Cultural Symbiosis Research Articles

Educating symbiotic p‐individuals through multi‐level conversations. From the integrity of concepts to the symbiosis of cultures

AbstractAbstract ‐ Interbody and transbody autopoietic virtual organisms, which Gordon Pask named “p‐individuals”, are taken to be the essential entities involved in cultural transmission. It is asserted that their problematical accessibility to consciousness, their competitive, and especially their pre‐emptive dominative character, must be dealt with more directly in order to work educationally toward symbiosis among cultures and between cultures and the biosphere. Both kinds of symbiosis are necessary conditions for our happiness and survival. Some heuristic rules for the appropriate conduct of multi‐level, and multi‐modal (verbal/visual etc.) learning conversations is examined as a practicable way to cultivate such symbioses. Gordon Pask's formal Conversation Theory prescribes some necessary aspects of such intercourse. Here it is extended and reframed by situating Pask's three leveled CT conversations in the author's seven cybersystemic levels of communication and control.

THE JEWS OF SPAIN AND THE QUEST FOR CULTURAL IDENTITY

The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 put and end to their long-standing presence in the Iberian Peninsula, a presence that goes back to the first century AD and hence lasted almost 15 centuries. This continuous pre sence is certainly the longest and most important in the history of the Jewish people after the destruction of the second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD by the Romans and the consecutive dispersion. We may assu me that in the interval of time of about seven centuries that separates the advent of Jewish communties in the Iberian Peninsula and the be ginning of the Muslim conquest, the Jews should have cultivated a mu sical repertory of their own, at least in connection with the religious practices and in view of enhancing liturgical and paraliturgical events. In one of the few attempts at a comprehensive description of the sta tus of Jewish music in Spain before 1492, the eminent Spanish scholar H. Angl?s considered the long presence of Jews in Spain ?a blessing for the art of music of the Iberian Pen?nsula? stressing that in the process of the Andalusian cultural symbiosis they were not mere passive reci pients but rather active contributors (?La musique Juive dans l'Espagne medievale?, in Yuval, I, Jerusalem, 1968, p. 48-64). Although this state ment is not devoid of logic and corresponds to the hypothesis formula ted above, it cannot be convincingly proven because of the absence of concrete musical documents. Indeed, the Sephardi musical tradition, like all oral traditions, has been perpetuated by oral transmission and lived only in the vulnerable memory of its bearers. Even the thesis of faithfulness of the exiles and their exemplary devotion and loyalty to sep hardi chants, songs and ballads as ardently claimed by the father-foun der of Jewish Ethnomusicology, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, vol. 4, Jerusalem, Berlin, Vienna, 1921-22, p.l) cannot guarantee a changless stability of the original tradition, con sidering its long exposure to a variety of other musical cultures after the

La géomancie ouest-africaine. Formes endogènes et emprunts extérieurs

B. Kassibo — West African Geomancy: Endogenous and Borrowed Forms. West African Systems of geomancy, especially in the Mande cultural zone, are, for scholars, hermetic but, for initiates, mystical and esoteric. This inquiry pursues two Unes of investigation: the problem whether "native" Systems are genuinely autochthonous (in comparison with classical geomancy of an Arab or Islamic sort); and the plausibility of the hypothesis of cultural symbiosis, as traditional divination was affected by the civilization of the written word, which has been present for more than a thousand years. This comparative study establishes relations be-tween various Systems and sheds light on the key referent—the Sudanese social world—that has underlaid the development and geographical diffusion of these Systems.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis

The crusade which conquered Mediterranean Spain in the thirteenth century resulted in the domination by an alien Christian minority of a dissident Muslim majority and an unusually large Jewish population. Professor Burns' research into previously untapped archival sources reveals the tensions and interaction between the three religious societies after the crusade. A principal source for the author's research has been the revolutionary paper registers of King Jaume the Conqueror. These abundant and neglected documents shed new light on Jaume's pluri-ethnic kingdom during its first generation of settlement. The chapters, each a pioneering work for its topic, are radically different in subject and in approach, and yet concern the same theme, the symbiosis of cultures in the redeveloping kingdom, and the same time-span, the reigns of Jaume the Conqueror and his son, Pere the Great.

Diplomatica Siciliana

The study of Muslim rule and its vestiges in medieval Sicily has a long and distinguished pedigree. In the nineteenth century the impetus was both scholarly and political, to which the monumental works of Amari and De Mas Latrie bear eloquent witness. In more recent times the motive has been simple and straightforward curiosity about a remarkable instance of cultural symbiosis. The parameters are now either linguistic or historical or both, and the gain is substantial. With the reprint exactly a century after its original publication in Palermo of Salvatore Cusa's I Diplomi greci ed Arabi di Sicilia one might be permitted to suppose that a reassessment of the earlier scholarship is underway. But the commemoration is itself curiously unhelpful: we are offered a typographically reduced replica of the original innocent of comment save for two pages of very general observations by Albrecht Noth on the significance of Cusa's compilation for students of Islamic history. Neither reference to subsequent work nor indication of a present project is included, a circumstance that only with generosity could be regarded as tantalizing.