Primal Nature Research Articles

From “Neti” to “Deathless Goddess”: The Feminine in Nandini Sahu’s Sita and Shedding the Metaphors

In both Sita and Shedding the Metaphors, Nandini Sahu offers revolutionary interpretations of womanhood, effortlessly embracing nature, tradition, and modern cultural norms. She says she "pours" her own "image" and "personality" into her characters and stories, drawing on her own experience and interactions (Shedding the Metaphors, Preface, 13). Her approach embraces subjectivity and empiricism as well as her broad variety of readings, including both literary and academic works, even though it is not necessarily autobiographical. Nandini Sahu also makes Sita her own in Sita, revitalizing Sita's mythology in the process and giving her a strong sense of modern relevance in poetry that is never prosaic and is driven by argument. Her women characters emerge as strong and impressive, with a strong emotional maturity and a marked sense of empathy and morality but willing to reveal their raw emotions and spontaneity. Their exploitation by uncaring individuals is seen in keeping with a patriarchal society, that is destructive of both femininity and nature. The strong single mothers and single working women manage to draw on their capacity to love and take care of others to feed their strength. Her women are Goddess-like and like primal Nature: abundant, giving, strong, eco-feminist, and ready to break free from stereotypes and conventional metaphors. The subjectivity of Sahu's Sita is strongly Indian feminist and highly modern. She moves fluidly between the past, conceptions of the past, and present patriarchy, where female foeticide still haunts India, without missing a beat (of argument or metre). She probes into every facet of women's existence, connecting old conceptions of male supremacy with present clichés.

시원적 자연의 무심한 힘에 대한 인간의 저항으로서 악 : 자연의 구멍들에 대한 반역으로서 인간의 스토리-텔링

시원적 자연의 무심한 힘에 대한 인간의 저항으로서 악 : 자연의 구멍들에 대한 반역으로서 인간의 스토리-텔링

The two-region multi-depot pickup and delivery problem

Logistics networks are constantly evolving such that new and more varied structures arise and need to be studied. Carriers are aiming for opportunities to save costs by efficient planning. Motivated by this, we define the two-region multi-depot pickup and delivery problem. A region in this setting refers to an area where customers and depots are located. We differentiate two kinds of requests depending on whether their customers are located in the same region or not. Due to geographical characteristics, direct transportation between different regions is considered inefficient and a long-distance transportation mode needs to be used to connect them. Hence, we face a complex problem where interrelated decisions are to be made. We propose a decomposition into three subproblems, which relate to well-known problems in the literature. For solving the global problem, an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm is developed. The algorithm mixes operators tailored to each of the different decisions of each subproblem. We demonstrate that these operators are efficient when applied to problems of their primal nature. In an extensive computational study, we show that the proposed ALNS dominates alternative ALNS schemes, where subproblems are treated sequentially. A detailed analysis of the solution convergence is provided. The proposed approach is a powerful tool to tackle complex decision problems in large distribution networks.

Conceptual lenses to bring into focus the blurred and unpack the entangled

Concepts have navigational consequences, guiding towards understanding and social practices that decrease danger, or misdirecting into assumptions that problems are being solved when worsening and that nature can be socially reconstructed at will. This article showed there has been a mismatch between natural science conclusions of what is needed to mitigate anthropogenic climate change and conceptions by polluters and many social scientists. It confirmed that natural science is needed to ground social science analyses of environmental problems. Some social theory previously made a cultural turn and recently a material turn, replacing culture/nature dualism with antidualist hybrids. The article demonstrated that much of environmental sociology has not zigzagged like that, instead consistently focussing on the interpenetration of social constructions and nature’s constructions. Rather than one-size-fits-all conceptions that indiscriminately interpret everything as hybrids, it proposed nuanced conceptions where hybridisation is variable and unpacked conflated conceptions. It argued that sociotechnological innovation has led to the internalisation of primal nature’s dynamics previously external to societies and unleashed primal nature. This results in intensified interaction between social constructions and nature’s constructions, and nature becoming a medium carrying social relations. Premature predictions of emancipatory catastrophism were shown to result from mistaking discourse for action.

A Discussion of Xunzi’s “Encouraging Learning” and Its Significance for Confucianism

Much of Xunzi’s philosophy can be characterized as a deepening of themes introduced by Confucius and, at the same time, a reaction against Mencius’ brand of Confucianism. For Xunzi, the idea of learning was a critical concept in achieving both of these goals. In Xunzi’s philosophy, learning is not simply the accumulation of knowledge but, rather, the process of coming to understand morality as a lifelong process of self-cultivation and self-improvement. Xunzi did not agree with Mencius that human nature was inherently good; instead he believed that human nature was bad, which is why individuals must actively learn to control their base desires. It is no coincidence that, in Xunzi’s project of self-cultivation based on learning to overcome one’s primal nature, chapter 1 of his anthology is “Encouraging Learning.” Reexamining the respective moral philosophies of Xunzi and Mencius from the perspective of learning and its role in moral cultivation can provide a deeper understanding of their overall philosophy.

In search of the social: Rethinking toleration, remembering hospitality

AbstractThis article puts forward a historical and philosophical critique of the concept of toleration that questions it as an ultimate achievement and instead interrogates its limitations and seeks ways in which it may point to its own supercession in more positive and durable social bonds. The violence which toleration historically aimed at containing remains a constant in present-day recourses to its relevancy, while the negative valuations of human interrelations that underlie such assessments are passed over. Reflections on genocide through the thought of Levinas prove the primal nature of the law of hospitality, while, following Aristotle, friendship, rather than marriage, safeguards society from violent conflict.

“The Gaze of the Natives”: Visualizing Reggae Music as CD Artwork

“The Gaze of the Natives”Visualizing Reggae Music as CD Artwork Andrea Elizabeth Shaw (bio) In An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Krista Thompson explores some of the earliest visual representations of the Anglophone Caribbean. She explains that starting in Jamaica in the late nineteenth century, “proponents of the tourist trade recognized that the idea of Jamaica would have to be reinvented in the imaginations of North American and British audiences.”1 This “reinvention” strategy became necessary in the face of Jamaica’s floundering sugar economy and was crafted with the hope that these newly shaped images of Jamaica would stimulate travel to the island as well as investment and white migration.2 As a result of these objectives, around the turn of the twentieth century, Jamaica underwent a makeover, enabled by photographs that “perpetuated an image of the island as primarily a place of nature and, more specifically, as landscape in which nature displayed the charms of a ‘picturesque tropical garden.’”3 Through images, often on postcards, the island was transformed from a struggling postemancipation economy stifled by “lazy black natives” and an abundance of tropical diseases to a luxuriant and inviting paradise.4 In Consuming the Caribbean, Mimi Sheller also explores the “reinvention” strategies that suffuse portrayals of the region and explains: “It could be argued that there is no ‘primal nature’ in the Caribbean both because so much of it has been constructed by human intervention and because every aspect of it is dosed with a heavy infusion of symbolic meaning and cultural allusions.”5 In other words, representations of the region are all mythic, including those perpetuated by the earliest images. The nineteenth-century Edenic visual interpretation of Jamaica as “picturesque” involved photographically fashioning both the island’s geographic [End Page 33] landscape as well as its inhabitants as either “exotic” or “orderly.”6 Visual renderings of Jamaica shaped by this underpinning desire to showcase the extraordinary and the extra-orderly became manifest in photographs of objects such as highly unusual trees and flawless gardens.7 Additionally, black and East Indian “natives” were posed as if engaged in various productive undertakings; these poses intended to lessen European anxieties about “native” work ethics and cleanliness.8 In “Cane Cutters” and “Banana Carriers,” which appear in Picturesque Jamaica, by A. Duperly and Sons, black men and women are posed with the tools of their labor amidst towering stalks of cane or dutifully balancing bananas on their head while obediently immobilized for the camera.9 A century later, another group of images of black Caribbean bodies has emerged on the global marketplace: CD art on reggae dancehall compilations. These images operate in a similarly performative space as the nineteenth-century Jamaican postcards. The connection between these seemingly disparate visual representations created a century apart, one primarily photographs, the other graphic art, may seem tenuous, but the manner in which the looker interacts with these images is similar. As E. Ann Kaplan points out, “Looking relations are never innocent,” but are shaped by the “cultural systems” of the looker.10 Just as those reinvented images of Jamaica were distributed in the global marketplace of touristic desire in the late eighteen-hundreds to spur a flagging economy, reggae dancehall CD cover art provides another type of “eye for the tropics.” Disseminated globally to generate sales of the music, the graphic designs that adorn reggae dancehall CDs provide an enticing visual peek at the music contained within. Unlike the disciplined black bodies captured in the nineteenth century, the bodies on the CD jackets are disorderly but also configured in poses to inspire consumer desire. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. “Cane Cutters.” Photo Courtesy of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), Gainesville. http://www.dloc.com/UF00103316/00001/. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. “Banana Carriers.” Photo Courtesy of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), Gainesville. http://www.dloc.com/UF00103316/00001/. This essay explores the cover art on reggae dancehall CDs in an effort to articulate a relationship between these contemporary artistic imaginings [End Page 34] of the Caribbean and earlier efforts to render the region in...

Fundamentals of core conditioning

A fundamental can be defined as a noun as a central or primary rule or principle on which something is based. It can also be defined as an adjective as forming a necessary base or core; of central importance. And, hence, this term fits perfectly with the discussion of core conditioning presented here and in The Primal Nature of Core Function piece associated with it in this issue.

Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor's marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers find alternative means of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the commodities in their environments. At the same time, they ennoble such actions by modeling them on the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Whether in literature or in the broader culture, American rugged consumers thus mediate between the mythic models of self-sufficiency celebrated by the country's older, frontier capitalism and the postindustrial realities of the present. The essay posits four provisional categories of rugged consumerism, ranging from the hypermasculine weaponization of unlikely objects to the (re)creation of environmentally sustainable interior designs.

Disgust sensitivity and the neurophysiology of left-right political orientations.

Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts—including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations.

Ruffin Ready

Ruffin Ready Joseph D. Haske (bio) Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems. Paul Ruffin. TCU Press. http://www.prs.tcu.edu. 96 pages; cloth, $15.95. A prolific and accomplished writer, editor, and publisher, Paul Ruffin's contribution to American letters, so far, includes two novels, three collections of short stories, three books of essays, and over a half dozen collections of poetry, including his recent compilation from the Texas Poet Laureate Series, Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems. Ruffin's collections The Man Who Would Be God (1993); Islands, Women, and God (2001); and Jesus in the Mist (2007) are among the best in American short fiction in recent history. In reading Ruffin's complete works, one finds that many of the characteristics that make his fiction so appealing carry over into his poetry. There exist few cases where exceptional fiction writers excel in verse, attaining the same level of skill with their poetry—Thomas Hardy comes to mind—but it is truly a rare accomplishment. Ruffin is one writer who certainly comes close to achieving this feat. His most recent book, Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems, from the TCU Texas Poet Laureate Series, reminds us of his versatility as a writer. He is that rare poet, reminiscent of Robert Frost, who effectively merges a lyrical, stylistic tradition with cognitive and metaphysical innovation. He translates his ability as a prose stylist into verse, creating profound narrative poetry that both tells a story and reveals some clever insight or knowledge, often through simple, unexpected figurative devices and imagery. There is a continuity between the genres as some themes and metaphors recur in both fiction and verse, thematically linking the greater body of his writing. For example, the utilization of the well as a figurative device, which we see in the story, "The Well" resurfaces in the poem "Cleaning the Well." In verse form, the reader witnesses the storyline's re-emergence, as the speaker is lowered into the well by his grandfather and The sky hovered like some pale moon above, eclipsed by his heavy red face bellowing down to me not to dally, to feel deep and load the bucket. As evident in these lines, Ruffin's poetry tends to build on the ordinary, presenting familiar, sometimes mundane, images and offering a twist that transports readers to the realm of the unfamiliar, surprising the reader along the way. The simple imagery ventures into the profound as revelation emerges from unexpected sources. The grandfather in the poem understands that, in the well, "There's always something down there you can't quite get in your hands. You'd know that if it wasn't your first trip down. You'll know from now on." Once again, the well, as a metaphor, provides insight to Ruffin's literal and figurative world. Just as the speaker descends into the darkness of the well, Ruffin, too, descends into dark territory. The well represents, in one sense, the deepest, darkest areas of the human psyche and a collective fear for the unspoken–the macabre hidden truths of our society. Just as the boy feels a sense of duty to descend, Ruffin also seems obligated to take the reader there, whether it is the bottom of a well, a fire at a retirement home, or the mind of a prostitute. In much of his work, Ruffin reveals the primal nature of humankind, examining the beast within us. One can educate oneself and convey a semblance of decorum, but people from all walks of society cannot escape the truth about what we truly are. Erudition and civility are superficial qualities; when all is said and done, we are all animals. We are ultimately motivated by nature and our biological urges, as the speaker reminds us in "To the Celibate": beyond the riches of this cloister, you are bone and flesh, designed to breed and die, no less than the purest holy man, no more than the lowly oyster. In poems such as this, Ruffin brings uncomfortable, and sometimes unpopular, truths about human nature and societal values to light, in a way that most poets dare not. If such works make a reader uneasy, perhaps this...

Bouldings Lamentation And The Equilibrium Model Of Luca Pacioli: An Examination Of Cross-Disciplinary Misunderstandings

This treatise addresses an interdisciplinary issue addressed by Kenneth Boulding, who lamented the difference in usage of Pacioli accounting model as between economic theorists and accoun-tants. In response, this treatise examines origins of the accounting model, and the evolution of its use are traced. Differences between economists and accountants are examined through the filter of Luca Pacioli bookkeeping model, the flawed foundation upon which all generalizations re-garding accountancy have been based for centuries. The economic nature of financial accounting models is detailed and similarities and differences between theoretical and applied models of financial accounting are examined. Pacioli applied model is re-examined in economic terms befitting its primal nature. The economic meaning underpinning bookkeeping terms is clarified, and the breach between accounting practice and literature and the solid economic reality underlying the accounting process is discussed The mutual misunderstanding which gave rise to Boulding dilemma is placed in its primal context, and requirements for its resolution are suggested.

Ana Hatlarıyla Friglerde Din

This study includes general assessment of information about the religional thought and life in the Kingdom of Phrygia. Religion is the most important value of a society. As it known the Phrygians have a special place in Anatolia. They have appeared in Anatolia from the end of the 13th century B.C. and became a major power in the 8th century B.C. They became a political power of Anatolia after Sea Peoples Migration which destroyed such great states of the Second Millennium B.C. as Hittites, Mittannies. It has already been accepted by many of the contemporary scholars that Phrygians was a tribe of Thrac origin as we are informed by Herodotos and Strabon. Also as far as archeological excavations indicated that there are indications that the artifacts used by tumulus in Thracian and Macedonia were similar to those used by Phrygians. In ancient times, archaeological evidence for Phrygian religious cult indicates that the major divinity was Mother Goddess known to the Phrygians as Kybele (or Cybele) was the great Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess of Anatolia.

Childhood and the Fear of Death in Ambrose Bierce's The Parenticide Club and "Visions of the Night"

Ambrose Bierce, whose writings are replete with themes and images of violent death, is most remembered today for his Civil War short stories, and especially for the much anthologized "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." A number of Bierce's tales and essays, however, feature family violence and parricide, suggesting that the author's obsessive concern with death may have earlier antecedents than his own experiences as a Union soldier in the Civil War. Broadening previous psychoanalytic approaches, this essay uses post-Freudian perspectives on the psychology of death and the unconscious, as well as relevant historical, cultural, and literary contexts, to consider Bierce's childhood and his subsequent life experiences as they relate to writings such as The Parenticide Club , a collection of four bizarre tales of parricide, and "Visions of the Night," a recollection of three persistent nightmares from the author's youth and adulthood. These writings, as well as the writer's gothic tales, suggest that in many ways Bierce recognized the importance of dreams in the work of the unconscious and the primal nature of the fear of death in humanity.

9 Ben-Collages & VI Fragments from a Never-Ending Work-in-Progress

9 Ben-Collages & VI Fragments from a Never-Ending Work-In-Progress i__7tn Elaine R. Barkin 9 Ben-Collages and VI Fragments 281 It seems that it is our primal nature to be suspended, permanently for life, %% *#**i#|?-- "m, **..:.^jj_j_to__^^'.l_l3te^?:-'^-w- ,.i ! ^*%-_fe-l_^__i *** ^r^--^^^-?: ---^ 282 PerspectivesofNew Music 9 Ben-Collages and VI Fragments 283 I hove my hov/e. 0 03 6 $7$, Ihave my ontology; -?-^-m not as preconceptions, but as after-facts of evolving consciousness. J = 44 ^-?^ - > -?*?p-f-^-= I hove my hou/e: *T^ *___________________________P_J_^B i 284 PerspectivesofNew Music Fragment I Each of us determines what music is 'ours', whose music will live within us?real inour heads, hearts, minds, lives?neither evanescent nor transient.We recall it, we think it, we experience it. We are the hosts within which music thrives and blossoms. Within us by invitation; cast off at our discretion?although casting off, trying to forget, ismore diffi cult than embracing or inviting.Music, the parasite, the sycophant, the freeloader, the leech that invades us and that, under superbest conditions, enriches us, stimulates our intellect, and keeps us vital, even if we can't say for surewhat it means orwhat it's about; abetting memory and mem 9 Ben-Collages andVI Fragments 285 ories; inciting passion, desire, hope, despair, anxiety, patriotism?you name it?triggered deliberately or inadvertently, anytime anywhere. Biologist Lewis Thomas said: Instead of using what we can guess at about the nature of thought to explain the nature of music . . . begin with music and see what music can tell us about the sensation of thinking.1 A challenge, an intimidation, bombarded as theworld isnowadays, as it always has been, by pervasive, heedless situations that promote the cir cumvention of thinking, but sometimes I thinkwho cares about that stuff that I don't really care about, and sometimes I get pissed off. For me?why care about all those others?, it's their problem isn't it??pur poseful listening to awork ofmusic that requests attention stimulates my consciousness and sensitizes me to those remarkable instantiations I call 'music', to those ideas that another has chosen to express in/as music. Those unnameable, unsayable experiences that I nonetheless desperately try to speak about, despite the likelihood that deep down such experi ences?entering, touching, suffusing, co-habiting?remain unshareable, private, mysterious, clandestine. Fragment II Here's the opening of a poem e. e. cummings wrote in 1926:2 since feeling isfirst who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; When I read the poem aloud, I hear and feelmy lips and tongue and mouth forming: jaunty alliterations?feeling, first;oblique rhymes?who, you; sibilant austerity of syntax, things, the softer since and kiss; and then I think I've been able to get beneath thewords in some way thatmakes sense. But tryingnot to put that sense intowords other than cummings's own isoften a losing battle. As ifbecause it'sword-stuff, it's okay to say it in other words!3 And then I think of Franz Liszt, who got it rightwhen, or so the story goes, having been asked by an audience member to explain awork he'd just played, he turned back to the piano and played it once again. 286 PerspectivesofNew Music cummings was asked by his publisher to explain his poetry; here's a short quote from cummings's Introduction: I can express [my theory of technique] in fifteenwords by quoting The Eternal Question and The Immortal Answer of Burlesque, to wit: The Eternal Question: "Would you hit awoman with a child?" and The Immortal Answer: "No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesque comedian I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.4 Fragment III Sometimes you sit down and be thinking you going to put it this way, according to how you feel about it. You might know how somebody else do it,but you tell yourself, I'm going to do itdiffer ent.When you sit, you don't know how itgoing to come out . . . you just put ityour way. ?Flora Moore, quilt-maker I just taken me some [scrap cloth...

The Internalization of Autonomous Nature into Society

There is presently much theoretical discourse claiming that nature is being socially constructed or even abolished. Some authors celebrate this development and others lament it. Still others bracket nature's dynamics out of the analysis. The present paper critically assesses these theories and methodologies concerning relations between social practices and processes of nature. It then develops an alternative argument. The expansion of society into wilderness areas has brought new disturbances of nature into society. Pristine nature has been replaced by socially encompassed primal nature, which retains its capacity for independent dynamics that affect social constructions. Moreover, nature remains embedded in technology and so does its potential to escape control. These hybrids constructed by humans and nonhumans recombine processes and materials of nature. Now that this recombi-nant nature has been integrated into society and new primal dynamics of nature have been internalised, there is increasing reason to incorporate the forces of nature into sociological analysis.

Humor and Irony in Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's "Heidebilder"-Cycle

On the face of it, this statement seems to justify the generally accepted image of Droste as an essentially serious poet whose occasional flights of humor are of little or no consequence. This image, resulting from the combined agency of historical circumstance and critical prejudice, has remained virtually unchanged in spite of recent attempts to do justice to structures found in some of her poetic works.2 It is important to realize that in the comment cited above, Droste does not attest to her own lack of humor but to her deliberate restraint in its poetic exploration on account of the limitations imposed on a woman writer by decorum and convention. I have discussed elsewhere the manifestations of Droste's ever-creative humorous vein in her letters to family and friends, and have suggested the need for a reevaluation of the nature and role of elements in her entire oeuvre.3 The present paper offers my first contribution to this comprehensive task. Wolfgang Kayser's important and illuminating discussion of Sprachform und Redeform in Annette von Droste-Htilshoff's (1940)4 seems to have dazzled subsequent commentators into a peculiar blindness to the function and structural significance of clearly perceived elements within this much-touted poetic cycle. Kayser has argued that the characteristic attitude (Haltung) informing the Heidebilder, as also Droste's other works, is one of intellectual impotence (geistige Ohnmacht) vis-a-vis an inscrutable reality (236), giving rise to an Urtiimlichkeit eines Sprechens, das zu seiner Wirklichkeit noch keinen Abstand gefunden hat (241). Nouns without an article, deverbative nouns (notably infinitives and collective coinages), unusual genitive combinations, participial constructions, paratactic sentence formation, apposition, asyndeton, anacoluthon these are the most salient features of Annette's poetic style that combine to bring about its distinctive prerational character. So befinden sich die Heidebilder gleichsam noch in einem dichterischen Urzustand vor aller entschiedener Formung (241). In fairness to this gebildete und geistig hochstehende Frau (241) Kayser points out that the observed primal nature of her poetic language is the product of a deliberate fashioning process (236). However, focusing on the various aspects of this one Redeart he has set out to expose, he does not pay comparable attention to other modes of speaking whose presence he is obliged to acknowledge but whose significance he plays down before any serious examination: Es gibt Stellen, in denen andere Readearten einbrechen, ohne dem Beschreiben eingeordnet zu werden (241). This, it seems, has to do with the perception of Annette von Droste-Huilshoff as an utterly unsmiling poeta perception Kayser shares with other commentators. W~ihrend Goethe

Sentimental Jonah’s Heart of Stone

Cranston examines Jonah in the context of its exhibition of pagan myth and fairytale. Cranston argues that Jonah represents the primal nature of man in his pan-like appearance and character, concluding that “Jonah is the embodiment of the typical qualities of the outcast, an outlaw in exile, pursuing his life of non-conformity” by distorting mythologies and fairytales and bending Christian ideology to personify anti-Christian ideals.