Search

En el Archivo del Real Monasterio de Guadalupe (Extremadura) se conservan nueve códices de milagros atribuidos a Santa María de Guadalupe, conocidos como Los Milagros de Guadalupe, que contienen cerca de mil novecientos relatos que abarcan el dilatado lapso entre principios del siglo XV y casi mediados del siglo XVIII. Los relatos de devotos peregrinos, que ponen de relieve su piedad y votos a Santa María de Guadalupe, son recogidos por los monjes jerónimos, anónimos copistas encargados de expurgar de dichas vivencias toda connotación herética. El artículo analiza algunos relatos de esa colección referidos al tránsito entre la vida, la muerte y la resurrección, tema tradicional desde el cristianismo de los orígenes en el que la representación del cuerpo, los sentidos y las emociones constituye la base de un planteamiento espiritual que contribuye a acentuar el sentido devocional en la práctica religiosa. En ese marco, el trabajo registra los indicios textuales –en los planos retórico, literario y teológico– que revelan los intentos de los redactores de la colección por ceñir el sensorium devocional a la ortodoxia cristiana, es decir por orientarlo hacia el hagiosensorium. En relación con la representación de enfermos, muertos y resucitados, se presta especial atención a los contextos milagrosos en que dichos personajes aparecen y a la secuencia promesa realizada-gracia recibida-promesa cumplida, modelo de intercambio de dones y agradecimientos que, en términos generales, se reconoce en todas las fuentes examinadas.

Background: Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a rare complication of measles, which emerges long after the initial infection. The diagnosis of SSPE can be challenging, especially when initial presentation is atypical. Clinical Description: A 6-year-old boy, apparently healthy previously, presented with a sudden onset of generalized myoclonic jerks with intact cognitive and scholastic skills. Past history revealed that the child had measles infection at 7 months of age. Clinical examination, including memory and intellect assessment, was normal except for the generalized myoclonus. Management and Outcome: Diagnosis of SSPE was confirmed with positive antimeasles antibodies and characteristic pseudoperiodic pattern on electroencephalogram. The child was started on standard treatment as per the existing guidelines. However, the child showed marked deterioration over the next 4 weeks with loss of cognition and intellect, causing hopelessness and grief in the family, leading to their self-withdrawal from further treatment. Conclusion: This case report describes the importance of considering SSPE as a potential diagnosis in patients with myoclonic jerks but intact cognitive and intellectual function. Furthermore, the case portrays the progressive deterioration and profound emotional impact on the family of child with this disease.

Drumming and chanting are core practices in modern magical-religious Witchcraft in the absence of unifying texts or standardized rituals. Song and musicality contribute towards self-creation and community making. However, Nature Religions and alternate spiritualities are seldom included in surveys of religious musicking or soundscapes. This article considers musicality in earlier publications on modern Witchcraft, as well as the author's fieldwork with magical-religious Witches in the UK, to show the valuable contribution they make to discussions on religious belonging and the sensorium through song, music, percussion, and soundscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most compelling effects of digitally enhanced and digitally enabled immersive exhibitions is their paradoxical dematerialization of "analog" experience. What leads exhibition visitors to accept that immersion is a state achieved only through technological mediation? Are we not already perceptually immersed in the world, as the phenomenologists asserted? This essay explores how digital enhancement disengages self-awareness by masquerading as immersion. In contrast, contemporary artists Karin Sander, Janet Cardiff, and Chris Salter employ desynchronizing and dislocating tactics to challenge naïve notions of what comprises an aesthetic experience, in order to requaint viewers with their own perceptual and ethical agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the role of disembodiment in the visual art and films of David Lynch. This line of inquiry, I argue, allows us to consider the ways scholars do and do not conceptualise the relationship between Lynch’s works of different mediums. Specifically, I pursue the conviction that Lynch’s preoccupation with an injured or fragmented body corresponds to his intermedial creative practice. I turn my attention to Lynch’s early short film The Alphabet (1968) which exemplifies how the violence inflicted on the body represents the violence wreaked by the separation of art into different media. Using Jacques Rancière’s definition of mediality and his idea of the sensorium, I offer a new perspective on the questions of disembodiment that manifest in tricky and unpredictable bodies in Lynch’s work and thus on how we should read Lynch’s output as joined up across mediums. 1

Drumming and chanting are core practices in modern magical-religious Witchcraft in the absence of unifying texts or standardized rituals. Song and musicality contribute towards self-creation and community making. However, Nature Religions and alternate spiritualities are seldom included in surveys of religious musicking or soundscapes. This article considers musicality in earlier publications on modern Witchcraft, as well as the author’s fieldwork with magical-religious Witches in the UK, to show the valuable contribution they make to discussions on religious belonging and the sensorium through song, music, percussion, and soundscapes.

At arm’s length, we might define translation as a process by which a set of information is manipulated, altered, transferred, or rendered into another form. But translation also, and often, bears on us more personally, more intimately. It has the potential to bridge chasms of difference in our encounters between languages, interpretations, and experiences. Translation also carries with it the possibility of getting things wrong. How might we align the spirit of translation—of the things it does—with the undoings it can engender? How might this issue probe the scope of translation across and beyond modes and textures of expression such as the written, the spoken, the sensory, the visual, and the auditory?

Table of Contents

The paper analyses the role that mineral objects and stones, described in medieval sources as votive offerings, play in the construction of a significant world. To do this, it evaluates the relationship that they establish, in the miraculous context, with the devotees, which configures them in a rank of entity equivalent or superior to that of the properly human due to the purpose and the way in which each actant uses them, and especially by the sensory aspect that defines such contacts allowing us to recognize specific characteristics of a sensorium that we qualify as devotional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen data audits build on Jesús Martín-Barbero's (JMB) theorization of the contemporary sensorium to foreground citizens' situated, affective responses to datafication. We argue that social audits are necessarily historically situated, highlighting how the processes by which we evaluate reality or think about data power are inevitability contextually bound. With this in mind, JMB's maps of contemporary mediations ground local experiences with datafication; however, we argue that his work can be complemented by more nuanced appreciations of affect theory. Based on this, we discuss three citizen-centered data audits techniques that can be used to encourage personal assessments of engagements with the contemporary sensorium. Overall, this work offers individuals and communities methods to analyze, reflect on, and evaluate their unique, contextual engagements with datafied and algorithmic societies. These methods offer people pathways to visualize and redraw the map of the systems they inhabit--and possibly even to reposition themselves within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the role of disembodiment in the visual art and films of David Lynch. This line of inquiry, I argue, allows us to consider the ways scholars do and do not conceptualise the relationship between Lynch’s works of different mediums. Specifically, I pursue the conviction that Lynch’s preoccupation with an injured or fragmented body corresponds to his intermedial creative practice. I turn my attention to Lynch’s early short film The Alphabet (1968) which exemplifies how the violence inflicted on the body represents the violence wreaked by the separation of art into different media. Using Jacques Rancière’s definition of mediality and his idea of the sensorium, I offer a new perspective on the questions of disembodiment that manifest in tricky and unpredictable bodies in Lynch’s work and thus on how we should read Lynch’s output as joined up across mediums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A través de la perspectiva de las cinco pieles del artista y arquitecto austríaco Hundertwasser, se invita a repensar la forma de permanecer en el mundo, lo que lleva a realizar una propuesta de análisis por medio de las interfaces, dejando a un lado el ámbito tecnológico, y entendiéndose como lenguajes que derivan en ‘formas de interacción’ ambiental, artística y arquitectónica. Con esto se propone una visión más compleja con respecto de las cinco pieles para la significación del universo, en la que se logre la convivencia equilibrada entre el animal humano, las especies no humanas y el entorno como un todo de permanencia común.

One of the most compelling effects of digitally enhanced and digitally enabled immersive exhibitions is their paradoxical dematerialization of “analog” experience. What leads exhibition visitors to accept that immersion is a state achieved only through technological mediation? Are we not already perceptually immersed in the world, as the phenomenologists asserted? This essay explores how digital enhancement disengages self-awareness by masquerading as immersion. In contrast, contemporary artists Karin Sander, Janet Cardiff, and Chris Salter employ desynchronizing and dislocating tactics to challenge naïve notions of what comprises an aesthetic experience, in order to requaint viewers with their own perceptual and ethical agency.

Accepting the idea that the mental representations of concepts, diagrams, relations, plans, etc., are thought-shapers, I suggest going a bit further. Any kind of representation, be it mental or public, i.e., accessible to others, bears thought-shaping potential, albeit not in the same manner. Just as the idea of embodied cognition takes into consideration environmental facilities and obstacles, I suggest investigating thought processes in a broader context, i.e., placing thought-shapers in the context of their formation. I propose that the elements of the above mentioned definition of thought-shapers are built upon a structure that consists of representational skills, means, and institutions. In accordance with the idea of embeddedness and enactment, the need for communication and the given cognitive and physical aptitudes result in different kinds of expression, i.e., different kinds of representations available to others. When an expressional mode solidifies, it opens up new possibilities and limitations. I propose that mundane, almost unnoticeable affordances and their accompanying limits do shape our thoughts thoroughly. In my argument for the thought-shaper potential of the generative technique of public representations, I will delineate a historical overview of representational means in tandem with the main characteristics of different eras’ crucial ideals and patterns of reasoning. I will close the historical overview with a terminological excursion exploring how publicly available representation and mental representation relate to each other and the kinds of ambiguities that accompany the latter term’s use. Accordingly, embedding thought-shapers, I will outline the evolution of different representational techniques and skills. Then, because language is a decisive representational means, I will investigate its orientating and distortive potential. I will rely on some of Bergson’s lesser-known remarks. I will illuminate how ocular-centrism was able to be a decisive metaphor in science and philosophy for long centuries, until recently even. In conclusion, as a case study, I will illuminate how the term “mental representation” as a highly abstract term facilitates and at the same time hinders philosophical and scientific inquiry.

English Abstract: Amid ongoing social and ecological transformations, vignerons (winegrowers) and the vines in their care are responding to the impacts of climatic and other forms of change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the eastern French winegrowing region of Alsace, I turn to the sensorium as the site where changing landscapes are forcing people to rethink the meaning of terroir, a key term in which winegrowing is articulated as a practice. I go beyond typical renderings of this French concept, often defined in terms of interactions among its various components (e.g. soil, wind and human know-how), to bring attention to the sensory relationships that connect them. Through walking and semi-directed interviews, as well as participant observations, with informants who represent thirteen different winegrowing sites, I generated data that explicate what is changing, how changes are being addressed and what this means for understanding the very place(s) in which place-based wine producers and their products are embedded. By attending to the senses, I contend that the goût du terroir or 'taste of place' is not merely reflected through the wines being produced by Alsatian winegrowers but is also a story of sensory relationships contributed by the vines themselves. French Abstract: Au milieu des transformations sociales et écologiques en cours, les vignerons et les vignes dont ils ont la charge réagissent aux changements climatiques et autres. En s'appuyant sur un travail ethnographique de terrain dans la région vitivinicole d'Alsace, dans l'est de la France, je me tourne vers le sensorium comme site où les paysages changeants forcent les gens à repenser la signification du terroir, un terme clé dans lequel la vitiviniculture est articulée comme une pratique. Je vais au-delà des représentations typiques de ce concept français souvent défini en termes d'interactions entre ses différentes composantes (par exemple le sol, le vent et le savoir-faire humain) pour attirer l'attention sur les relations sensorielles qui les relient. Par le biais d'entretiens à pied et semi-dirigés, ainsi que d'observations participantes, avec des informateurs représentant treize sites vitivinicoles différents, j'ai généré des données qui expliquent ce qui change, comment les changements sont abordés, et ce que cela signifie pour la compréhension des lieux dans lesquels les producteurs de vin et leurs produits sont intégrés. En prêtant attention aux sens, je soutiens que le « goût du terroir » (ou 'taste of place') ne se reflète pas seulement dans les vins produits par les vignerons alsaciens, mais qu'il s'agit également d'une histoire de relations sensorielles apportées par les vignes elles-mêmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extended definition of “observation” is developed in order to account for the usage in the physical sciences and in neuropsychology. An observation is initially defined as a perception that has a focus of attention and is guided by theoretical considerations. Since the focus may change, one adopts a pluralist position according to which the object of perception may involve any stage of the causal chain that leads to perception, such as the source of light or sound, the obstructions, the medium or even the receptor. The “neutral” observations of the empiricists are seen as involving only low-level or medium-level theorization. Examples are examined, such as a lunar eclipse, the rainbow, and observations mediated by instruments, whose “artifacts” are considered observations of the instrument itself. One also defines null-effect observations. Observations of photographs and drawings may be considered either the observation of a printed sheet of paper or the observation of the pictured object or people. This causal-pluralist metatheory of observation also accepts that one may “observe light”, observe the retina, and observe parts of the brain which are outside the region of the “sensorium”. Illusions and hallucinations are analyzed within this “observational materialism”, which considers that qualia are self-observations of the brain. Criticisms that the approach is too wide in scope are analyzed in the conclusion.

Copyright of Index: Revista de Arte Contemporaneo is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Pesticides and toxicity are constitutive features of modernization in Africa, despite ongoing portrayals of the continent as "too poor to pollute." This article examines social science scholarship on agricultural pesticide expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We recount the rise of agrochemical usage in colonial projects that placed African smallholder farmers at the forefront of toxic vulnerability. We then outline prevalent literature on "knowledge deficits" and unsafe farmer practices as approaches that can downplay deeper structures. Missing in this literature, we argue, are the embodied and sensory experiences of African farmers as they become pesticide users, even amid an awareness of toxicity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Mozambique and Burkina Faso, we explore how the "toxic sensorium" of using agrochemicals intersects with farmers' projects of modern aspiration. Th is approach can help elucidate why and how differently situated farmers live with pesticides, thereby expanding existing literature on structural violence and knowledge gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tanto frente al avance de los medios electrónicos y las teletransmisiones del siglo XX como frente a la digitalización cibernética del siglo XXI, los diversos campos epistémicos se han encargado de problematizar la relación entre lo perceptivo, lo estético (espacio-tiempo) y los cambios tecnológicos que imponen nuevas prácticas intersubjetivas, comportamientos y modos de subjetivación. En muchos autores surge el uso de un concepto puntual: el sensorium. Ya sea que se proponga un enfoque cultural o una perspectiva específicamente gnoseológica, suele repetirse una referencia de dicha categoría en relación con los cambios de la velocidad y la aceleración de las imágenes, los textos y las comunicaciones; primero en la era de la electrónica analógica y luego en la época digital. El objetivo de este trabajo es exponer una breve sistematización del concepto de sensorium en vistas de una posible definición en tanto unidad de análisis estético-política. Dicha categoría permite, por un lado, pensar la disciplina Estética como pensamiento político; y por el otro, pensar lo político en clave estética. Para ello el texto repasa los diversos sentidos que ha tenido la categoría a lo largo de la historia, según su emergencia en diferentes epistemes. La primera parte recorre ciertos discursos puntuales identificando autores en los cuales se pueden encontrar usos específicos (Newton, Simmel, Benjamin, McLuhan, Kittler, etc.), delineando así una serie de sentidos relacionados con el espacio y el tiempo desde lo estético, lo perceptivo, lo gnoseológico, lo sociológico y lo técnico. A partir de dicho esquema, en la segunda parte se presenta la idea de un “giro sensorial” en los estudios sociopolíticos contemporáneos, donde la idea de sensorium cobra una nueva importancia. Por último, se hace foco en las relaciones conceptuales que se derivan del uso que propone Rancière en torno a la categoría. En base a dicho recorrido el texto busca delinear una serie de elementos para abrir la posibilidad de definir la Estética como el pensamiento del sensorium común; se trata de una unidad de análisis estético-política que funciona como marco teórico para una morfología de lo social en tanto analítica del orden de lo sensible.

The "colored-brain thesis", or strong qualitative physicalism, is discussed from historical and philosophical perspectives. This thesis was proposed by Thomas Case (1888), in a non-materialistic context, and is close to views explored by H. H. Price (1932) and E. Boring (1933). Using Mary's room thought experiment, one can argue that physicalism implies qualitative physicalism. Qualitative physicalism involves three basic statements: (i) perceptual internalism, and realism of qualia; (ii) ontic physicalism, charaterized as a description in space, time, and scale; and (iii) mind-brain identity thesis. In addition, (iv) structuralism in physics, and distinguishing the present version from that suggested by H. Feigl and S. Pepper, (v) realism of the physical description. The "neurosurgeon argument" is presented, as to why the greenness of a visually perceived avocado, which (according to this view) is present in the brain as a physical-chemical attribute, would not be seen as green by a neurosurgeon who opens the observer's skull. This conception is compared with two close views, Russellian (and Schlickian) monisms and panprotopsychism (including panqualityism). According to the strong qualitative physicalism presented here, the phenomenal experience of a quale q is identical to a physico-chemical quality q, which arises from a combination of (1) the materiality ω associated with the brain, and (2) the causal organization or structure of the relevant elements of the brain Σ, including in this organization the structure of the self: (Σω)q. The "explanatory gap" between mental and physical states is shifted to a gap between the physico-chemical qualities q and the organized materiality of a specific brain region (Σω)q, and is seen as being bridged only by a set of non-explanatory postulates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the scientific problem of theoretical elaboration and contextualization of immersive environment realized in the physical space of a gallery or museum, in VR and on the new virtual platforms on the Internet, as well as in hybrid space, in the augmented and mixed reality of the 21st century. The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the formation of the immersive environment and of the practices of VR and AR projects creation in Ukrainian contemporary art in recent years. The task is to elaborate the theoretical bases of the development of immersive environments and VR, review and analysis of projects that use the digital technologies in order to create an immersion and AR. The methodology of the study consists in theoretical and field research of immersivity and in the author’s experiments development. The main method is a comprehensive and systematic approach to the development of the theory of virtuality, visual and photometric methods, analysis of concepts, spatial structure and technological features of online VR platforms and artistic realizations. The concept of sensorium is involved, which describes the feeling, perception and interpretation of information about the world around. The peculiarities of creating immersive environments in physical space in the projects «Meta Physical Time-Space», «Refraction of Reality», «Living Energy» were explored (to be included into the national art discourse), as well as in VR in the frame of VR-festivals, such, as Carbon Media Art Festival, «Frontier» and «Virtuality» that serve as a testing ground for the development of new technological art. The possibilities of new online VR platforms, such as Mozilla Hubs, WebXR, AltspaceVR, artspaces. kunstmatrix, Cryptovoxels, Transmadatac Virtual Museum, are analyzed. The practice of creating VR projects on platforms on the Internet: Artefact Chornobyl 33 and Artefact Chornobyl + MADATAC, «VR Collider» and «Genesis» are considered as case study. Drift from immersive environments in physical space to virtual reality has been detected. The multi-vector nature of AR projects and different types of connection with book publishing, public art objects, contemporary sculpture and urban practice have been revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the perception of inaccessibility as it reflects the cultural education of the sensorium. Following Gilroy, sensorium is taken here to mean the dense weave of historical experience that organizes the relations among the senses and perception itself. With this concept, I examine texts related to accessibility management at a large Canadian University. These texts include a 2017–18 email exchange regarding accessibility between a subway station and a university building, as well as the first policy statement on ‘The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons’ from 1981. Through these texts, I show how people, now as then, are taught to sense disability as excludable. The paper demonstrates how the sensorium is educated to exclude a concern for the history, responsibility, as well as the touch of the actual physical environment. In pursuit of a re-education of the sensorium, this paper reveals how disabled people are sensed as potentially includable in the future while excludable in the present.

Copyright of Avant is the property of Centre for Philosophical Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Philosophy & History of Biology / Filosofia e História da Biologia is the property of Associacao Brasileira de Filosofia e Historia da Biologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city's identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ancient Greek world didn’t have rules that were applied in every shrines and for every rituals that were performed inside. The norms depended on the places, the deities, and sometimes the period of the year. Among the documentation which provides us with information on the way the religious festivals were performed and the behaviour expected on the part of the worshippers entering the sanctuaries, we find a rich series of inscriptions, commonly called “sacred laws”. Until recently, these epigraphical datas have been studied from the point of view of the authorities which emitted the rules. The paper aims at shifting the perspective by studying the effects that such ritual prescriptions had upon the members of the community, in order to see to what extend the ritual norms were intented to act upon the body and the sensory experience of the worshippers. First, the paper sheds light upon the nature of the most common prohibitions to be found in the inscriptions. Then it focusses on the sensory effects produced by some rules connected to Demeter in the Peloponnesian, stating that these rules are meaningful regarding the relation established between the goddess and her worshippers.

Nos proponemos trabajar cierta zona de lo que Rancière ha pensado como “régimen estético de las artes”. A partir de esta comprensión, revisaremos los otros dos regímenes del arte, pero más directamente el régimen representativo, con el cual el estético plantea su ruptura. Para ello, trabajaremos una contraposición directa con la noción de muthos que se encuentra en la Poética de Aristóteles y con los “malos entendidos” que vislumbra Rancière sobre la modernidad artística, en particular con lo que se pensó a partir del modernismo y la autonomía estética, que le adjudicó una relevancia decisiva al concepto de montaje.

El artículo se propone indagar la huella borrada de “lo barroco” en la literatura cubana haciendo pie principalmente en dos textos, Antología de la literatura cubana de José Lezama y Lo cubano en la poesía de Cintio Vitier, con el propósito de advertir esos trazos por debajo de las operaciones críticas que muchas veces procuraron invisibilizarlos. En un segundo momento, el trabajo se centra en la escritura de José Martí. A través de la lectura del Diario de campaña, se intenta revisar esa la marca de esa tradición atendiendo a ciertos elementos textuales que lo configuran como un texto “opaco” entre los que sobresalen el fragmentarismo, el sensorium y la hipertelia.

This paper explores the perception of inaccessibility as it reflects the cultural education of the sensorium. Following Gilroy, sensorium is taken here to mean the dense weave of historical experience that organizes the relations among the senses and perception itself. With this concept, I examine texts related to accessibility management at a large Canadian University. These texts include a 2017-18 email exchange regarding accessibility between a subway station and a university building, as well as the first policy statement on 'The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons' from 1981. Through these texts, I show how people, now as then, are taught to sense disability as excludable. The paper demonstrates how the sensorium is educated to exclude a concern for the history, responsibility, as well as the touch of the actual physical environment. In pursuit of a re-education of the sensorium, this paper reveals how disabled people are sensed as potentially includable in the future while excludable in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent research devoted to “rhetoric’s sensorium” and “rhetorical situation”, the essay aims at relating the birth of the orator to his “moment of glory”. The analysis departs from the similarities of Mihail Kogălniceanu’s and B.P. Hasdeu’s discontinuous careers, both of them eminent Romanian personalities of the 19th century who gave up literature on account its inherent uncertainty, afterward pursuing success as political orators. Nonetheless, even if both of them discover that sensuality can be converted into brilliant oratory, it is the aspiring orators’ education (both education of senses and institutional education) that makes the difference between the former’s glory and the latter’s failure. A series of examples extracted from early literature and grouped according to the frequency of favored rhetorical effects prove that each one understands “glory” in a different manner, which makes the former a typical persuader (a mediator of experience) and the latter a manipulator (a seeker of the Absolute). Each orator’s manner (persuader vs. manipulator) becomes apparent in the way autobiography is functionalized within political speeches: while Kogălniceanu formalizes autobiography so that it becomes a trope enabling the orator to reinvent himself in any new rhetorical situation may occur, Hasdeu attaches autobiography to a sense of exceptionalism. Hence, the relationship between the birth of the orator and his moment of glory is discernible not only in his awakening of senses but also in the orator’s (aptitude for) rebirth in new situations.

This paper questions preconceptions that situate the |xam in a Stone Age past where they can be objectified by a timeless gaze. From such appropriations and (miss)-representation, the |xam emerge either as shamans or victims or as the quintessential proto-scientists. We explore instead the expressive culture of the |xam and describe its significance as “applied history” for people’s lives in the present. Our investigation follows two routes; firstly, via notions of vibration, sound and rock engravings as they remain available for intermedial comparison in the archaeological and ethnographic records. Secondly, we consider the complex ontological instabilities and continuities in an oral tradition by focusing on !khwa—rain potency. From this we demonstrate how cultural literacy, with no direct written form, is translated from an extinct |xam language and culture and finds meaningful leverage among present-day descendants of the |xam who are genetically extant but now speak another language, Afrikaans.

Interview with Agnieszka Jelewska by Monika Włudzik and Witold Wachowski.

Wywiad z Agnieszką Jelewską. Rozmawiają: Monika Włudzik i Witold Wachowski.

The hermeticism and aphoristic style of Marshall McLuhan probably affected the scientific reception of his work. Nevertheless, the writings of the Canadian author still continue to attract both criticisms and praise. In this paper, we provide a brief account of his contribution. After reviewing some of the ideas of thinkers to whom McLuhan himself is indebted, we address the posterity of his writings and evoke the most recurrent criticisms of his work. The paper ends by mentioning how McLuhan imported approaches mobilized in literary theory in the 1930s into media analysis and by calling on Harold Innis’ approach to complement that of McLuhan.