Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

2014-04-23
 |  Social Science
Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

Author: David B. MacDonald

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

ISBN: 9781554588664

Category: Social Science

Page: 322

View: 984

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What is Europe? Who is European? What do Europe and European identity mean in the twenty-first century? This collection of sixteen essays seeks to answer these questions by focusing on Europe as it is seen through its own eyes and through the eyes of others across a variety of cultural texts, including sport, film, literature, dance, cartography, and fashion. These texts, as interpreted here by emerging researchers as well as well-established scholars, enable us to engage with European identities in the plural and to understand what these identities mean in larger cultural and political contexts. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume permits an exploration of European identity that reaches beyond the area of European studies to incorporate understandings of identity from the viewpoints of both insider and other. Contributors explore diverse understandings of what it means to be “other” to a country, a culture, a society, or a subgroup. This book offers a fresh perspective on the evolving concept of identity—in the context of Europe’s past, present, and future—and expands on the existing literature by considering the political tensions and social implications of the development of European identity, as well as its literary, artistic, and cultural manifestations.

The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal

1996
 |  Parapsychology
The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal

Author: Gordon Stein

Publisher:

ISBN: UOM:49015002843390

Category: Parapsychology

Page: 902

View: 948

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The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal contains over 90 articles by more than 50 experts on topics including the strictly paranormal (psychokinesis, channeling, levitation, astrology, phrenology, palmistry); the historical (mediums, psychic research, alchemy, Houdini); the philosophical (miracles, survival of death, reincarnation); and work on investigatory photography, statistics, the media and the Bermuda Triangle. In his foreword, Carl Sagan says, "I wish [this book] were on the shelves of every newspaper editorial desk and every television newsroom, to encourage more skeptical backbone in reporting . . . . [I]n school libraries so that children would have some counterbalance to the many paranormal and mystical claims in our society."

European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color

2022-05-30
 |  Science
European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color

Author: Peter Frost

Publisher:

ISBN: 1680538721

Category: Science

Page: 0

View: 681

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Europeans, especially those from northern and eastern Europe, are unique in having diverse hair and eye colors and a skin almost as pale as an albino's. Those colors are not only brighter than the original black and brown but also "purer"--they lie within thin slices of the visible spectrum. Overall, that color scheme is more developed in women, who naturally have a higher incidence of red hair, blonde hair, and green eyes. They also have fairer skin. The distinguishing features of Europeans began as female features. A visual transformation occurred among ancestral humans on the open plains of Europe, and it began among their women. It also occurred over a short span of time--less than ten thousand years. Why? How? That is the puzzle this book will address.

Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727

2008-11-12
 |  History
Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727

Author: Nabil Matar

Publisher: Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231512084

Category: History

Page: 344

View: 775

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Traveling to archives in Tunisia, Morocco, France, and England, with visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Spain, Nabil Matar assembles a rare history of Europe's rise to power as seen through the eyes of those who were later subjugated by it. Many historians of the Middle East believe Arabs and Muslims had no interest in Europe during this period of Western discovery and empire, but in fact these groups were very much engaged with the naval and industrial development, politics, and trade of European Christendom. Beginning in 1578 with a major Moroccan victory over a Portuguese invading army, Matar surveys this early modern period, in which Europeans and Arabs often shared common political, commercial, and military goals. Matar concentrates on how Muslim captives, ransomers, traders, envoys, travelers, and rulers pursued those goals while transmitting to the nonprint cultures of North Africa their knowledge of the peoples and societies of Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Italy, and Malta. From the first non-European description of Queen Elizabeth I to early accounts of Florence and Pisa in Arabic, from Tunisian descriptions of the Morisco expulsion in 1609 to the letters of a Moroccan Armenian ambassador in London, the translations of the book's second half draw on the popular and elite sources that were available to Arabs in the early modern period. Letters from male and female captives in Europe, chronicles of European naval attacks and the taqayid (newspaper) reports on Muslim resistance, and descriptions of opera and quinine appear here in English for the first time. Matar notes that the Arabs of the Maghrib and the Mashriq were eager to engage Christendom, despite wars and rivalries, and hoped to establish routes of trade and alliances through treaties and royal marriages. However, the rise of an intolerant and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of European military technology brought these advances to an end. In conclusion, Matar details the decline of Arab-Islamic power and the rise of Britain and France.