A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Though Achilles the character is bound by fate and by narrative tradition, Achilles’s poem, the Iliad, was never fixed and monolithic in antiquity—it was multiform. And the wider epic tradition, from which the Iliad emerged, was yet more multiform. In Achilles Unbound, Casey Dué, building on nearly twenty years of work as coeditor of the Homer Multitext (www.homermultitext.org), explores both the traditionality and multiformity of the Iliad in a way that gives us a greater appreciation of the epic that has been handed down to us.
Dué argues that the attested multiforms of the Iliad—in ancient quotations, on papyrus, and in the scholia of medieval manuscripts—give us glimpses of the very long history of the text, access to even earlier Iliads, and a greater awareness of the mechanisms by which such a remarkable poem could be composed in performance. Using methodologies grounded in an understanding of Homeric poetry as a system, Achilles Unbound argues for nothing short of a paradigm shift in our approach to the Homeric epics, one that embraces their long evolution and the totality of the world of epic song, in which each performance was newly composed and received by its audience.
The tradition of agape, or unconditional love, is not exclusive to any religion. It is a primary underlying principle found in religions worldwide. The concept of altruistic love challenges the spiritual person to "love your enemies" or to "love without thought of return." It is a love that flows out to others through compassion, kindness, tenderness, and charitable giving.
Buddhists have a path of compassion, where caring for others becomes the motivating force behind existence. Hindus have a branch of yoga, the heart-centered path, that leads to enlightenment through an overwhelming love for God that takes the form of loving all humanity. Eastern religions, such as Taoism and Confucianism, see transcendent love as essential to true wisdom.
Love is a universal theme of love found in all religious traditions, Buddhist, Christian, Islam, or others. As we realize that all religions have this spiritual principle of love at their core, we can develop a sense of shared humanity. The religious tradition of agape love examined in this book will inspire those who are learning to grow in compassion and love for all people.
Long regarded as copies of lost Greek masterpieces, a great many Roman works are now seen as neoclassical images worthy of analysis within their own Roman contexts. This book identifies and takes account of Roman criteria in rethinking the function and aesthetic appeal of these works in the eyes of their Roman owners and audiences. Collectively, the essays argue that many traditional assumptions about the status of works of classical art as originals or copies, and much of the evidence that has been used to sustain these assumptions, must be thoroughly rethought.
Among the authors are classical archaeologists, art historians (whose areas of expertise range from antiquity to the nineteenth century), and a contemporary artist and critic.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan.
Like many indigenous legal institutions across North America, the Hopi Tribal Court was created in the image of Anglo-American-style law. But Richland shows that in recent years, Hopi jurists and litigants have called for their courts to develop a jurisprudence that better reflects Hopi culture and traditions. Providing unprecedented insights into the Hopi and English courtroom interactions through which this conflict plays out, Richland argues that tensions between the language of Anglo-style law and Hopi tradition both drive Hopi jurisprudence and make it unique. Ultimately, Richland’s analyses of the language of Hopi law offer a fresh approach to the cultural politics that influence indigenous legal and governmental practices worldwide.
David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis.
Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.
Bona discusses the novels in pairs according to their focus on Italian American life. She first examines the traditions of italianitá (a flavor of things Italian) that inform and enhance works of fiction. The novelists in that tradition were Mari Tomasi (Like Lesser Gods, 1949) and Marion Benasutti (No Steady Job for Papa, 1966).
Bona then turns to later novels that highlight the Italian American belief in the family's honor and reputation. Conflicts between generations, specifically between autocratic fathers and their children, are central to Octavia Waldo's 1961 A Cup of the Sun and Josephine Gattuso Hendin's 1988 The Right Thing to Do.
Even when writers choose to steer away from the familial focus, Bona notes, their developmental narratives trace the reintegration of characters suffering from a crisis of cultural identity. Relating the characters' struggles to their relationship to the family, Bona examines Diana Cavallo's 1961 A Bridge of Leaves and Dorothy Bryant's 1978 Miss Giardino.
Bona then discusses two innovative novels— Helen Barolini's 1979 Umbertina and Tina De Rosa's 1980 Paper Fish— both of which feature a granddaughter who invokes her grandmother, a godparent figure. Through Barolini's feminist and De Rosa's modernist perspectives, both novels present a young girl developing artistically.
Closing with a discussion of the contemporary terrain Italian American women traverse, Bona examines such topics as sexual identity when it meets cultural identity and the inclusion of italianitá when Italian American identity is not central to the story. Italian American women writers, she concludes, continue in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on the interplay between cultural identity and women's development.
An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century.
This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality.
Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity.
In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.
Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi present an international collection of essays reevaluating the multifaceted performance art of Nobel laureate Dario Fo.
The contributors, all of whom either have previously published on Fo or have worked with him, are the major Dario Fo scholars of three continents. Going beyond the Marxist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, the editors and contributors try to establish an appropriate language in which to debate Fo’s theater. They seek to identify the core of Fo’s work, the material that will be of lasting value. This involves locating Fo in history, examining the nature of his development through successive phases, incorporating his politics into a wider framework of radical dissent, and setting his theatrical achievements in a context and a tradition.
The essays cover every aspect of Dario Fo: as actor, playwright, performer, and songwriter. They also provide the historical background of Fo’s theater, as well as an in-depth analyses of specific works and the contribution of Franca Rame.
In a world of multinational commerce, satellite broadcasting, migration, terrorism, and global arms dealing, what is said and how it is said in one society can no longer be isolated from what is said and how it is said in another. Debating Muslims focuses on Iranian culture, Shi’ite Islam, and Iranians in the United States, offering an experiment in postmodern ethnography and an invitation to think in a multifaceted way about Islam in the contemporary world.
With a foreword by Arnold I. Davidson and Daniele Lorenzini.
In his final book, renowned philosopher Pierre Hadot explores Goethe’s relationship with ancient spiritual exercises—transformative acts of intellect, imagination, or will. Goethe sought both an intense experience of the present moment as well as a kind of cosmic consciousness, both of which are rooted in ancient philosophical practices. These practices shaped Goethe’s audacious contrast to the traditional maxim memento mori (Don’t forget that you will die) with the aim of transforming our ordinary consciousness. Ultimately, Hadot reveals how Goethe cultivated a deep love for life that brings to the forefront a new maxim: Don’t forget to live.
Often considered China’s greatest poet, Du Fu (712–770) came of age at the height of the Tang dynasty, in an era marked by confidence that the accumulated wisdom of the precedent cultural tradition would guarantee civilization’s continued stability and prosperity. When his society collapsed into civil war in 755, however, he began to question contemporary assumptions about the role that tradition should play in making sense of experience and defining human flourishing.
In this book, Lucas Bender argues that Du Fu’s reconsideration of the nature and importance of tradition has played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. In reimagining his relationship to tradition, Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry’s relationship to ethics. He also looked forward to the transformations his own poetry would undergo as it was elevated to the pinnacle of the Chinese poetic pantheon.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Among southeastern Indians pottery was an innovation that enhanced the economic value of native foods and the efficiency of food preparation. But even though pottery was available in the Southeast as early as 4,500 years ago, it took nearly two millenia before it was widely used. Why would an innovation of such economic value take so long to be adopted?
The answer lies in the social and political contexts of traditional cooking technology. Sassaman's book questions the value of using technological traits alone to mark temporal and spatial boundaries of prehistoric cultures and shows how social process shapes the prehistoric archaeological record.
Wesley Bernardini / James S. Brown Jr. / Cheryl Claassen / John E. Clark / ArleneColman / Warren DeBoer /
On the field, legends like Don Hutson, Ray Nitschke, and Brett Favre made the Green Bay Packers into a professional football powerhouse. But the history of the NFL’s only small-town franchise is as much a story of business creativity as gridiron supremacy. Behind every Packer who became a legend on the field, there was an Andrew Turnbull, Dominic Olejniczak, or Bob Harlan, leaders whose dedication and creativity in preserving the franchise were unwavering.
Green Bay Packers: Trials, Triumphs, and Traditions tells the improbable story of professional football’s most iconic team, and along the way gives a unique window into the rise of modern professional sports. As the NFL has evolved into a financial juggernaut, the Green Bay Packers, with more than 112,158 stockholders, stand alone as the only professional sports franchise owned by fans, thus providing the only public record of how a sports team is run.
Featuring more than 300 photographs, some never before seen, Green Bay Packers illustrates how the most creative team in sports is also one of the most successful, with names like Lambeau, Canadeo, Lombardi, Hornung, Holmgren, and White leading the way to a league-best thirteen NFL titles and twenty-one Hall of Fame inductees. This comprehensive, up-to-date history of the Packers includes the 2011 season.
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), across disciplines. New translations of work by and about Hamann are appearing, as are a number of books and articles on Hamann’s aesthetics, theories of language and sexuality, and unique place in Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought.
Edited by Lisa Marie Anderson, Hamann and the Tradition gathers established and emerging scholars to examine the full range of Hamann’s impact—be it on German Romanticism or on the very practice of theology. Of particular interest to those not familiar with Hamann will be a chapter devoted to examining—or in some cases, placing—Hamann in dialogue with other important thinkers, such as Socrates, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
This collection of original essays presents a more complex and positive view of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women, demonstrating his recognition of the crucial role that women played--as critics, reviewers, readers, and authors--in building a national readership that made his writing career so successful.
The book begins with an examination of the influence exerted by the women in Hawthorne's immediate family. It goes on to explore his links to a broad range of women writers, as well as his attitudes toward the female characters he created. Among the authors discussed are Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
In 1979, a Kekchi Maya Indian accidentally discovered the entrance to Naj Tunich, a deep cave in the Maya Mountains of El Peten, Guatemala. One of the world's few deep caves that contain rock art, Naj Tunich features figural images and hieroglyphic inscriptions that have helped to revolutionize our understanding of ancient Maya art and ritual.
In this book, Andrea Stone takes a comprehensive look at Maya cave painting from Preconquest times to the Colonial period. After surveying Mesoamerican cave and rock painting sites and discussing all twenty-five known painted caves in the Maya area, she focuses extensively on Naj Tunich. Her text analyzes the images and inscriptions, while photographs and line drawings provide a complete visual catalog of the cave art, some of which has been subsequently destroyed by vandals.
This important new body of images and texts enlarges our understanding of the Maya view of sacred landscape and the role of caves in ritual. It will be important reading for all students of the Maya, as well as for others interested in cave art and in human relationships with the natural environment.
In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.
Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utilizes deconstruction to explore Egyptian, French neoclassical, and postmodern attempts to use pyramids to constitute a sense of lasting presence. And the third case study employs hermeneutics to reveal how the American understanding of the natural landscape has evolved from religious to secular to ecological since the nineteenth century.
Following this ill-fated quest, father and son returned near-penniless to New York to face eviction. They resettled in a small Manchester cabin where young Joseph later saw angels–not unlike his father and other contemporaries–and eventually found hieroglyph-inscribed sheets of gold, which his former money-digging associates repeatedly tried to steal.
During this turbulent time Joseph Smith was brought to court three times for crystal gazing, eloped with a former landlord’s daughter, watched as his mother and siblings were excommunicated from the Presbyterian church, published his translation of the hieroglyphs, founded the Church of Christ, saw a potential convert forcibly abducted by her minister, and eventually sought refuge in Ohio where he changed the name of his church and its place of origin.
His study recounts the rise of the Anglo-Jewish elite--great commercial and financial magnates such as the Goldsmids, the Franks, Samson Gideon, and Joseph Salvador--who rapidly adopted the gentlemanly style of life of the landed class and adjusted their religious practices to harmonize with the standards of upper-class Englishmen. Similarly, the Jewish poor--peddlers, hawkers, and old-clothes men--took easily to many patterns of lower-class life, including crime, street violence, sexual promiscuity, and coarse entertainment.
An impressive marshaling of fact and analysis, The Jews of Georgian England serves to illuminate a significant aspect of the Jewish passage to modernity.
"Contributes to English as well as Jewish history. . . . Every reader will learn something new about the statistics, setting or mores of Jewish life in the eighteenth century. . . ." --American Historical Review
Todd M. Endelman is William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan. He is also the author of Comparing Jewish Societies, Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, and Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945.
The just war tradition is central to the practice of international relations, in questions of war, peace, and the conduct of war in the contemporary world, but surprisingly few scholars have questioned the authority of the tradition as a source of moral guidance for modern statecraft. Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice brings together many of the most important contemporary writers on just war to consider questions of authority surrounding the just war tradition.
Authority is critical in two key senses. First, it is central to framing the ethical debate about the justice or injustice of war, raising questions about the universality of just war and the tradition’s relationship to religion, law, and democracy. Second, who has the legitimate authority to make just-war claims and declare and prosecute war? Such authority has traditionally been located in the sovereign state, but non-state and supra-state claims to legitimate authority have become increasingly important over the last twenty years as the just war tradition has been used to think about multilateral military operations, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and sub-state violence. The chapters in this collection, organized around these two dimensions, offer a compelling reassessment of the authority issue’s centrality in how we can, do, and ought to think about war in contemporary global politics.
For a particular audience at a particular moment, "tradition" is what it believes it has inherited from the past--and it may not be particularly old. The boundaries between the traditional and the innovative may become blurry and indistinct. By rethinking tradition, we can see Homer's methods and concerns in a new light. The Homeric poet is not naive. He must convince his audience that the story is true. He must therefore seem disinterested, unconcerned with promoting anyone's interests. The poet speaks as if everything he says is merely the repetition of old tales. Yet he carefully ensures that even someone who knows only a minimal amount about the ancient heroes can follow and enjoy the performance, while someone who knows many stories will not remember inappropriate ones. Pretending that every detail is already familiar, the poet heightens suspense and implies that ordinary people are the real judges of great heroes.
---Greece & Rome
---Irene J.F. de Jong, Gnomon
At the heart of Christian ethics is the biblical commandment to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself. But what is the meaning of love? Scholars have wrestled with this question since the recording of the Christian gospels, and in recent decades teachers and students of Christian ethics have engaged in vigorous debates about appropriate interpretations and implications of this critical norm.
In Love and Christian Ethics, nearly two dozen leading experts analyze and assess the meaning of love from a wide range of perspectives. Chapters are organized into three areas: influential sources and exponents of Western Christian thought about the ethical significance of love, perennial theoretical questions attending that consideration, and the implications of Christian love for important social realities. Contributors bring a richness of thought and experience to deliver unprecedentedly broad and rigorous analysis of this central tenet of Christian ethics and faith. William Werpehowski provides an afterword on future trajectories for this research. Love and Christian Ethics is sure to become a benchmark resource in the field.
As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns.
Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. In Maya Market Women, S. Ashley Kistler describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, Kistler presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.
"History painting," for many people, conjures up Washington Crossing the Delaware and other paintings of heroic historical events. But history has made its way into considerably more American art than such obvious examples, in the view of Michael Kammen. In three thought-provoking and innovative essays, Kammen ranges from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, from central Europe to the western United States, and from elegant oil painting to folk sculpture to show the transformations of Old World icons of time into New World images of social memory and tradition.
In the first essay, Kammen demonstrates how American artists and artisans modified European emblems of time in response to their New World setting. In the second essay concerning nineteenth-century landscape art, he explores how artists used space to represent the movement of American culture through time. In the final essay, he looks at two distinctively American motifs of collective memory and tradition—old houses and elm trees. Throughout this interdisciplinary study, Kammen draws his examples from well-known and lesser-known artists, as well as from diverse American writers. Over 100 black-and-white illustrations accompany the text.
Of interest to all students of American culture, Meadows of Memory raises intriguing questions about the American paradox of desiring to conquer mutability while yearning for emblems of a (perhaps imagined?) past.
Informal in tone yet serious in content, this book serves as a lively and accessible guide for readers discovering the tradition of political thought that dates back to Socrates and Plato. Because the arguments of the great philosophers are nearly eternal, even those long schooled on politics will find that this book calls on recurring questions about morality and power, justice and war, the risk of democracy, the necessity for evil, the perils of tolerance, and the meaning of happiness. Jeffrey Abramson argues politics with the classic writers and draws the reader into a spirited conversation with contemporary examples that illustrate the enduring nature of political dilemmas. As the discussions deepen, the voices of Abramson’s own teachers, and of the students he has taught, enter into the mix, and the book becomes a tribute not just to the great philosophers but also to the special bond between teacher and student.
As Hegel famously noted, referring to the Roman goddess Minerva, her owl brought back wisdom only at dusk, when it was too late to shine light on actual politics. Abramson reminds us that there are real political problems to confront, and in a book filled with grace and passion, he captures just how exciting serious learning can be.
Three areas of Indian life are analyzed: social stratification, charismatic leadership, and law. The authors question whether objective historical conditions, such as advanced industrialization, urbanization, or literacy, are requisites for political modernization.
This book is one of the first comprehensive studies of Islam as locally understood in the Middle East. Specifically, it is concerned with the prevalent North African belief that certain men, called marabouts, have a special relation to God that enables them to serve as intermediaries and to influence the well-being of their clients and kin. Dale F. Eickelman examines the Moroccan pilgrimage center of Boujad and unpublished Moroccan and French archival materials related to it to show how popular Islam has been modified by its adherents to accommodate new social and economic realities. In the course of his analysis he demonstrates the necessary interrelationship between social history and the anthropological study of symbolism.
Eickelman begins with an outline of the early development of Islam in Morocco, emphasizing the "maraboutic crisis" of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. He also examines the history and social characteristics of the Sherqawi religious lodge, on which the study focuses, in preprotectorate Morocco. In the central portion of the book, he analyzes the economic activities and social institutions of Boujad and its rural hinterland, as well as some basic assumptions the townspeople and tribesmen make about the social order. Finally, there is an intensive discussion of maraboutism as a phenomenon and the changing local character of Islam in Morocco.
In focusing on the "folk" level of Islam, rather than on "high culture" tradition, the author has made possible a more general interpretation of Moroccan society that is in contrast with earlier accounts that postulated a marked discontinuity between tribe and town, past and present.
This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to an ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this collection promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods.
Contributors are T. Christopher Aplin, Tara Browner, Paula Conlon, David E. Draper, Elaine Keillor, Lucy Lafferty, Franziska von Rosen, David Samuels, Laurel Sercombe, and Judith Vander.
The first comprehensive history of Native American tribes in Wisconsin, this thorough and thoroughly readable account follows Wisconsin’s Indian communities—Ojibwa, Potawatomie, Menominee, Winnebago, Oneida, Stockbridge-Munsee, and Ottawa—from the 1600s through 1960. Written for students and general readers, it covers in detail the ways that native communities have striven to shape and maintain their traditions in the face of enormous external pressures.
The author, Robert E. Bieder, begins by describing the Wisconsin region in the 1600s—both the natural environment, with its profound significance for Native American peoples, and the territories of the many tribal cultures throughout the region—and then surveys experiences with French, British, and, finally, American contact. Using native legends and historical and ethnological sources, Bieder describes how the Wisconsin communities adapted first to the influx of Indian groups fleeing the expanding Iroquois Confederacy in eastern America and then to the arrival of fur traders, lumber men, and farmers. Economic shifts and general social forces, he shows, brought about massive adjustments in diet, settlement patterns, politics, and religion, leading to a redefinition of native tradition.
Historical photographs and maps illustrate the text, and an extensive bibliography has many suggestions for further reading.
The Navajo Nation court system is the largest and most established tribal legal system in the world. Since the landmark 1959 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Lee that affirmed tribal court authority over reservation-based claims, the Navajo Nation has been at the vanguard of a far-reaching, transformative jurisprudential movement among Indian tribes in North America and indigenous peoples around the world to retrieve and use traditional values to address contemporary legal issues.
A justice on the Navajo Nation Supreme Court for sixteen years, Justice Raymond D. Austin has been deeply involved in the movement to develop tribal courts and tribal law as effective means of modern self-government. He has written foundational opinions that have established Navajo common law and, throughout his legal career, has recognized the benefit of tribal customs and traditions as tools of restorative justice.
In Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law, Justice Austin considers the history and implications of how the Navajo Nation courts apply foundational Navajo doctrines to modern legal issues. He explains key Navajo foundational concepts like Hózhó (harmony), K'é (peacefulness and solidarity), and K'éí (kinship) both within the Navajo cultural context and, using the case method of legal analysis, as they are adapted and applied by Navajo judges in virtually every important area of legal life in the tribe.
In addition to detailed case studies, Justice Austin provides a broad view of tribal law, documenting the development of tribal courts as important institutions of indigenous self-governance and outlining how other indigenous peoples, both in North America and elsewhere around the world, can draw on traditional precepts to achieve self-determination and self-government, solve community problems, and control their own futures.
In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters: Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man’s-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.
Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka’s sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels, Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka’s: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin’s vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem’s home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum.
Alter’s focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.
In Off Whiteness: Place, Blood, and Tradition in Post-Reconstruction Southern Literature, Izabela Hopkins explores the remaking of whiteness in the Post-Reconstruction South as represented in literary fiction. To focus her study, she discusses the writings of four prominent figures: Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who contributed to discussions of racial and social identity during the post–Civil War South through poetry, journalism, essays, novels, and more.
Off Whiteness draws from both sides of the color line—as well as from both the male and female experience—to examine the ambivalence of Southern whiteness from three particular vantage points: place, ideality, and repeatability. Hopkins develops her analysis across nine chapters divided into three parts. In her exploration of these four writers with differing backgrounds and experiences, she utilizes both their well-known and lesser-known texts to argue against the superficial oversimplification that “whiteness requires blackness to define itself.”
Hopkins’s analysis not only successfully grapples with a wide range of post-structural theories; it also approaches the significance of language and religion with intention and sensitivity, thereby addressing areas that are typically ignored in whiteness studies scholarship. The interdisciplinary nature of Off Whiteness positions it as an engaging text relevant to the work and interests of scholars drawn to American and Southern history, cultural and social studies, literary studies, etymology, and critical race theory.
MacDougall demonstrates that Penobscot legend, linguistics, dance, and oral tradition became foundations of resistance against assimilation into the dominant culture. She thoughtfully and accessibly reconstructs from published, archival, and oral sources the tribe's metaphorical and triumphant Dance of Resistance—founded on spiritual power, reverence for homeland, and commitment to self-determination—from colonial times to the present. A decade of political activism culminated in the precedent-setting 1980 Maine Indian Land Claims settlement. Today the Penobscots run small industries, manage their natural resources, and provide health services, K through 8 education, and social services to the poor and elderly of their community.
Plato’s dialogues are some of the most widely read texts in Western philosophy, and one would imagine them fully mined for elemental material. Yet, in Plato and Tradition, Patricia Fagan reveals the dialogues to be continuing sources of fresh insight. She recovers from them an underappreciated depth of cultural reference that is crucial to understanding their central philosophical concerns. Through careful readings of six dialogues, Fagan demonstrates that Plato’s presentation of Socrates highlights the centrality of tradition in political, erotic, and philosophic life. Plato embeds Socrates’s arguments and ideas in traditional references that would have been familiar to contemporaries of Socrates or Plato but that today’s reader typically passes over. Fagan’s book unpacks this cultural and literary context for the proper and full understanding of the philosophical argument of the Platonic dialogues. She concludes that, as Socrates demonstrates in word and deed, tradition is essential to successful living. But we must take up tradition with a critical openness to questioning its significance and future. Her original and compelling analyses may change the views of many readers who think themselves already well versed in the dialogues.
Polykleitos of Argos is one of the most celebrated sculptors of classical Greece. This richly illustrated volume of superb essays by art historians, classical scholars, and archaeologists discusses Polykleitos’ life and influence, his intellectual and cultural milieu, and his best-known work—the bronze Doryphoros, or “Spear-Bearer.”
Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition displays an impressive range of approaches–from commentary on the artistic and philosophical antecedents that influenced Polykleitos’ own aesthetic to the role of contemporary Greek anatomical knowledge in his representation of the human form. The essays offer extended analysis of his work as well as reflections of his style in sculpture, paintings, coins, and other art in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. This volume also contains a thorough discussion of Polykleitos’ original bronze Doryphoros, its pose, its relation to other spear-bearer sculptures, and the fine Roman marble copy of it now at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
A major economic industry among American Indian tribes is the public promotion and display of aspects of their cultural heritage in a wide range of tourist venues. Few do it better than the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, whose homeland is the Qualla Boundary of North Carolina. Through extensive research into the work of other scholars dating back to the late 1800s, and interviews with a wide range of contemporary Cherokees, Beard-Moose presents the two faces of the Cherokee people. One is the public face that populates the powwows, dramatic presentations, museums, and myriad roadside craft locations. The other is the private face whose homecoming, Indian fairs, traditions, belief system, community strength, and cultural heritage are threatened by the very activities that put food on their tables. Constructing an ethnohistory of tourism and comparing the experiences of the Cherokee with the Florida Seminoles and Southwestern tribes, this work brings into sharp focus the fine line between promoting and selling Indian culture.
"This is a much-needed recalibration, as professional organizations and practitioners across genres of public history struggle to diversify their own ranks and to bring contemporary activists into the fold." — Catherine Gudis, University of California, Riverside.
"Taken all together, the articles in this volume highlight the persistent threads of justice work that has characterized the multifaceted history of public history as well as the challenges faced in doing that work."—Patricia Mooney-Melvin, The Public Historian
A Classic of Blues Literature inductee into the Blues Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame
Drawing on archives and interviews with musicians, Red River Blues remains an acclaimed work of blues scholarship. Bruce Bastin traces the origins of the music to the turn of the twentieth century, when African Americans rejected slave songs, worksongs, and minstrel music in favor of a potent new vehicle for secular musical expression. Bastin looks at the blues' early emerging popularity and its spread via the Great Migration, delves into a wealth of field recordings, and looks at the careers of Brownie McGhee, Blind Boy Fuller, Curly Weaver, Sonny Terry, and many other foundational artists.
After explaining how and why women have been excluded from the rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn provides the opportunity for Sappho, Aspasia, Diotima, Hortensia, Fulvia, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret More Roper, Anne Askew, and Elizabeth I to speak with equal authority and as eloquently as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine. Her aim is nothing less than regendering and changing forever the history of rhetoric.
To that end, Glenn locates women’s contributions to and participation in the rhetorical tradition and writes them into an expanded, inclusive tradition. She regenders the tradition by designating those terms of identity that have promoted and supported men’s control of public, persuasive discourse—the culturally constructed social relations between, the appropriate roles for, and the subjective identities of women and men.
Glenn is the first scholar to contextualize, analyze, and follow the migration of women’s rhetorical accomplishments systematically. To locate these women, she follows the migration of the Western intellectual tradition from its inception in classical antiquity and its confrontation with and ultimate appropriation by evangelical Christianity to its force in the medieval Church and in Tudor arts and politics.
Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea.
Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory.
This generously illustrated book offers an extensive analysis of Tintoretto’s greatest paintings, charting his life and work in the context of Venetian art and the culture of the Cinquecento. Tom Nichols shows that Tintoretto was an extraordinarily innovative artist who created a new manner of painting, which, for all of its originality and sophistication, was still able to appeal to the shared emotions of the widest possible audience. This compact, pocket edition features sixteen additional illustrations and a new afterword by the author, and it will continue to be one of the definitive treatments of this once grossly overlooked master.
This generously illustrated book offers a long-overdue re-evaluation of Tintoretto. Tom Nichols charts the artist's life and work in the context of Venetian art and the culture of the Cinquecento. He shows how the artist created a new manner of painting, which for all its originality and sophistication made its first appeal to the shared emotions of the widest-possible viewing audience. The book deals extensively with Tintoretto's greatest works, including the paintings at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice.
"Shils is a man of fabled learning, whose mind purrs powerfully like the moth at dusk. I hesitate to use the word conservative of him because it misses the central concern of his work, which is not conservatism, but the conservation of those human resources and achievements which are richest, and matter most."—David A. Martin, Times Literary Supplement
"Tradition is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject that encompasses the totality of tradition in all its multifaceted variables and functions. . . . It is a landmark analytical and theoretical sociological study that not only fills a need but also provides a basic model and impetus for further research."—H. Leon Abrams Jr., Sociology
Our emerging world system is bringing the great traditions and cultures it has spawned into ever more intimate and dangerous contact. Langan argues that we must struggle toward a unity of discourse respectful of genuine experiences of varying civilizations if we are to live peacefully on one planet.
Rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century in Coptic and Ethiopic versions, the Epistle of the Apostles (Epistula Apostolorum) is a "revelation dialogue," in which the risen Jesus converses with his disciples before his ascension and delivers instructions for strengthening the young church. In the first major study in English of this ancient document, Julian V. Hills probes its remarkable witness to the traditions that circulated in Jesus' name in the second century.
Hills tackles the document's literary framework, collecting and assessing signals to its composition. In detailed analyses of passages about Jesus' miracles, the first appearance of the risen Lord, the second advent, and the commissioning of the Apostles, Hills shows how older traditions were reshaped and interpreted according to the distinctive communal situation and theological vision of the author.
In Hills's careful and insightful work, scholars and students of early Christianity will find clues to the elusive reality of Christianity in the second century. This ancient Epistle can now become a prominent conversation partner among many newly accessible early post-resurrection traditions.
This expanded edition of the out-of-print original, published in 1990, includes a new preface and bibliography.
Explore the opportunities and challenges of Septuagint studies
Recent research into the Septuagint has revealed numerous examples of modifications of the meaning of the Hebrew text in the course of its translation into Greek. This collection of essays by one of the leading scholars on the Septuagint shows how complex the translation of individual books was, provides reasons for differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, and paves the way for a theology of the Septuagint. Articles introduce the field of Septuagint studies, the problem of the Letter of Aristeas, and the Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism.
Features:
- A methodological discussion of whether and how a theology of the Septuagint can be written
- Essays introducing the field of Septuagint studies and its Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism
- Fifteen English and German essays covering twenty-five years of Septuagint research
Tradition and Modernity focuses on how Christians and Muslims connect their traditions to modernity, looking especially at understandings of history, changing patterns of authority, and approaches to freedom. The volume includes a selection of relevant texts from 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, from John Henry Newman to Tariq Ramadan, accompanied by illuminating commentaries.
Emphasizing how tradition adapts, survives, thrives, and either mutates or remains stable in today’s modern world, the contributors pay specific attention to how traditions now resist or expedite dissemination and adoption by individuals and communities. This complex and intimate portrayal of tradition in the twenty-first century offers a comprehensive overview of the folkloristic and popular conceptualizations of tradition from the past to present and presents a thoughtful assessment and projection of how “tradition” will fare in years to come. The book will be useful to advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in folklore and will contribute significantly to the scholarly literature on tradition within the folklore discipline.
Additional Contributors: Simon Bronner, Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, Merrill Kaplan, Lynne S. McNeill, Elliott Oring, Casey R. Schmitt, and Tok Thompson
Relations between the Chosŏn and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the “traditional” Chinese ”tribute system.” In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Chosŏn Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists. Between 1850 and 1910, the Qing attempted to defend its informal empire in Korea by intervening directly, not only to preserve its geopolitical position but also to promote its commercial interests. And it utilized the technology of empire—treaties, international law, the telegraph, steamships, and gunboats.
Although the transformation of Qing–Chosŏn diplomacy was based on modern imperialism, this work argues that it is more accurate to describe the dramatic shift in relations in terms of flexible adaptation by one of the world’s major empires in response to new challenges. Moreover, the new modes of Qing imperialism were a hybrid of East Asian and Western mechanisms and institutions. Through these means, the Qing Empire played a fundamental role in Korea’s integration into regional and global political and economic systems.
In Unsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye examine how tradition and gender come together to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study.
Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year’s celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more.
In Unsettling Assumptions, folkloric forms express but also counteract negative aspects of culture like misogyny, homophobia, and racism. But expressive culture also emerges as fundamental to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity and the construction and negotiation of power.
During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life.
With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.
Incorporating a nuanced understanding of visual culture into his analysis, Overmyer-Velázquez shows how ideas of modernity figured in Oaxacans’ ideologies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion and how they were expressed in Oaxaca City’s streets, plazas, buildings, newspapers, and public rituals. He pays particular attention to the roles of national and regional elites, the Catholic church, and popular groups—such as Oaxaca City’s madams and prostitutes—in shaping the discourses and practices of modernity. At the same time, he illuminates the dynamic interplay between these groups. Ultimately, this well-illustrated history provides insight into provincial life in pre-Revolutionary Mexico and challenges any easy distinctions between the center and the periphery or modernity and tradition.
Weavers of Tradition and Beauty presents new information on contemporary Native American basketry of the Great Basin, largely from the viewpoint of the weavers themselves. In collecting their stories, Kathleen Curtis and Mary Lee Fulkerson traveled throughout Nevada, never dreaming their odyssey over back-roads and to reservations would stretch into years. Finding a deep connection to the people of the sage, the authors accompanied the weavers as they gathered and prepared their special willow, dyed the bracken fern root, and wove their baskets. Baskets—and the people who weave them—have always been revered and honored by Native Americans. Fulkerson and Curtis depict, in text and full color and black and white photographs, how their art prevails—even over adverse environmental, social, and economic conditions. Today, contemporary weavers continue their work by creating baskets in the manner of their ancestors. Teaching their children and grandchildren how to weave baskets, these artisans carry on a long and strong tradition. By documenting the basketry of Nevada's native people, the authors make a significant contribution in preserving this ancient and beautiful craft. Foreword by Catherine S. Fowler.
Based upon nearly three decades of fieldwork, from 1983 to 2010, The Worlds of Russian Rural Women follows three generations of Russian women and shows how they alternately preserve, discard, and rework the cultural traditions of their forebears to suit changing needs and self-conceptions. In a major contribution to the study of folklore, Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva document the ways that women’s tales of traditional practices associated with marriage, childbirth, and death reflect both upholding and transgression of social norms. Their romance songs, satirical ditties, and healing and harmful magic reveal the complexity of power relations in the Russian villages.
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