World Of Human Affairs Research Articles

Silkworms of Exile: Jewish History and Collective Memory in the Kabbalistic Works of Meir ibn Gabbai

Meir ibn Gabbai (1480–ca. 1540) was an influential kabbalist active in the first half of the fifteenth century. He was born in Spain, but following the edict of expulsion in 1492, he and his family fled and resettled in the Ottoman Empire. There, he composed three important works that enjoyed a wide readership and shaped the views of subsequent generations of kabbalists. While these texts do not reflect an interest in chronicling historical events, they are a rich resource for understanding how Jews in this period understood themselves within the broader sweep of history, and how they assigned meaning to collective Jewish historical experience. Ibn Gabbai regarded the dissemination of Kabbalah through the composition of kabbalistic books as a means by which Jews could survive the traumas of exile and correct the course of human and cosmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of medieval kabbalistic texts, ibn Gabbai argued for the power of Jewish religious practice as a mechanism for rebalancing the divine realm, perfecting the cosmic order, and returning the Jewish people to their proper place in the world of human affairs and flow of historical time. The rhetorical strategies evident in ibn Gabbai's texts reveal a remarkably self-aware approach to the importance of kabbalistic discourse for sustaining Jewish life in the face of historical challenges.

Redeploying the Abjection of the Pog Gandao ‘Wilful Woman’ for Women’s Empowerment and Feminist Politics in a Mystical Context

In this article, I examine the marginalisation and abjection of strongwilled and assertive women in Dagaaba settings in rural north-western Ghana. This is done by paying attention to a local identity category known as pog gandao—‘a woman who is more than a man’. The pog gandao, or what I gloss as the wilful woman, concept is used by men and women locally to stigmatise hard-working and assertive Dagaaba women. Drawing inspiration from the reappropriation and redeployment of queer abjection for the subversion of homophobia and the violence of compulsory heterosexuality, I demonstrate how such naming or shaming into the position of a pog gandao serves to hamper initiatives by enterprising and talented Dagaaba women. Being labelled as pog gandao, it appears, is even to lose one’s status in normative gender presentation as a woman; it means to transcend into a realm beyond the masculine. But this transcendence is not enviable due to its potential to expose the subject in question to perceived supernatural harm, a serious matter in this cultural context whereby the world of human affairs is understood as thoroughly saturated with supernatural forces that structure daily and ritual comportment. I argue that the shaming interpellation of pog gandao works as the most powerful weapon against wilful women in oppressive male-centric institutions of the Dagaaba. And yet, this stigmatised interpellation also has great emancipating potential, and I conclude by exploring ways to reclaim it for undermining female subordination, and for both empowering women and for feminist politics.

Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.

Keats for Beginners

IN A LETTER TO COVENTRY PATMORE, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS DESCRIBES John Keats as of of Romantic movement, by which he means one of poets who helped start movement away from neoclassical poetry and poetics. (1) Given that Keats's first book of poems was published in 1817 when Wordsworth was in his mid 40s, calling Keats of beginners seems almost anachronistic. But Hopkins's letter evokes another sense of beginner, one on which I will focus. An awareness of Keats as beginner--one invested in principle of beginning--lurks within Hopkins's letter. Of poets one might associate with Romantic movement--Wordsworth, Tighe, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Hemans--Keats of beginners, as if only some Romantic poets ought to be considered beginners. Following Hopkins, or, at least, following this hint in Hopkins's letter, I want to ask: what does it mean to call Keats beginner? Who or what beginner? What and when beginning? How might Keats's poems be understood as beginners? These questions might take one in any number of directions, but as philosopher Hannah Arendt, to whom we shall turn, suggests in opening to The Human Condition, beginning and not ending, natality and not mortality, may be central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. (2) Beginning is, for Arendt, political because it of, and not beyond, world. Calling Keats a beginner makes possible rethinking of Keats's relationship to politics. The event of beginning, I show with specific reference to closing lines of Sleep and Poetry and opening lines of Endymion, exposes fundamental gap between cognition and perception, understanding and experience; for Keats, I argue, this gap makes possible political commitment even as it complicates very idea of political action. One of Beginners Almost from start, Romantic poets have been accused of turning away from active involvement in politics, understood as instrumental action or intervention in world of human affairs. The defining turn of poet inward to explore his own thoughts and feelings, it argued, constitutes simultaneously turn away from poet's own historical moment. Turning inward, poet turns away from others. Keats for instance most famous for addressing not his fellow man but nightingale and an urn. Indeed, of Romantic poets accused of turning away from history and politics, Keats often prime example. As Stopford A. Brooke writes in 1907: [Keats] has ... no vital interest in present, none in man as whole, none in political movement of human thought, none in future of mankind, none in liberty, equality and fraternity. (3) Brooke offers particularly damning picture of Keats but it picture of Keats largely still in play. It view of poet, in other words, that we have largely inherited. Keats: dreamer-poet far removed from (and even uninterested in) world of human affairs. More damning than Brooke's argument that Keats has no interest in the political movement of human thought Jerome McGann's later suggestion that Romantic poets use art as means to escape world. It one thing to take no interest in politics; it quite another thing actively to flee all things political. In response to world turned topsy-turvy--with French Revolution's dramatic failure, marked by violence of Terror and rise of Napoleon as dictator--the Romantic poet, argues McGann, sticks his head in sand (or, perhaps more precisely, in idealized work of art). Romantic poetry, writes McGann, is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby actual human issues with which poetry concerned are resituated in variety of idealized localities. (4) The poet uses poetry to transport himself into an idealized world and so away from actual human issues, and once again Keats prime example. …

Young people's mental health: the spiritual power of fairy stories, myths and legends

Children and young people have the capacity to conjure feelings of faith and hope when experiencing emotional and psychological distress. World myths, legends and fairy stories as part of early child development offer a rich source of material to draw from and enlist in the therapeutic endeavour. Fairies often act in a healing capacity in mythology, or they appear as agents between the world of human affairs and the invisible forces of nature. Mythological beings also possess helping powers in advance of mortals achieving superhuman tasks, but they can also when used as metaphor, frighten children and potentially cause psychological harm. This paper suggests that mental health practitioners can utilise such powerful narratives therapeutically and in a culturally respectful and spiritually innovative way. Harnessing the child's imagination can be a powerful vehicle for a transforming experience at the psychic level with consequent positive benefits for emotional well-being.

Praxis‐related research: serving two masters?

This article elucidates criteria which might be helpful in evaluating praxis‐related research. The authors explore both sides of the research and development (R & D) project. They examine different ways of understanding contributions to knowledge through research but more especially exploring ideas about contributions to changing praxis. Changing praxis necessarily involves changing not only each participant as an individual actor, but changing patterns of activity. In most praxis‐related research, this is pursued by involving a widening range of participants in a setting. This poses the further problem that the ripple effects of the project are not entirely under the researcher’s control. Thus, as the title suggests, praxis‐related research serves two masters. Very often, R & D projects aim to make contributions to social science. Generally they also aim to make contributions to the world of human affairs. Different criteria are appropriate for judging each.

Geometry in Context in the Sixteenth Century: the View From the Museum

AbstractThis paper examines the discrepancy between the attitudes of many historians of mathematics to sixteenth-century geometry and those of museum curators and others interested in practical mathematics and in instruments. It argues for the need to treat past mathematical practice, not in relation to timeless criteria of mathematical worth, but according to the agenda of the period. Three examples of geometrical activity (cartography, surveying and warfare) are used to illustrate this, and two particular contexts (the wider world of human affairs and the discipline of natural philosophy) are presented in which mathematical practice localised in the sixteenth century takes on a special historical significance.

Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (review)

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, Lance Taylor Peterson Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xx + 143 pages. Some time ago, America witnessed the arrival on its shores of the so-called French Freud, but at the moment is perhaps still unfamiliar with the existence [End Page 1034] on the horizon of a French Wittgenstein. As the English-speaking analytic philosophers who lay claim to Wittgenstein would probably have little interest in the relationship of their master with Freud, perhaps only a French philosopher like Jacques Bouveresse, answering to the prestige of psychoanalysis in his country, would take up the project. Bouveresse, who teaches at the Collège de France, has over a dozen books to his credit, but the present volume on Freud and Wittgenstein is his first to appear in English translation. On the surface, the book is a fairly quiet, scholarly exercise, certainly providing, as Vincent Descombes writes in his introduction, an “attentive commentary on all the texts in which Wittgenstein mentions Freud . . . and second, a discussion of all the literature on the question (viii).” Yet, as Descombes emphasizes, this book also represents a chance to reassess in a French theoretical context the Lacanian program through Wittgenstein, who is painted as an “anti-Lacan avant la lettre (41).” For this reason, this thin volume might, in addition to clarifying the relationship of two idiosyncratic Viennese thinkers, provide for an English-speaking audience some acquaintance with the changes that have overcome French intellectual life since the eclipse of the maîtres à penser in the early eighties. Indeed, these latter French intellectuals have often been credited with the resurgence of American interest in the work of Freud. Stateside proponents of psychoanalysis, particularly numerous in literature departments, have always been acutely aware of the institutional resistance to Freud within the scientific culture of the university. Within this context, proponents recast Freud’s claim to be “the heroic scientist who imposes revolutionary discoveries by conquering formidable prejudice (13)” by systematically evacuating the scientific status of its theories, yet retaining claims to be discovering a new, uncharted terrain (the “unconscious”) and making the importance of this discovery philosophical (as a critique of the “philosophy of consciousness”). Bouveresse emphasizes, however, Freud’s claim that his discoveries were scientific; and this claim provoked most of Wittgenstein’s sharp critical commentary. Bouveresse recalls that Wittgenstein, exposed to a vibrant Viennese psychoanalytic culture, saw the work of the master quite differently: not as a brave expression of difficult unpalatable truths, but as a seductive way of seeing the world of human affairs that had already laid rhetorical siege to a large audience. This “way of seeing” appropriated the prestige of science without submitting to the trial of hypothesis and theoretical revision. Wittgenstein seconded this criticism of the scientific claims of the doctrine with a philosophical analysis of the master’s thought: Freud was a good place to look for “philosophical mistakes” (51). Bouveresse manages to paint a coherent picture of Wittgenstein’s scattered analyses of these errors. In these analyses, we can see how the contemporary French readers of the later Wittgenstein find a new kind of philosophical analysis: one that corrects errors by making distinctions, rather than deconstructing them. This comedy of errors takes place on two stages. The first is Freud’s philosophy [End Page 1035] of mind and, of course, the role played by the unconscious; and the latter does not fare too well. Bouveresse emphasizes that Freud’s conception of the nature of consciousness (as “the internal perception of ‘objects’ of a certain type”) remained utterly traditional compared to that of Wittgenstein. Far from decentering consciousness, the hypothesis of the “unconscious” amounts to a theoretical sleight of hand, inventing a theoretical entity, a homunculus inside the global subject, whose activities retain all the philosophical problems involved in the description of the actions of traditional subjects. This is the side effect of a mistake that Wittgenstein found often in philosophy: the nominalization of a linguistic expression whose only valid descriptive uses are of the unassuming adverbial kind (“She did it unconsciously”). The introduction of the nominal...

Archaeology and the ecodynamics of human-modified landscapes

First generation modelling of cultural systems, as applied in archaeology, frequently invoked linear, deterministic relationships as well as privileging concepts such as stability and an assumed cumulative evolution towards increasing complexity. But can the world of human affairs with its numerous reversals and unintended consequences really be captured by such models? Recent advances in the natural sciences have demonstrated the central role of non-linear phenomena, discontinuities and unpredictable breaks from established patterns and events. It is argued that such findings can form the basis for a new theoretical framework, human ecodynamics.

The scientific status of the behavioral sciences: The case of research on teaching: An essay-review of empiricist research on teaching: A philosophical and practical critique of its scientific pretensions John H. Chambers (1992). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers (ISBN 0-7923-1848-X)

It matters greatly whether a mode of inquiry and a body of knowledge have scientific standing. Scientific method is recognized as the major avenue into valid knowledge about certain important aspects of the world. The victories of the natural sciences have led us to seek similar achievements in the world of human affairs by using the same general methods. And philosophers and historians of science had been foremost in the effort to identify what those methods and victories consist of. Nonetheless, natural scientists are notoriously unimpressed with philosophy of science. One philosopher remarked on “the frustrated exasperation with which working scientists regard the arguments of most professional philosophers of science” (Toulmin, 1971, p. viii). For example, the fact that the sun has risen every day in the past does not assure us logically that it will rise tomorrow. It is such philosophical propositions that arouse the “frustrated exasperation.” However, because the scientific status of the natural sciences is so strong, natural scientists can afford such a reaction, even as they often unwittingly and naively philosophize about their work. On the other hand, the social and behavioral sciences have no such assured standing. So workers in those fields are well-advised to pay attention to their philosophical critics. Recently such a critic has given unprecedentedly close attention to research on teaching. In his Empiricist Research on Teaching: A Philosophical and Practical Critique of Its Scientific Pretensions, John H. Chambers has brought to bear a wide knowledge of the philosophy and history of the natural sciences, and most particularly the physical sciences. Chambers makes two main criticisms of research on teaching. First, it has been not scientific but empiricist. Second, even as empiricism, such research has had little practical value. In his view, the claim of researchers on teaching to being scientific is mere “kudos-seeking” pretentiousness, and their claim to useful results is equally unwarranted. He charges with serious misunderstandings of the nature of science, or practical usefulness, or both, many writers on pedagogical and other educational research, including Neville Bennett, David C. Berliner, Walter R. Borg, Jere E. Brophy, Carolyn M. Evertson, Jeremy D. Finn, N. L. Gage, Meredith Gall, Thomas L. Good, Andreas Helmke, Fred N. Kerlinger, Graham Nuthall, F. W. Schrader, Lee S. Shulman, Robert E. Slavin, and Herbert J. Walberg. The book deals with both more and less than its title suggests. More, because its argument applies to much other research in the behavioral sciences-in education, psychology (educational, personality, social, counseling, and much else), and just about all of sociology. Less, because it deals primarily not with all research on teaching but with that which is often labeled “quantitative.” Of course, “quantitative” pedagogical research has salient characteristics-such as public character, replicability, falsifiability, and important kinds of objectivity-other than those of using statistics and quantifiable data. Only toward the end of the book and relatively briefly does Chambers give attention to “qualitative” and “humanistic” approaches to research on teaching. But I shall follow Chambers and use the unqualified term “research on teaching” to refer to quantitative research of that kind, unless otherwise indicated.

The Breeding of Vegetable Crops: Highlights of the Past Seventy-Five Years

Abstract The period I have been asked to review has been a momentous and exciting one for Plant Breeding and Genetics. It spans the interval between the rediscovery of Mendel's classical work and the rise of molecular genetics. During this period the status of plant breeders has changed from that of a bumbling busybody, or poorman's Burbank, to that of one of the most influential and important groups of people in our Society, with the fate of hungry peoples of the world resting upon the success of their endeavors. The plant breeder's image as a factor in the world of human affairs has recently received much favorable public recognition with the initiation of the Green Revolution and the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Norman Borlaug.

Literary Relations in the Light of Goethe's Principle of "Wiederspiegelung"

T WAS Goethe's practice in his later years to express the great processes he discerned at work everywhere-not only in nature, but in human life, history, and art-in terms of a few symbols of great simplicity but charged with the cumulative experience of his scientific work. Thus all nature within and without is dominated by the great principles of Polaritat and Steigerung-those two grosse Triebrader aller Natur. Polarity is present, not only in the physical world as a constant alternation of opposites, but equally in the world of human affairs: head and heart, body and soul, love and hate, sense and reason, conscious and unconscious, the real and the ideal, mind and matter, contemplation and activity, analysis and synthesis, God and the world. For, like breathing in and breathing out, it is the very rhythm of life itself. Steigerung, or ascent, is in the physical sphere the principle whereby a substance through qualitative intensification undergoes a qualitative change to something of a different order; in the biological sphere it connotes the upward progression observable in nature from the lower to the more highly organized forms of life. And what is true of colors, plants, and animals is equally true of art, of love, even of the culinary