Threads Of Continuity Research Articles

South Africa, 1994 + 30: A Conversation About History After Apartheid

AbstractIn this wide-ranging conversation, six scholars of South Africa detail threads of continuity and change in the historiographies, popular memories, archives, research agendas, methodologies, and within the South African academy and historical professional since the end of formal apartheid in 1994.

Solidarity in the Field of Religious Education

This article argues that the field of religious education can have a clearer sense of identity if religious educators recognize the threads of historical continuity in the field and forge bonds of greater unity in our professional guild by adopting a shared commitment to explore various modes of religious learning as expressions of the universal human quest for meaning, value, and understanding. To provide a vision for and direction within the field, we recommend religious educators adopt the guiding image of standing in solidarity with one another at the crossroads of religion and education and research and practice.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ST. PETERSBURG CLASSICISTS IN THE 19TH - EARLY 20THCENTURY: IN THREE VOLUMES / ED. A.K. GAVRILOV. ST. PETERSBURG: BIBLIOTHECA CLASSICA PETROPOLITANA EDITION, 2021. (VOL. I: A-K (XXXVI, 1-426). VOL. II: L-YA (VI, 427-860). VOL. III: INDEXES AND APPENDICES (VIII, 861-1050)

The review presents the long-awaited book, based on years of thinking by authors about the fate of the national humanities. The dictionary has already become a fact of literary and cultural life, and its protagonists are not only the people described in it, but also the authors of essays and the editorial board, constantly discovering threads of continuity with St. Petersburg classicists. 43 authors of various philological specializations participated in the building of this, without any exaggeration, epochmaking work, which includes articles devoted to 250 St. Petersburg classicists in the 19th - early 20thcentury (scholars, tutors, translators, managers). To recreate the true image of the personage, the authors attracted a wide range of sources, namely, research papers, memoirs, correspondence and still unpublished archival materials. Collected together (although with varying degrees of detail depending on the number of extant sources), these portraits give us a comprehensive picture of the development of St. Petersburg classicism in its heyday and at the same time allow us to assess the state of intellectual forces and spiritual life of Russian society as a whole. The dictionary is convenient to use, because it is equipped with various indexes that make up a separate volume, which ends with a review essay written by the responsible editor and inspirer of the publication A.K. Gavrilov, where, among other things, the principle of material selection is analyzed in detail. The book is convenient and indispensable for work and at the same time is a fascinating reading.

African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics By Cajetan Iheka

Reviewed by: African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka Christopher R. Hebert African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics BY CAJETAN IHEKA Duke UP, 2021. xiii + 322 pp. ISBN 9781478014744 paper. Cajetan Iheka's African Ecomedia, his first full-length work following Naturalizing Africa (2017), is a continuation of his focus on the intersection between African cultural expression and environmental issues on the continent. Unlike Naturalizing Africa, which discusses literary texts across a broad geographical range, African Ecomedia turns toward visual culture, to include films (both documentary and fictional), photographs, sculpture, and video art. Iheka broadly demarcates the "media" within this book into three different kinds: media arts (film, photography), resource media (oil, uranium), and elemental media (earth, air, water, fire) (8). Importantly, these three kinds of media are linked through transnational networks that often prioritize Western consumption over the ecological health of African environments and the well-being of African laborers who work with e-waste or dangerous resource media. By foregrounding these different kinds of media as well as their networks of production and consumption, African [End Page 190] Ecomedia broadly expands the purview of the environmental humanities and provides a framework for a nuanced discussion of media in a world that is radically interconnected. Iheka's task in this work, therefore, is not only to explicate different representations of the environment in African visual culture, but also to untangle the complicated itineraries of media in all its materiality on the African continent. Iheka's first chapter opens with a discussion of Wanuri Kahiu's film Pumzi and Fabrice Monteiro's photographic collection The Prophecy from the perspective of temporal entanglement. By calling attention to the ways in which these artists incorporate elements of the past in their new-media creations, Iheka identifies important threads of continuity between ecological attitudes of the past and those of an imagined future, most interestingly through the waste aesthetics of Monteiro's photographs. His second and third chapters approach environmental issues in various films and photography collections through the idea of spatial entanglement—for example, excessive consumption of electronic goods in Europe and North America directly contributes to rapidly growing e-waste sites in Ghana, just as a thirst for oil in the industrial centers of the Global North has traumatizing effects on resource centers in Africa, particularly the Niger Delta region. His examination of Pieter Hugo's photography collection Permanent Error in chapter two is especially salient, as he deftly analyzes the photos of burning waste in Agbogbloshie not as "poverty porn" but to explain the "logics of exploitation" that the images reveal (66). Iheka's fourth chapter focuses on the circulation of a grisly safari trophy-photo shortly after the death of Cecil the Lion and, importantly, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. This photo and its viral trajectory "allows for apprehending vulnerabilities across species" (153). In this chapter, Iheka also calls for more attention toward "interspecies entanglement"—and he cites Orlando von Einsiedel's film Virunga as a positive example of media that "activates a borderland for intertwining human-nonhuman interests" (153). Finally, his fifth chapter explores African cities and their urban spaces as sites of precarity as well as sustainability. His analysis of Wu Jing's Wolf Warrior 2, a Chinese film set in an African city, is especially interesting as it underscores the struggle for influence in Africa between China and the West, as well as the racist ideologies at the heart of much media that takes Africa as its subject. As he notes, "in every battle in which elephants fight, the grass—in this case the African space and the continent's inhabitants—suffers" (207). One of the biggest strengths of Iheka's work in African Ecomedia is his commitment to a practice of what he calls insightful reading—a way of responsibly engaging with media arts that depict ecological degradation and human suffering. For example, Iheka does not turn away from the haunting photographs of young Ghanaian e-waste workers in Pieter Hugo's Permanent Error, nor does he downplay the future trauma that ordinary people will experience in the Niger Delta or in Arlit, where oil exploration and the mining of...

Faith and fatherland? The Ancient Order of Hibernians, northern nationalism and the partition of Ireland

AbstractIn 1912, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.) had become the most significant nationalist organisation in Ulster, a powerful auxiliary to the Irish Parliamentary Party, and a key part of what unionists feared would be Rome rule in a self-governed Ireland. However, while the A.O.H. is crucial to understanding nationalist Ulster and the border question, its reputation for fraternal secrecy and the apparent suddenness of its decline after the Irish Party's 1918 collapse has often seen it elude sustained academic enquiry. This article provides the first examination of the order from the Ulster crisis to the early decades of partition, drawing on the records of its governing Board of Erin. Scrutinising the grassroots and the leadership, this article interrogates dissension among Hibernians, the suspension of divisions and defections to Sinn Féin as the order reconciled proposals for Ulster exclusion with its traditional appeal. While Hibernians often found themselves part of a three-cornered conflict in the violent 1920s, the order ultimately survived on both sides of the border with regional variation important in estimating decline. Its persistence, therefore, illustrates something of the lived experience of partition and highlights important threads of continuity in a period of political and social upheaval.

Modeling Discontinuous Cultural Evolution: The Impact of Cross-Domain Transfer.

This paper uses autocatalytic networks to model discontinuous cultural transitions involving cross-domain transfer, using as an illustrative example, artworks inspired by the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art: the carving of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Löwenmensch, or lion-human. Autocatalytic networks provide a general modeling setting in which nodes are not just passive transmitters of activation; they actively galvanize, or “catalyze” the synthesis of novel (“foodset-derived”) nodes from existing ones (the “foodset.”) This makes them uniquely suited to model how new structure grows out of earlier structure, i.e., cumulative, generative network growth. They have been used to model the origin and early evolution of biological life, and the emergence of cognitive structures capable of undergoing cultural evolution. We conducted a study in which six individual creators and one group generated music, prose, poetry, and visual art inspired by the Hohlenstein-Stadel Löwenmensch, and answered questions about the process. The data revealed four through-lines by which they expressed the Löwenmensch in an alternative art form: (1) lion-human hybrid, (2) subtracting from the whole to reveal the form within, (3) deterioration, and (4) waiting to be found with a story to tell. Autocatalytic networks were used to model how these four spontaneously derived through-lines form a cultural lineage from Löwenmensch to artist to audience. We used the resulting data from three creators to model the cross-domain transfer from inspirational source (sculpted figurine) to creative product (music, poetry, prose, visual art). These four spontaneously-generated threads of cultural continuity formed the backbone of this Löwenmensch-inspired cultural lineage, enabling culture to evolve even in the face of discontinuity at the level conventional categories or domains. We know of no other theory of cultural evolution that accommodates cross-domain transfer or other forms of discontinuity. The approach paves the way for a broad scientific framework for the origins of evolutionary processes.

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

‘All ages and no age’: Memory, and Self-Narration in Irma Kurtz’s Then Again: Travels in Search of My Younger Self

In her recently published text Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing (2013) Lynne Segal argues that, in relation to the ageing process “what essentially matters is neither the sociology nor the biology of ageing but the narrative of the self, the stories we tell ourselves” (Segal 2013, 9). Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, suggests that in order to achieve a functioning personal narrative, each individual requires a perspectival mapping of his/her “internal topography” as the past does not simply lie dormant awaiting some form of resurrection but holds the potential for creative collaboration. One recent text which specifically engages with the pivotal role that memory plays in the ageing process and whether it is possible to, as Bollas suggests, “make the past available for the self’s future” (Bollas 1993, 3) is Irma Kurtz’s travelogue/memoir entitled Then Again: travels in search of my younger self my Younger Self (2003). Born in New Jersey in 1935 to Eastern European immigrants, Irma Kurtz has written four autobiographical texts, several novels as well as a number of publications related to her long-standing role as ‘agony aunt’ for Cosmopolitan magazine. My reading of Kurtz’s Then Again will focus not only on Bollas’s perspective on what he terms the “psychic signifiers” that are implicitly linked to the creative use of memory and how this concept can be applied to Kurtz’s text but also suggests that Stephen Frosh’s view on the importance of the achievement of a personal narrative which creatively engages with what he terms the “hauntings” of the past is also relevant to the central thematic concern of Then Again. Kurtz’s emphasis upon the threads of continuity that enable us to both differentiate and recapitulate past experiences as we experience the crisis of old age, will be specifically linked to the belief expounded by both Frosh and Bollas that ageing represents a multiplicity of continuities over time and how a successful negotiation of the ageing process depends upon an ability to make use of the self as an object of memory that simultaneously is, and is not, equivalent to its present manifestation(s). This article attempts to depict the central roles that memory and narration must play if such possibilities are to be achieved.

The formation of ionospheric physics – confluence of traditions and threads of continuity

Abstract. This paper examines how ionospheric physics emerged as a research speciality in Britain, Germany, and the United States in the first four decades of the 20th century. It argues that the formation of this discipline can be viewed as the confluence of four deep-rooted traditions in which scientists and engineers transformed, from within, research areas connected to radio wave propagation and geomagnetism. These traditions include Cambridge school's mathematical physics, Göttingen's mathematical physics, laboratory-based experimental physics, and Humboldtian-style terrestrial physics. Although focused on ionospheric physics, the paper pursues the idea that a dynamic conception of scientific tradition will provide a new perspective for the study of geosciences history.

PRESERVING SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNITY ARCHIVES IN A CONTEXT OF UBUNTU

South Africa is rich in archival collections that contribute significantly to nation building and to sociocultural cohesion in the post-apartheid era. The archives bring the past to life and reveal threads of continuity in the historical development of communities. The present paper discusses personal and independent community archives in localities in Limpopo Province. The study considers villages in their entirety as living, evolving entities. From that perspective it looks at the prospects of personal and independent community archives which are in the custody of, respectively, private individuals and social groups striving sustainably to preserve archival material of interest to broader communities while simultaneously advancing the ubuntu principle (a person is a person through other persons). By conducting unstructured interviews with inhabitants involved in the creation of archives, and by applying the ubuntu principle as a theory that provides insight, it has become clear that personal and independent community archives function as tools that preserve communal memory for the interest of present communities and future generations. The study looks at personal and independent community archives in different localities and identifies ways to better manage such archives for the benefit of the community at large. In Limpopo Province archives of various types have not been meaningfully integrated into mainstream community archives. This has resulted in a gap separating individuals building personal archives from social groups that generate their own repositories. This separation hinders the profitable exchange of informative materials within communities. During interviews, community members have recommended practical steps to improve the preservation of their community archives and promote the ubuntu principle.

On Georg Simmel's Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft: Preliminary Methods, Problems, and Concepts for a Critique of Modern Monetary Economics

The aim of this article is to expose some threads of continuity between Philosophie des Geldes and a less explored writing of Georg Simmel’s theoretical trajectory, namely: Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. To this end, I argue that in this early text Simmel proposes a psychological, sociological, and historical method to examine morality issues, which he later replicates in his approach regarding modern monetary economics. At the same time, I state that both works share resemblances in terms of the exposed topics: The opus magnum of 1900, like that early writing, gives great relevance to ethical issues. On this basis, I evidence the methodological affinity between these texts by comparing the Berliner’s treatment of moral duty, on the one hand, and economic value, on the other. Having done this, I explain how the thesis on the conflict of values delineated by young Simmel is then revisited in Philosophie des Geldes to account for the tension between economic value and the value of people.

Liturgy and chant in a twelfth-century Exeter missal

AbstractExeter Cathedral Library and Archives MS 3515 (hereafter EXcl 3515), a notated missal located in Exeter Cathedral, has to date received very little scholarly attention. This neglect may be due to the absence of a liturgical kalendar and evidence of local saints in the Sanctorale. Its assignment to the thirteenth century with a generic English origin suggests that critical questions concerning provenance and dating have been overlooked. The source itself comprises four disparate sections assembled so as to create a complete liturgical cycle. Yet the parts are not as separate as hitherto believed. A comparative investigation reveals not only an Exeter provenance and a twelfth-century dating, but also a new witness to the St Denis/Corbie tradition. Research also reveals unexpected threads of liturgical continuity with the Anglo-Saxon past. As a complete pre-Sarum source of Mass prayers, chants and readings, EXcl 3515 offers a useful lens with which to view a transitional period in the development of a medieval secular liturgy in England. (By contrast, the three dominant cathedrals – Salisbury, York and Hereford – all lack notated chant sources from this period.) EXcl 3515 adds not only significant new data to the current information on secular liturgies, but also challenges accepted theories on the shaping of a distinctive English Use in southwest England.

Staging the Speculative

Staging the Speculative

Threads of local continuity between centralized and decentralized causality: Transitional explanations for the behavior of a complex system

One line of research on student understanding of complex systems has tended to emphasize discontinuities between common misconceptions and relatively more sophisticated understandings. Other work has focused on instruction while acknowledging the existence of other ways of understanding complex systems, but less emphasis has been on examining the knowledge structures within these intermediate ways of understanding. This study takes a microgenetic approach to examining student’s explanations for the behavior of complex systems. Using the Knowledge-in-Pieces epistemological perspective, the analysis documents a continuity of reasoning patterns across less prototypically centralized and more prototypically decentralized (a more sophisticated causality) explanations while explaining the movement of sand dunes. The first analysis examines 31 interviews and shows that many reflected a general reasoning pattern that encompassing some combination of an initial centralized explanation, a final decentralized explanation, and transitional explanations. A second analysis examines a single student’s reasoning pattern and finds that the activation of relevant intuitive knowledge pieces (p-prims) and transitional explanations function as threads of continuity across the continuum of reasoning patterns. These findings suggest that students are able to exhibit a continuity of reasoning patterns across centralized to decentralized causality and are able to access productive intuitive knowledge about complex systems that are applicable to both the macro and micro levels of sand dune movement. Implications suggest that future research investigate these transitional explanations along with the mechanisms of shifting explanations that can account for this robust continuum.

Ideas, Individuals and Institutions: Notion and Practices of a European Electricity System

Based upon extensive multi-archival research, this article traces the long lineage of the notion of European electricity network. Since the 1930s engineers and policy makers conceived of a geographical conception for rationalising and optimising electricity supply: a European one. This article purports that three vectors undergirded threads of continuity: institutional, intellectual and physical (technological networks). These vectors, and the actors involved in them, created strong path dependencies that kept the idea of a European system firmly on the agenda. Today's international electricity market of the European Union should be seen as an extension of this legacy.

Failed Solidarity: Confronting Imperial Structures in Kim Sa-ryang’s “Into the Light” and Kim Tal-su’s “Village with a View of Mt. Fuji”

Published twelve year’s apart, Kim Sa-ryang’s “Into the Light” (1939) and Kim Tal-su’s “Village with a View of Mt. Fuji” (1951) straddle the August 15, 1945 border that separates Imperial Japan (or colonial Korea) from postwar occupied Japan (or “liberated” Korea). Since these two works represent different sides of this chronological binary, it is telling that both represent Japanese society as being stratified based on a social hierarchy of ethnic difference. This article argues that Kim Sa-ryang and Kim Tal-su’s efforts to subvert this distinction between the colonizer and the colonized fails because imperial structures, in both Imperial Japan and postwar Japan, prevent solidarity between Koreans and oppressed Japanese groups. The threads of continuity between these two works, therefore, pose a powerful critique of the postwar persistence of these structures and their continued impact on Japan, even while under the occupation of an external power.

Modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections: Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia

This paper explores the dynamics of the modern Asian Catholic ecclesiastical experience in Malaysia within the context of diaspora. Using the South Indian Tamil Catholic community in Malaysia as a case in point, I explore the mediations that occur in ecclesiastical spaces as a result of the points of contact between Catholic Tamil Nadu and its diaspora in Malaysia. Through an analysis of two festivals of ethnic Tamil heritage, the Feast of Our Lady of Good Health and the Pongal Festival, in a predominantly Tamil parish community, the discussion will show how the interactions between ethnicity, culture, and the Catholic Tamil diaspora in Malaysia foreground a sinuous interweaving of the threads of continuity, adaptation and dialogue. I also attempt to extend the investigation a little further to show instances of subtle differences that emerge as a result of the diasporic relocation of vernacular Catholicism inherited from South India. The latter subsequently reveal the modern Asian ecclesiastical interconnections that occur as South Indian Catholicism is practised within its national Malaysian Catholic context.

Concept of Social Justice in Tribal Society: A Case of the Nyishi

Generalizations about traditional society are always dangerous because of the distances of time and space that are involved. How far, for example, does traditional Nyishi society “coexist with” modern Nyishi society or is it wholly a thing of the past? The question is a difficult one. One cannot deny that there are many threads of continuity, linking the past with the present, and the old social order with the new, but how important are the elements of discontinuity? One of the assumptions behind this paper is that the discontinuities are of diminishing importance and that traditional concepts survive because they find a new dimension and a new application in the modern situation. Traditional Nyishi society is now history, mainly oral history, but that does not mean to say it can be ignored. On the contrary, to recognize traditional concepts and to understand their workings in the modern Nyishi society, it is first of all necessary to see them as part of a political and social order which no longer exists in its pure form. That is largely what I shall be doing in this paper.

Kafka's Golem

This articles examines two of Franz Kafka's lesser-known fragments in light of the Prague Golem legend and its popularity in the early twentieth century: a brief story about a rabbi's attempt to make a clay man in his house and the tale of a mysterious animal that lives in a provincial synagogue. By tracing threads of narrative continuity between these fragments, which are the only explicitly Jewish tales in Kafka's corpus, and with earlier versions of the Golem tradition that were available to Kafka, the article illuminates his deep engagement with Jewish storytelling traditions. At the same time, the complex textual history of the fragments is shown to be integral to their interpretation.