Suchergebnisse

Smallpox was eradicated in the 1970s but the cult of Sitala, the Bengali 'smallpox goddess', has resisted. With the spread of AIDS some modifications occurred. Sitala is increasingly worshipped as an AIDS-goddess. Devotees look at contagion as a (desirable) form of possession and believe their faith will protect them. As it was for smallpox, when variolation was preferred to vaccination, the contact with the goddess is looked upon as a form of love, in both maternal and sexual terms. The relation between Sitala, smallpox and AIDS will be analyzed from an indigenous perspective and according to modern ethno-psychoanalytical theories. The issues herein discussed are: (1) the identification of Sitala with smallpox; (2) the existence of a pan-Indian 'plague goddess'; and (3) the consolidated presence of a 'smallpox myth'. I wish so to demonstrate the fallaciousness of those theories which look at Sitala as a response to the irrational or as a manifestation of the untamed female nature. By identifying Sitala with the fertility/agricultural cycle rather than with one or more diseases, I hope to explain the mechanics at the origin of Sitala's worship, a ritual system grounded in the paradox of the 'barren mother'.

G.R.F. Ferrari offers a new framework for understanding different ways in which we communicate with each other. He explores the idea of "intimations": social interactions that approach outright communication but do not quite reach it. The metaphor from which he starts is that of a communicative scale or switch, which goes from "off" (no communication intended) to fully "on" (outright communication). Intimations lie in between. Three intermediate positions are identified: quarter-on, half-on, and three-quarters-on. Progression along the communicative scale is determined by the extent to which what comes across in the transmission is required to come across by recognition of the intention of the transmitting party. At a quarter-on, it is required not to; at half-on, it is neither required to nor required not to; at three-quarters-on, it is required to, but only partially; at full-on, it is required to, and the recognition is complete. The half-on intimation is primarily used for impression-management in social life. To illustrate it, the book concentrates on fashion and the "messages" we send with our clothes. With the quarter-on and three-quarters-on intimation, the focus of argument is on the fact that transmissions at the same position of the communicative scale have the same underlying structure, whether they are made in the formal arts or in daily life outside the arts. For the quarter-on intimation, the formal art is lyric poetry; for the three-quarters-on intimation, it is storytelling. The book discusses storytelling at length, and at the end investigates its connection to situational irony

G.R.F. Ferrari offers a new framework for understanding ways in which we communicate with each other. He explores the idea of 'intimations': social interactions that approach outright communication but do not quite reach it. He considers poetry, storytelling, and fashion as examples of different levels of communication

Alas, each 'theoretically correct step' that philosophers take towards imposing justice on society is for that very reason a 'practical step towards injustice' (p. 355), for it is not in human nature to be so malleable to the exigencies of a theory that requires that there be 'one set of true principles for living a just, and therefore happy, life' (p. 354). University of Chicago Press, 2005 -a book with which Rosen engages at several points -I attempt to show that the city-soul analogy works formally as well as poetically, and that Callipolis is a happy city, indeed, the happiest of cities (pace p. 315).

In considerazione della recente inversione del trend relativo al numero di arrivi e presenze di residenti e non residenti nel panorama turistico italiano, il lavoro si propone l'obiettivo di valutare in che misura la dotazione infrastrutturale relativa alla telefonia e alla telematica e la dotazione digitale diffusa tra le imprese operanti nel turismo siano in grado di stimolare la domanda domestica dei flussi turistici in Italia. I risultati derivanti dai modelli spaziali proposti confermano l'ipotesi generale relativa alla centralità dei processi di digitalizzazione del turismo, sia nella prospettiva degli interventi pubblici che nella prospettiva delle iniziative imprenditoriali. In tal modo, l'armonizzazione delle politiche pubbliche e private diventa fondamentale nella possibilità di rivitalizzare e stimolare i flussi turistici domestici in Italia. Le implicazioni politiche possono essere lette come uno strumento in grado di riequilibrare un preoccupante trend che considera la domanda turistica in Italia relativa agli ultimi 30 anni. ; In consideration of the recent trend reversal in the number of foreigners' and residents' arrivals and nights spent in the Italian tourism system, this work is proposing to evaluate to what extent the endowment of infrastructures for telephonic and telematic and the digital endowment among the enterprises are able to boost the domestic tourism demand in Italy. The results of the proposed spatial models confirm the general assumption regarding the centrality of the digitalization processes, both from the public interventions perspective and from the entrepreneurial initiatives perspective. In this way, the need to harmonize public and private policies becomes pivotal in order to revitalize and stimulate the internal tourism demand in Italy. The policy implications can be read as an instrument for rebalancing a troubling trend involving the tourism demand in Italy of the last 30 years.

AbstractParental responsiveness and synchronization during early face‐to‐face interactions between mother and infant have been theorized to affect a broad spectrum of positive developmental outcomes in social and cognitive infant growth and to facilitate the development of a sense of self in the baby. Here we show that being imitated can significantly affect the behavior of nursery‐reared infant monkeys, which are at an increased risk for developing aberrant social behaviors. Infants look longer and lipsmack more at an experimenter both during imitation and after being imitated. These results demonstrate that from early in life imitation might be used as a privileged form of communication by adults to enhance infants' visual engagement and their social communication. Imitation may therefore be useful to counteract the negative effects of early social adversities.

AbstractAcross all languages studied to date, audiovisual speech exhibits a consistent rhythmic structure. This rhythm is critical to speech perception. Some have suggested that the speech rhythm evolved de novo in humans. An alternative account – the one we explored here – is that the rhythm of speech evolved through the modification of rhythmic facial expressions. We tested this idea by investigating the structure and development of macaque monkey lipsmacks and found that their developmental trajectory is strikingly similar to the one that leads from human infant babbling to adult speech. Specifically, we show that: (1) younger monkeys produce slower, more variable mouth movements and as they get older, these movements become faster and less variable; and (2) this developmental pattern does not occur for another cyclical mouth movement – chewing. These patterns parallel human developmental patterns for speech and chewing. They suggest that, in both species, the two types of rhythmic mouth movements use different underlying neural circuits that develop in different ways. Ultimately, both lipsmacking and speech converge on a ∼5 Hz rhythm that represents the frequency that characterizes the speech rhythm of human adults. We conclude that monkey lipsmacking and human speech share a homologous developmental mechanism, lending strong empirical support to the idea that the human speech rhythm evolved from the rhythmic facial expressions of our primate ancestors.