This volume is intended to be a practical manual to learn the basics of the Ainu language, in its varieties of Southern Hokkaidō and Sakhalin. Each lesson presents one specific topic that is investigated taking into account both varieties of the language. Three kinds of activities guide the student throughout each lesson to inductively make generalisations on the language that can be supported by linguistic evidence and, possibly, to revise the information they were given as a start of their analysis. In order to do this, the student learns to observe the data, recognize recurring patterns and exceptions, and formulate a description of the language behaviours illustrated by the given examples. At the end of each lesson the student actively …

Authors read and they use their readings within their writing process. Scrutinizing authors’ readings provides information on their tastes, working subjects at a given period, methodology, and scholarly milieu. It also brings a lot to intellectual history, highlighting the texts and manuscripts circulating in a certain context. Eight contributions investigating the readings of as many authors, from different points of view, are gathered here. The studied authors are mainly from pre-modern Islam – al-Qādī al-Fāḍil, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Ṣafadī, al-Subkī, al-Maqrīzī – with three exceptions: an incursion into the Ottoman 19th century – Esʿad Efendi –, a detour by the French court of Charles V – Evrart de Conty –, and a preface about Greek Antiquity – Philodème de Gadara.

al-Naḫl yamūtu wāqifan (Palm Trees Wither Upright) is the first work by Tunisian writer Ibrāhīm Darġūṯī, born in El-Mahassen (Tozeur) in 1955, proponent of the experimentalism and magical realism, and known all over the Arab world for his pungent writing style. The work was published in Sfax in 1989, and is a collection of short stories devoted to the local life of al-Ǧarīd region, in southern Tunisia; to its traditions, distinctive traits and, at times, to imagination, creating a unique mixture, which is representative of Darġūṯī’s literature. Men, the desert, and palm trees are the essential elements, the three primary colours of this literary text. Stories unfold around this triad and through them its author introduces the many facets of …

This collection of essays investigates some of the theories and concepts related to the burgeoning presence of dance and performance in the museum. This surge has led to significant revisions of the roles and functions that museums currently play in society. The authors provide key analyses on why and how museums are changing by looking into participatory practices and decolonisation processes, the shifting relationship with the visitor/spectator, the introduction of digital practices in collection making and museum curation, and the creation of increasingly complex documentation practices. The tasks designed by artists who are involved in the European project Dancing Museums. The Democracy of Beings (2018-21) respond to the essays by suggesting a series of body-mind practices that readers could perform …

This volume – which stems from an international conference held at the University of Graz on March 2, 2020, just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic – represents a small, but specifically targeted contribution to a field of research and discussion that has increasingly come to the fore in the last two decades, regarding the practice of covering or veiling womens’ heads or faces over different times and places. “Dress is never value free”, as anthropologists state, and veiling functions as an assertion/communication of relationship dynamics in terms of gender, social and cultural identity, phases and stages of life (puberty, marriage, death) or of religious beliefs – even reaching to a typical dichotomy of our times, the female condition …

This book records the landmark performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the Jewish quarter that gave the world the word ‘ghetto’. Practitioners and critics discuss how this multi-ethnic production and its radical choice to cast five actors as Shylock provided the opportunity to respond creatively to Europe’s legacy of antisemitism, racism and difference. They observe how the place and play stand as ambivalent documents of civilization: instruments of intolerance but also sites of cultural exchange.

The impact of the Hellenization in the Ancient Near East resulted in a notable presence of Greek koiné language and culture and in the interaction between Greek and Nabataean that conducted inhabitants to engrave inscriptions in public spaces using one of the two languages or both. In this questionably ‘diglossic’ situation, a significant number of Nabataean-Greek inscriptions emerged, showing that the koinéŽ was employed by the Nabataeans as a sign of Hellenistic cultural affinity. This book offers a linguistic and philological analysis of fifty-one Nabataean-Greek epigraphic evidences existing in northern Arabia, Near East and Aegean Sea, dating from the first century BCE to the third-fourth century CE. This collection is an analysis of the linguistic contact between Nabataean and …

The interviews and audio recordings comprised in this volume are the outcome of a field research to Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh which took place in October-November 1985 for the preparation of the Author’s BA thesis on the life and teachings of the Indian saint Sai Baba of Shirdi (d. 1918), discussed at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in June 1987 (Un maestro dell’India moderna: il Sāī Bābā di Śirḍī. L’uomo, l’ambiente, gli insegnamenti). The conversations of each day are preceded by excerpts from the Authorʼs diary. These testimonies record the words of various people in the village of Shirdi and other locales, among whom are the last old men who knew Sai Baba: Balaji Pilaji Gurav, Bappaji …

This book is the result of a fruitful exchange between the textual studies about Marco Polo’s Devisement dou Monde and the socio-historical research regarding Mendicant Orders. The Order of Preachers, in particular, includes the figure of the Venetian merchant as an auctoritas in the area of anthropological knowledge of Eastern traditions, through a Latin translation process contributing to evangelization in Asia. The aim of this book is to analyze the Dominican reception hybridizing philological and linguistical with historical and archival methods. The crossing of these research trajectories led to the finding of a parchment that testifies definitively the trusting relationship between Marco and the preachers of SS. Giovanni e Paolo convent. This convent is a key cultural center in the …

Nuzi was a town in what is today northeastern Iraq. It flourished as part of the kingdom of Mittanni from about 1475 to 1350 BCE, early in the Late Bronze Age. Uniquely for a town of its moderate size, Nuzi produced a huge number of documents of which almost 7,000 survive. These include economic, legal, administrative, and even a few scholastic texts. They come from government offices in the town, private houses from several of the town’s neighborhoods, and private villas in Nuzi’s wealthy suburbs. The present volume presents text editions, including transliterations, translations, and analyses of some 
of these tablets from the suburbs, predominantly from a single family’s records, a huge private archive, one of the largest ever to …

Con la Rivoluzione della Dignità (2014) un’ampia rappresentanza della popolazione dell’Ucraina si è pronunciata a favore di una collocazione geopolitica nell’UE e nella NATO. In parallelo, la Russia è intervenuta in Crimea e nel Donbas. La società ucraina, oltre ad affrontare le conseguenze di un conflitto e di una situazione geopolitica delicata, sta cercando un proprio equilibrio socio-politico interno, come dimostra l’avvicendamento Poroshenko-Zelens’kyj. La presente raccolta di studi, che coinvolge studiosi italiani, si concentra sui risvolti di carattere storico, giuridico, linguistico, culturale e religioso che accompagnano questo assestamento.