McLuhan’s status as the patriarch of Canadian media studies is explored as a troublesome nomological principle in light of Derrida’s Archive Fever. The trouble with archives, for Derrida, is the trouble of the original source. Linking McLuhan’s exploration of typographical and electronic communication systems to Derrida’s deconstruction of the archive as a technology of exteriorization, this paper investigates the nature of subjectivity and objectivity in Western epistemology. Can the archive, conceived of as a medium, allow for an escape from the (...) specters of the past? Derrida’s proposed ‘archive of the future’ is theorized in terms of McLuhan’s sense of acoustic space and Foucault’s non-subjective discourse, and as a spatial and cultural construct reflecting the technological uncertainty in an age of mixed-media. (shrink)

As self-conscious curators and critics of moral history, the early Confucians are relevant to the contemporary debate over the fate of memorials dedicated to morally flawed individuals. They provide us with a pragmatic justification that is distinct from those utilized in the current debate, and in many respects superior to the alternatives. In addition to supplying this curative philosophic resource, the early Confucian practices of ancestral memorialization suggest preventative measures we might adopt to minimize the chances of establishing divisive (...) and oppressive memorials in the future. (shrink)

As self-conscious curators and critics of moral history, the early Confucians are relevant to the contemporary debate over the fate of memorials dedicated to morally flawed individuals. They provide us with a pragmatic justification that is distinct from those utilized in the current debate, and in many respects superior to the alternatives. In addition to supplying this curative philosophic resource, the early Confucian practices of ancestral memorialization suggest preventative measures we might adopt to minimize the chances of establishing divisive (...) and oppressive memorials in the future. (shrink)

The problem of the construction of memory that faces the Afro-Brazilian population presents itself as more than a simple need for an identity connected to an original past, but in addition as essential, because for historical reasons their social reality has not yet reached the end of its struggle. The African composition of Brazilian culture is based on several sources of many origins peculiar to different African peoples. The memory people have of Africa is vague, generic, indefinite. Though (...) the lost ancestral past is multi-ethnic, multicultural Africa, the retrievable past is the one Brazil has succeeded in integrating into the construction of a new civilization: a past that can only be re-invented, a re-created memory. (shrink)

According to the evolutionary hypothesis of Silverman and Eals (1992, Sex differences in spatial abilities: Evolutionary theory and data. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 533–549). Oxford: Oxford University Press), women evolutionary hypothesis, women surpass men in object location memory as a result of a sexual division in foraging activities among early humans. After surveying the main anthropological information on ancestral sex-related foraging, we (...) review the evidence on how robust women’s advantage in object location memory is. This leads us to suggest that the functional understanding of this type of memory would benefit from comparing men and women in carefully designed and ecologically meaningful cognitive contexts involving, for instance, incidental versus intentional settings that call for either the absolute or relative encoding of the locations of common versus uncommon objects. (shrink)

La cultura del agua debe ser vinculada de forma especial a las manifestaciones del patrimonio cultural intangible de los pueblos, como las tradiciones orales o escritas, la simbología o los rituales, que conforman lo que llamamos los Imaginarios del Agua. Estos deben ser analizados y deconstruidos a la luz de los nuevos paradigmas, como la hermenéutica y la ecocrítica. De este modo, la mitografía ayuda a perfilar el significado profundo de la cultura del agua ante las nuevas demandas medioambientales, educativas (...) y culturales del siglo XXI, en un contexto donde el agua ya no es solo un recurso estratégico, sino un bien cultural ligado al desarrollo local y a las políticas de sostenibilidad. Por ello, al conocer las tradiciones ancestrales y los imaginarios en torno al agua, y al sensibilizar a los alumnos con los valores plurales de estas manifestaciones culturales --que siempre van encaminados al respeto y al conocimiento del patrimonio natural y cultural--, contribuimos de forma decisiva a la gobernanza del agua y a la gestión sostenible y responsable de los recursos hídricos, pues sin duda el principal problema de la sostenibilidad será la educación de los ciudadanos. Water culture must be linked in a special way to expressions of intangible cultural heritage of peoples, such as oral or written traditions, symbols or rituals that make up what we call the imaginary water. They must be analyzed and deconstructed in the light of the new paradigms, such as hermeneutics and the ecocriticism. Thus, mythography helps shape the profound meaning of the culture of the water at the new environmental, educational and cultural demands of the 21st century, in a context where the water is not only a strategic resource but a cultural property linked to local development and sustainability policies. Therefore, to know the ancestral traditions and imaginaries in connection to water, and to educate students with the plural values of these cultural manifestations, --which always aimed to respect and knowledge of the natural and cultural heritage-- we contribute decisively to the governance of the water and the sustainable and responsible management of water resources then no doubt the main problem of sustainability will be the education of citizens. (shrink)

The northern Mexican Ralámuli people consider plants to be their kin. First‐ and secondhand ethnographies bring forth fundamental issues that convey the possibility of communicating with plants. For example, the notion of an interconnected world has to do with roots, with threads, and with thought or nátali (consciousness, remembrance, ancestral memory), all of which embrace the life path. This path also refers to that used by healers, who in their dreams and through their chants communicate with sacred plants. (...) This article also deepens the understanding of textiles—originally made from vegetal fibers and considering that in Ralámuli origin stories the Earth was woven—and their iconography, which also appears in healing contexts, to see if there is a relationship between specific motifs and the information that, via dreams and chants, the plants are delivering. (shrink)

When pandemics hit communities, women are bound to suffer as most of the responsibilities of ensuring food security lie on them. This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the role that church-going women play in food provision. The qualitative study used interviews and focus group discussions to examine the toll of the pandemic-induced restrictions, especially with regard to their disruption of activities that ensure the provision of food for the family. They sought to identify how an environment (...) as restrictive as the one that was imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic affects those largely responsible for food provision in urban Marondera – the women, in this case. The focus was extended to factor in how disasters and pandemics affect women and detract from their normative food procurement and provision roles in marginal societies and how these effects can be mitigated to allow women to carry on with their roles even in restrictive environments. This research was motivated by the recent COVID-19-imposed regulations that restricted the movement of people, restrictions that have only recently been relaxed and (in some cases) removed. We also sought to establish how gender roles are played out, together with whether they are exacerbated by pandemics, and in what ways these pandemics result in higher workloads on women. By utilising the Africana womanist theory, the study analysed women roles in food provision and food security in their societies within the restrictive environments of the pandemics.Contribution: This study concluded that there are gender inequalities that are exacerbated by these pandemics that result in higher workloads for women. It foregrounded how existing gender inequalities were exacerbated by the pandemic, resulting in higher workloads on women. It therefore recommended that women should form empowerment groups to help focus attention on food provision to mitigate challenges women face in this role. Finally, we averred that there ought to be consultation and participation of women on issues to do with pandemics to allow for their full and productive participation in critical roles of providing food. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The art of Simon Finn has always had a markedly temporal dynamic. Vast structures built and annihilated again and again across different media, their fragmentation across space and time simultaneously methodical and darkly chaotic. Roiling waters and eldritch surfaces held captive in their unrest. Finn’s works render cycles of construction and disintegration, of stasis and motion, in ways that shed light upon the underlying structures of our experience of time while shattering simplistic notions of linearity. This is nowhere more apparent (...) than in Instability, through which Finn allows us to explore the intertwining of personal and historical time, ancestral memory and radical futurity, artefactual form and temporal function. (shrink)

In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver (...) and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity. Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future. (shrink)

In humans, conscious perception and cognition depends upon the thalamocortical complex, which supports perception, explicit cognition, memory, language, planning, and strategic control. When parts of the T-C system are damaged or stimulated, corresponding effects are found on conscious contents and state, as assessed by reliable reports. In contrast, large regions like cerebellum and basal ganglia can be damaged without affecting conscious cognition directly. Functional brain recordings also show robust activity differences in cortex between experimentally matched conscious and unconscious events. (...) This basic anatomy and physiology is highly conserved in mammals and perhaps ancestral reptiles. While language is absent in other species, homologies in perception, memory, and motor cortex suggest that consciousness of one kind or another may be biologically fundamental and phylogenetically ancient. In humans we infer subjective experiences from behavioral and brain evidence. This evidence is quite similar in other mammals and perhaps some non-mammalian species. On the weight of the biological evidence, therefore, subjectivity may be conserved in species with human-like brains and behavior. (shrink)

The history of organizations and collectives is something alive. It is a network of memories, actions, collaborations, dreams, encounters, and disconnections that live within each of its members. The EcoDialogue Center is an academic space of the University of Veracruz for promoting dialogue between disciplines. In this article we are presenting the stories, both personal and collective, and the values and ideals that create our Center. We are using this opportunity to reflect on the cultural, geographical, emotional, intellectual, and societal (...) conditions that have allowed this innovative process within the rules and customs of a university. (shrink)

The genetic code appeared on Earth with the first cells. The codes of cultural evolution arrived almost four billion years later. These are the only codes that are recognized by modern biology. In this book, however, Marcello Barbieri explains that there are many more organic codes in nature, and their appearance not only took place throughout the history of life but marked the major steps of that history. A code establishes a correspondence between two independent 'worlds', and the codemaker is (...) a third party between those 'worlds'. Therefore the cell can be thought of as a trinity of genotype, phenotype and ribotype. The ancestral ribotypes were the agents which gave rise to the first cells. The book goes on to explain how organic codes and organic memories can be used to shed new light on the problems encountered in cell signalling, epigenesis, embryonic development, and the evolution of language. (shrink)

The isocortex is a distinctive feature of mammalian brains, which has no clear counterpart in the cerebral hemispheres of other amniotes. This paper speculates on the evolutionary processes giving rise to the isocortex. As a first step, we intend to identify what structure may be ancestral to the isocortex in the reptilian brain. Then, it is necessary to account for the transformations (developmental, connectional, and functional) of this ancestral structure, which resulted in the origin of the isocortex. One (...) long-held perspective argues that part of the isocortex derives from the ventral pallium of reptiles, whereas another view proposes that the isocortex originated mostly from the dorsal pallium. We consider that, at this point, evidence tends to favor correspondence of the isocortex with the dorsal cortex of reptiles. In any case, the isocortex may have originated partly as a consequence of an overall “dorsalizing” effect (that is, an expansion of the territories expressing dorsal-specific genes) during pallial development. Furthermore, expansion of the dorsal pallium may have been driven by selective pressures favoring the development of associative networks between the dorsal cortex, the olfactory cortex, and the hippocampus, which participated in spatial or episodic memory in the early mammals. In this context, sensory projections that in reptiles end in the ventral pallium, are observed to terminate in the isocortex (dorsal pallium) of mammals, perhaps owing to their participation in these associative networks. Key Words: basolateral amygdala; claustrum; Emx-1; endopiriform nucleus; dorsal cortex; dorsal ventricular ridge; hippocampus; homology; olfactory cortex; Pax-6; ventral pallium. (shrink)

The article purports to examine the risk to cultural identity amongst an Indian community in South Africa using a single case study methodology. A case study approach was followed, using the qualitative research methodology, whereby not only the how, but also adding focus on the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, experiences and motivations that people have underlie their behaviour. The year 1960 marked the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the Indians to the Colony of Natal, hence the study considers the period (...) 1895 to 1960. Identifying with a particular culture allows members of that community to experience feelings of belonging and security. Moving across continents, Indian indentured sugar plantation labourers came to the Colony of Natal from 1860 until 1911 bringing with them their cultural identity. The risk to cultural identity is a significant contributor to an individual’s well-being. Cultural identity may be viewed as a sense of belonging based on one’s ancestry, rituals, religion, traditions, values and even language. When they were transported during the concurrent time of colonisation and indenture, they became displaced and thus an emotional threat to their well-being, belonging and security was created and simultaneously experienced. This threat compromised their cultural identity. This risk to cultural identity is investigated in the narrative of an Indian female national matriarch, Mrs Takurine Mahesh Singh who arrived in the Colony in 1895 and passed away in 1959. A risk to cultural identity existed, but the Indian community in South Africa did not experience deculturalisation. They were able to practise their ancestral culture without losing their identity. This is one of the findings and it concludes the abstract.Contribution: The study of identity, identity diffusion, identity loss is a very important aspect to study, especially for displaced communities who suffer not only alienation from their mother country, but also losing contact and cultures as a result of displacement. This article provides insight on the risk to cultural identity in Natal between 1895 and 1960. In terms of the findings, cultural identity is an important contributor to well-being. Identifying with a particular culture gave the matriarch a feeling of belonging and security. It also provides access to social and other networks which provide support and shared strength, values and aspirations. Although a product of oral history, for this research, the article could not be supported by other historical materials in an attempt at balancing the views as scholars have not explored the widowed Indian nationals who have remained in the Colony after indenture. This article should not be viewed simplistically as a retelling of Mrs Singh’s life story, but rather a narrative based on reflective memories that pieced together her departure from India under the political system of indenture, living and surviving as a widow under harsh laws and having multiple identities. The narrative oral history approach combined with a qualitative research methodology does not focus on analysis and interpretation but rather brings to the fore, the opportunity for further exploratory studies where the question ‘why’ will be answered. (shrink)

This ground-breaking study conveys the thrill and moral power of the ancient Roman story-world and its ancestral tales of bloody heroism. Its account of 'exemplary ethics' explores how and what Romans learnt from these moral exempla, arguing that they disseminated widely not only core values such as courage and loyalty, but also key ethical debates and controversies which are still relevant for us today. Exemplary ethics encouraged controversial thinking, creative imitation, and a critical perspective on moral issues, and it (...) plays an important role in Western philosophical thought. The model of exemplary ethics developed here is based on a comprehensive survey of Latin literature, and its innovative approach also synthesizes methodologies from disciplines such as contemporary philosophy, educational theory, and cultural memory studies. It offers a new and robust framework for the study of Roman exempla that will also be valuable for the study of moral exempla in other settings. (shrink)

The world, as a unifying nexus of significance, is inherently precarious and constitutively destined toward its own unraveling. Our fascination with a future end of the world masks our realization that the world as common and unified totality is already disintegrating. What remains after the end of the world is also what pre-cedes it, the geomaterial elements, which condition the world without being reducible to things within it. Through our participation in elemental materiality, we encounter the abyssal vertigo of deep (...) time as an anachronistic rupture of lived and historical time. The geological memory of stone situates it at the threshold of world and non-world, while our liability to an immemorial prehistory situates us at the intersection of incommensurable durations, those of the ancestral past as well as the apocalyptic future.El mundo, como un nexo de significado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra comprensión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que condicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de duraciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur’s recourse to the metahistorical categories, space of experience and horizon of expectation, invites an inquiry into geography’s role as the guarantor of history. The ontology of the flesh provides the first indication of how one’s body is implicated in the sense of one’s place in the world. In turn, narrative inscriptions of events on the landscape transform the physical topography of a place into an array of sites where memories of ancestral wisdom and historical traumas endure. By (...) anchoring historians’ representations of the past in the places and locales in which events took place, geography constructs a third space analogous to the third time of history. The aporias engendered by the phenomenology of time, however, have no equivalent in the phenomenology of space. The dissymmetry between the dialectic that informs the discourse of space and the one that informs the discourse of time thus keeps in place the reciprocal relation between geography and historiography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Racine, Oedipus, and Absolute Fantasies*Mitchell Greenberg (bio)Tout mythe se rapporte à l’origine. Toute question d’origine ne saurait ouvrir que sur un mythe [Every myth points back to an origin. Any questioning of origins necessarily opens onto myth].—Jean-Paul Valabrega, Phantasme, mythe, corps et sensAinsi l’itinéraire de la psychanalyse freudienne est-il celui d’une recherche qui... se fait attentive à ce qui du corps réside dans les mots, s’inscrit dans les traces, (...) reste gravé en mémoire au point de n’apparaître que comme réminiscence [Thus the itinerary of Freudian psychoanalysis would be a quest for... what of the body resides in words, is inscribed in traces, or remains engraved in memory to such an extent that it only can reappear as reminiscence].—Pierre Fédida, “L’anatomie dans la psychanalyse”Something happened in the seventeenth century. Somethings in this particularly conflicted period radically altered the ways in which human subjectivity was created and internalized to produce what in our late twentieth century we have come to call modernity. Despite the different and often contradictory inflections we like to give it, it now seems fairly certain that there was a “crisis of the seventeenth century,” a crisis that was traumatic and that was marked, most significantly for our purposes at least, by an altering of subjective sensibility.In an ever-crescendoing leitmotiv from Machiavelli to Montaigne, from Richelieu to Louis XIV, from Olivares to James I, we hear echoing across Europe the same strident clamor. An anxious, pervasive suspicion that the order of things was out of kilter, that in fact the world was sinking into disorder, seems to dominate European thought in the first half of the century. 1 The fear of chaos, especially in societies whose past has been grounded in rigid hierarchical structures, is obviously exacerbated in periods of great [End Page 40] social change. Nevertheless, if we are to believe those political theorists influenced by the work of Freud, this fear, although enflamed by real experience of social unrest, reaches well beyond the actuality of a particular historical event and finds its terrifying power in the most archaic strata of the human psyche. “All civilization,” writes Eugène Enriquez,is a struggle against chaos. Not against chaos as it might or might not have actually existed in prehistoric times, but against the phantasm of a primordial chaos, of a primeval disorder, of an immixture, of the undifferentiated, against an ordinary violence.... Chaos is the constantly retreating horizon in front of which all social organization and institutions are constructed. It returns us to our ancestral fear. We embrace any and all protection against it.[101]The stately image of Classical France, therefore, an image to which we have become accustomed by almost two hundred years of academic history and which finds its most paradigmatic icon in the tragic production of Racine, tends to obscure a reality of almost constant social and religious trauma. For the purposes of my discussion, I would like to return to Racine, who is perhaps the most prominent representative of the aesthetic and ethical tradition of classicism, which, perfected in France in the mid-1600s, will go on to colonize European ethics and aesthetics into the eighteenth century. Despite the radical changes wrought by political, industrial, philosophical, and psychoanalytical revolutions, classicism, through its corollary myth of the unitary ego, continues to haunt our own inabilities to live unneurotically the various drives, contradictions, identifications, and projections that continually tell us that we are not one but many.A central paradox exists at the heart of any discussion of Racinian dramaturgy. While the tragic dilemma of Racine’s theater is profoundly anchored in the passionate, forbidden sexuality of its characters, passions that are inextricably tied to the desiring body, this body is absent, banished from the lexical construction of the Racinian text. How are we to understand the conundrum of a theater that, more than any other, presents incestuous sexual desire and its frustration as the enchafed crucible of tragedy, when the crucible itself has been exiled from the field of representation? In its plots and peripeteia, Racine’s theater ingeniously reconfigures how his protagonists... (shrink)

In this paper I offer an analysis, reconstruction and defense of Locke's account of personal identity. I begin with a detailed analysis of Locke's use of the term 'conscious' in its historical context. This term, which plays a central role in Locke's theory, had senses in the seventeenth century which it does not have today. In the light of this analysis, an interpretation of continuity of consciousness as the ancestral of memory is given. It is argued that this (...) interpretation of Locke's theory of personal identity does not involve an ontological commitment to immaterial substances, and Locke is defended against the historically important criticisms of Butler and Reid. In the conclusion I suggest that the account of the individuation of persons implicit in Locke's discussion of personal identity is similar to the account of contextual individuation given by Hintikka. (shrink)

This article stages the imaginary “travel” of the ideas of the Argentine philosopher/anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch (1922–1979) to the Caribbean, in the service of sketching the work of feminist cultural producers in generational knowledge transmission. The first part elaborates a dialogue between Kusch’s concept of “fagocitación” (phagocytosis) with “transculturación” (transculturation), developed by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969). The second part of the article focuses on how Dominican diasporic composer, singer, and healer Irka Mateo enters this itinerary as a field researcher, an (...) intellectual and expressive cultural producer. I suggest that Mateo’s notion that the “field” might inhabit her music captures a key dimension of her work as expressive and embodied cultural praxis, and that this inhabitation subtends how the artist envisions the preservation of cultural memory and links her work to Kusch and Ortiz. The final section of the article looks at the implications of forgetting to the transmission of ancestral knowledges to illustrate how Mateo’s work offers some clues that can help us better discern what re-membering means, which might be distinct and enrich how we remember. (shrink)

This article builds on a developing interdisciplinary discussion of home. It studies two 20th-century texts in counterpoint: political philosopher Agnes Heller's essay, `Where Are We at Home,' and novelist Melpo Axioti's My Home, a nostalgic recollection of life on Mykonos. Heller contrasts the elusive, self-appointed geography of postmodern living with a traditional view of primordial dwelling, a non-transient way of dwelling that gave to Earth a commitment stretching from ancestral past to a distant future. That experience is all but (...) lost today, Heller muses as she surveys the horizon for space-bound alternatives to today's geographic promiscuity. The closing paragraph of her essay, which settles inconclusively on a Mediterranean landscape, opens a portal to My Home, the work of another political exile deprived of nationality and citizenship during the Cold War. Axioti's postmodern novel juxtaposes native stories of a transient life on Mykonos with the modern developer's efforts to discover firm foundations for building and an exile's wish to recover solid memories of home. Between those perspectives, Mykonos comes alive as a different type of home, in which obligation forms a bridge between presence and absence. The article closes by inquiring whether a thoughtful look at fragile Mediterranean worlds might reintroduce the idea of obligation to postmodern conceptions of home. (shrink)