"Naked" Baptism in the Early Church: The Rhetoric and the Reality

Baptism was understood as a radical life-changing act in the early church. Its radical nature was reflected by it being administered to candidates, male and female, who were apparently naked. The issue of nakedness must, however, be re-examined in view of the fact that baptism was normally administered by male clergy and Judeo-Christian modesty would not likely allow a religious practice where female nakedness was exposed to male gaze. This makes it unlikely that male clergy did in fact baptize naked women. The article notes that the term gymnos , used for nakedness, had a much wider usage than its English equivalent and might simply point to divestiture of outer garments only. Certain patristic texts support this perspective by apparently indicating relative nakedness only in baptism. Nevertheless, the language of "nakedness" was used to underscore the radical death-and-birth nature of the baptismal rite.     

(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts a gendered analysis of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India, particularly focused on women’s position within the movement, the continuum of gender based violence that they experience and the potential for transformative politics. The contemporary Maoist movement in India has been informed by a stated commitment to ‘progressive’ gender politics and social transformations; in that it marks a departure from the Naxalite movement of the 60s and 70s. Yet women remain concentrated in the group’s lower ranks and are absent from leadership positions. In addition, sexual and gender based violence and discrimination within the movement further undermine the commitment of the revolution to create opportunities for transformative politics including gender justice and equality. We consider it important that women’s lived experiences of the conflict - as combatants, supporters as well as civilians affected by it - are brought to the foreground. Drawing from postcolonial feminist approaches, we reflect on the challenges and possibilities for feminist politics and ethics within the Indian Maoist movement. We conclude that the rhetoric and reality of gender equality within the Maoist movement provides a unique opportunity to further investigate and analyze the ways in which feminist activism and the women’s movement in India have alienated the concerns of marginalized women from dalit and adivasi communities.     

The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: A Review Essay of McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics

The homeostatic method, which was developed to reconstruct the number of inhabitants of a city or even a country in pre-statistical periods, has yet to receive much attention from demographic historians. Applied first to Amsterdam during the years from 1586 to 1865, the method has subsequently been used to compute the population of other places, including England from 1541 to 1871. The author reviews major schools of thought in historical demography and shows that the homeostatic method, with its emphasis on fertility regulated by marriages, logically extends some schools and is both simpler and more accurate than others. He then explains the method in detail, applying it to Dutch and English cases, and compares its estimates with those obtained through the use of other techniques.     

西方古典修辞学与史学——以修昔底德为例

历史学的编纂写作必须依赖于某种交流与传播的载体或中介 ,诸如语言、图示、影像和文字等 ,其中最基本的形式便是由文字、词汇、语法、文法等构成的文本。西方古典史学的兴起正是凭借文本的革命而确立的 ,即由诗歌或韵文向散文的文体转变。在此过程中 ,作为散文体基本文法之一的修辞学对历史学产生了重要的影响 ,其中修昔底德的历史堪称修辞与史学的完美结合。     

'Professionalising' Participation: From Rhetoric to Practice

Local government is increasingly seeking to encourage young people's participation in local government planning and decision-making. This paper examines the relationship between professionals in local government and the young people who are the focus of local government participatory initiatives. We argue that whilst the move towards developing participation initiatives is welcome, there is a need to adopt a process of critical reflection with regard to these initiatives. The case of one New Zealand city is examined where young people express their views on the effectiveness or otherwise of their council's participation initiatives. Our findings suggest that whilst well intentioned these initiatives have had limited success in facilitating meaningful participation and perhaps the participation process as currently practised is in urgent need of review.     

Rhetoric and pragmatics in Ulysses: how Joyce invented Twitter

Particularly upon their first appearance, Twitter and James Joyce’s unique style had to face similarly infamous charges in that they were both accused of slowly but inexorably corrupting the English language. In fact, the linguistic practices – stylemes in the case of Ulysses – breeding such corruption are often the same: clippings, abbreviations, the dropping out of inflexional endings, omissions, ellipses, the overabundance of acronyms, creative compound words and blends, symbolisations and onomatopoeias, lexicalisations of (often) vernacular pronunciations. This paper sets out to investigate these features, their rhetorical effect and pragmatic function in order to explore the epistemological, perceptive and social context which made it possible a hundred years ago for an Irish modernist to anticipate how English was to be used on today’s social media and on Twitter in particular.     

历史与现实

历史与现实只是两个词,而不是两回事。语言把本体弄成两半,同时又遮蔽了另一半。这样,一半是语言性的“历史”和“现实”,一半是事实性的历史与现实。“历史即现实”这个新历史观的命题在最抽象的意义上,它是最具体的,同时,在最具体的意义上,它又是最抽象的。本质上,历史首先是一种深度的存在。只有在历史的无限深度之下,才有永恒的意义。历史是距离人们最远而又最近的东西。但人们只知道“最远”而不知道“最近”,所以,人们的历史观就大成问题。     

Growth Cultures: the global bioeconomy and its bioregions * Philip Cooke

As a consequence of reviewing books for journals, I now readacknowledgements and prefaces with a degree of interest thatis perhaps unwarranted by normal standards, but which I havefound increasingly important when seeking to understand whathas inspired scholars in their work and how they develop theirideas. This is especially evident in Phil Cooke's new book GrowthCultures that brings together several years worth of researchon the bioeconomy—as the commercial exploitation of thelife sciences is now commonly defined. It is well worth readingthe preface to this volume to ground the rest of the book inthe evolving thinking about this important ‘industry’. Growth Cultures collects together in one volume much of Cooke'sprolific output from the late 1990s onwards     

The prince and the churl: The traumatic experience of Philip Augustus

Historians have recently argued that by the late Middle Ages a number of Mediterranean economies, notably southern Italy and parts of Spain, stood in a “colonial” relationship vis-à-vis other Mediterranean or northern European regions. For Sicily it has been argued that its economy was based on the exchange of agricultural products, principally grain, for imported manufactures, mainly textiles. Sicilian cloth manufactures were too weak to withstand foreign competition, which created an unbalanced and externally dependent structure of exchange and radically curtailed any chance of autochthonous economic development. This article discusses the empirical evidence upholding these statements about Sicilian textile manufactures. It includes an evaluation of the proportion of foreign imports to local production and consumption, of the socially distinct markets to which foreign and local manufactures catered, and of the nature, quality and extent of local production; the discussion is set in the context of the economic and social transformations taking place in Europe after 1350. The final part briefly analyses the institutional structures and constraints peculiar to Sicilian manufacture, such as the relationship between city and countryside and the apparent lack of any craft organizations. In the light of the extensive evidence for textile manufactures, the author concludes that the empirical basis for the argument that Sicily had a “colonial” dependence on cloth imports is insufficient, that local manufacture was quite capable of withstanding foreign competition of comparable quality, and that the explanation for Sicily's economic development in the late medieval and modern periods must be sought in its own social structures and in the result of the conflicts that arose within them.