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Ethnics, Ktetics, and Topics: the Grammatical Terminology

P. M. Fraser

in Greek Ethnic Terminology

An analysis of the civic and regional terminology of Greek communal life, and especially the use of the term τὸ ἐθνικόν, is an essential preliminary to understanding how the Greeks considered ... More

An analysis of the civic and regional terminology of Greek communal life, and especially the use of the term τὸ ἐθνικόν, is an essential preliminary to understanding how the Greeks considered national and civic identity once the regular framework of polis-life was established. With the development of grammatical and linguistic analysis, words denoting membership of a community were called ἐθνικά, the nominal adjectival form which we find regularly in Stephanus of Byzantium and in lexica: τὸ ἐθνικόν (ὁ) δεῖνα. The history of the term formed a distinct branch of the traditional studies of the grammarians and lexicographers. This chapter is concerned with the ethnic significance of the adjective as a term used to denote nationality or origin (in the Greek sense), but inevitably it takes account of other meanings of the term when necessary.Less

Peter Grimes: The Development of a Hero (1986)

Willard Spiegelman

in Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays

This chapter criticizes English composer Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes. It examines how audiences viewed and partly misunderstood the character of Peter Grimes and discusses the problems ... More

This chapter criticizes English composer Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes. It examines how audiences viewed and partly misunderstood the character of Peter Grimes and discusses the problems concerning the recreation of a literary character in another medium and the dilemma of making retrospective connections along a literary lineage. It suggests that Peter Grimes' embedding of his identity in the life of the community is similar to Britten's own communal life which demonstrates a commitment to the social relationships upon which all identity depends.Less

In a Strange Ocean: Imagining Futures with Others

Teresa Shewry

in Hope At Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature

This chapter develops a story about hope that takes form through the connections between human and nonhuman beings, specifically fish, against the backdrop of the rapid loss of fish through excesses ... More

This chapter develops a story about hope that takes form through the connections between human and nonhuman beings, specifically fish, against the backdrop of the rapid loss of fish through excesses in fishing in a nineteenth century penal colony. The chapter moves to an archipelago at the border of the Pacific Ocean, Tasmania, and to Australian writer Richard Flanagan’s novels Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001) and The Unknown Terrorist (2006). In reading these novels, I come to understand hope as a relation with the present world and future that is accessible only to particular characters and yet that always exists within a broader ecology involving intimacies between people, fish, and the ocean. I reflect on the catastrophic material realities that sometimes come to be apprehended in terms of hope, including empire, incarceration, and fishing. Although such realities may evoke a future involving survival for some, they mean devastation for others. In Flanagan’s writings, people’s passionate interactions with each other and with fish spark new hopes, based on struggles for a communal life better defined by the expressions of nonhuman beings.Less

Sainthood-towards-Death: Magnus

Timothy C. Baker

in George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community

This chapter takes a look at Magnus, Brown's central work. It sheds some light on the way Brown imagines sacrifice as the centre of communal life. It studies Brown's rebalancing of the tension ... More

This chapter takes a look at Magnus, Brown's central work. It sheds some light on the way Brown imagines sacrifice as the centre of communal life. It studies Brown's rebalancing of the tension between spiritual and historical signification and his use of the framework of Magnus's life to study the relationship between individuals and the community. It examines the three primary narratives of the life and death of Magnus, along with the dangers of hagiography that Brown faced during his first major attempt at writing the Magnus narrative. It notes that the novel is a blend of modern and medieval styles, and looks at the nature of sacrifice and the ways Brown treats the moment of death.Less

Emancipation and Its Aftershocks: The Reorganization of Moravian Jewry

in Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation

The Revolution of 1848 ushered Jewish emancipation, which required the dissolution of autonomous Jewish communities. This brought new challenges to Christian-Jewish relations and placed new strains ... More

The Revolution of 1848 ushered Jewish emancipation, which required the dissolution of autonomous Jewish communities. This brought new challenges to Christian-Jewish relations and placed new strains on the institutions of Jewish communal life. This chapter focuses on the promulgation of the Provincial Township Law, which treated Jews as equal individuals in the emerging civil state. It then examines the effects of the revolution on Jewish communal life, focusing on the financial crisis that took place in 1848 to 1850. Finally, the chapter discusses the reorganization of Moravia's Jewish communities.Less

Against the “Attack on Linking”: Rearticulating the “Jewish Intellectual” for Today

Martin Land

in Jews and the Ends of Theory

This chapter begins by tracing the assertions that link the predominance of Jews in critical discourses to Jewish marginality to a 1919 essay by Thorstein Veblen. Veblen does not argue that ... More

This chapter begins by tracing the assertions that link the predominance of Jews in critical discourses to Jewish marginality to a 1919 essay by Thorstein Veblen. Veblen does not argue that creativity and innovation thrive on the margins but, rather, that marginal groups like the Jews are better able than their European contemporaries to hold to a position of detachment and alienation from tradition and received wisdom, transforming their marginality into a critical perspective from which they are able to question, as it were, both themselves and the European social and economic systems. Recent critics of Veblen have pointed at his blindness toward the cultural and economic characteristics of Jewish communal life. In their critique, however, they take the disproportionate success of American Jews as their prime measure, supplanting Veblen's intellectual value with monetary value. From this perspective, Jews are no longer marginal but, on the contrary, central to the ever-expanding social order of capital.Less

The Cold War: A Community Divided

David H. Weinberg

in Recovering a Voice: West European Jewry After the Holocaust

This chapter focuses on the Cold War, which split both Europe and its Jews into two camps. The Cold War imposed new barriers, both literally and figuratively. For the Jews of western Europe in ... More

This chapter focuses on the Cold War, which split both Europe and its Jews into two camps. The Cold War imposed new barriers, both literally and figuratively. For the Jews of western Europe in particular, Soviet and American threats of unleashing nuclear missiles raised the prospect of a posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler over his ideological and ‘racial’ enemies. Divisions also arose in the communities themselves, reviving political debates from the interwar period that threatened to undo the fragile unity that leaders had attempted to forge after 1945. Yet rising East–West tensions did not totally paralyse west European Jewish communal life. Despite the formidable obstacles, both non-communist left-wing elements in the European Section of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and mainstream leaders in western Europe worked diligently to steer a middle path between the demands of local political militants and leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States.Less

Mosaic or cracked vase? Diversity and community life

Tom Clark, Robert D. Putnam, and Edward Fieldhouse

in The Age of Obama: The Changing Place of Minorities in British and American Society

This chapter assesses whether diversity has a tendency to lead to more conflict or to friendly contact in Britain and the United States, evaluates the effect of diversity for whites and for ... More

This chapter assesses whether diversity has a tendency to lead to more conflict or to friendly contact in Britain and the United States, evaluates the effect of diversity for whites and for minorities, and studies the connection between diversity in a locality and how community-minded and communally active its citizens are. It also discusses communal life in both countries and measures the combined effect of the potential channels, which could weaken or strengthen community life.Less

Towards the Future: Religious, Educational, and Cultural Reconstruction

David H. Weinberg

in Recovering a Voice: West European Jewry After the Holocaust

This chapter assesses how the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands dealt with the unprecedented religious, educational, and cultural needs of their diverse constituents. The sharp increase in ... More

This chapter assesses how the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands dealt with the unprecedented religious, educational, and cultural needs of their diverse constituents. The sharp increase in the number of alienated and unaffiliated Jews was a source of deep concern to rabbis and religious educators. In response, Orthodox institutions initiated liturgical changes that they hoped would make religious services more attractive. Liberal Judaism also made new inroads. Many young Jews had lived through the war years without any access to Jewish learning or Jewish communal life. In addressing the needs of this ‘lost’ generation, local Jewish educators not only had to develop innovative pedagogical techniques, such as informal classes, public lectures and discussion groups, and the use of radio, television, and film but also had to find ways of reintegrating young people into Jewish and general society. Thanks to funds received from the Claims Conference in the early 1950s and with the assistance of teachers and curricula supplied by American and Israeli agencies, Jewish pedagogues, rabbis, and administrators in western Europe not only formulated creative strategies to educate children, but also set about training new administrators, spiritual leaders, and schoolteachers.Less

Introduction

Jean-François Pradeau

in Plato and the City: A New Introduction to Plato's Political Thought

This chapter provides the background to Plato's political philosophy, and states that the backbone of the Platonic political philosophy lies in speculative politics. It argues that politics need ... More

This chapter provides the background to Plato's political philosophy, and states that the backbone of the Platonic political philosophy lies in speculative politics. It argues that politics need speculation, as its analysis depends on what it means to live in a communal life, otherwise politics will be reduced to a life of conflict and power struggles. Plato's political philosophy also focuses upon the existence of cities, as he believes that humanity needs to belong in the same community, a single city united by the rule of law and language.Less

Leon Botstein: I'm Tone-Deaf to Belief

Arthur J. Magida

in Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage

Agnosticism establishes an affiliation to religion, predominantly curious in nature, and at times borders on inquisitiveness. It is this link that prevents a collapse into atheism, but the actual ... More

Agnosticism establishes an affiliation to religion, predominantly curious in nature, and at times borders on inquisitiveness. It is this link that prevents a collapse into atheism, but the actual belief is absent in terms of its salient features. Humbling of the self to an assumed highest authority is largely absent. This chapter charts elements that sustain in a threadbare religious connection. The subject of inquiry is of Jewish descent. Most elements that characterize such kinds of affiliation are largely symbolic in nature and often practiced as parts of communal life, components of communal legacies. Modus operandi of the rituals chart the usual practices, most of which turn out to be only one-time formalities, never ever to be remembered in detail, in terms of their intricacies, reflecting the instrumental value of religion for individuals who ascribe a relative rather than absolute value to it.Less

Recovering the porous individual

Brian Sudlow

in Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914

The conditions of individual secularisation posed two sets of moral problems for believers in France and England at that time. The first concerns the mapping out of human behaviour if belief in God ... More

The conditions of individual secularisation posed two sets of moral problems for believers in France and England at that time. The first concerns the mapping out of human behaviour if belief in God has become deistic or has collapsed into atheism. The second concerns the alternative moral criteria to counter the anthropocentrism transmitted by individual secularisation. These two sets of problems provide vital perspectives from which to read French and English Catholic literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many French and English Catholic writers depict the individual's relationship to God not as amorphous or anthropocentric but as circumscribed by grace (God's help) and virtue in a theocentric collaboration, which leads to a form of communal life between God and the human person. This chapter shows that religious porosity must itself be buffered in some way against the influence of secular society.Less

The “People from Downstream”: The Chambira Basin and Urarina Society

Bartholomew Dean

in Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia

This chapter discusses an introduction to the Chambira Basin, which is the ancestral “homelands” of the Urarina, the so-called people from downstream. It presents geographical and ecological ... More

This chapter discusses an introduction to the Chambira Basin, which is the ancestral “homelands” of the Urarina, the so-called people from downstream. It presents geographical and ecological contextualizations, which are followed by a summary of the major contours of Urarina social organization and a characterization of the daily rounds of communal life. It also addresses the formation of regional and ethnic identities by attending to the importance of the ribereño cultural identities.Less

Ebenezer: Spirituality and Identity

Moses O. Biney

in From Africa to America: Religion and Adaptation among Ghanaian Immigrants in New York

This chapter examines the nature of spirituality in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY). It also assesses how the congregation's spirituality fosters communality and helps maintain ... More

This chapter examines the nature of spirituality in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY). It also assesses how the congregation's spirituality fosters communality and helps maintain or reshape its identity by examining some of the theological and ethical beliefs which underpin the church's communal life and how these are expressed. It shows that the church's spirituality is a tapestry crafted from aspects of Ghanaian cultural values, biblical interpretation, interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary theological beliefs and practices inherited through the Basel, Scottish, and Moravian missionaries, and the realities of the congregants' lives as immigrants in the United States of America. This spirituality is what currently defines, and in many ways provides authority for moral action and sanction in the community life of the PCGNY. On the other hand, this spirituality is given expression to and is also shaped by the church's community life.Less

From the Chmielnicki Persecutions of 1648–1649 Until the Peace of Andruszow

in The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

This chapter traces the history of the growth and development of the Jewish community in Pinsk from the Chmielnicki persecutions of 1648–1649 until the Peace of Andruszow. Topics discussed include ... More

This chapter traces the history of the growth and development of the Jewish community in Pinsk from the Chmielnicki persecutions of 1648–1649 until the Peace of Andruszow. Topics discussed include the 1648–1649 persecutions in Pinsk; the Jews of Pinsk during the 1648–1649 persecutions; loss of life; renewal and rehabilitation of communal life; Pinsk during the Polish–Muscovite War (1655–1659); the capture of Pinsk by Mikhail Kurhan; the second Muscovite occupation; and restoration of Polish rule 1660–1667.Less

Social Worlds

Jared Ross Hardesty

in Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston

This chapter examines how Afro-Bostonians built strong and resilient social worlds. They made friends and acquaintances with similarly unfree people of all races, and fought vociferously to protect ... More

This chapter examines how Afro-Bostonians built strong and resilient social worlds. They made friends and acquaintances with similarly unfree people of all races, and fought vociferously to protect their marriages and families. They built cross-class, cross-racial, and cross-gender networks both within their masters’ households and in Boston at large. Although marriage between whites and blacks was expressly forbidden, slaves intermarried with each other, free blacks, and Native Americans, while oftentimes illicitly cohabitating with white partners. Moving away from classifying black communities as racially exclusive, this chapter argues their social reality was much more fluid and dynamic.Less