintings of Hermaphroditus, as a result, scholars have been inevitably drawn to Ovid's narrative. The pull of Ovid is admittedly almost irresistible, and his reputation as a poet who challenges norms, conventions, and genres makes it attractive to see him as creating room for modern notions of gender fluidity. As Georgia Nugent argued more than thirty years ago, however, Ovid's narrative is, in curious ways, a reductive version of the myth, ‘a paradigmatic example of how what is sexually threatening may be textually recuperated and stabilized’. I wish to reanimate Nugent's arguments here, and to suggest that scholars’ regular invocation of Ovid when interpreting the products of Roman art is a mistake, for two reasons: first, the figure Ovid describes is, in fact, not typical of what we see in Roman sculptures and wall paintings; and second, Ovid presents a version of Hermaphroditus’ gender identity that is deliberately less challenging to the stability of sexual binarism—and to traditional gender roles—than are those material depictions. For those of us who wish to advocate for the rights of intersexed individuals, in other words, Ovid is the wrong champion.

The concept of agroecosystems as a theoretical basis of ecologically tolerant nature management

Purpose. The main goal of the authors was to prove the suitability of the concept of noosphere ecosystems to interpret not only ecological phenomena and processes, but also phenomena of socio-natural content, and, subsequently, possibly geopolitical processes, in particular, spatial expansion of certain ethnic groups. Methods. In the course of our research a set of methodological approaches and scientific methods was used. The set of methods includes: empirical, which was implemented in the sequential implementation of the following operations: observation, modeling, forecasting; comparative – was implemented while comparing the main functions of natural and agroecosystems. Results. The formation of agricultural areas is the second stage in the transformation of natural ecosystems into agroecosystems. The main assumption of our work is the possibility of the existence of an agricultural system that has a dual character of borders. Our assumption was tested on the territory of Kharkiv region – one of the most developed agricultural territories of Ukraine. Based on the assumption that soil is both a condition and a result of human agricultural activity, as well as the fact that it connects natural and economic boundaries of agroecosystems in space-time, we calculated the balance of matter in the soil and coefficient of ecological danger. Mapping the values ​​of the coefficient of ecological danger showed that out of 429 farms in the region, only 7 farms have values ​​of the coefficient more than 1. This means that under the conditions of intensive agriculture there is a constant shortage of matter and energy, which leads to a negative balance of humus in the soil. According to the author's concept, one of the main causes of environmental problems lies in the different rates of development of nature and society. Conclusions. The “memory” of the former structurally and informationally unchanging biosphere is embedded in agroecosystems. According to modern notions of rhizome, such a memory is soil. Such “memory” at the level of agroecosystems provides self-regulation of the “human ecosystem” through both direct regulation of the human population (disease, war) and indirect impact on planetary spatial structures. In particular, due to the preservation of certain proportions between the territories with “naturalized” and “commodity” economy.

Cultural Stance on The Notion of Tradition VS Modernity in Manju Kapur’s Contemporary Fiction

This research explores Manju Kapur's Home from the perspective of modernity. Tensions between tradition and modernity, represented in the novel can be viewed against the influence of a western culture that has taken place in the 21st century within the lives of people in India. Ideological stance on the notions of tradition vs. modernity in respect to the conflicting issue, through the characters as Nisha, Rupa, Yashpal, Ajay, Vijaya, and Raju, where they almost abandoned their parental business style, traditional thinking and moves ahead of their way either in their business or in the family life. Characters in the novel are deviated from their social norms and values due to the influences of western values on Indian society is a sign of modernity. This research is qualitative in nature. This research approaches Kapur's Home from the theoretical perspectives of modernity that have appeared in the studies of Jurgen Habermas, Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, Peter Wagner, Dilip Parmeshwar Gaonkar, and Ziauddin Saradar. This research finds that joint family divides into a single settlement, characters start to adopt modernity, forgetting their traditional norms and values for their benefit.