The court of Star Chamber remains notorious even now: commentators sometimes invoke its name to suggest that a judicial body or legal action is not quite lawful, something secretive and illegitimate. The court provoked concern in its own time, too, though its vilification deepened after its death. With roots in the mid fourteenth century, St…
‘The music industry’ is commonly understood as a singular entity that is often portrayed as a place of shared concerns and goals. However, as many observers and academics have pointed out, this singular term is misleading and the very idea of a united place belies the reality which is ridden with tension and full of competing interests and industries (see Sterne, 2014). It is withi…
The knowledge that the African continent gave civilization the Arts and Sciences, Religion and Philosophy is des- tined to produce a change in the mentality both of the White and Black people. 2. There are three persons in the drama of Greek philosophy: (a) Alexander the Great; (b) Aristotle's School and; (c) The Ancient Roman Government who are responsible for a false tradition about Africa an…
We don’t usually think of speaking as similar to chewing, licking and sucking, but, like speaking, all of these actions involve movements of the mouth, tongue and lips in some kind of controlled way. So, perhaps this connection is not as improbable as it first sounds. It is an example of the type of observation that can lead to interesting speculations about the origins of spoken language. Th…
When we examine power in social worlds – even in a place as seemingly mundane as a farm – our eye is inevitably drawn towards visible expressions of power. For critical social theorists, activists and practitioners, a farm makes a particular kind of empowered world visible. We can see it in the way that farmers treat animals, cultivate fields, and i…
In 1948 an animated public information film called Your Very Good Health explained the benefits of Britain’s soon-to-be-introduced National Health Service (NHS).1 It portrayed two different categories of hospital patient. The central character, Charley, says he is ‘on the panel’ as he cycles through an optimistic impression of a new town.2The narrator asks him to imagine that he fell off …
Emptiness is a challenging concept: slippery in definition and elastic in meaning. It implies a total lack of content: people, buildings, objects or markings on a map. In the abstract, emptiness equals nothingness, a perfect void. Yet when one thinks of places on the globe that one might associate with being empty – the Gobi or Sahara deserts, t…
This equation suggests that if relationships 1 and 2 are opposedin type, then relationships 3 and 4 will be similarly opposed.A similarity in type between 1 and 2, or 3 and 4, though allowedby the formula, is taken to be a very rare occurrence. IndeedL6vi -Strauss suggests that this latter type of structure couldwell be expected to break down or at lea…
Beaver. Moose. Caribou. Think “animal” in Canada, and these and other iconic creatures of the Canadian wilderness are sure to come first to mind. Yet Canada has become increasingly urban since Confederation, to the extent that more than 80 per cent of the population today is considered to live in an urban setting.1 That urban identity has shaped profoundly…
eflections on God, Christ and cosmos in the writings of Paul and the Pauline School show that these authors were familiar with important notions from Graeco-Roman cosmology and theology. George van Kooten comes to the conclusion that they might even have adopted a way of thinking in which Judaism and Graeco-Roman cosmology were forged into a new synthesis, and Christ was viewed as a cosmic god.…