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This collection of essays by regional specialists draws on a wide range of ethnographic and historical data to reassess the significance of the ancestors for changing relations of power and emerging identities in Madagascar.
During the early 20th century, a group of ex-slaves established a frontier society in the no-man’s-land of the extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar. First settlers skilfully deployed a fluid set of Malagasy customs to implant a myth of themselves as tompon-tany or “masters of the land”. Eventually, they created a land monopoly to reinforce their legitimacy and to exclude later migrants. Some of them were labelled andevo (“slave” or “slave descent”). The tompon-tany prohibited the andevo from owning land, and thereby from having tombs. This book focuses on the plight of the tombless andevo, and how their ascribed impurity and association with infertility, illness, death and misfortune made them an essential part of the tompon-tany world-view.
Mining the rich Venetian archives, especially the unusually detailed records of Venice's own branch of the Roman Inquisition, Guido Ruggiero provides a strikingly new and provocative interpretation of the end of the Renaissance in Italy. In this boldly structured work, he develops five narrative accounts of individual encounters with the Inquisition that illustrate the double-edged metaphor of how passions were both bound by late Renaissance society and were seen in turn as binding people. In this way new perspectives are opened on magic, witchcraft, love, marriage, gender, and discipline at the level of the community and beyond. Witches, courtesans, prostitutes, women healers, nobles, Cardinals, and renegade priests and monks speak from these pages describing their lives, beliefs, hopes, fears, and lies. With an imaginative flair for storytelling and impeccable scholarship, Ruggiero exposes the rich complexity of the culture and poetics of the everyday at the end of the Renaissance and illuminates a previously unexplored chapter in Italian history.
Greek-owned shipping has been at the top of the world fleet for the last twenty years. Winner of the 1997 Runciman Award, this richly sourced study traces the development of the Greek tramp fleet from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Gelina Harlaftis argues that the success of Greek-owned shipping in recent years has been a result not of a number of entrepreneurs using flags of convenience in the 1940s, but of networks and organisational structures which date back to the nineteenth century. This study provides the most comprehensive history of development of modern Greek shipping ever published. It is illustrated with numerous maps and photographs, and includes extensive tables of primary data.
These 130 articles Aisan mythologies and cover such topics as Buddhist and Hindu symbolic systems, myth in pre-Islamic Iran, Chinese cosmology and demons, and the Japanese conceptions of the afterlife and the "vital spirit". Also includes myths from Turkey, Korea, Tibet, and Mongolia. Illustrations.
La Andriana es una comedia que nos sumerge en el mundo de la juventud romana llena de amor, engaño, humor e intriga. La historia se desarrolla en la antigua Roma y nos muestra las complejidades de las relaciones personales. A través de giros inesperados y situaciones cómicas, Terencio nos entretiene con esta encantadora obra que ha perdurado en el tiempo.
An epic account of the power of memory in Madagascar.
Analyzes the pornographic poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues written in poet Domenico Venier's social circle, showing how male writers created female characters who were defiled and available to all. Also shows how two women writers with ties to the salon appropriated and transformed these tropes of female sexuality.