Nostalgia for Mysticism Essay Example for Free

Nostalgia for Mysticism Essay One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of the town of Macondo, sticky with nostalgia, and the Buendia family who lived out those very years of solitude. Gabo’s work is written in a style known as magical realism, in which elements of the magical and the mundane are interwoven seamlessly, making it impossible to determine where reality ends and the extraordinary begins. The story is set in an otherwise ordinary world, with familiar historical and cultural realities, although events which occur are not always explained by universal laws or familiar logic. The story was originally written in Spanish, and has since been translated into thirty-seven languages. However, as any origins or bloodlines are important- it is equally as important to note that the birthplace of this masterpiece is Latin America. Much of the magical and resonant elements come to a climax at the end of the book. As the last chapters surge into our hearts, we are presented with the line that both summarizes the story itself, and the extraordinary magic and mysticism that is artfully omnipresent within its pages. In reference to the Buendia legacy it reads, â€Å"The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants.† (Marquez) At the moment we read this, we realize that Aureliano Babilonia’s son, who is bloated and still damp with the dew of birth, is being carried away by all the ants in the world. Aureliano Babilonia, the last remaining Buendia’s, is reading the manuscript of the gypsy, Melquiades, the most significant character in the novel outside of the Buendia family, who wrote the prophecy of the family one hundred years before in Sanskrit, his mother tongue. He leads us to the demise of Macondo, as it blows away in torrents of dust and whirlwinds of longing, and as the novel comes to a close we read, Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth (Marquez). The novel plays with our sensibilities however it is not fantasy. It is something entirely different, because it was born from the womb of a culture that is comfortable with the mythical and the conventionally unbelievable. Magical Realism could not have been born from any other mother, than the slippery Spanish speaking, and catholic mother of Latin America: a women who wishes on saints and casts spells in the form of prayers. Magical Realism is an art form, and represents an important aspect of Latin culture. Therefore, in order to understand the symbiotic relationship between this literary style and culture, we must have a working definition of culture. Edward B, Tylor, a British anthropologist defined culture as â€Å"a complex whole including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capability or habit acquired by human beings as members of society.† (Danesi, 3) So, culture is a conglomeration of the creations by the members of the society. However, more importantly, according to semiotician Marcel Danasi, â€Å"Societies are simultaneously the geographical and historical ‘reifications’ (manifestations) of cultures: i.e. they have existence in time and space, enfolding the signifying processes that shape and regulate the lives of the people who live within them.† (3) The logical process of the creation of culture is that culture manifests itself from the historical and ideological backgrounds of a given sphere. According to Eduardo Restrepo, â€Å"Culture is the deepest and most solid rock of our common sense.† (Grossberg, 169) Therefore, cultural sensibilities and norms are defined and framed by the culture itself. So, any art form, which we understand to be the child of a culture, can be traced back to a historical and or ideological element. In the case of Magical Realism and its importance in Latin American culture, we can trace both its creation and wide acceptance to Catholicism, and the mystical implications of Catholicism in the region. The iron of the blood that flows throughout Latin America is arguably Catholicism, but not Catholicism in the traditional sense, a Catholicism that was born of conquest, but was not defined by subordination. One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. It helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions to the indigenous peoples. (Schwaller) Now, Catholicism in the region is characterized by various practices that could arguably be considered associated with magic. This was due to the transcultural assimilation of the religion. It is a religion that was brought by the Spanish and Portuguese during the conquest of the new world, but as they introduced their religion, elements of religious cultures pushed through and created a new Catholicism. It was met by various cultures such as the Mayas, Aztecs, and even Caribbean voodoo, which are all more commonly associated with mysticism. (Schwaller) Now Catholicism is scene in multiple facets of daily life in Latin America. In nearly every home you can find a statue of the Virgin Mary. â€Å"Representations of saints take center stage in Hispanic religion. We pray, light candles and talk to our patrons, which are saints. Each Latin American country has a patron saint or virgin they celebrate. Patron Saints are also assigned to towns and regions, and we celebrate â€Å"Las Fiestas Patronales† or the patrons’ festivities in many Hispanic countries.† (â€Å"Hispanic Culture Online†) In addition, the Spanish language itself is wrought with rhetoric that implies the existence of miracles, which in this case we equate to magic. For example words like ojala, which derives from Arabic meaning literally â€Å"Allah willing† but more frequently meaning â€Å"I wish† or â€Å"I hope†, and â€Å"si dios quiere† â€Å"if God wills it†, are abundant in everyday conversation. From a semiotic point of view, in which we seek to understand the impact of this on the culture itself, we see that language of the sort creates a certain cultural framework. The words themselves, according to Jack Solomon, †¦Do mean what we want them to mean. Although a word and its meaning may appear to be one and the same, the truth is that words are only signs of meaning, arbitrary symbols whose significance, like the dots and dashes of the Morse code, is determined by cultural beliefs and social convention (2). The words used are vital within the culture, because without cultural context they would not have significance. Therefore, a culture is the sum of it’s language, and historical background. This summation is commonly known as a paradigm. Michel Foucault, who did extensive studies on paradigms and their application, asserts, â€Å" that for a given type of action, there are different possible ways to ‘conduct oneself’.† (Harrer, 79) A paradigm is defined as â€Å"a set of associated signifiers or signifiers which are all members of some defining category, but in which each is significantly different.† (Chandler) Cultures inevitably exist within a paradigm, and in simplistic terms a cultural paradigm can be considered the intricate web of what is significant, acceptable, and understood within a culture. The paradigm is perpetuated by language and practice. In practice we see how traditions and artistic expressions are simply mirrors that reflect the cultural paradigm as it is actively and continuously being defined by the peoples of that culture. Art must exist within a cultural paradigm, and therefore understanding those very paradigms allows us to contextually understand the significance of the art form. As for understanding One Hundred Years of Solitude, and its use of magical realism, we can look to various religious practices in Latin American Catholicism and how the normalize the abnormal. A prime example is the patron saint San Antonio. It is common in Latin culture for a person who is single and wants love to place a statue of this saint face down. They will pray to this saint, and only once their love is found will they turn the saint face up. What we see in this example is that mythology, and beliefs that have no basis in science or fact are practiced because of their religious ubiquity, and the magical adherence to the catholic religion that most Latinos are accustomed too. This is not the only example that can be found. Another pertinent example comes from the Virgin Mary. Latin Americans will pray to the Virgin Mary, for example, when their child falls ill. If the illness is cured, whether or not they can truly attribute this to their prayers, they will commemorate their devotion to the saint by naming their child after him. Many people even take pilgrimages to honor the importance that the saint made in their life. These instances of belief in the supernatural are commonplace, and allow us to understand how an entire culture of people could read in Marquez’s work, upon the death of Jose Arcadio Buendia: Then they went into Jose Arcadio Buendias room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by. (Marquez) and accept that the flowers are falling from the sky, but we are not transported to a world separate from reality. We understand that their metaphoric existence is one of honoring the dead, and commemorating a life. As we read this we are living in the reality that has been constructed by Latin America herself, a culture where often times the most unbelievable and magical occurrences serve better to explain reality than the dry and lifeless recitation of reality itself. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in December of 1982 on account of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within his speech he recounted tales of madness and fantastical occurrences in the region. He emphasizes the fact that to him his novel resembles reality, as he understands it: A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. (Marquez) The solitude he describes comes to represent the unique roots of the Latin American cultural paradigm, one that renders the region lonely, because no other culture can quite believe the ‘unbridled reality’ that shaped the culture. He is but one cipher more because the creation of magical realism was prophesized hundreds of years before, when the conventionality of European society collided with the ebb and flow of the immense sorrows and beauties in Latin America. History and language led to a cultural paradigm which laid the very foundation for a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude to be written, and to answer to the resounding question, which we have been exploring throughout this essay, what’s the significance of magical realism in the cultural paradigm? we needn’t look any further than the immortal pages of the novel. Melquiades, the gypsy who wrote the prophecy within One Hundred Years of Solitude says so poignantly â€Å"Things have a life of their own, its simply a matter of waking up their souls.† (Marquez) The pinnacle is that Melquiades does not just say that people have a life of their own, but things. The inanimate is granted animation and soul, and it is accepted because the cultural paradigm grants importance to that which cannot necessarily be tangibly explained or experienced. Latin America, rich with history of conquest, built from the alchemy and melding of various cultures to create a new identity, and alight with Spanish that linguistically reinforces the existence of God and the supernatural, had to be the birthplace of magical realism. Latin America is a region in which the lines between the magical and real are blurred. So, the creation of the genre of magical realism simply represents the acceptance that in telling a story as resounding as one of one hundred years of solitude in a sleepy, fictional town of Macondo, metaphor and magic become more truthful than even the truth itself, just as in Latin American culture the spiritual is granted more importance and potency than the literal. Works Cited Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics for Beginners. . N.p., 26 2002. Web. 27 Nov 2012.http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem03.html. Danesi, Marcel. Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction Handbook. Indiana: IndianaUniversity Press, 1999. Print. Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2010. Print. Hispanic Religion The Catholic Traditions, Meaning Celebrations AmongHispanics. Hispanic Culture Online. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov 2012.http://www.hispanic-culture-online.com/hispanic-religion.html. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper, 1970. Print. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. The Solitude of Latin America. Nobel Prize AwardCeremony. Sweden, Stockholm. 08 1982. Speech. Schwaller, John Frederick. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America. NewYork: NYU Press, 2012. eBook.

Washington History :: essays research papers

Assignment #1 Question #1 A) How is a region defined?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  A region can be defined by its’ geography, industry, or culture. For example the Bible belt is a cultural region; Silicon Valley is an industrial region, and the Plains States form a region defined by the geography and agriculture both. B) What Unifying forces define the Northwest?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The region of the Pacific Northwest is defined as a Hinterland replete with a wide array of natural resources. The treasures found in the natural beauty of the Northwest’s pristine waterways, ample valleys, and lush mountain forests define the region. No other region in the United States can compare with the beauty and majesty of the Pacific Northwest. It stands alone as having one of the most varied and rich landscapes in the country. Thus allowing an independent, confined, and truly original culture to emerge. Question #2  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  What is the size and distribution of the population of the Northwest?   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Pacific Northwest region is lightly populated with the majority of the residents located in a few key areas. The main population centers of thirty thousand or more pertaining to Washington are the Puget Sound area, and Spokane. In Oregon it is the Willamette Valley from Portland to Eugene and Medford where the population centers are located. Idaho, while being much more rural then Washington and Oregon, does have clusters of more highly populated areas in select geographic areas, such as Boise and Pocatello. All of Idaho’s major urban areas are located on or around the Snake River. Taking the time to really study the location of cites in relation to surrounding geographic areas one gets a good look into the minds of the first settlers and even the native inhabitants. Larger urban centers are usually located on or near waterways; all were and still are very reliable sources of food, water, and trade. One example of this statement is shown in today's Vanc ouver, Washington, which was first settled on the Columbia River. Question #3  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Discuss the natural setting of the Northwest   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Pacific Northwest is rich in culture and beauty. What gives this land its beauty, so much so that the region is know the world over? Maybe it is the giant snake of concrete known as Interstate-5? Could it be the snow crowned Peaks of the cascades? Or is it the glistening monoliths of glass that tear at the cloud filled sky above the Emerald City of Seattle? The Sun bathed beaches of the San Juan Islands?

Jared Diamond

The question motivating the book is: why did history untold differently on different continents? † (Page: 8, lines: 1, 2, and 3) Well, due to the fact this book covers 13,000 years of history in a brief time it Is hard to properly write a thesis that would cover everything he will talk about. For one thing he has to talk about history on different continents, why did some societies progress slower or faster than others, and whyEurasia was more advanced or modern than the rest of the world. All these things made It harder for him to write a solid concrete thesis for example I'll start with why Eurasia was typically more advanced (by modern standards) than the rest of the world. So, to start it off, most people would probably say that Eurasia probably had more environmental advantages, such as more land, rivers, trees, and other materials that are so called â€Å"essential† to a better civilization.Another reason would be the mount of resources that they had available to t hem, such as iron, might not have been enough for them to fully understand it's potential. Now let us talk about why some societies may have progressed slower or faster than other societies. Well one reason could have been religion. Religion can impact a society In many ways like technologically, politically (if they have a political system), but mainly medically.I say mainly medically because if you are a polytheist and a disease that is spreading mom to your village or town your people would probably assume that your gods and/ or goddesses are either angry or they have cursed your land, which would cause the people to not even think that there may be a cure. While on the other hand another religion like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam mentions nothing of god causing famine, diseases and other things Just because he Is angry. O they look for the reason of what Is causing the famine, or disease, and then they try to find a way to end the famine, or cure the disease. A societies pol itical views may change because of a religion, like Christianity. For example before the birth of Sis (Jesus) the Roman Empire was run by the senate and an Emperor. Tater Christianity was accepted by the pagans of the eastern Roman Empire a. K. A. The Byzantine Empire the political slowly shifted from the emperor to the Patriarch or as he would later be called the Pope. We are finally going to talk about how history unfolded on different continents.Now as you'll probably see the problem with this subject is we are not taught about hat happens In other continents such as Australia, South America, and North America, even f we are it has to start out with what led Eurasian to go there. Also they focus so much on Eurasia that they forget about the rest of the world, like at the time of the Dark ages Muslims were actually in a Golden age. We were discovering new things, inventing new things such as the first water clock, successfully performing surgeries that other civilizations had not even thought of doing.So Just cause Eurasia had the black plague going on they focused so much on one event that occurred mainly in Eurasia that they claim it was the dark age. That's like one ‘Off person saying Mondays should be holidays and majority to that world agreeing without a second thought. Finally we are done, but you're probably like â€Å"I'm lost†. That is exactly my point, the reason his thesis is hard to understand in concrete terms is because he is sort of Jumping from place to place trying to connect it all but at the same time trying to go in order.

Human Resources Management ( Hrm ) - 1229 Words

Human Resources Management (HRM) is people who work in an organization. The manager is a person who manages people, leads, facilitates and provide tools for the organization. HRM sets strategic processes and procedures, run difficult and complex communication as the organization attracts the best talents from the recruiting process. Human resources management is where everything begins and ends for an individual and the organization. Meaning, it’s where total processes are created for the organization and the individual, such as; planning, forecasting, compensation, benefits, diversity, salary, decisions, ethics, records, right protection, leadership, development, and the list is endless. In view of the fact that everything starts with HRM, it faces many challenges for the organization and the individual. Therefore, excellent communication skills are essential. Communication is â€Å"everything.† It’s the number one driver in the process of planning a succes sful organization. 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