The allegation that punishment is a core element of culture does not seem to explain the rapid changes in attitudes towards the death penalty seen in most modern societies during the last few decades. Attitudes of harshness and death in punishment are much more easily changed than proponents of the "cultural" explanation think. The misunderstandings about China (often held by Chinese themselves) are that a long tradition of harsh punishment has made such values into an unavoidable cultural norm. China, however, is not exceptional in harbouring penal populist norms as such, and Chinese history was much more lenient and merciful than assumed in these simplified arguments about "Chinese cultural harshness". Even if China today is exceptional in the uses of harsh punishments and executes more people than the rest of the world combined, there is no need to see this fact in terms of Chinese culture. China can use its own traditions to end this situation effectively in a fairly short period of time if there is the political will to do so. Given such political will, public opinion will follow suit.
First ed. published in 1918 under title: Reflections on war and death. ; Translation of Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; 2
Death and the macabre have always been deeply entrenched in Irish culture: one of its most celebrated sons, Bram Stoker, has granted Ireland a central place in the Gothic literary tradition. The wake and the funeral have a prominent place into the Irish obsession with death and all its paraphernalia. In their book about Irish funerary tradition, Nina Witoszek and Patrick Sheeran state how those traditions are a mark of identity and might be seen as politically charged since the history of Ireland is one of a country divided by opposing loyalties and religious affiliations. Poetry has been regarded as one of the most effective vehicles for the transmission of death traditions in the rich Irish culture, and the modern and contemporary Irish poetry is a remarkable depository of death imagery. By recalling the distinction by Vivian Mercier, who identifies 'macabre' and 'grotesque' as two types of humour typical of the Irish comic tradition (along with the fantastic), the essay discusses the cultural and anthropological matrix of the Irish macabre through examples from contemporary Irish literature, focusing in particular on novels by Patrick McCabe and John Banville.
Recent actions by French military forces in Niger and the global prominence of terrorist groups such as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram, have highlighted the growing counter terrorist focus on the countries of Sub Saharan Africa. Additionally in a post Bin Laden world and with the immanent withdrawal of coalition combat troops from Afghanistan, there is the possibility of Africa as a continent becoming the new front in the Global War on Terror (Mben et al., 2013). However, it is a mistake to assume that Africa's story is uniformly one of violence and death. Vibrant cultures and a rugged entrepreneurial spirit have combined with a robust Internet backbone, to create the embryonic emergence of high tech hotspots across Africa. With rising IT literacy levels, more and more Africans are becoming connected to the information super highway on a daily basis (Graham, 2010). A tiny minority of these Africans are terrorists.
Special Edition Issue - Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa ; Recent actions by French military forces in Niger and the global prominence of terrorist groups such as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram, have highlighted the growing counter terrorist focus on the countries of Sub Saharan Africa. Additionally in a post Bin Laden world and with the immanent withdrawal of coalition combat troops from Afghanistan, there is the possibility of Africa as a continent becoming the new front in the Global War on Terror (Mben et al., 2013). However, it is a mistake to assume that Africa's story is uniformly one of violence and death. Vibrant cultures and a rugged entrepreneurial spirit have combined with a robust Internet backbone, to create the embryonic emergence of high tech hotspots across Africa. With rising IT literacy levels, more and more Africans are becoming connected to the information super highway on a daily basis (Graham, 2010). A tiny minority of these Africans are terrorists. ; Publisher PDF
Sudden, violent and otherwise unexplained deaths are investigated in most western jurisdictions through a Coronial or medico-legal process. A crucial element of such an investigation is the legislative requirement to remove the body for autopsy and other medical interventions, processes which can disrupt traditional religious and cultural grieving practices. While recent legislative changes in an increasing number of jurisdictions allow families to raise objections based on religious and cultural grounds, such concerns can be over-ruled, often exacerbating the trauma and grief of families. Based on funded research which interviews a range of Coronial staff in one Australian jurisdiction, this paper explores the disjuncture between medico-legal discourses, which position the body as corpse, and the rise of more 'therapeutic' discourses which recognise the family's wishes to reposition the body as beloved and lamented.
The violations of Human Rights remain spread in all over the world until now. There are violations of Human Rights in all the countries in this universe. It is not possible to find a country, which free from this violation. It is very terrible, such as the professional killing and systematic murder. It will cause to grow the culture of dead. This culture does not respect on the human life. The professional killing and systematic murder are real social fact, which are not distinct and justly resolved. This criminal actions will grow more terrible, if the official organs of the government provoke and take apart in this matter, do not want to obstacle and stop them, although they are capable to do it. The culture of Human Rights can be built, if the culture of life has been respected, the people, especially the organ of the government takes care and respect to Human Rights and promote them as well as possible. So the human life will grows to the directions of the welfare for the people and more civilized. If the people develop the culture of Human Rights, the human civilizations will grow for respect them. We have task to develop the culture of Human Rights.
The subject of analysis in this article comprises folkloric motives related to death and funeral in the late Lithuanian military-historical folksongs. The scope of investigation embraces the songs that became popular approximately in the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century, chiefly related historically to the Russian–Japanese War and the World War I, in which Lithuanians had to participate as soldiers of the Tsarist Russian army. The main attention is paid in the article to the following folkloric motives of the songs: the seeing of the soldier off to the war and saying farewell to him; death in the battlefield, far away from home; the soldiers' graves; the nameless mass burials; death without funeral. The farewell motives found in some of the examined songs contain reflections of certain rituals of farewell and seeing the man off to the war, existing in the traditional Lithuanian culture. The foreboding of death is very distinctly expressed here. In the late military-historical folksongs, image of the battlefield emerges as the specific space of death, becoming a popular folkloric motive. The poetics of the death 179 in the battlefield is subtly supplemented by quite frequently used Christian religious images. Among numerous realistic and sometimes even openly naturalistic motives, the much more lyrical poetic parallel of bullet and bee could be discerned, encountered not only in Lithuanian, but also in Latvian military songs. A special place in the late. [to full text]
The subject of analysis in this article comprises folkloric motives related to death and funeral in the late Lithuanian military-historical folksongs. The scope of investigation embraces the songs that became popular approximately in the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century, chiefly related historically to the Russian–Japanese War and the World War I, in which Lithuanians had to participate as soldiers of the Tsarist Russian army. The main attention is paid in the article to the following folkloric motives of the songs: the seeing of the soldier off to the war and saying farewell to him; death in the battlefield, far away from home; the soldiers' graves; the nameless mass burials; death without funeral. The farewell motives found in some of the examined songs contain reflections of certain rituals of farewell and seeing the man off to the war, existing in the traditional Lithuanian culture. The foreboding of death is very distinctly expressed here. In the late military-historical folksongs, image of the battlefield emerges as the specific space of death, becoming a popular folkloric motive. The poetics of the death 179 in the battlefield is subtly supplemented by quite frequently used Christian religious images. Among numerous realistic and sometimes even openly naturalistic motives, the much more lyrical poetic parallel of bullet and bee could be discerned, encountered not only in Lithuanian, but also in Latvian military songs. A special place in the late. [to full text]
In this article, we examine the visual motif of the corpse and its presence in the public sphere in times of pandemic from an iconographic, political and anthropological perspective. Through the analysis of the representation of the dead body in images presented by modern media, we reflect on how the formal and iconographic schemes of presentation of death were transformed following the irruption of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic scheme, which is unusual from a political and anthropological perspective, assumes a particular approach to the problem of the representation of the dead body (anonymous body, carrier of a virus), encrypted in a dialectic between systematic omission and censorship and displacement of the representation of death towards the cumulative symmetry of empty pits or coffins that prefigure the corpse to come. Pandemic iconography, often based on science fiction imagery, outlines the dehumanized restlessness of a dystopian future. Under these exceptional conditions, some corpses, which are a priori anonymous, stand out, showing, even in the suspended space of Covid-19, the permanence of structural schemes of violence that must be denounced and fought in the present. With that in mind, we also examine the corpses claimed by Black Lives Matter and their distinctive representations, which are very different from those of the victims of the epidemic. Finally, through these references and based on the media treatment of Diego Armando Maradona's body, we consider the significance of the return of the iconic corpse to the center of the public sphere, which imposes a regime of extreme visibility and goes beyond the representative limits of pandemic exceptionality.
This chapter offers a critical analysis of the burgeoning cottage industry of cyber- and actual Toraja zombie tourism. Various studies have chronicled tourists' fascination with cadavers, and with touring the purported haunts of the undead (c.f. Light 2009; Linke 2005; Stone 2011a), yet the ways in which new death-oriented leisure zones not only arise but become fetishized remain understudied. This chapter responds to the recent call for new research on the relationship between the media and dark tourism sites (Stone 2011b:327). Data derived from fieldwork in the Toraja highlands of Indonesia and web-based sources demonstrate the role of both the internet and the anthropological imagination in this process. A second theme in this chapter entails examining the often-contradictory emotional dynamics underlying the pursuit of fun and fright by vacationers. Ethnographic studies of the complex emotional terrain entailed in these first-hand encounters remain limited and this chapter contribute to our understanding of the emotional dynamics embodied in touristic pilgrimages to observe the mortuary rituals of another culture. FInally, although this chapter examines the Western voyeuristic fascination with dead (and potentially undead) corpses, my aim is not to fuel sensationalized imagery of another dark place where dark activities are seemingly a part of everyday life. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois' cautions regarding 'pornographies of violence' as captivating yet repelling chronicles of violence that circumvent critical analysis strike me as equally apt for discussions of this particular genre of dark tourism (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003:1). What I term 'pornographies of the macabre,' like pornographies of violence, can reify stigmatized perceptions of subordinated peoples while neglecting to spotlight the "chains of causality…link[ing] structural, political, and symbolic violence…buttress[ing] unequal power relations" (Bourgois 2003:433). Thus, this chapter also examines the cultural "logic" and ...
The virtual screening of a library of chalcone derivatives led us to the identification of potential new MDM2 ligands. The chalcones with the best docking scores obeying the Lipinski rule of five were subsequently prepared by base-catalyzed aldol reactions. The activity of these compounds as inhibitors of p53–MDM2 interaction was investigated using a yeast-based screening assay. Using this approach two chalcones (3 and 4) were identified as putative small molecule inhibitors of p53–MDM2 interaction. The activity of both chalcones was further investigated in a panel of human tumor cells. Chalcones 3 and 4 revealed a pronounced tumor cell growth inhibitory effect on tumor cell lines. Additionally, chalcone 4 caused alterations in the cell cycle profile, induced apoptosis and increased the levels of p53, p21 and PUMA proteins in NCI-H460 cells. Computational docking studies allowed to predict that, like nutlin-3A (a well-known small-molecule inhibitor of p53–MDM2 interaction), chalcones 3 and 4 bind to the p53-binding site of MDM2. The results here presented will be valuable for the structure-based design of novel and potent p53–MDM2 inhibitors. ; This research was partially supported by the Strategic Funding UID/Multi/04423/2013 , ERDF , COMPETE , and FCT under the projects PTDC/MAR-BIO/4694/2014, and INNOVMAR – Innovation and Sustainability in the Management and Exploitation of Marine Resources, reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000035 , Research Line NOVELMAR . This work also received financial support from the European Union (FEDER funds POCI/01/0145/FEDER/007265) and National Funds (FCT/MEC, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and Ministério da Educação e Ciência) under the Partnership Agreement PT2020 UID/QUI/50006/2013 and the FCT project PTDC/DTP-FTO/1981/2014, "PEst-C/SAU/LA0003/2013", "NORTE-07-0162-FEDER-00018 – Contributos para o reforço da capacidade do IPATIMUP enquanto actor do sistema regional de inovação" and NORTE-07-0162-FEDER-000067 – Reforço e consolidação da capacidade infraestrutural do IPATIMUP para o sistema regional de inovação", both supported by ON.2 – O Novo Norte, through FEDER funds under the QREN. IPATIMUP integrates the i3S Research Unit, which is partially supported by FCT. The authors also thank FCT for the grants of R.T. Lima ( SFRH/BPD/68787/2010 ), J. Soares ( SFRH/BD/78971/2011 ), and S. Gomes ( SFRH/BD/96189/2013 ; Doctoral Programme BiotechHealth), L. Raimundo ( PD/BI/113926/2015 , Doctoral Programme BiotechHealth).
In 2015 the Government of Indonesia carried out three stages of executions of 18 inmates, out of 18 convicted prisoners, only 4 inmates were Indonesian citizens, the rest were foreign nationals, this was what later made the execution of death executions by the Indonesian government in 2015 a global spotlight . For the Indonesian government, the execution of several people convicted of narcotics and illegal drugs is a logical consequence of the spirit of law enforcement in Indonesia. It is also evidence of the government's commitment in its fight against drugs. In Indonesia, violations and crimes against the misuse of narcotics and illegal drugs are high class crimes (extra ordinary crime) as well as terrorism. This article discusses how the history of the death penalty, then also about the existence of the implementation of the death penalty in the legal system in Indonesia, furthermore also about the debate and pros and cons of the implementation of the death penalty, and the last is about the implementation of the death penalty in the perspective of human rights relativeiseme. This arithmetic draws the conclusion that the development of the pendang way of carrying out the death penalty is strongly influenced by historical factors of the country concerned. In addition, natural factors (culture) and culture (culture) also influence the development of thought implementation and application of the death penalty.
This chapter will focus on the cultural politics of the borderlands between Central Europe and the Balkans, where South Slav communities may be found outside coherent Serbian and Croatian-speaking areas. This is the borderland region of Hungary that has been referred to in different historical periods and under different political regimes as: Lower Pannonia, Transdanubia, the Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina), or the Danube Banovina. This work will be illustrated by passages and references taken from Mara Stevanović's book Nebo bez oblaka (1977) which was the only children's book of short stories in "Serbo-Croat" to be published in socialist Hungary, which well-illustrates the daily lives of children, their parents and grandparents (three generations) from rural, ethnic minority backgrounds, mostly in the Banat region. The time period covered in this paper will be from the socialist period (1948 – 1989) into the Hungarian transition of the 1990s. The chapter will take into account the significance of the 1949 Hungarian Constitution which guaranteed the cultural rights of the South Slav population in Socialist Hungary. It then demonstrates how there was a shift in political interpretation from considering the South Slavs as "atoms of pluralism" (Crowe, 1989) to their being actively supported by the Hungarian government from the 1960s onwards, in terms of the development of minority culture and education.
Examination of honor culture and attitudes toward death and dying found in letters, diaries, and newspapers - from the colonial and revolutionary period through the Civil War era - strongly suggests that Civil War soldiers did not suffer from psychological combat trauma. Psychological combat trauma is as much a part of today's war as uniforms and ammunition, but this was not the reality for Civil War Americans. The truth is that all wars are terrible for those who fight them, and physical stresses of battle have been part of warfare in every age. Twentieth-century ideas of the psychological effects of war differ vastly from those of the nineteenth century. Civil War battle offered potential for psychiatric trauma. Civil War soldiers, however, lived in a time of different expectations and beliefs about honor and death and dying. Expectations for psychiatric trauma for these soldiers did not exist. This dissertation uses research in honor culture, masculinity studies, and attitudes toward death and dying to illustrate the idea that nineteenth-century cultural ideals of honor and death reduced or prevented psychological consequences of combat in Civil War soldiers.
