Search results for "taboo"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
The taboo against group contact: Hypothesis of Gypsy ontologization
2007
The concept of this article is that the symbolic relationships between human beings and animals serve as a model for the relationships between the majority and the ethnic minority. We postulate that there are two representations that serve to organize these relationships between human beings and animals: a domestic and a wild one. If the domestic animal is an index of human culture, the wild animal is an index of nature which man considers himself to share with the animal. With the wild representation, contact with the animal will be taboo, as it constitutes a threat to the anthropological difference. We offer the hypothesis that ontologization of the minority, that is, the substitution of …
The Taboo of the Perverse Dying Body
2014
A human being is continuously living towards death within a mortal body that is dying little by little, second after second. In the gloss of popular media, the taboo reality of this stain of mortality is hidden by a diversion, which is created by the multiple pornographies of visual culture: the pornography of perfect bodies and the pornography of violent death. No longer invisible or ‘unspeakable’, the taboo body has been appropriated to serve a function in the mainstream didactics. Both the lusus naturae of natural bodies and the decay of sickness and death are squeezed into such roles in the postmodern visual narrative that the mortality of the human being appears unlikely and accidental…
Names of Snakes in Latvian Texts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
2020
Names of Snakes in Latvian Texts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries This article analyses the naming of snakes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latvian texts which are taken from the Corpus of Early Written Latvian Texts, containing the first Latvian dictionaries, religious texts, and some secular texts. The objective of the paper is to try to determine how precisely the translators of religious texts rendered names of snakes, and to ascertain whether any semantic changes have taken place, or whether religious texts show specific use. The study also aims to find out if taboo of dangerous animals, snakes in particular, and related euphemisation is reflected in early Latvian text…
La Transición, ¿un mito creado por y para la televisión
2015
This article deals with the representations of Spanish transition to democracy shown by television in Spain from 1995 to nowadays. Without claiming to be exhaustive, it analyses the recycling as well as the re-creating of scenes and figures which already belong to History although they are still present in collective memory. The analysis of a few fictional and informative programmes will enable us to sketch out a cartography of the representations of the transition on television. We will see how they get organized around TV formats and genres (series and mini-series, biopics and political thrillers), how they are related to other previous programmes or, on the contrary, how they attempt to …
O materinstvu na drugi način - prećutane strane materinstva u romanu "Optužena" Slavenke Drakulić
2017
Slavenka Drakulić is a Croatian journalist and writer, known as a feminist who writes about the problems in women’s lives. In the novel Optužena (2012), she demonstrates in an interesting, artistic way the less known questions of motherhood, often ignored and tabooed in social discourse. It is known that starting from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about maternity, it has been idealized and used in order to constrain women within the patriarchal system, by identifying them primarily as mothers. The concepts of Sigmund Freud, who believed maternity and maternal love to be natural and appropriate for every “standard” woman, contributed to turning into taboos some pathologies connected with mat…
Imperturbable taboos: Pataphysical frame-breaking
2012
International audience
Children's rights and teachers' responsibilities : Reproducing or transforming the cultural taboo on child sexual abuse?
2019
Enhancing young learners’ knowledge about appropriate and inappropriate sexual behaviour is crucial for the protection of children’s rights. This article discusses teachers’ understandings of their practices and approaches to the topic of child sexual abuse in Norwegian upper secondary schools, based on phone interviews with 64 social science teachers. Countering child sexual abuse is a political priority for the Norwegian government, and the Committee on the Rights of the Child acknowledges several state initiatives to counter child sexual abuse through education. Nevertheless, this study finds that teachers do not address this topic adequately, indicating that cultural taboos regarding ta…
The Death of the Others and the Taboo: Suicide Represented
2015
The visual representations of suicide have a lengthy history in Western culture, within which selfannihilation is considered a taboo form of death. In the long reach of the established traditions, the images of suicide have done more than simply illustrate the moral attitudes of their time. Through the versatility of existing templates and signs, images of suicide have posed as vehicles of ideological change; and, within inter-discursive mythologies, they have participated in cultural meaning-making processes around the conceptions of suicide, from the ethics of suicide to its agents, methods, and causes. This article studies the representations of otherness in the suicide depictions of con…
Gypsies: What Threat? Threat and Purity in Majority and Minority Relationships
2020
Paraphrasing the book Purity and Danger by Douglas (1966), this chapter analyses the relationships between the majority and the minority in terms of threat and purity. The majority will do everything possible to remain pure; in other words, not to mix with the minority ontologised as wild (i.e. closer to nature than to the majority culture). The taboo of contact underlies a whole series of daily practices and discourses. Through such means, the majority socialises its members so that they do not mix with stigmatised minorities. The second part of the chapter focuses on the social construction of the Gypsy minority as a threat to Gadje society. Prejudice, discrimination, and persecution, whi…
Taboo on two wheels: the bicycle as a disruptive cultural object
2014
International audience