The Myth of Replacement

The Myth of Replacement PDF Author: Thomas D. Worthen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Changes in season, rulership, and human fortune are the stuff of which myth is made. Why should these themes pervade the mythologies of so many cultures? Might they even provide an explanation for seemingly unrelated myths and rituals? What these myths have in common, observes Thomas Worthen, is an ancient awareness that the heavens were subject to irregularities. The movement of stars we now attribute to precession was once a cause for concern about the stability of the world. Worthen here proposes the paradigm of "replacement" to account for the recurrence of common elements in the myths of many peoples. First citing the importance of rotation ritual in cultures as diverse as Buddhist and Gaelic, he draws on Georges Dum�zil's work with the Indo-European Ambrosia Cycle to lay the foundation for his paradigm. He then applies it to South American myths previously explored by Claude L�vi-Strauss, to the Greek myth of Phaethon, and to myths of dynastic replacement about Zeus and his forebears. He further shows show how the replacement paradigm explains a number of semantic puzzles in Indo-European studies, such as the relationship of words for "hammer" and "mill." The Myth of Replacement grandly illustrates the common knowledge of nature held by ancient peoples of the world. It offers scholars new perspectives on previously unconnected material as it provides general readers with a better understanding of the universality of myth.

The Myth of Replacement

The Myth of Replacement PDF Author: Thomas D. Worthen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
Changes in season, rulership, and human fortune are the stuff of which myth is made. Why should these themes pervade the mythologies of so many cultures? Might they even provide an explanation for seemingly unrelated myths and rituals? What these myths have in common, observes Thomas Worthen, is an ancient awareness that the heavens were subject to irregularities. The movement of stars we now attribute to precession was once a cause for concern about the stability of the world. Worthen here proposes the paradigm of "replacement" to account for the recurrence of common elements in the myths of many peoples. First citing the importance of rotation ritual in cultures as diverse as Buddhist and Gaelic, he draws on Georges Dum�zil's work with the Indo-European Ambrosia Cycle to lay the foundation for his paradigm. He then applies it to South American myths previously explored by Claude L�vi-Strauss, to the Greek myth of Phaethon, and to myths of dynastic replacement about Zeus and his forebears. He further shows show how the replacement paradigm explains a number of semantic puzzles in Indo-European studies, such as the relationship of words for "hammer" and "mill." The Myth of Replacement grandly illustrates the common knowledge of nature held by ancient peoples of the world. It offers scholars new perspectives on previously unconnected material as it provides general readers with a better understanding of the universality of myth.

The Replacement

The Replacement PDF Author: Brenna Yovanoff
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 184738840X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The Catcher in the Rye meets Edward Scissorhands in this chilling, gothic tale. Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world. Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs. Praise for The Replacement: 'I so loved this book' Lauren Kate, bestselling author of Fallen 'Eerie and beautiful' Maggie Stiefvater, bestselling author of Shiver 'This is a dark tale that will totally change any preconceptions you have about fairies' The Sun

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge PDF Author: Ian Wilson
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459627474
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The recent announcement that Google would digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long - dreamed - of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infrin...

The Myth of Print Culture

The Myth of Print Culture PDF Author: Joseph A. Dane
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802087751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The Myth of Print Culture is a critique of bibliographical and editorial method, focusing on the disparity between levels of material evidence (unique and singular) and levels of text (abstract and reproducible). It demonstrates how the particulars of evidence are manipulated in standard scholarly arguments by the higher levels of textuality they are intended to support. The individual studies in the book focus on a range of problems: basic definitions of what a book is; statistical assumptions; and editorial methods used to define and collate the presumably basic unit of 'variant.' This work differs from other recent studies in print culture in its emphasis on fifteenth-century books and its insistence that the problems encountered in that historical milieu (problems as basic as cataloguing errors) are the same as problems encountered in other areas of literary criticism. The difficulties in the simplest of cataloguing decisions, argues Joseph Dane, tend to repeat themselves at all levels of bibliographical, editorial, and literary history.

The Myth of the Closed Mind

The Myth of the Closed Mind PDF Author: Ray Scott Percival
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 0812696859
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Religious zeal, suicide terrorism, passionate commitment to ideologies, and the results of various psychological tests are often cited to show that humans are fundamentally irrational. The author examines all such supposed examples of irrationality and argues that they are compatible with rationality. Rationality does not mean absence of error, but the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty.

The Myth of Homeland Security

The Myth of Homeland Security PDF Author: Marcus Ranum
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780471458791
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"As I write this, I'm sitting in a restaurant in a major U.S. airport, eating my breakfast with a plastic knife and fork. I worked up quite an appetite getting here two hours early and shuffling in the block-long lines until I got to the security checkpoint where I could take off my shoes, remove my belt, and put my carry-on luggage through the screening system . "What's going on? It's homeland security. Welcome to the new age of knee-jerk security at any price. Well, I've paid, and you've paid, and we'll all keep paying-but is it going to help? Have we embarked on a massive multibillion-dollar boondoggle that's going to do nothing more than make us feel more secure? Are we paying nosebleed prices for "feel-good" measures? . "This book was painful to write. By nature, I am a problem solver. Professionally I have made my career out of solving complex problems efficiently by trying to find the right place to push hard and make a difference. Researching the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA, INS, the PATRIOT Act, and so forth, one falls into a rabbit's hole of interdependent lameness and dysfunction. I came face to face with the realization that there are gigantic bureaucracies that exist primarily for the sole purpose of prolonging their existence, that the very structure of bureaucracy rewards inefficiency and encourages territorialism and turf warfare."

The Myth of Digital Democracy

The Myth of Digital Democracy PDF Author: Matthew Hindman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691138680
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Matthew Hindman reveals here that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse in the United States, but rather that it empowers a small set of elites - some new, but most familiar.

The Myth of International Order

The Myth of International Order PDF Author: Arjun Chowdhury
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190686715
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime's collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war showed Foreign Policy's index of failed states to be deeply flawed--FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong, but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than Sweden. Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his launching point Charles Tilly's famous dictum that 'war made the state, and the state made war, ' Arjun Chowdhury argues that the problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic power with stability. But major wars are the true source of stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival. Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable: there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India's districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the majority of states in the world--about two thirds--are weak states. Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international security requires a normative shift: the language of weakness and failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions. Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war, which is an extremely costly approach--in terms of human lives and capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak. Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink foundational concepts of international politics like political stability and state failure.

Evolution and the Myth of Creationism

Evolution and the Myth of Creationism PDF Author: Tim M. Berra
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804717700
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Gives a description of evolutionary theory and analyzes the arguments of the creationists.

The Insanity Hoax

The Insanity Hoax PDF Author: Judith Schlesinger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780983698241
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
"The mad genius is a favorite cultural stereotype, but despite media caricatures, popular expectations, and the extravagant claims of a few, there's no scientific proof that creative people are crazier than anyone else. Drawing on three decades of research, psychologist Judith Schlesinger tracks the myth from its birth in ancient Greece to modern times, showing how it distorts society's view of our most exceptional minds"--Page 4 of cover.