Facework in Syria and the United States: A cross-cultural comparison

“The first rule when communicating with people from the Arab world is not to let them lose face” said J. Al-Omari. Face or one's social identity is cultural. A face threat is a situation which threatens to create a loss of face. When experiencing face-threats people guard their face with facework – behavioral actions enacted to protect one's face. Since facework varies across cultures, this study analyzed how cultural collectivism, power distance, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance influence direct, indirect, competitive, cooperative, hostile, and ritualistic facework in Syria and the United States, employing a MANCOVA design with gender as the covariate. Significant findings (n = 336) showed that: (a) US Americans reported using more direct, competitive, and hostile facework strategies than Syrians while (b) Syrians reported using more indirect, cooperative and ritualistic facework strategies than US Americans (c) US American facework strategies corresponded to individualistic, weak power distance, masculine, and low uncertainty avoidance cultural dimensions while Syrian facework corresponded to collectivistic, high-power distance, moderately masculine, and high uncertainty avoidance and (d) VSM 94 results showed Syria to be more individualistic than Hofstede's original rankings.     

The Philosophical Conflict between the School of Baghdad and the School of Khorasan in the Tenth Century: Towards a New Understanding of the Development of Islamic Philosophy

Historians often present the evolution of Islamic philosophy through a limited number of philosophers beginning with al-Kindī and concluding with Ibn Rushd. This practice tacitly asserts that Islamic philosophy developed only in accordance with this “sequential” or “chronological” context that assumes it was the inevitable evolution of Aristotelian thought in Arabic. However, most of those who present Islamic philosophy in this manner appear to have overlooked the fact that it developed in the context of a philosophical conflict that emerged between the two schools to which the majority of Islamic philosophers belonged – the School of Baghdad and the School of Khorasan, which appeared in the tenth century and introduced philosophy to Islam and Muslims. This study stands apart from earlier attempts to present Islamic philosophy by considering these two schools and the frequently violent disputes that occurred between them. It is based on an historical-analytical approach accompanied by a rereading of numerous historical and literary texts and presents a reinterpretation of the works of Ibn Sīnā that differs from past interpretations of the history of Islamic philosophy. The study concludes with a thorough examination of the texts and contexts, which demonstrates the existence of the two philosophical schools and their significant contributions to the development of Islamic philosophy, albeit with their own distinctive elements. The study also argues that the philosophical School of Baghdad migrated to Morocco and Andalusia and arrived, in some respects, in Europe through Ibn Rushd, whereas the School of Khorasan appeared in Suhrawardī’s Philosophy of Illumination and in modern Iranian philosophy.     

Family Problem Solving: A Comparative Study of Adult Children in Puerto Rico and the Upper Midwest

This study examined family problems and problem solving among American Upper Midwest and Puerto Ricans participants. Thematic and chi-square analyses provide a snapshot of how diverse families experience similar macro problems in day-to-day endeavors. Responses to each macro issue or strategy also suggest ways that the two cultural groups relate to family problems differently. Puerto Rico participants described and discussed significantly more communication-related problems and they also identified communicating about the problem less as something they had thought about to resolve the problem than did Upper Midwest participants. The article discusses how micro level values are inherent in macrocultural family problems.     

“Going to the Extremes”: The Balearics and Cyprus in the Early Medieval Byzantine Insular System

ABSTRACT

This contribution mainly focuses on Cyprus and the Balearics, islands located at opposite geographical extremes of the Byzantine Mediterranean, during the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Historians have often regarded these islands as peripheral additions to the Byzantine heartland of the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau; this article argues that, in fact, archaeological and material indicators (such as ceramics, lead seals and coins), paired with the scarce textual sources, point to a certain degree of economic prosperity in the abovementioned islands during the period under scrutiny, suggesting that they continued to play an important role in the political, administrative and religious structures of the Byzantine Empire. A resilient insular economy and continuity of local production of artefacts was ensured by the persistence of demand from local secular and religious elites and regular, if infrequent, contacts with other areas of the Byzantine heartland or the Muslim Mediterranean.     

A Visit to Remember: Stigmata and Celebrity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Focusing on a type of religious celebrity that attracted European crowds at the turn of the twentieth century, the stigmatized female mystic, in this article I examine the role of the audience in the generation of a celebrity culture from below, i.e., as opposed to the current type of pre-manufactured mass-media celebrity. To examine the audience’s role, I consider the thousands who visited two stigmatized laywomen: the Frenchwoman Marie-Julie Jahenny and the Spaniard Margalida Amengual. The article shows the importance of the personal experiences of the members of the audience, highlighting the role of word-of-mouth communication in the rise to fame of these two stigmatics. I argue that popular enthusiasm is key to achieving both celebrity and ‘living saint’ status. Drawing on the parallels between fans and religious devotees, I also provide evidence of the interplay between the cult of saints and celebrity worship.     

Cultural Trends of Audience Online Interaction with Vocal Talent Shows: A Comparative Study between China and the US

This study examined cultural reflections online of audience comments on social network sites regarding vocal talent shows in China and the United States. The study applied dimensions of cross culture to investigate audience comments on the official social networking sites of The Voice of China and The Voice. Findings reflect Hofstede’s dimensions as applied to social media and illustrate how individuals alter their “local” cultural norms in the new media environment. The study specifically enhances the exploration of cultural manifestations in cyberspace, which fewer cross-cultural studies have researched.     

Orthodoxy and Religious Antagonism in Byzantine Perceptions of the Seljuk Turks (Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries)

This paper focuses on religiously based concepts in the Comnenian dynasty's ideology when propagating Byzantium's political and military antagonism with the Muslim-Turkish principalities of Asia Minor. Whereas during the conquest period in the second half of the eleventh century Byzantine perceptions were mainly determined by the classical bipolarity of barbarism vs. Roman civilisation and therefore defined the Seljuk Turks as an ethnic rather than a religious entity, in the 1130s a tendency to identify them with the “sons of Hagar”, i.e. the Muslims, prevailed. At the same time the court rhetoricians of Emperor John II developed forms of imperial representation exhibiting allusions to Old Testament prototypes (Moses) and certain features of western crusader ideology. The image of his successor, Manuel I, instead draws more intensively on the idea of the emperor's Christ-like position and the motif of the tireless defender of the true faith.     

十九世纪徽州民俗风情的素描

晚明戏曲家汤显祖曾有“欲识金银气，须从黄白游”的诗句。所谓黄白，原为金银之别称，此处系代指皖南的黄山和白岳(齐云山)。由此我们不难想见——在当时人的心目中徽州究竟是何等地富裕!     

Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its Mediterranean Neighbours in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

As scholars of people's physical environments, we tend to view the past according to our own forms of categorisation rather than those of contemporaries. From a medieval Mediterranean perspective, the fragmentation of scholarship caused by modern disciplinary constraints—Islamic, Byzantine, Western—has artificially set apart cultures which had more in common than has hitherto been acknowledged. This is a comparative study of the dress and textile cultures of southern Italy, particularly Apulia, Egypt and the Fatimid Caliphate and regions in the Byzantine Empire, as recorded in dowries, wills and other documents. This article also demonstrates how using the Mediterranean as a framework for comparison allows us to identify new areas where cultural differences really lay.