The scholarly consensus is that the early essays “Il mare dell’oggettività” and “La sfida al labirinto” are two of the most important Italo Calvino wrote on his literary poetics, influencing the metaphors and problematics of his entire corpus: the sea of objectivity, the labyrinth, chaotic flux, a rational cogito subjectivity, binary oppositions etc. The essays were made available to a general public in the collection Una pietra sopra in 1980, part of a selection of texts handpicked by Calvino himself. Curiously, the 1986 English translation titled The Uses of Literature does not contain these important and influential essays, making them unavailable to an Anglophone audience. These essays are here now translated, accompanied by a critical commentary by the translator about their relevance and importance to Calvino’s corpus. The problematics discussed in these essays would re-emerge, with remarkable consistency, in the metaphorical imagery Calvino deployed throughout his career. Nevertheless, Calvino evolves the problematics significantly throughout his career, almost inverting his original stance. Rather than this being an inversion, however, the translator argues that Calvino’s evolution represents a dialectical movement propelled by contradiction, and that therein lies the actual poetics or the stylized mode of thought that these essays inaugurated. Viewing the essays in this light renders them, and Calvino’s entire corpus, ripe for dialogic encounter and collision with otherwise parallel philosophical traditions and schools of thought.

AbstractThis final essay in religious studies at Malmö Lärarutbildningen (Teacher’s education) is a minor field study (MFS) carried out in Ghana about Trokosi. Trokosi is a tradition, system and practice where young girls are given to village shrine priests as sexual and domestic slaves, or "wives of the gods", in compensation for offenses allegedly committed by a member of the girl's family. My main research question has been: What are the thoughts of the victims as well as the rescuers of Trokosi thoughts about the Trokosi tradition, system and practice? The thesis is based on a minor field study, observations and interviews. I observed the work at International Needs Network Ghana (INNG) and their work with Trokosi mainly focusing on the International Needs Vocational Training Centre (INVTC). At INVTC former Trokosi get the opportunity of becoming independence and self-sufficient - ke te pam tem eng. In this essay I have interviewed two opponents to Trokosi, in this essay called the rescuers, as well as one victim of Trokosi. In my interviews, the only person who criticized the theory and the religion behind Trokosi was the victim, a person who was born into this belief system. INNG’s critics are not about the theory behind Trokosi but how it is practised. Applying of feminist perspective this thesis focuses religious and cultural practices, in this case Trokosi, as a part of a larger system that is limiting women’s lives. In addition, post colonial theory may contribute to the analysis of “third world women’s own struggle and aspiration for independence. There are different views and perspectives on Trokosi and despite Ghana’s constitution and other documents that forbid this type of practice it is still vital. This indicates that there are more factors to consider. For instance overall patriarchal structures and post colonial experiences. Information and education is essential for the transformation of Trokosi in order to favour women’s right especially in the fields of human- and women’s rights.

The hypothesis of this study is that there is a relationship between race attitudes and "denominocentrism, " and with certain social categories, e.g., age, social class, income, education, etc., in the Church of the Brethren in the Pacific Coast Region. If a relationship can be identified and analyzed, the results will be of value as tools in helping to understand, predict, and change human behavior. It might be further suggested that if there is a strong relationship between attitudes and certain social categories in the church, attitudes of the Brethren on these issues, and perhaps on many more, are, to a large extent, conditioned by, if not the direct outgrowth of, certain socio-economic factors.

The Nazi violence did not have its origins only in the brutality of the First World War or radical nationalist ideologies, but also in European colonialism. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that colonial processes were fundamental to the origins of the Holocaust. To prove this, I applied the content analysis to detect colonial discourse (stereotype, ambivalence, and mimicry) in three legislations from different contexts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriages between races. The documents analyzed exemplified the segregationist thinking of each period of colonization. Portuguese laws from the beginning of modernity demonstrate the transition from religious to racist thought. Analyzing German Southwest Africa, there is the application of racist pseudoscience, and finally, in Nazism, a mixture of both, but also an evolution of colonial discourse. At the end, I proved the existence of colonial discourse in the Nuremberg Laws, demonstrating how earlier colonialisms influenced the Holocaust.

No description available.

Missing from the discussion surrounding the use of coinage in select burials within southern Italian Greek necropoleis in the fourth and third centuries BCE is an attempt to reconstruct the ancient conception of the ritualistic function of coinage. It is through a chronological survey of epigraphical evidence for temple finances that we can trace the concurrent developments of the recognition of a fiduciary value to money, on one hand, and the acceptance of a ritualistic function to coinage on the other. Both occur simultaneously in Magna Graecia where the earliest coins in burial have been found. The case study of Metaponto, an archaeological site around the Lucanian Apennines, reveals a correspondence between an Oscan assemblage of funerary equipment and the presence of coinage. One tomb in particular contains an old coin’s ceramic impression, a clear representation of a value above that of its monetary model. Indigenous Italian agency ought therefore be considered when explaining, not just the ritualistic deposition of bronze coinage in Italy, but also a broader recognition of the sacred and fiduciary value to coinage which led to its deposition. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / When did humans start conceptualising the abstract notion of value which underpins modern paper money? The time of Socrates’ death was one of economic transition, when coins were first integrated into funerary rituals, used as religious dedicatory offerings, and minted in a new metal, bronze. These concurrent developments stemmed from the need for Greeks, using silver, to exchange with indigenous Italians who used bronze. This created a symbolic value for the bronze coins which was manifested in the contemporaneous acceptance of coinage in religious rituals. The case study of Metaponto, a Greek city founded in southern Italy, demonstrates the indigenous Italian impetus to include coinage in funerary assemblages, and by extension, their involvement in redefining the economic conception of money. A ceramic impression of an older coin found in one of these burials, is similar to paper money in that it represents a value abstracted from its silver model.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.