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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

“Sounds Like” Redemption? On The Musicality Of Species And The Species Of Musicality, Tyler Yamin, Alice Rudge Jan 2024

“Sounds Like” Redemption? On The Musicality Of Species And The Species Of Musicality, Tyler Yamin, Alice Rudge

Faculty Journal Articles

Popular and academic studies of music frequently claim that human musicality arose from the so-called ‘natural world’ of non-human species. And amid the anxieties produced by the Anthropocene, it is thought that the possibility of reconnecting with the natural world through a renewed appreciation of music’s links with nature may usher in a new era of posthuman environmental consciousness, offering repair and redemption. To critique these claims, we trace how notions of ‘musicality’ have been applied to or denied from non-human entities across diverse disciplines since the late nineteenth century. We conclude that such debates reinforce the separation that they …


A Note On The Identification Of The ‘Bankes Tomb’ As Tt 64, Daniele Salvoldi Dr. Jan 2019

A Note On The Identification Of The ‘Bankes Tomb’ As Tt 64, Daniele Salvoldi Dr.

Faculty Journal Articles

In 2013, Stefanie Hardekopf argued for the identification of the ‘Bankes Tomb’ with TT 64. Her arguments were convincing, but they lacked the ultimate proof, i.e. the presence of a cartouche of Thutmose IV in archival documents from the Bankes papers referring to the tomb. This short note provides further data, publishing a previously unstudied manuscript indeed holding a copy of the cartouches of Thutmose IV hanging from the neck of a hunter said to belong to the same tomb as the other fragments cut by Bankes. The hunter scene has also been identified among the drawings in the Bankes …


Book Review: Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses In The Himalayan Foothills (Kirin Narayan), Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2017

Book Review: Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses In The Himalayan Foothills (Kirin Narayan), Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.


Pilgrims To Tourists: Evolution Of Travel In South Sinai In The 19th And 20th Century, Daniele Salvoldi Dr. Jan 2017

Pilgrims To Tourists: Evolution Of Travel In South Sinai In The 19th And 20th Century, Daniele Salvoldi Dr.

Faculty Journal Articles

Since Late Antiquity, South Sinai has been anattraction or travellers. For centuries, the fortune the region had laid in its holy character for both Christianity and Islam. It is only in the 19thcentury that other motivations arose and what wasa traditional pilgrimage turned often into leisure travel. In the words of Joseph Hobbs: “All who travelled overland to Mount Sinai emphasized the hazards along the way. From the early 19th century such obstacles became an attraction in themselves, a reason to travel.” 1 The main difference between pilgrims and travellers was the motivation: “Pilgrimage formost was necessity, penance, exile, suffering …


Waiting For A Place: At Gravedigger’S Pub, Jeffrey Alan Tolbert Jul 2016

Waiting For A Place: At Gravedigger’S Pub, Jeffrey Alan Tolbert

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay I consider how place can defeat our attempts to analyze it by become meaningful to us in ways that exceed the scope of our scholarly interests and methods. Discussing my fieldwork at a Dublin pub, I touch on the concepts of sense of place, nostalgia, and the importance of human relationships that form in places even in the context of what might be considered "failed" research.


"Dark And Wicked Things": Slender Man, The Folkloresque, And The Implications Of Belief, Jeffrey A. Tolbert Jan 2015

"Dark And Wicked Things": Slender Man, The Folkloresque, And The Implications Of Belief, Jeffrey A. Tolbert

Faculty Journal Articles

In this paper I examine the media discourses surrounding the May 2014 stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin by two of her friends, supposedly to please the online legendary monster Slender Man, and several subsequent events which media outlets also attempted to link to the horror meme. I consider the implications of folkloric believability, by which I mean the interplay of belief about a tradition’s status as folklore, which in turn has important implications for the believability of the tradition’s content. I argue that an understanding of the processes through which individuals interact with and shape emergent traditions …


Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2014

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …


Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2009

Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are …


Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2009

Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and …


Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2008

Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Ponds are ubiquitous in the Maithil region of Nepal, and they figure prominently in folk narratives and ceremonial paintings produced by women there. I argue that in Maithil women's folktales, as in their paintings, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping Maithil society, even as this register shift occurs within plots featuring male protagonists. I argue further that in the absence of a habit of exegesis in their expressive arts, and given the cross-referential, dialogic nature of expressive practices, a methodology that draws into interpretive conversation …


Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis Aug 2007

Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at …


'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2005

'Listen, Rama’S Wife!’: Maithil Women’S Perspectives And Practices In The Festival Of Sāmā-Cakevā, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal …


Feminist Tigers And Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies And Instrument Effects In The Struggle For Definition And Control Over Development In Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2003

Feminist Tigers And Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies And Instrument Effects In The Struggle For Definition And Control Over Development In Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken …