Symbolic Categories Research Articles

Representations of Women in Some Early Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland

Since D. B. Quinn's The Elizabethans and the Irish, the history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of a wide range of studies, but only recently has women's role in that history received attention. Similarly, Nicholas Canny's article on “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity” initiated a debate about whether sixteenth-century tracts on Ireland express a unified colonialist ideology, but only recently has the construction of sexuality in these texts come under scrutiny. It is not surprising that those who study the history of women in early modern Ireland do not often turn to the English tracts for evidence, except with great caution and reservation. So much related in these documents is indebted to the stereotypes of a colonialist discourse, initiated by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, rather than to observation or encounter. Recent work on the history of women in early modern Ireland presents us with a sense of what is not being represented in the English settlers' descriptions. Such aspects of women's lives in Gaelic Ireland as their right to hold and acquire their own land and to keep their own names while married are not referred to in these tracts. These tracts do not yield transparent information about actual Irish women of the period, although there are fascinating references to their activities. Spenser writes that Irish women had “the trust and care of all things both at home and in the fields.” And at least one woman, the foster mother of Murrogh O'Brien, is said to have drunk the blood of her child's head as she grieved when he had been drawn and quartered by the English. The character of these texts as colonialist discourse makes the representation of women as a symbolic category or “gender” the more useful focus rather than some unmediated sense of “women.”

Procedural learning: I. Locus of practice effects in speeded choice tasks.

When subjects perform 750 trials of a speeded choice task mapping different categories of symbols (e.g., letters, digits) onto different responses, excellent transfer is observed to new items in the trained categories (Experiment 1). However, when arbitrary sets of stimuli are mapped onto each response, introducing new stimuli substantially retards performance (Experiment 2), even when the size of the potential stimulus set remains constant (Experiment 3). Surprisingly, responses to already trained items are as slow as responses to new items in these transfer tests. When the mapping is categorical, shuffling the assignment of stimuli to responses drastically slows responses (Experiment 4). However, changing to a spatially homologous mapping with responses on the other hand produces excellent transfer (Experiment 5). Together, these results indicate that practice in speeded choice tasks affects primarily the response selection stage, rather than perceptual processing or motor responses. These data suggest that practice primarily strengthens links between category representations and spatially defined responses. Furthermore, when an arbitrary collection of symbols is mapped onto a given response, practice produces an ad hoc category representation and strengthens links between individual items and the category, as well as links between the category and the response. With practice, people become dramatically faster and more accurate in sensorimotor skills. Characterizing these changes is of major importance, for both applied and theoretical purposes. In applied situations, it would be useful to know how conditions of skill acquisition can be structured so that learning is most efficient and to know when one form of training will produce useful transfer to other, related tasks. For theoretical purposes, understanding the functional character of skill learning should provide a basis for developing detailed models of the changes that underlie such learning (such as neural net models). The present article focuses on the changes in performance that occur with modest amounts of practice in very simple sensorimotor tasks, namely those requiring speeded choice responses. In speeded choice tasks, subjects are presented with a single stimulus and must rapidly select and execute a response depending on the identity of the stimulus. This is one of the simplest paradigms in which one can examine procedural skills and their development, and it provides a useful laboratory model for the numerous human skills that involve retrieving and producing arbitrary responses to stimuli. Performance in speeded choice tasks is subject to various kinds of change as subjects perform repeated trials. Subjects' responses become faster (and often more accurate)—the prac

Some Proposals for Feminist Literary Criticism

����� The investigation of gender relations remains a central concern of feminist scholarship, though feminists have often vigorously debated how best to define them. Almost all American feminist scholars now agree that gender relations are social constructions. They define gender as a social category that must be distinguished from sex, the biological substratum on which gender rests and which allows various societies to define masculinity and femininity as opposite, if dialectically related, terms. In the 1970s and early eighties, particularly under the influence of poststructuralism, much academic feminism in the United States concentrated on defining the nature of women's difference from men. But in the course of the 1980s, as a consequence of developments within academic feminism as well as external political pressures, feminist scholarship in the United States moved from an emphasis on women's difference from men to an exploration of differences among women. Now, in the nineties, feminist scholars confront the problem of how to refine the concept of women's difference—both from men and from other women—and to move beyond it. Here I want first to outline four major areas of debate within feminist scholarship in the United States that are also of particular relevance to feminist literary criticism. Then I would like to suggest a number of areas in which feminist literary criticism might respond concretely to questions raised by feminist theory.1 1. Throughout the 1980s feminist scholars increasingly came to recognize that, if femininity was a social construction, it was no longer possible to speak simply of without specifying which women one meant, since definitions of femininity were dynamic and constantly changing, varying historically, culturally, racially, ethnically, by class and religion and for many other reasons. Feminist scholars thus began to investigate the multiple and shifting relationships of any culture's categories of femininity to their categories of masculinity, other symbolic categories, and other modes of cultural, political and economic organization and experience. Some feminists argued that femininity was internally as well as externally unstable:2 because gendered subjects within any particular culture inhabit a variety of subject positions simultaneously, the discourses (on gender and on other issues) that call them into being are

The IPA 1989 Kiel Convention Workgroup 9 report: Computer Coding of IPA Symbols and Computer Representation of Individual Languages

The Association must define and communicate its officially accepted symbols to other organizations and professionals, including publishers, dictionary makers, computer-systems specialists, and programmers. Accordingly, it was decided that each accepted symbol or diacritic should be assigned a unique numerical equivalent, independent of computer-coding conventions, and a unique name which provides a mnemonic description of the character shape. Symbols that have been used in earlier versions of the IPA, but deleted in later revisions, should retain a number, and name, for reference purposes. The numerical equivalent (IPA Number) is to be regarded as a communication-interchange standard, to serve as a basis for creating computer-code translation tables from various phonetic-character-set software to the common IPA Number. This IPA Number is not implemented directly in computer format (for example, ASCII), but is expressed as a simple numerical directory of digit triples to serve as a unique reference. The IPA Number can also serve as a typesetter's guide to the Phonetic Symbol Chart. The systematic numerical listing represents the IPA symbols as presented in the Chart. Therefore, the first digit of the triple indicates the symbol category; inn for accepted IPA consonant symbols, 2nn for former IPA consonant symbols and non-IPA consonant symbols, 3nn for vowels, 4nn for segmental diacritics, 5nn for suprasegmental symbols; 6nn-8nn are reserved for future specification (e.g., for symbols for voice quality settings or for pathological speech). The digit triple 9nn has the function of an escape sequence from IPA-symbol mode into procedures definable for special applications (e.g., Roman, Greek, Cyrillic orthographies, “Comment” mode, etc.).

Healthism and Physical Education

Abstract Health has become a symbolic category of considerable importance, expressing a range of notions relating to well‐being, consumption and normality. A particular view of health as corporeal and individualistic has become pervasive within the new health consciousness, and school physical education represents one site among many where the ideology of healthism is produced. This paper draws on a study of an innovative programme in primary schools in Queensland, Australia. It explores how on the one hand the instructional discourse of ‘daily physical education’ varied across a number of sites of meaning production and how on the other hand this instructional discourse was embedded in the regulative discourse of healthism which set limits on the extent to which the people operating at these sites could make their own sense of daily physical education. We argue that a corporeal and individualistic concept of health, in which body shape and fatness play a central role, is being produced through health‐bas...

Effect of familiarity and category contrast on stimulus and response priming.

In a letter-symbol classification task, flanking incompatible symbols slowed response latencies to letter targets, whereas incompatible letter flankers did not slow the classification of symbol targets. The conditions surrounding this asymmetry in response competition were investigated in five experiments. The results showed that: (1) the asymmetry was not related to the familiarity of the symbol targets or to the prime-target interval; (2) when the classification involved familiar and unfamiliar symbols, the asymmetry remained (i.e., there was less interference associated with the unfamiliar symbol targets), but there was now significant response competition associated with both symbol categories; and (3) with a mixed-category task (i.e., letters and symbols assigned to both responses), the symbol targets continued to be less interfered with by both letter and symbol incompatible flankers. These findings were interpreted as suggesting that response competition can be influenced by both classification decision rules and cohesiveness of exemplars comprising a category.

Symbolism and Presidential Perceptions of Leadership

This paper seeks to shed light on the discussion of leadership in higher education by focusing on its symbolic dimensions. The author considers leadership from the perspective of post-secondary organizations as socially constructed and subjective entities, then examines six symbolic categories used by presidents: metaphorical, physical, communicative, structural, personification, and ideational. The author concludes with a discussion of the implications for administrators of understanding the symbolism of their leadership.

Religious Concepts in West African Cosmogonies

Cosmogonies in a broad sense, are theories about the origin of the universe. Here they are taken to refer to which explain the origin and organization of the universe from the fewest possible elements, or to creation properly so called which attribute the origin of the universe to the activity of some pre-existing divine being.1 Contrary to the suggestion of Okot p'Bitek that myths of origin in African religions ... have no religious significance,2 cosmogonic are very fertile sources of traditional African religious beliefs, as will be abundantly illustrated by the analysis below. In fact, African cosmogonies not only provide the symbolic categories by which Africans understand the organization of their universe, but also suggest patterns by which they try to maintain the balance and the harmony of the world through ritual.3 For they define the nature and power of being in the universe and their relationships, and thus suggest rituals by which man tries to relate with them and the universe as a whole.

L'interpretation de differentes categories de gestes chez des sujets aphasiques

Hecaen's (1967) classification of nonverbal signals was tested in the decoding of pantomines by aphasic subjects. In the first condition, 24 nonverbal signals, belonging to the categories of symbols, icons, indexes and actual uses of objects, were submitted to 20 normal subjects, 20 aphasics and 7 right hemisphere damaged subjects in a gesture-picture matching task. Brain-damaged subjects made more errors than normals, and the category of indexes was more difficult than the others, but the interaction groups X categories was not significant. In aphasic subjects the different categories were positively correlated. In the second condition, verbal analogues of the nonverbal signals were proposed following the same procedure. The same effects were observed. These results lead to a criticism of the classical experimental procedures used in the study of nonverbal signals decoding in aphasics, and lead one to reflect on the nature of the matching task.

Healing and the cultural order: the case of the Barolong boo Ratshidi of southern Africa

Healing reveals clearly both the dialectical relationship between the cultural order and subjective experience and the role of this dialectic in wider processes of continuity and change. This examination of one southern Africa therapeutic system is set in the context of a more general debate between formalist and phenomenological interpretations of ritual and cosmology. It examines the relationship between shared symbolic categories and the indigenous perceptions of order and disorder, suggesting that affliction here is a structurally configured dislocation of the self and its social and cosmic context. Healing thus entails the manipulation of multivocal symbolic media, seeking to reintegrate the physical, conceptual, and social universe of sufferers and community. In rapidly changing societies, healing reveals how existing symbolic categories subsume chaotic experience and also how perceptions of an expanding sociocultural domain may transform these categories themselves, [healing, change, Africa, cosmology, self and society. Western allopathic medicine]

Les fondements de la tripartition sociale chez Adalbéron de Laon

Le Poème au roi Robert d'Adalbéron de Laon, est surtout connu pour l'exposé qu'il contient de la tripartition sociale. Cette théorie, issue de la vieille idéologie indo-européenne, trouve là son expression la plus complète en Occident. Ce n'est pas un hasard si elle apparaît ainsi, sous cette forme très élaborée, entre 1027 et 1030. Les travaux de Jean-François Lemarignier ont clairement démontré que cette époque marque un tournant dans la conception du pouvoir royal. Par bien des aspects, le Carmen en est une des expressions littéraires. A partir du vieux thème d'origine païenne, Adalbéron construit une théorie chrétienne de l'ordre social dont le pivot est une conception qui se veut traditionnelle de la royauté. C'est l'urgence de ce qu'il interprète comme une crise qui le pousse à tenter la fusion de ces deux éléments hétérogènes : une expression païenne de la souveraineté et une tradition chrétienne des rapports entre loi divine et loi humaine. Il y réussit apparemment au moyen d'une architecture rhétorique savante dont on peut décomposer la structure. Mais on soupçonne assez vite que cette virtuosité cache tout un système de représentation beaucoup moins directement lié à la conjoncture politique.

Nyoro Symbolism and Nyoro Ethnography: A Rejoinder

Opening ParagraphThis paper attempts to clarify a little further certain of the symbolic categories of the Banyoro of western Uganda, and at the same time to refocus attention on some of the methodological difficulties involved in the analysis of ethnographic material through the framework of the binary mode of symbolic classification. This entails some consideration of a recent contribution to this journal by Professor Rodney Needham, in which he attempts to rebut my detailed criticisms of his version of some aspects of Nyoro symbolism (Needham 1976; Beattie 1968; see also Needham 1967; 1973; and Beattie 1976: 232 n. 4). In doing so he repeats certain of his earlier misrepresentations, as well as introducing some new ones. He also asserts, of a number of my own—and some other—publications on Nyoro ritual and symbolism, to which I had drawn attention, that ‘they were either not relevant to [his] train of argument or, in general, were redundant to [his] primary sources’ (Needham 1976: 237). These assertions must be very briefly considered before I go on to deal with the further arguments he now advances.

The Symbol and Artistic Creativity

We set as our task in the present work to distinguish between the symbol and certain categories that play the dominant role in artistic creativity. In characterizing artistic creativity, one usually speaks of metaphor, type, realistic image, naturalistic copy, and myth. We now proceed to comparison of all these categories.

The naming and recognition of written symbols in aphasic and alexic patients

A test consisting of sixty-six written symbols was administered to matched groups of controls, aphasic patients, and alexic patients. The test was designed to determine how the naming and recognition of symbols is affected in aphasia and whether the difficulties associated with alexia are restricted to verbal symbolic materials. Aphasics had more difficulty in symbol naming than control groups; posterior aphasics had more difficulty in recognizing symbols than anterior aphasics; alexic patients had considerable difficulty in naming and recognizing all symbolic categories. The relative difficulty of the various symbolic categories was consistent across all subject groups except the alexic subjects. The results are discussed in terms of the nature of naming, recognition, and reading of symbolic materials; the relationship between alexia and other disturbances of language and symbol use: the mechanisms which may mediate symbol processing under conditions of cortical injury.

Aspects of Nyoro Symbolism

Opening ParagraphLike other African peoples, Banyoro have a rich and complex symbolism, and there are numerous references to aspects of this in both older and more recent writings about Nyoro traditional culture. But until the publication in a recent issue of this journal of a paper on the significance of right and left in Nyoro symbolic classification by my colleague Dr. Rodney Needham (Needham, 1967), no systematic analysis of Nyoro symbolic categories, or even of the more important of them, had yet been attempted. I hope myself to take up this theme in a forthcoming monograph on Nyoro ritual, though I believe that to do it justice will require some further detailed inquiry through the Runyoro language in Bunyoro itself. In the meantime Needham's interesting essay, based on most of the available written sources, is a significant contribution to the subject. There is certainly much research to be done on the symbolism of right and left and of other complementary oppositions in African cultures, and it is to be hoped that his pioneering efforts will stimulate further researches in these fields.

The Logic of Compulsion in “Roger Malvin's Burial”

In the proliferation of Hawthorne criticism over the past decade every current literary-theory or methodology has had a say. A good deal of this criticism, nevertheless, has shared an assumption that the way to see to the bottom of Hawthorne is to analyze his symbolism or his recurrent motifs. Though there have been many careful studies of separate plots, and though some critics have preferred to approach Hawthorne by way of his biography or his explicit ideas, more usually he is revealed to us in terms of such symbolic categories as “the light and the dark,” “the power of blackness,” the Devil archetype, or the myth of man's fall. This kind of criticism can be fruitful, especially if, as in Hyatt Waggoner's case, a sense of Hawthorne's eclecticism and irony is allowed to temper the zealous pursuit of symbolic consistency. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that the exegesis of verbal patterns can subserve and disguise a critical hobbyhorse; some of the more dogmatic moral and theological readings have been couched as mere explications of Hawthorne's symbols. The rich suggestiveness of Hawthorne's language tempts the critic to ignore what is literally occurring in the plot, to iron out possible uncertainties of meaning or purpose, and to minimize the great distance separating Hawthorne from the tradition of pure didactic allegory. Such, I feel, are the shortcomings of Roy R. Male's Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, which, by analyzing only those symbols that can bear Biblical or sacramental glossing, succeeds in blending Hawthorne into a background of Christian moralism.

Propaganda for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports

Little-used techniques of content analysis lend force and validity to this review of six widely publicized leader-scholar reports, by the author of Road of Propaganda. Mrs. Dovring, a Swede displaced to Urbana, Illinois, analyzes the reports in the general categories of symbols of identification, problems, and demands. She contends that the reports tend to be banal by seeking to speak to a large audience, and ineffective by speaking from the shelter of expertism.