You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A social reality (including social pathology) is constantly being constructed anew in the process of confrontation of perspectives and definitions of individuals, institutions and social groups. Therefore what interests the authors of the book more than the disputes on the right definition, is the understanding of social pathology phenomena - their causes, mechanisms, and social costs. Complex and multidimensional as it is, social reality is best described from various perspectives. For that reason, a potentially interesting and fruitful interdisciplinary approach characterises the book. It contains mainly texts of psychologists who work at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. The articles...
For the first time in English, Michael Ostling tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes.
The essays in this volume articulate the historical ground on which this artistic exploration of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism depends. They also elaborate the spectrum that connects them, in terms of their historical location and ideological emphases, and thus suggest the ways in which they are connected in terms of rhetorical discourse. The essays are governed by the sense that anti-Semitism has not been a unitary experience or event. Rather it is its varieties that are explored--rexactly those aspects that have made it so difficult to grasp, and that led to the wide-ranging events and murdering methods of the Holocaust. Thus the editors eschew the causal explanation of Hitler's Willing Executioners as they seek to provide more nuanced understanding. Murray Baumgarten directs the Jewish Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter Kenez teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bruce Thompson is a lecturer in History and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The World in the Mind and Sculpture of Deafblind People discusses the creative capabilities of people with simultaneous impairment of sight and hearing. It is a pioneering interdisciplinary study combining theories from the fields of pedagogy, psychology, semiotics and theory of art. It presents a study of the act of creation performed by deafblind people, which makes it possible to propose a vision of reality as conveyed through their sculptures, and which forms a base for the scrutiny of the specific and individual ways of understanding the world and its visualisation in the minds of deafblind artists. The key to the model of the analysis of the creative act proposed here is the concept of...
Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of manuscripts, ritual objects, and folk art developed by Hasidic masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism, and Safed Kabbalah. Examined at the delicate and difficult to define interface between seemingly simple, folk art and complex ideological and conceptual outlooks which contain deep, abstract symbols, the study touches on aspects of object history, intellectual history, the decorative arts, and the history of religion. Based on original texts, the focus of this volume is on the subjective experience of the user at the moment of ritual, applying tenets of process philosophy and literary theory – Wolfgang Iser, Gaston Bachelard, and Walter Benjamin – to the analysis of objects.
How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes. After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all over the region. These efforts tried both to explain the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape public opinion on their society’s shared post-war heritage. Museums and films made political use of recollections of the recent past, and employed selected museum, memorial, and media tools and tactics to make its political intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars around the region take a fresh look at the subject as they address the strategies of fashioning popular perceptions of the recent past.
How does a ruler become "the Great"? Is greatness a part of authority exercised or a part of an image created? These and other questions are addressed in this volume on the life and memory of Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania (r.1392-1430). The study raises a hypothesis that Vytautas was the main engineer of his image as the great ruler while his contemporaries and later generations developed this image and adapted it to their needs and understandings. Investigating the propaganda surrounding the grand duke, this study reveals that, in fact, there were two opposite images: that of a good ruler and that of a tyrant. The paradox is that frequently these opposites were based on the same features of the grand duke's character or episodes from his biography. The research is based on a wide array of written and visual sources as well as on records of oral tradition. Rich and diverse primary materials are analysed from the perspectives of political and social history, memorial culture, as well as iconography and rhetoric.
Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.
Before the mid-fifteenth century, the Christian and Islamic governments of Europe had restricted the architecture and design of synagogues and often prevented Jews from becoming architects. Stiefel presents a study of the material culture and religious architecture that this era produced.