Symbolic Parallel Research Articles

Reasons and consequences of historical buildings and structures fragments' reuse

The article examines the peculiarities of the use of secondary raw materials in architectural and urban planning activities. The conducted research showed that the use of secondary raw materials is an established practice in architectural and urban planning activities. Surviving but no longer needed buildings and structures, their ruins, individual fragments of former architectural and urban planning objects, and construction materials extracted from them are subject to reuse. Pragmatic saving of time and materials is not the only reason for the integration of used elements in new buildings. Among the other conditionally positive driving motives of this practice: attempts to strengthen the political ambitions of modern powerful people, to draw symbolic parallels between different religions, to realize their own creative ambitions, to preserve the fragments of destroyed culture, and to perpetuate the collective memory of the inhabitants of certain territories. Unfortunately, the history of architecture preserves evidence that the re-use of architectural fragments can also be motivated by opposite, conditionally negative goals, such as contempt for the conquered state; contempt for another religion; superiority to the destroyed culture; fear of deposed but creepy mythical creatures; hatred of the persecuted people. The outlined motives determine the nature of behaviour with secondary raw materials and the result of its use. Respect and willingness to study lost objects of cultural heritage leads to the emergence of new interesting and meaningful architectural and urban planning solutions. Indifference, self-assertion, and aggression increase chaos and insensitivity to beauty and cause inappropriate project decisions, for which descendants are later ashamed. Because of the application of recycling practices in architectural and urban planning activities, historical buildings and structures do not lose their identity, acquiring a new symbolic meaning; turn into archaeological artefacts with an unknown past, or as depersonalized raw materials dissolve into newly created objects.

Визуализация представлений о душе в украшениях национальных костюмов саха (якутов) и тувинцев

Introduction. The cultural heritages of the Sakha (Yakut) and the Tuvan are distinguished by a similarity of basic worldview ideas pertaining to the structure of the Universe, multi-storeyedness of each of the Three Worlds, the pantheon of deities, etc. Goals. The article aims to interpret semantics of ethnic jewelry as a visual narrative articulating the ideas of individual soul in traditional Sakha and Tuvan cultures. To facilitate this, the paper shall summarize the available descriptions of these ideas from ethnographic material, identify some facts confirming jewelry used to serve as markers of soul, consider semantics of traditional jewelry signs. The study hypothesizes as follows: when it comes to soul visualizations, folklore sources manifest repeated indications localizing one of the three souls (aorta, blood, belt, etc.) ― hence, the other two must also have some certain locations and related beliefs, too. Methods. With due regard of the dynamics in religious and aesthetic preferences, the employed interdisciplinary and comparative historical approaches comprise the structural/functional, interpretative, and axiological methods. The method of mosaic reconstruction proves as instrumental in revealing jewelry symbolism. Results. The paper confirms adornments (jewelry pieces) act as means to visualize some valuable worldviews, ideas of human soul and its whereabouts, prestige and behavioral norms. The former are defined as utmost identity signs for an inhabitant of the Middle World that serve as markers and protective amulets for each of the three human souls, also viewed as mediators between the sacred and profane worlds, triggers in ritual communication, and social status indicators. Conclusions. Being a universal form, circle (silver disk, bead, infinity knot, and button) denotes the place and function of each soul. For instance, the air one of the Sakha and the middle one of the Tuvan are placed in the head and identified with head adornments (jewelry pieces). According to Sakha beliefs, the maternal soul is localized in the mediastinum (pulse and blood ― heart and liver), while Tuvans place soul one into the navel. Yakut women of fertile age tend to mark this soul with solar breast jewelry, with no identified symbolic parallels in the Tuvan costume. Yakuts believe the third earthly soul be indicated with a belt buckle and dwell in the navel, while the Tuvan tradition says the good soul dwells in the belt. So, the Yakut have retained somewhat more archaic version of the symbolic corpus. And the differences are largely determined by the late influence of Manchu-Chinese culture and Buddhism on worldviews of southern Tuvans.

GROßSTÄDTE ALS TOPOI DER MIGRATIONSKRISE IN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGER LITERATUR AM ANFANG DES 21. JAHRHUNDERTS

The following paper offers a transgeneric analysis of three contemporary German literary texts which shows how the plot setting - which is in all these cases an urban environment, i.e. a city – can be described as a topos to address ongoing migration crises. These urban places of action and the depicted migration crises create a state of paradox and irony: big cities attract the population and represent a place that is desirable to live in, yet they seem to marginalize and ostracize the very groups that migrate towards them. The research presented in this paper stems from an ongoing research project that deals with the phenomenon of crisis in contemporary English, German and Croatian literature, with an emphasis on systems in crisis, where the systems are defined from a sociological perspective as the family, the local community, the state, the region, and so on. The research was conducted within the installation research project “UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature” (2021.-2026) funded by the Croatian Science Fund. The aim of the project is to prove the hypothesis that what we have at hand is a predominantly subversive attitude on the part of literature towards the phenomenon of crisis and towards systems in crisis. The research done in the first year of the project (2021) shows that of the 126 German-language prose and drama texts included in the corpus, focusing on texts published from 2000 to 2021, 29 deal explicitly with crises in the local community or in the city and 23 with migration crises (cf. Novak et al. 2021, p. 3). The literary works selected for analysis, which offer urban areas as the setting of the narrative, show how, at the expense of the protagonists’/characters’ isolated experience, a shared, global view is illustrated that might indicate literary trends in dealing with contemporary problems in society, such as the attitude towards the ‘other’, the marginalized, or the ‘different’. Paradoxically, at the same time, through the way they subtly address these problematic attitudes, the literary texts become topoi that allow space for criticism. The novel and two plays that are the focus of this research have all been published in German since the year 2000 and are part of the project’s corpus. They have been selected as representative examples of how the urban, civilized, dominant community acts and reacts when it comes into contact with the ‘other’. They encompass both the individual and the collective, tragedy and comedy, but also social satire which addresses many problems of the world we consider to be structured and ordered, revealing that it is in reality a place of complex dynamics of centricity versus provinciality and inclusion versus exclusion. The paper takes a close look at Robert Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt (2017), Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! (2015) and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) (2015). The transgeneric analysis of the selected literary texts shows how the migration crises in the big cities are not explicitly addressed, but rather pushed to the sides and margins – both literally and figuratively - and overlooked, and thus made even deeper within the system of the narrative (that is, in the narrative of both the prose as well as the drama text). In all three examples, the “we” is often emphasized as dominant, while “the others” are marginalized, both geographically and symbolically, due to this dominance. The migrants/refugees appear and remain on the geographical periphery, while also not even being recognized, and listened to, or else they become condemned to a life in symbolic parallel worlds. The community in all three examples acts globally in the economic and communication-strategic sense, but limits its self-image and the conception of “we” locally, and in doing so emphasizes the meaningfulness of their own tradition, while diminishing the existence of the others.

Relating Genesis 16 to sexual abuse in the church: Hagar as a biblical parallel

Sexual abuse within the church is not a new phenomenon, with revelations about abuse within the catholic church having long been on the public radar. However, in the wake of the #Metoo movement, recent years have seen an increase in awareness of cases of sexual abuse within Christian circles. This essay will argue for the relevance as Hagar, long an important symbolic figure for the oppressed, as a biblical symbolic parallel for victims/survivors of abuse within the church. In viewing sexual abuse through this lens, I will also be considering relevant insights and applications for the church.

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Remediation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Traditions. The Case of “Leviathan” and “The Golovlyov Family”

Andrei Zvyagintsev often emphasises the opinion that Russian culture originates from classic Russian literature, i.e. the works of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Platonov etc. Treating the director’s approach (expressed in many interviews) as a kind of justification the proposed paper focuses on the interpretation of Leviathan from the comparative point of view, adapting the traditions of Saltykov-Shchedrin, in particular those deriving from his novel The Golovlyov Family. The methodological foundation of the presented case study constitute the concepts of cultural memory of Aleida Assmann, Renate Lachmann and Astrid Erll, which find their common ground in treating literature as a medium through which culture is continually rewritten, retranscribed and renegotiated. The interpretation of the selected satirical aspects of eating and drinking activities found both in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s and Zvyagintsev’s works leads to establishing a new intertextual relationship in the domain of cultural memory and to revealing areas of cultural communication between different media, based on structural and symbolic parallels revealed in the literary and cinematic text.

Transnational identity and the Gulf crisis: changing narratives of belonging in Qatar

Abstract What does the recent Gulf diplomatic crisis of June 2017 to January 2021 mean for the future of the region's signature transnationalism: the khalījī [Gulf] identity? This identity narrative encompasses the shared sociocultural backgrounds of the people of the region, but the unprecedented separations, caused by the regional crisis, may have shifted the discourse of belonging in the Gulf. To investigate the impact of the recent crisis on regional identity narratives, this article explores the new National Museum of Qatar's presentation of Qatar's political history from 1848 to 1868, as well as museum-goers' reactions to this presentation, through original fieldwork and ethnographic interviews with Qatari and expatriate residents. The analysis highlights the museum's purposeful portrayal of parallels between intra-Gulf conflicts of the past and the recent crisis, a presentational choice that stands in sharp contrast to previous regional norms of tactful diplomacy. Further, museum-goers recognized the linguistic and symbolic parallels, provoking both engagement with and rejection of the concept of khalījī identity. In summary, this analysis suggests that the crisis has shifted the norms of discourse in the region in ways that may make social reconciliation difficult, even as political bonds resume. As the region moves forward from crisis, policy-makers should reduce the tension between national and transnational identity narratives by creating space for the renewal of khalījī ties.

Igbo endearment terms: In-group identity construction in selected novels by Achebe and Adichie

The continuing and increasing interest in the study of identities in the humanities and the social sciences since the turn of the twenty-first century points to the significance of the subject matter in human evolution. Against such a significant backdrop, we scrutinise the symbolic parallel between the use of endearment terms and the construction of identities in the works of two prominent Nigerian novelists – Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Despite studies on their respective novels, extensive studies on how these Nigerian novelists deploy linguistic resources to enunciate in-group identity are still inadequate. Using social constructionism and literary pragmatics as our theoretical point of reference, we contend that these novelists’ use of Igbo endearment terms function as a linguistic means by which in-group identities are constructed, drawing our data from four of the authors’ novels: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Our critical and textual analysis reveals that the use of Igbo endearment terms are strategies for illuminating how literary characters use language in socio-discursive encounters to enact and re-enact as well as maintain their belonging to or membership of a group.

«Свет Без Пламени»: Лестница Якова Л. Улицкой И Доктор Живаго Б. Пастернака

In her interviews and essays, Ulitskaya has often alluded to the great effect that Pasternak’s poetry, and especially Doctor Zhivago, has had on her. In one of the episodes of her novel The Big Green Tent, she describes a first encounter with Pasternak’s novel; the teacher of literature who plays a decisive role in the lives of the main characters reads a manuscript copy of the novel and describes it as a worthy continuation of 19th-century Russian prose.The parallels between the novels The Big Green Tent and Doctor Zhivago have al- ready been the subject of scholarly attention but the connection between Jacob’s Ladder and the Pasternak novel has not been studied so far. In this study, I examine this connec- tion: on the one hand, at the level of macrostructures, the chronotope, the patterns of the heroes’ fates and the principal thematic elements, and on the other hand, at the level of cer- tain microstructures.The latter are linked to the present-day plot of Ulitskaya’s novel and, more specifi- cally, Nora’s life. Nora reads the correspondence and notes that her grandfather left for her as well as the KGB documents about Yakov Osetsky towards the end of her life (and the plot itself). As a result of this, she wishes to write the novel that her grandfather Yakov could not due to the historical situation.The process of Nora’s confrontation with the past and her becoming a writer are coded in Ulitskaya’s text by two of the poems of the Zhivago cycle Winter Night and August and also in the related episodes of Pasternak’s novel. All of these have biographical relevance and present creation as a fundamental element of life, which is closely linked to love and death as well as metaphysical experience. The symbolic parallel of this in Zhivago’s August is the transfiguration of Jesus and “the light without a flame” that blinds the disciples. This symbolism appears in Jacob’s Ladder on two levels: first, in the stage set that Nora creates for King Lear, and second, as a concomitant of her confrontation with the past and her becoming a writer.It is in this way that the fundamental elements of Pasternak’s life and poetry play a crucial role at the level of microstructures: they provide the context and symbolism of the central question of Ulitskaya’s novel, the nature of “the essence” of the human.

FAUNONYMS AND FLORONYMS IN POETIC LANGUAGE OF TODOS OSMACHKA

Based on the fact that a comprehensive study of the author idiostyles and description of the transformations of archetypal and traditional images-symbols is a prerequisite for a qualitative study of the history of a national artistic language, the article explores the peculiarities of metaphors and symbols implementation in the poetic language of Todos Osmachka, namely zoonyms, ornithonyms, dendronyms and florisms. For the first time ever individual figurative parallels of the author are described in details, a comparative method and seme-component analysis are used to establish semantic transformations of such plant symbols as верба, калина, дуб, ромен-зілля, акація, дзвіночок, роза, semantic transformations of genonymum of квітка and faunonyms such as вовк and ворон, ornithonyms голубка, орел, зозуля. The traditional symbolic parallels as «людина – дерево», «осінь – кінець життя», as well as those that indicate the specificity of the author's worldview: «квіточка-дзвіночок – серце поета», «зрубана акація – втрачене кохання» are considered. It is emphasised on the necessity for a clear distinction between individual authorial and inherited symbols, consequently for an adequate interpretation of such concepts as “archetypal image-symbol”, “individual author's symbol”, “folk poetic symbol” etc. For this analysis there were taken deliberately both the early works of the poet and his works created in exile. Such approach gives the opportunity to trace the development of figurative paradigms. It is pointed out that despite the absolute value as a subject of study, the considered images-symbols do not constitute an idiostylistic dominant. They usually perform an auxiliary function and form the background for the perception of another, more important, according to the author’s opinion, image. But their usage by the poet even during a prolonged exileprovides the indication that these faunonyms and “plant” symbols are components of the mental base that should determine the ethnicity of the author. To establish the primary meaning of traditional images-symbols were used the works of Mykola Kostomarov “Slavic Mythology” and of Jack Tresidder “Dictionary of Symbols”, semecomponent analysis was performed with the help of “The Dictionary of the Ukrainian language” in 11 volumes.

ЖАНР ХУАНЯО і БУКЕТИ БАРОКО: МЕТАМОРФОЗИ БУТТЯ

The purpose of the study is to identify the figurative and symbolic parallels of the depiction of flowers in the art of China and Europe. Methodology. The study made use of the methods: historical-cultural, comparative, artistic-stylistic, iconological, iconographic. Results. It is shown that in the art of China and Europe, the image of flowers is interconnected with the embodiment of the ideal, beautiful. In our figurative and artistic analysis of the masterpieces of Chinese painting, it is shown that the masters of the “flowers and birds” genre, in the content and form of embodiment, follow the law of the universe formed in Taoism, according to which a cycle occurs in life, as in nature. In the genre of European floral still life of the 17th century, a philosophical, cognitive attitude of a person to the real world surrounding him is expressed. For the Dutch and Flemish still life, associated with the spiritual culture of Christianity, instructive meaning is important. Artists glorify the beauty of the world created by the Creator and, at the same time, adjusts the viewer to reflect on the transience of life. It can be seen that the formation of the European flower still life as an independent genre was influenced by the fine and decorative art of China, in particular, the “flowers and birds” (huanyao) genre. Common features with the style of gunbi (thorough paintbrush) are manifested in a careful study of colors, in a harmonious combination of realistic authenticity with the decorative and linear conventionality of the artistic image. The image of flowers in European painting and art in China is associated with the idea of harmony of the world, presented in the elements. The Baroque floral still life, like the huanyao genre, contain a deep symbolic meaning. The scientific novelty of the publication lies in the fact that for the first time it compares the huanyao genre with baroque bouquets, figurative and symbolic parallels of the image of flowers in the art of China and Europe are found. Practical significance validated the possibility of using the results of the study to develop textbooks and programs for the in-depth study of the art of China and Europe.

ОБРАЗ І СИМВОЛ КВІТУЧОГО ДЕРЕВА У МИСТЕЦТВІ КИТАЮ І ЄВРОПИ

The purpose of the study is to reveal the figurative and symbolic parallels of the image of a flowering tree in the art of China and Europe. When studying the topic chosen by us, it was especially important to use a comparative method, which allows comparing works of art from Europe and China based on related subjects from different time periods and identifying the general and the particular. The artistic-stylistic and iconological method is actively used. Iconology along with the iconography allows to perceive the symbolic content of the work.

Symbolic Multi-Level Loop Mapping of Loop Programs for Massively Parallel Processor Arrays

Today’s MPSoCs (multiprocessor systems-on-chip) have brought up massively parallel processor array accelerators that may achieve a high computational efficiency by exploiting multiple levels of parallelism and different memory hierarchies. Such parallel processor arrays are perfect targets, particularly for the acceleration of nested loop programs due to their regular and massively parallel nature. However, existing loop parallelization techniques are often unable to exploit multiple levels of parallelism and are either I/O or memory bounded. Furthermore, if the number of available processing elements becomes only known at runtime—as in adaptive systems—static approaches fail. In this article, we solve some of these problems by proposing a hybrid compile/runtime multi-level symbolic parallelization technique that is able to: (a) exploit multiple levels of parallelism as well as (b) different memory hierarchies, and (c) to match the I/O or memory capabilities of the target architecture for scenarios where the number of available processing elements is only known at runtime. Our proposed technique consists of two compile-time transformations: (a) symbolic hierarchical tiling followed by (b) symbolic multi-level scheduling. The tiling levels scheduled in parallel exploit different levels of parallelism, whereas the sequential one, different memory hierarchies. Furthermore, by tuning the size of the tiles on the individual levels, a tradeoff between the necessary I/O-bandwidth and memory is possible, which facilitates obeying resource constraints. The resulting schedules are symbolic with respect to the problem size and tile sizes. Thus, the number of processing elements to map onto does not need to be known at compile time. At runtime, when the number of available processors becomes known, a simple prologue chooses a feasible schedule with respect to I/O and memory constraints that is latency-optimal for the chosen tile size. In summary, our approach determines the set of feasible, latency-optimal symbolic loop schedule candidates at compile time, from which one is dynamically selected at runtime. This approach exploits multiple levels of parallelism, is independent of the problem size of the loop nest, and thereby avoids any expensive re-compilation at runtime. This is particularly important for low cost and memory-scarce embedded MPSoC platforms that may not afford to host a just-in-time compiler.

Digital consumers as cultural curators: the irony of Vaporwave

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.FindingsHermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.Research limitations/implicationsThis research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.Practical implicationsAs digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.Social implicationsVaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.Originality/valueThis interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

Late Holocene Poetics: Genre and Geohistory in Beachy Head

ABSTRACT Might we read the changing work of literary genre as a signature of the Holocene–Anthropocene transition, a symbolic parallel to the lithostratigraphic markers sought by geologists? I argue that the rise and fall of rural descriptive poetry in Britain may index an early but formative phase of this epochal transition. Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807) is my example of a late Holocene poetics closely attuned to the planetary forces energizing capitalism as a world ecology but largely unable to represent, except in the negative, the emergence of fossil capitalism. Internalized in the form of “Beachy Head,” I suggest, is a pre-thermodynamic conception of the intertwinement of planetary and socio-historical forces, a model of energy exchange that takes as its paradigmatic object not the steam engine but the climate system, and which takes as its source of input not the stock of subterranean coal but the flow of solar radiance. By recovering this late Holocene imaginary, we gain a different vantage on the Anthropocene, as an epoch in which climatological exigency has been not transcended but intensified by the fossil energy regime.

Approaching Symbolic Parallelization by Synthesis of Recurrence Decompositions

We present GraSSP, a novel approach to perform automated parallelization relying on recent advances in formal verification and synthesis. GraSSP augments an existing sequential program with an additional functionality to decompose data dependencies in loop iterations, to compute partial results, and to compose them together. We show that for some classes of the sequential prefix sum problems, such parallelization can be performed efficiently.

Fighting gentrification in the neoliberal university: Displacing communities, researchers and the very possibility of radical critique

The demolition of social housing figures prominently in the most recent wave of state-led gentrification in London: fighting these processes as academics and activists presents ethical, methodological and strategic issues. We have chosen to address these issues by cautiously drawing a symbolic parallel between the conditions faced by social tenants in London, threatened with the destruction of their homes and communities, and the challenges faced by researchers who study and work within these communities, often on part-time, temporary and insecure contracts, themselves under threat of eviction from the very city they research and from academia. Navigating professional precarity and the precarity of place, we stress the need for longitudinal and ethnographic research into the effects of demolition and regeneration, whilst warning against critical urban research becoming more and more the province of tenured middle class scholars.

Resilient Matters

Resilient Matters

Post-imperial crises and liminal masculinity in Orhan Kemal’s My Father’s House–The Idle Years

My Father’s House–The Idle Years is an autobiographical novel by Orhan Kemal, one of the giants of Turkish literature. The novel’s explicit focus is on a boy who grows up pursuing self-realization in a working-class atmosphere. The story takes place during a period of abrupt transformation when the Republic of Turkey, newly born out of the ashes of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, is adapting to oppressive conditions introduced by a burgeoning capitalism. Scholarship on Orhan Kemal has extensively uncovered and charted his socialist realism and unorthodox look at the history of Turkey, but it has not concerned itself enough with the issue of masculinity, which is an indisputable part of Kemal’s view of labour and political power. This paper is an initial attempt to approach Kemal’s autobiographical novels with theories of masculinity. I argue that My Father’s House–The Idle Years explores rites of passages into manhood in what can be referred to as a crisis of imperial loss: the boy grows in an attempt to restore his father’s victimized manhood, in a symbolic parallel to the transformation of the disintegrated Ottoman Empire into self-governed nation-states. Kemal handles the loss metaphorically, using the instability generated by the gender anxieties of a young boy who fails to be like his father to represent the instability generated by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. I examine My Father’s House–The Idle Years as the Oedipalized story of post-Ottoman Turkey.

Dramatic Text, Music Text:

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.

Between medicine and manthravady: agency and identity in Paniya health

The Paniya tribe of Wayanad, Kerala, suffer from a range of health issues related to their experience of marginality. They have indigenous forms of healing; however, the use of biomedicine has increased. But, lack of time and resources means that the broader dimensions of health and well-being remain unaddressed. The socio-economic causes of illness are reconfigured into medical terms for management in the clinical setting. Ultimately, the struggles of the marginalized are rendered invisible, and primary medical aid has become a conduit through which ideology and modes of practice are transferred. However, the Paniya use biomedicine in an attempt to negotiate new forms of identity. Symbolic parallels between the ‘rituals’ of medicine and manthravady (black magic) facilitate movement between the two. However, specific practices within the manthravady ritual draw on deeply embedded cultural idioms that caution against the coercive influences of dominant groups and help the Paniya make sense of their place in the contemporary world.