Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities.

Today, and for the last 20 years, the Blanco Bowling Club and Café has seen a decrease of active membership and faces real challenges to maintain relevance in an ever-evolving world of technology, activities, entertainment and economic uncertainty. Ninepin bowling is spread over four mostly rural counties in Texas’ Hill Country with 18 different alleys, including Blanco. Though Blanco’s population has grown over the last 50 years, its bowling club’s membership hasn’t. Blanco, a town of 2,205 people is a rural outlier statistically – it has grown every 10 years since the 1950s. From 2000 to 2010, Blanco’s population grew by over 33 percent, more than double Texas’ average and almost five times the national growth rate. Several factors could account for Blanco’s growth, but being roughly 45 miles from both Austin and San Antonio and being located on a state highway doesn’t hurt. Gourley suspects that now more than ever people are calling Blanco home while working in nearby population centers. They don’t get out into the community as much. The club, and to some extent the town itself, is and has been under a quiet assault from the modern world. / text

This thesis explores the representation of Heimat in Stephan Thome’s novel Grenzgang (2009). The concept of Heimat is a subjective and therefore challenging idea, as a result there is no generally accepted definition of Heimat. Thus notions that contribute to the conception of Heimat – nostalgia, womanhood, the triad of province-city-world as well as nationhood and tradition – are analysed in the present work. Far beyond the cliché of an idyllic Heimat as a place to escape from real life, Grenzgang demonstrates a more modern version of the concept. The inhabitants of the Hessian town Bergenstadt, especially the protagonists Thomas and Kerstin, have to deal with the harsh reality of their lives. Since the Hessian countryside is caught up in the processes of globalization, its inhabitants have new opportunities, but they have to come to terms with new threats as well. The result is increasing insecurity, which in turn is partly buffered by the existing tradition of the “Grenzgang,” i.e. walking along the limits of the town in order to re-establish its borders. That tradition is the connecting element in this novel, causing the inhabitants of Bergenstadt to experience a feeling of security and identity in the traditional community. Furthermore, they build up a relationship with their rural environment and their history. The novel Grenzgang demonstrates that Heimat can be acquired actively through social relations even if this Heimat is threatened by insecurity. The thesis stresses the progressive character of the individual acquisition of traditions while its special focus is on the subjectivity of the concept of Heimat: Each character has to find his or her own form of Heimat and by extension his or her identity. Grenzgang shows that this can be successfully experienced in the present day. Furthermore the novel's realistic treatment of the countryside differs from the positively-transfigured, negative or ironic representations of previous Heimat novels.

The research investigates English proverbs, i.e. how human experience is reflected in them, study of literal and figurative meanings of proverbs and stylistic devices. / Darbe tyrinėjamos angliškos patarlės, t.y. kokia gyvenimo patirtis jose atsiskleidžia, tyrinėjamos jų tiesioginės ir perkeltinės reikšmės bei analizuojamos stilistinės priemonės.

The film documents the teaching, reconstruction and transmission of ancient classical Bagpipe music called Ceol Mor, Gaelic for “Big Music”, commonly known as Piobaireachd. The author engaged several leading members of the performer community in Scotland and Canada to produce this aural and visual record of the learning and performance of The Lament For Patrick Og MacCrimmon, composed by Iain Dall MacKay around the year 1730. The author finds that Piobaireachd‟s oral tradition was once a continuum of variation and communal composition which drove the diffusion of new interpretations as it passed between performers. But whereas artistic creativity, variation and communal composition were hallmarks of pre-staff notation Piobaireachd performance, these have been replaced by ritual, stasis and conformity with stylized practices. Mainstream Piobaireachd performance now has as a fundamental object, congruence with past performances derived from strict texts.

No description available.

Unsafe abortion claims the lives of thousands of women every year. Globally, it is the women in Sub-Saharan Africa who face the highest risk of death and injury from abortion-related complications (Ahman & Shah 2011, p.123). Current global and national efforts to reduce incidences of unsafe abortion are ineffective in the rural Ghanaian community where this research was undertaken. This anthropological examination of key aspects of contemporary local social practice and the norms and customs which underpin it, demonstrates the necessity for many local women to utilise a dangerous plant to facilitate potentially fatal self-induced abortions as their primary means of resisting culturally-defined fertility patterns. This thesis is broadly structured around anthropologists’ Scheper-Hughes’ and Lock’s (1987, p.6) concept of three intersectional bodily perspectives: the phenomenological individual body-self, the social body and the body as an artefact of political control. The reader is offered insight from each of these perspectives into the social practice of unsafe abortion in the lives of rural Ghanaian women. I argue that unsafe abortion can be seen as a kind of social struggle against the local economic mode of production. The thesis provides an analysis of the position of many women within local relations of production from a neo-Marxist perspective which has been modified by concepts of class and exploitation particular to pre-industrialist societies. The modifications are taken from the theoretical positions of French anthropologists Terray (1975), Meillassoux (1972) and P.P Rey (1975). In addition, following the work of critical medical anthropologist Scheper-Hughes (1993), the thesis demonstrates the ways in which medical discourses and policy output about family planning and reproductive health which are produced and reproduced at the level of the national body politic, obscure more deeply embedded powerful ideologies and social praxis about female sexuality and reproduction which is produced and reproduced at the level of the social body within the context of popular interpretations of tradition and customary law. Ultimately, I argue that current Programmes of Action aimed at reducing incidences of unsafe abortion fail to address patterns of gender violence and patriarchal control by medicalising some village women’s social suffering.

No description available.

This work intends to be an application and understanding of the Christian just war tradition as it pertains to the actions of the United States government in Iraq. It includes a short history of the evolution of the tradition, the application and discussion of the three most controversial criterion, and a discussion of how the terror attacks on the World Trade Center may constitute a pre-emptive strike. Essentially, the piece endeavors to explore how untested, unseen dangers drive a government to act for the defense of its citizens and their way of life. The theory draws heavily on Michael Walzer’s invention of the concept of “supreme emergency” which allowed for exceptional actions during war if a people’s entire way of life is threatened.

This study will examine the integral role of owls in Ainu spiritual belief systems through the means of Ainu oral literature and Ainu material arts. In the past, the indigenous people known as Ainu lived only in northern Japan, including Kurile Islands (“Kurile Ainu”), Sakhalin (“Sakhalin Ainu”), and Hokkaido (“Hokkaido Ainu”). Today, Ainu people live across Japan; however, Hokkaido is considered their spiritual homeland and the majority of the population lives in this northern prefecture. This paper will focus on the group of people called “Hokkaido Ainu”. Before a large number of Japanese migrated to Hokkaido during the Meiji era (1868-1912), Ainu people had lived close to nature through various activities such as fishing, hunting, and gathering. As a result of these daily activities involving nature, the Ainu developed their spiritual belief systems. For example, they believe that various spirits exist in natural phenomena such as plants, insects, and animals. Among these animals, the bear, killer whale and owl are considered in many Ainu societies as the highest-ranked animal kamuy, meaning gods or deities. The Owl God in particular, is believed to be the guardian of the village. In this project, the symbolic representation of the Owl God in four different Ainu traditional folklores and various forms of arts will be carefully examined. The goal of this study is to demonstrate that although the language and physical communities are under threat by Japanese migration and a modern industrial economy, the spiritual belief in the Owl God as the guardian of the village continues to exist in contemporary Ainu works of art. In addition, I will argue that the representation of the Owl God, Kotan-kor-kamuy, is an important symbolic expression of Ainu cultural identity. / Graduate