Strange People Research Articles

Der priesterkönig Johannes und sein Reich — Legende oder realität?

In the middle of the twelfth century rumours of a powerful Christian ruler beyond Islam, called Prester John, spread through Europe. In his vast kingdom, according to report, society was at peace and strange people, animals and plants, as well as valuable precious stones with miraculous powers, were to be found. At first this kingdom was sought for in India, then in the thirteenth century was transferred to Central Asia, and in the fourteenth to Ethiopia. Henry the Navigator and his captains tried to reach this powerful ruler in order to combine with him in attacking Islam in the rear. But it was only in 1517 that the Portuguese succeeded in contacting the Ethiopian ruler in person and helping him against his Islamic enemies. Through political ineptitude they made themselves unpopular, were persecuted, and finally in 1640 driven out of the country. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on history and ethnology, but also on geography, Germanistics and theology, an attempt is made here to decide if Prester John really existed and where his kingdom was, and, failing both possibilities, to ascertain who in the twelfth century had an interest in the ‘discovery’ of such a person, and to review the consequences of this ‘discovery’ in subsequent centuries.

Strange and Wonderful People Seen in Rhode Island

Strange and Wonderful People Seen in Rhode Island

Cases in Point: A Limited Glossary of Stumblebum Usage

(1984). Cases in Point: A Limited Glossary of Stumblebum Usage. The Sociological Quarterly: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 417-427.

A comparative study of children's worries.

In the late thirties Pinter and Lev discovered that fifth and sixth graders in New York City worried most about family and school items, with the greatest single worry being "failing a test" in school. The present study was designed to replicated their work and to determine whether changing social, economic, and political conditions have affected the worries of children. In 1977 an augmented version of the 1939 Pinter and Lev Worries Inventory was administered to 645 rural and urban fifth and sixth graders in Chautauqua County, New York. Results indicate that "failing a test" was still the most worrisome item. Comparisons of the Pinter and Lev and the present study indicate that boys in the 1939 sample worried significantly more about economic items, girls in the 1977 sample worried significantly more in all areas except personal health, and children in the 1977 sample had more worries pertaining to "robbers." "kidnappers," "strange people following me," and "being taken away by strangers." In addition, "some-one dying in my family" ranked fourth for boys and girls in the 1977 sample and 39th for boys and 31st for girls in the 1939 sample.

Children's Recognition of Situational Aspects of Facial Expression

ABRAMOVITCH, RONA. Children's Recognition of Situational Aspects of Facial Expression. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 459-463. 2 experiments were done in which a total of 36 preschool children were presented with videotapes of their own and unknown mothers interacting with strange and familiar people. They saw only the mother's face and upper torso, with no sound. The children were able to guess correctly whether their own mother was interacting with a friend or a stranger (of the same or opposite sex). However, they were not successful with respect to videotapes of unknown mothers. Adults (20 in the first experiment and 14 in the second) were presented with the same videotapes and were successful in discriminating interactions with friends versus strangers. The results are discussed in terms of ability to recognize situational as well as affective or emotional aspects of facial expressions.

The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century

One of the incidental consequences of the success of British arms in eighteenth-century India was the appearance of a number of publications which reflect the intense curiosity of contemporary Europeans about strange peoples, their manners and religions. Of the three principal religions of India, Hinduism attracted the most attention. European contact with Islam was several centuries old, while few travellers could identify Buddhism with any certainty. This book reprints some of the most significant English contributions to the early European understanding of Hinduism.

Let Us Build Bridges*

IN THE northern part of the island of Borneo, two months ago, I walked across a bridge. It was a frail suspension bridge, three feet wide and perhaps 50 yards long. It swayed with me as I walked along the split bamboo floor, holding the cables with both hands. I stopped in the middle over the muddy stream, and a woman of the Kadazan tribe passed me, baby on back, and basket of vegetables on her head. As she walked on, the bridge and I undulated like a wave, so that I shared in her motion. A little way downstream, a conventional type of arched cement bridge crossed the stream, but one abutment had been washed away in the rainy season. Still farther downstream, a ford crossed the now sluggish stream which cascaded over the stone slabs of the roadway. A sign warned autos not to cross the ford if the water level stands above a certain mark on a post. Three types of bridge, three levels, for all kinds of conveyances; and when the roaring mountain torrent makes the ford impassable, and the bridge is washed away, communication still continues on foot over the frail suspension bridge. You and I are teachers of foreign languages. We believe that learning a foreign language is not an idle exercise or merely intellectual discipline, but that a foreign language, well learned, is a bridge of communication and contact with another people, another culture, which then becomes less foreign, more human, to the learner. Many kinds of bridges at many different levels are needed in this world, for many different kinds of people and different uses. There are or soon will be three billion people on the earth, speaking thousands of different languages. Let us therefore build bridges. We are living in a strangely paradoxical world. The relative size of our globe is shrinking at a fantastic rate. It is a commonplace to point out that you can fly from here to Singapore, halfway around the earth, in less than twentyfour hours. When the new supersonic transport goes into service in the mid-70s, you will fly from London to New York almost twice as fast as the sun can make the same trip. The result is that this is also a frighteningly expanding world, growing vast, enormous. Far more touches us intimately than ever before. People and sights now crowd into our consciousness which we could easily ignore before. We turn on the television and live through an ugly riot in Detroit, or a similar one except for a few details, in Bombay. American boys are fighting and dying in South Vietnam, a place which few could have located on a map ten years ago; but we watch them now on TV and suffer with them, and with the Vietnamese peasants. We find ourselves in other countries and among strange people before the bridges have been built, before communication has been established. We are sitting down to eat with people to whom this unprepared intimate contact is distasteful.

An M. A. Program in German with a New Approach

Teachers of German in America are generally agreed that students preparing to teach that language should spend at least a year at a German university. The question is: When should they go and how? Our many undergraduate programs abroad do not, in the opinion of this writer, offer a satisfactory answer, simply because their participants are unable to perform the work of German university students. Our juniors and seniors do not know the language well enough to follow intelligently a lecture in German or to take an active part in seminars; and their intellectual immaturity makes it impossible for them to adjust to German university life. In order to supply them with the constant guidance and supervision to which they have been accustomed at home, and in order not to overtax their limited resources, they are partially, or completely, segregated from the German student body and given special lectures by special tutors, and this at a level which is more reminiscent of a German Volksschule than a German university. Why can we not realize that a German university is no place for our undergraduates (with their two or three years of College German!), and ask ourselves whether we are not being just a trifle presumptuous in sending to German universities students the majority of whom would probably never be able to obtain a German Reifezeugnis? Must we not admit that we should send only graduates? However, even our graduates may feel completely lost when they first come to a German university. In addition to their neverending struggle with the German language, they are further handicapped by two important factors: 1) The difference between the American and the German educational system, and 2) the erroneous image of Germany which American students seem to have been encouraged to create in their minds. It can take these students the better part of a year trying to adapt themselves to a new system and a strange people; and in their disappointment and frustration they frequently end up with an utterly distorted sense of academic values, without actually having learned, and understood, a thing.

The World Beneath the City

A couple of years ago I got a copy of this book, I cannot remember how or where. It looked like the kind of routine job that somebody turned out after inadvertently collecting the material. On the contrary, it is a delightful description, a history and physical examination of the bowels of New York City, the intertwining labyrinth of sewers, water supply, gas lines, electric cables, steam ducts, subways, and the strange people whose life leads them literally into the underground. The city depends on a great many lifelines, and the multitudinous metabolic activities of urban life depend on the proper functioning of an incredible snare of cables, wires, steam lines, tunnels, subways, and the vast arteries of subterranean power transmission. Not the least interesting in the account of the world below the city is the analogy that one sees of the city as a living organism differing from a

Effects of medial temporal lesions on taste preference in the monkey.

MONKEYS with lesions in the medial portions of the anterior temporal lobes (the amygdala and pyriform cortex) tend to show marked changes in their responses to events that, pre-operatively, served as rewards or punishments. For example, it has been claimed that animals tend to be unafraid of snakes and strange people, to mount inanimate objects, to ingest a host of objects that were unacceptable pre-operatively. According to one descriptive generalization1 monkeys are still motivated by reward and punishment, but the classes of events that are rewarding or punishing alter. In order to examine this view more specifically and also to rule out the possibility that the changes in reward–punishment classification occur simply because of changes in sensory capacity, the following experiments were undertaken.

Point of View in Modern Drama

CRITICS OF FICITON generally agree that the most significant development in the modern novel has been the move away from the comfortable method of narrating a story whereby the author sees all, knows all, and tells all-frequently by nudging the reader with his elbow or by leading him ceremoniously into a room full of strange people. Perhaps the needs for greater psychological authenticity and dramatic immediacy finally prompted the novelist to step out of the scene. The extremely varied narrative methods which have been developed to satisfy these needs include the simple dramatic narrator of, let us say, Huckleberry Finn, the central consciousness of Henry James' later novels, the complex multiple narrators of Conrad, the stream of consciousness technique of James Joyce,and the poetic interior monologues of Virginia Woolf. All of these methods have at least one purpose in common: the desire to establish a point of view which is limited and, therefore, more dramatically convincing than that furnished by the omniscient author. But novelists since Henry James have certainly been aware that in achieving a measure of dramatic objectivity they often sacrifice some of their freedom to explore the psychological subtleties of character or to develop the rich philosophical implications of human experience. To strike a balance, they have sought-in the words of Joseph Warren Beach-a "subjective drama" in which the point of view is restricted to the consciousness of a character who is able to participate dramatically in the events of the story and at the same time reflect upon them, interpret them, within the boundaries of his own limited understanding and experience. This method has the advantage of expressing dramatic immediacy without depriving the form of its flexibility.

A Bibliography of British Travel Books on Argentina: 1810-1860

Books of travel and books inspired by travel have probably been more popular in Great Britain than any other literary form, with the exception of novels.This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when travel, owing to the lack of today's facilities, was reserved for the relative few. During that period, photography had not yet replaced the written word, as is happening in our own generation. The nineteenth-century Englishman wandered through the medium of a travel book and not through newsreels, travelogues, and even full-length movies. Today, the Englishman, like the American, is able to sit in his living room and see the world on his television screen. He is not dependent on literature to the extent that his grandfather or great-grandfather was. For the Englishman of the nineteenth century, therefore, travel literature was very important. Often, these books furnished the only source of information concerning strange lands and strange peoples.

Residential Integration: The Case of Hyde Park in Chicago

In 1952—a short six or seven years ago—our neighborhood in Chicago was in a state of panic. What had grown from the village of Hyde Park into a fine urban community of 75,000 seemed doomed. Thousands of poor Negroes were moving in; large apartments were being reconverted into small ones, turning middle-class buildings into rows of tenements along streets rapidly becoming slums. There were strange people in blocks where neighbors were all familiar faces. There was a rash of new crimes: burglaries, purse-snatchings, and occasional rapes. People could not safely walk the streets in the evening except in groups.

Point of View in Modern Drama

CRITICS OF FICITON generally agree that the most significant development in the modern novel has been the move away from the comfortable method of narrating a story whereby the author sees all, knows all, and tells all-frequently by nudging the reader with his elbow or by leading him ceremoniously into a room full of strange people. Perhaps the needs for greater psychological authenticity and dramatic immediacy finally prompted the novelist to step out of the scene. The extremely varied narrative methods which have been developed to satisfy these needs include the simple dramatic narrator of, let us say, Huckleberry Finn, the central consciousness of Henry James' later novels, the complex multiple narrators of Conrad, the stream of consciousness technique of James Joyce,and the poetic interior monologues of Virginia Woolf. All of these methods have at least one purpose in common: the desire to establish a point of view which is limited and, therefore, more dramatically convincing than that furnished by the omniscient author. But novelists since Henry James have certainly been aware that in achieving a measure of dramatic objectivity they often sacrifice some of their freedom to explore the psychological subtleties of character or to develop the rich philosophical implications of human experience. To strike a balance, they have sought-in the words of Joseph Warren Beach-a "subjective drama" in which the point of view is restricted to the consciousness of a character who is able to participate dramatically in the events of the story and at the same time reflect upon them, interpret them, within the boundaries of his own limited understanding and experience. This method has the advantage of expressing dramatic immediacy without depriving the form of its flexibility.

NEW YORK NEUROLOGICAL SOCIETY AND THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, SECTION OF NEUROLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY

Anxiety Neurosis of Seventy Years' Standing. Dr. C. P. Oberndorf and Dr. Arnold Eisendorfer (by invitation). The clinical history of a woman aged 79 is presented as exceptional in the patient's compulsions and phobias associated with extreme anxiety have existed almost uninterruptedly for over seventy years without affecting her general physical condition or her intellectual functions. The patient dated her onset of her symptoms at the age of 5 years, when, with the beginning of masturbation, she became self conscious, had feelings of guilt, was afraid of strange people and was increasingly dependent on and fearful of her mother. The fear of fire and the compulsion to listen for fire engines, which later extended to many other unrelated noises, began at this time. On at least four occasions aggravation of the symptoms required hospitalization. Each of the hospital records was similar in the description of her illness, and in each the diagnosis of psychoneurosis was made. At the age of 50 she was feferred to Dr. Oberndorf, who by therapy consisting largely of persuasion and reassurance enabled the patient to carry on her life without complete subjugation of her fears. This patient's neurosis raises the question why and how neurotic formations continue so separated from the main stream of thought flow without contaminating it. Perepel, however, expressed the opinion degradation of the personality results and that the state of perpetual excitement of the neurotic . . . cannot but result in the wearing out of the brain. This was not true in this case, in which compulsions the patient recognized as being alien and at cross purposes with the rest of her character caused no deterioration. The question is considered whether anxiety in itself, when once mobilized, may not constitute an agency of security which is more acceptable than the greater danger against which it had been called into being. Patients have been known to feel the absence of such anxiety as an abnormal and disagreeable sensation.

Montesquieu the Novelist and Some Imitations of the "Lettres Persanes"

SEVERAL circumstances have conspired to divert the attention of critics from the importance of the r6le played by Montesquieu in the evolution of the French novel. His immense reputation as a publicist has so far excluded a proper consideration of the Lettres persanes. The fictitious element of this work is usually dismissed rather contemptuously and summarily as so much pill-gilding. It is of course natural that modern critics should find it difficult to pretend an interest in the attempt to portray the moeurs of a Persian harem as seen by an eighteenth-century Frenchman. The vogue for this sort of exoticism has passed, great as was its charm for a nation filled with eager curiosity about strange lands and peoples, a curiosity which had been but whetted by Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights and the travel books of Chardin and Tavernier. But perhaps the chief reason for our apathy towards the achievements of Montesquieu in the field of the romanesque is to be found in the contempt which he cherished for novelists, 'ces especes de poetes qui outrent egalement le langage de l'esprit et celui du coeur: ils passent leur vie a chercher la nature et la manquent toujours I.' Note however, that he is disgusted, not with the genre of the novel, but with those specimens of the genre which it had been his misfoytune to read. He realises that the essential of the good novel is that it should be true to life. He thus ranks with Lesage as one of the first to entertain this conception of the function of the novel. Indeed, in his slashing attack on the ridiculous conventions which trammelled the action of the eighteenth-century novel, and particularly on the abuse of the 'merveilleux,' he goes far beyond Lesage, and paves the way for that divorce between the conte and the novel which was not to became

The Sea Dyaks of Borneo

IT is obvious that this pleasantly written book is not intended for the anthropologist, but is rather meant for that large class of readers who take a general interest in remote countries and strange peoples. Nor is Mr. Gomes in any special sense himself an anthropologist, a matter it is well to mention, since in some reviews considerable stress has been laid on the fact that no mention is made of the so-called nyarong, the “spirit helper” of the Dyaks. But even if the nyarong, or, as it should be spelt ngarong, is not mentioned by name, its existence is not ignored; an undoubted example will be found on p. 188, and it may be assumed that the reference to a Dyak of whom it is recorded on p. 143 that “he treated a snake with the greatest kindness, because it had been revealed to him in a dream that the spirit of his grandfather dwelt in that snake,” is another example of the same belief.

Scientific Exploration in Central Asia 1

IT is with a lingering feeling of regret that we recognise how different, of necessity, are the explorations of the present day from those of fifty years ago. No longer is it possible, except in rare instances, for a traveller to return with tales of new discoveries of lakes, sources of rivers, mighty peaks, and of the strange peoples that dwell there. Much work still remains, but it is of a more scientific nature, and therefore will probably provide matter which when published may be less entertaining and less widely read. When a traveller makes a speciality of one particular branch of science, as Dr. Gottfried Merzbacher does in his volume on “The Central Tianshan Mountains,” to the almost entire exclusion of all others, it follows that he can only appeal to a limited number of readers; to those, in fact, who are interested in the study of geology and glaciers. We would, however, make this reservation, that the photographs which adorn this book are exceptionally beautiful representations of snow scenery, and will more than satisfy the ordinary reader as well as the man of science, and that the map is of great general value.

The Legends and Myths of Hawaii-The Fables and Folk-Lore of a Strange People. By His Hawaiian Majesty Kalakaua

The Legends and Myths of Hawaii-The Fables and Folk-Lore of a Strange People. By His Hawaiian Majesty Kalakaua