Theme (narrative)

About: Theme (narrative) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 159511 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theme.

A Handful of Paragraphs on ' Translation' and 'Norms'

Abstract: The format of paragraphs has been chosen to present questions and a few tentative answers on the theme of translation and norms. The formulation of questions is an important aspect of any research programme, and it has been the basis for descriptiveexplanatory research as well. Translating as an act and as an event is characterised by variability, it is historically, socially and culturally determined, in short, norm-governed. In the paragraphs below, the following issues are discussed: the relationships between social agreements, conventions, and norms; translational norms, acts of translation and translation events, norms and values, norms for translated texts vs. norms for non-translated texts, competing norms. Comments on the reactions to three different Hebrew translations of Hemingway's short story 'The Killers' are presented at the end of the paper.

Five ways to fix statistics

Abstract: As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change to improve science. The common theme? The problem is not our maths, but ourselves. As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change to improve science. The common theme? The problem is not our maths, but ourselves.

Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism

Abstract: Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, eds., Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 199 pages.Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism brings together a collection of papers that engage both a very traditional subject of anthropology, pilgrimage, and one that only much more recently was deemed worthy of the intellectual scrutiny of our discipline, tourism. In doing so, editors Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman engage discussions of the fluid and mobile realities of the experience of pilgrims-pilgrimage and tourists-tourism. As such, ideas of identity, place, sacredness-secular and ethnography become central to the volume. Chapters in the book travel to Spain, east England, New Guinea, New Mexico, Japan, Toronto and California. They take the reader on journeys to religious and secular pilgrimage-tourist destinations. One travels, depending on the chapter, and sometimes simultaneously, in the shoes of a spiritual-religious pilgrim, an ethnographer, a "trekkie," a touristtraveller, or a colonial missionary. The editors offer a well-written and engaging introduction to the thematic focus of the book, laying out how current anthropological thinking about pilgrimage has travelled itself under the guidance of Turner and Turner (1978), Morinis (1984), Bade and Sallnow (1991), and Coleman and Elsner (1995). Balancing this theoretical discussion of pilgrimage is one on tourism and tourists which highlights mainly the work of MacCannell (1976), Graburn (1977, 1989), and Bruner (1991). The final chapter, written by Badone, offers a useful theoretical perspective which attempts to situate those "travellers" discussed in the book "in an interstitial border zone, a metaphorical space "betwixt and between" cultures where social actors have the potential to reformulate meanings and negotiate identities" (p. 181).If taken as a whole, the book accomplishes its purpose of examining the intersection of the journeys of pilgrimage and tourism. Individual chapters read in isolation, at times, could be seen to be out of place within the larger theme of the book, or at least a bit of a stretch to link the themes together (see for example Holmes-Rodman, Fife, Coleman and Porter). I do not offer this comment as a criticism, however, of the inclusion of any of these papers. Editors have the right to presume that a reader may well do them the courtesy of reading the entire book to see the multidimensional ways which a collection of papers do in fact speak to each other and larger umbrella themes.Holmes-Rodman, in a very compellingly written piece about her physical, professional and metaphorical journey to Chimayo, New Mexico, moves the reader back and forth between the contradictions and complexities of the roles of ethnographer, pilgrim and traveller. Fife's piece on the creation of "sacred" space and the pilgrimage made by missionaries to foster such space in, but not necessarily enroute to, New Guinea in the late 19th century, offers a critique of the presumed nature of a pilgrimage site, and physical mobility understood to be integral to any pilgrimage. He links the vision of these missionaries to the tourists of the same era who travelled to places such as the English Lake District and Niagara Falls. The latter emphasized the physical effort expended to see and understand a site. Missionaries in New Guinea expended parallel physical efforts to turn their mission compounds into "sacred sites" of pilgrimage. His argument for understanding such spaces as sites of pilgrimage, I feel, is one of the more distinctive and insightful contributions to the entire volume.Spain is a popular destination of the travellers documented here. Three papers (Roseman, Frey, and Tate) are all geographically located there. The detailed ethnographic work done by Frey strives to capture the "aftermath" of the experience of those who travel the Camino de Santiago. …

The role of mathematics in the rise of science

Abstract: The central theme of these essays is the nature and role of mathematics, its growth and spread, and its involvement with ever-wider areas of knowledge. The author attempts to determine the decisive and creative aspects of the abstractness" of mathematics which have made it the dominant intellectual force that it is. He frequently confronts the mathematics and physics of today with the mathematics and physics of the Greeks, which, however renowned, was not yet capable of this abstractness. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.