Journal articles on the topic 'Social aspects of Bengali proverbs'

The proverb is summarized and refined by human through many years of social practice beings. As a social variant, it reflects the social customs and cultural values. It is not difficult to see this kind of phenomenon in the English proverb because of the widespread discrimination against women in human culture. Through studying the development trend of sexism in English proverbs, the paper analyses these phenomena from the five aspects-personality, behavior, intelligence, marriage and social status. And then the paper probes into the causes of sexism from three aspects: historical reasons, cultural origin and social factors. The proper comprehension of the sexism in English proverbs not only helps to improve the students' ability of using English, but also avoids the intercultural conflicts caused by improper using of English proverbs in the foreign exchanges.

Proverbs in Hakka dialect reflect the attitude of the Hakka’s social life and nature. Hakka dialect’s proverbs are divided into two major categories of social life and natural phenomenon. This article tries to analyze how is the Hakkanese culture reflected by the characteristics of these two aspects. In aspects of social life, it could be seen the proverbs from several points of view, including the religion and traditional virtue, fame and academic, regional dialects, and feng shui. On the part of natural phenomenon, it could be seen Hakkanese dependency and understanding on the nature, as well as their agricultural production –based on their way of life and survival. The article is particularly concerned about the cultural characteristics of the Hakkanese which is shaped and reflected due to their migration history and root.

AbstractThis paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history.

Proverbs are considered as part of folklore or public literature and one of important cultural treasures. Hence, discussing and studying proverbs can make us familiar with cultural aspects, value and norms of the owners of those proverbs. In this study Kurdish and Farsi proverbs are investigated based on cultural components and its species are presented and classified based on the same components. The present study shows that Kurdish and Farsi proverbs have spoken of two categories of values and norms, and anti-values and abnormalities, first, positive values and norms such as encouraging to truthfulness, effort, patience and tolerance, pragmatic, wise, etc; and second, negative values and in other words anti-values and abnormal action that they have been blame such as lying, avarice, cruelty, etc; also based on Malinowski’s theory, the three individual, social and combined functions are conceivable Keywords: Culture, Value, Norm, Anti-Value, Kurdish proverbs, Farsi proverbs, etc.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the Biblical approach of Proverbs 1-9 that is applicable and relevant on addressing increased antisocial ills in Africa.Methodology: The study was a desktop research where review of empirical literature was done.Results: It is only in the book of Proverbs 1-9 that we find the individual instructions from parents to their children. The book of Proverbs 1-9 can conveniently serve as the Biblical manual of parenting. The book of Proverbs 1-9 regards the home as the basic institution of learning the life skills. To appropriate the teachings and practices of Proverbs 1-9 in the life of child rearing in the African communities, there is need for the search of the Biblical approach that will enable parents to extract lessons that are applicable and relevant for the purposes of addressing increased anti-social ills in the community. The study argues that traditional-historical method of Biblical analysis as the most appropriate approach to be followed in the quest for the meaning of Proverbs 1-9 that will enable the extraction of lessons that are applicable and relevant in the African child rearing. The nature of the book of Proverbs 1-9 in terms of its traditional historical nature, social setting, purpose, relationship between it and other ancient near East wisdom literature, authorship and social-cultural environment are strong indicators that traditional historical method is the most appropriate approach that is relevant and applicable in the present African communities child rearing.Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: The study hypothesizes that if the analysis of Proverbs 1-9 engages traditional-historical method, the crucial aspects of parenting which includes the parenting styles, contents of instructions and the goal of the instructions will be extracted. These aspects will ultimately serve as a foundation upon which child rearing in African communities be established. Understanding the Biblical teaching on child rearing in Proverbs 1-9 serves as a manual that deepens the understanding of Christian parenting in African communities hoping that it will contribute towards reducing anti-social ills.

Igala proverbs play a very important role in everyday language of the Igala people. The language has beautiful proverbs which cover all aspects of the people’s life and culture. These proverbs are drawn from careful observation of social events, the lives of people and animals. Also, some proverbs have traces of experiences of the people’s occupations such as farming, fishing, hunting, weaving, wrestling and dancing. The language has proverbs that talk above family and human relations, good and evil, poverty and riches, joy and sorrow. It is on this basis that this study examines how the elders/traditional leaders who are custodians of Igala cultural values use proverbs as a generalized code for establishing standards in ethical and moral values, enthroning respect for elders and constituted authorities and discouraging the youths from embracing social vices prevalent in our society. This study adopts Dan Sperber’s and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory. Participant observation and interview were the means of data collection. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive and analytical tools. The work uses the traditional contexts of Ogugu and Ankpa proverbs to present their epistemological significance in Igala kingdom. Keywords: Igala Proverbs, Correctional Tools, Traditional Elders, Relevance Theory, Traditional Institutions

Stylistic effects of transitivity in the use of animal proverbs in Bole Butake’s And Palm Wine Will Flow, analyses the message the author is passing through the use of animal proverbs. Systemic functional theory views language as a resource people use to accomplish their purposes by expressing meaning in context. Particular aspects of a given context define the meanings likely to be expressed and the language likely to be used to express those meanings. The method of analysis is a descriptive approach that describes the proverbs and the relationship between the animals used in the proverbs, showing opposition in the animal camp. Butake brings man to the level of the animal because he wants reconciliation in the human society. This is the reason for the excess use of the material process which shows action. Transitivity as used in this study correlates linguistic choices and social aspects of language use, and brings out the underlying message of protest in the play.

Second person pronouns functioning as person deixis are found to be used in both Bengali and English language to express the role relationships as well as the interpersonal relationships involved between the participants in conversation. However, the expression of these relationships through the use of second person deixis varies significantly in the two languages as it necessarily involves both linguistic as well as social aspects. Being an Asian language, Bengali has a detailed and somewhat complex system of encoding the role relationship of the participants, their interrelationships, their social status, level of formality and politeness involved, and so on by the use of second person deixis. In contrast, English, a European language, exhibits relatively simple and straight forward ways of encoding the aforementioned issues of conversation. Based on the intuitive observation of the utterances of the two languages, the present study intends to make a comparative analysis of the use of second person deixis in Bengali and English with a view to exploring the extent to which the two languages differ linguistically and pragmatically in their encoding of social information with the use of such deictic expressions.

The aim of this paper is to present the Spanish proverbs related to the topic of greed that can be understood as a continuation of Publilius Syrus’ sentences. For the analysis are taken into account the contributions of two Hellenistic philosophical schools (Stoicism and Epicureanism), which illuminate the scope of the criticism of greed that occurs in these proverbs, both from a psychological as a social point of view. Latin sentences and Spanish proverbs are compared according to their formal or semantic continuity, as well as depending on other aspects (such as the tone or prosodic issues).

Proverbs are precedent language units that relate to the field of speech elements. The presence of sacred components in the composition of these units, reinterpreted in according to the speech situation, indicates a high motivation of the internal form of the communicative microstructure. In our article we call them linguistic units with sacred semantics and give the definition as a complexly structured moralizing statement with holistic and generalized ideas about the positive attitude of folk culture to traditional religion. The studied proverbs have parallel components arranged in a linear sequence. An important feature for the paremiological semantics is “weak thoughts”, i.e. which are difficult to be understood without knowing the situation that they fully characterize. For proverbs, a discursive intention is important, which illustrates cognitive content with moral, and in our case, traditionally confessional function. Modern social, ideological, moral, ethical and everyday problems are correlated and commensurate with the existence of the sacred world in order to give current problems both universal and temporary features giving an assessment from the point of view of the tenets of traditional religion. The article on the diachronic socio-historical and cultural background illustrates the ethno-labeling markers grief, trouble, strength, mind as part of stable language units with sacred semantics gore - ne beda; sila yest - uma ne nado ; the main periods of common usage named components in lexicographical sources are presented and the sacralization of these meanings in russian orthodox culture is represented. However, in the process of civilizational changes, we state the profane of sacred meanings to ironic level. These proverbs - linguistics with sacred semantics - at the same time both phrase combination and aphoristic statement, and micro-text with deep linguistic and culturological content, reflecting different historical, ideological, political eras. The defiling process of the language units with sacred semantics can be explained by the open form of the proverbs themselves, involving various forms of transformations. Due to the active people abuse they develop special principles of attitude to the world, to god, to a man, use it in their native language and in many ways with the help of language that opens up opportunities for us to study new linguistic subparadigms.

The study of “language and gender” has been always popular among linguistics. Language, as a mirror of the society, reflects a nation’s values and beliefs. Sexism against women has been common in English-speaking countries. So we can also see sexism in English here and there. Proverbs and idioms are blood and guts of a nation. This paper pays much attention to the sexism in English proverbs and idioms. This paper first discusses the preview studies about sexism and the definition of English proverbs and idioms; and then the thesis expounds the manifestations of sexism in proverbs and idioms from the perspectives of social status, wisdom, character, and marriage; then the paper also makes deep studies into the causes of sexism from three aspects: society, culture and psychology; finally, this paper indicates the development trend of sexism in English proverbs and idioms. Through the studies on English proverbs and idioms, this paper tries to reveal the phenomenon of sexism in language and find out solutions to help people reduce and eliminate discrimination against women in society and language.

While the concept of freedom in India has mainly been seen through the lens of the freedom struggle/movement, this article conjoins the idea (concept) and practice (movement) of freedom as reflected in the Bengali nationalist discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that freedom was a multidimensional concept and contained many connotative strands. Indigenous lineages were linked to the political idea of freedom, expressed as swaraj. But this political term was not seen in terms of politics alone. Rather, it was an evocation and extension of the older idea of freedom in India (as a category of the spiritual, emphasizing identity with the universal). This strand symbolized the indigeneity of freedom by highlighting aspects of personal and social freedom. To understand the nature of freedom as woven into the texture of the freedom movement in India—pioneered by the Indian National Congress, I explore how indigenous origins were refracted through a critical internalization and rearticulation of Western concepts of freedom in India’s own terms. This developed through a discourse on freedom on the site of samaj or social collectivity. It evolved within a grid, in which two principles— dharma and cultural Aryan-ness—set apart Indian society from the West and also underpinned the imagination of the nation. This emblematized the ‘independence’ of the subjugated through contestation of certain basic tenets of colonial power-knowledge. This shows that there was an interpenetration of different related freedoms, in the site of a harmonious social order ( samaj), and this crucially influenced ways of rethinking Indianness and nationhood.

Proverbs are the summary of class struggle, working practice and life experience of human beings. Proverbs represent the unique characteristics and cultural features of a nation. People of various cultural backgrounds communicate with each other. Cross-cultural communication has been the focus of the present era. Only through communication can we learn from each other and come to know each other better. Only through communication can we give full play to human wisdom and enjoy the common fruits of civilization. The achievements brought about by cultural communication can never be over-estimated. Therefore, in order to gain a better cross-cultural communication with English speaking countries, it’s not only important but also necessary to understand the English and Chinese proverbs and their origins from a cultural perspective. This thesis analyzes and compares the cultural differences between English and Chinese proverbs from four aspects---Human experiences, Literary works, Religions and Social discrimination.

Food and foodways are essential components of the Efik biocultural system, as the Efik people of Southern Cross River State, Southeastern Nigeria, are famous for their rich dietary history and cuisine tradition. Food and foodways are, therefore, quintessential aspects of the Efik cultural history and social structure, which are intergenerational. This article explores the use of food symbolisms (embedded in rich metaphors) in Efik proverbs, which are perceptual frameworks or conceptual grids that highlight fundamental cultural values and mores as well as reinforce and instill acceptable social behavior. The study is rooted in the Afrocentric paradigm, which re-asserts the interpretation of Efik proverbs based on African values, perspectives, and narratives, and adds relevant ontological and epistemological analytic dimensions in operationalizing the collective and contextual understanding of Efik (African) proverbs. In this context, the Efik view the world through the lens of food, exploring the role of food and eating correlates as means of addressing their society’s psychodynamic challenges, which paradoxically are not about food.

Higher education in Ukraine is focused not only on the formation of specific competencies of future specialists, but also on the development of communicative competence, which in necessary for a modern specialist in any professional activity. Therefore, the improvement of training courses on the culture of communication is an actual pedagogical task. Improvement may consist in expanding the philosophical and axiological context of these courses. Such a context creates conditions not only for learning, but also for educating specialists of new generation. To this end, a methodology was developed and tested to introduce folk proverbs with relevant sentences into the courses on the culture of communication. In addition to the practical feasibility of this pedagogical initiative, it also sees a socio-philosophical content. This content is revealed through the understanding of the functions of proverbs in the communicative space of culture in the discourse of the paradigm of theatricality of being. Studies show that in the “theater” of being, folk proverbs are actualized in two aspects: 1) ontological, as “scenarios” of possible life situations and their consequences, which were interpreted popular wisdom; 2) dramaturgical, as “remarks”, capable of filling the “dialogue”/communication with a certain meaning, as a language artistic gesture. Both of these aspects imply an axiological aspect, since they create conditions for the transmission and consolidation of certain values inherent in the national culture. Combining all these aspects in the practice of introducing Ukrainian proverbs into communication culture courses contributes to the formation of additional competence among students - the ability to actualize cultural heritage in the modern conditions of social activity. Expansion (in perspective) of this practice through familiarizing students with similar proverbs of other nations will create the foundation for more effective inter-ethnic, intercultural communications.

No matter in what currency, money rules personal and financial life to a remarkable degree, and it is not surprising that international and national proverb collections contain a plethora of examples from antiquity to the modern age. Many monetary proverbs were coined in the United States with modern American proverbs reflecting this preoccupation with pecuniary issues quite distinctly. Based on about 110 such proverbs coined after the year 1900 it is shown that they contain folk wisdom regarding business, trade, sales, purchase, payment, price, etc. with money playing a dominant role. This can be seen as a reflection of a general American worldview or mentality stemming from the fact that capitalism is part of the social and economic structure of the country. The proverbs under discussion are from The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012) edited by Charles Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder and Fred Shapiro. Some of the modern proverbs give solid financial advice, especially regarding investment in the stock market. While many of them indicate a definite preoccupation with materialistic matters and an interest in accumulating wealth, there are also proverbs that deal with such socio-economic aspects as the widening schism between richness and poverty. There can be no doubt that money and wealth in all their iterations are part of the American capitalist worldview. There are numerous other components to the image of a general American mentality, but business and finance certainly belong to it.

Recognized for its own distinctive aspects, Sarawak’s Malay Community is unique, mainly in the aspects of culture, language, and lifestyle. One of the relevant Malay proverbs in the context of heritage states: “Yang lama dikelek, Yang Baharu didukung” means that the traditional custom will always be practiced, while the modern way of life will be embraced. Thus, it is important to preserve these cultural heritages to sustain and protect their values. This study’s objective focuses on the exploration of the Malay youths’ and their awareness towards Sarawak’s Malay Heritage, specifically on Traditional Malay Clothing, Music and Dances. It also recognizes the use of social media as a medium to promote and sustain Sarawak’s Malay Cultural Heritage. The study involves 115 respondents who are undergraduate students of one of the local universities in Sarawak, where they have completed an online survey to address the study’s objectives effectively.

Abstract The scholarship of change and transformations in proverbs has become an emergent industry in contemporary African studies. The term in transgressive paremiography used for this phenomenon of transformation is called postproverbials. Postproverbiality in Fulfulde is one illustration of the engagement with perspectives of modernities, and aspects of change in worldviews among the Ful’be. “Five and five does not make ten, …” is a signal Ful’be proverbial clause which represents the early interactional history of trade, political and jurisprudent relations between the Ful’be and the predominant Hausa communities of Northern Nigeria. The proverb has experienced a radical reception and turning, based on contemporary social relations and literacy. It is employed in this essay as a symbolic example of how change in proverb construction can also be a challenge to received history. Thirteen pairs of Ful’be proverbs and postproverbials will be deployed to establish the phenomenon of transgressive proverb-making among contemporary Ful’be speakers. The essay will highlight the peculiar forms of extensions, adaptations and cutterage that have been invested into the making of new radical Fulbe proverbs, usually by a younger generation of Fulfulde speakers whose attempt (inadvertent or deliberate) is ultimately to break conventions through newly invented proverbs.

The study of the ways, perceptions and practices by means of which a traditional society domesticates animals constitutes an important chapter in the understanding and interpretation of the making of its civilization, as the presence of animals can be found in all its facets and expressions. In the present paper which, in its initial form, was delivered as a lecture to the Hellenic Veterinary Medical Society, reference was made to the ways the Greek traditional society uses to integrate animals in its cultural system. This reference, however, was a brief and indicative one, as these ways have not been sufficiently studied from a folkanthropological point of view in Greece. This integration happened in many different ways, through the production and reproduction of the animals in their quality as financial asset, the consumption of their meat during week days and celebrations, their naming, the care to prevent and to cure illnesses affecting them, their participation in the worship rituals of saints as sacrificial offers, both real and symbolic, their position in the symbolic and the imaginary as it is depicted in oral narrative (legends, fairy tales, traditions, proverbs). Special mention is made to the saint patrons (St. Modestos, St. Mamas, St. Minas) of the animals in orthodox Christian religion and in Greek popular beliefs and practices.

The purpose of the article is to display some results of linguistic analysis of proverb adaptation motivated by the armed revolt in Moscow in December, 1905. The novelty of the research is that the adapted proverbs Moscow is not beautiful for its houses, but it is beautiful for its blood traces and Moscow brings no damage to Dubasov were chosen for the first time as objects of analysis in historical and cultural aspects by the method of historically distanced adapted proverb analysis, developed and approved by the author. The research method comprises elements of componential,contextual, logical and semiotic analysisalong with the dictionary definition interpretations. The article states the following results: original proverbal sources for cultural transformation may be stated as identification potential of the adapted proverbs by establishing a prototypical comparison system based on structural model similarity and assigning both adapted and proverbal phrases in Russian to one of the four highest logical and semiotic invariant groups; the method of historically distanced adapted proverb analysiscontributes to defining extralinguistic factors which caused formation of new language units; the judgments expressed by the adapted proverbs under studies were formulated; the types of adapted proverbs were singled out.The further studies of adapted paremiologymotivated by social and political events in 1905–1907 Russia might be considered as research prospects with compliancy of adapted paremiology dictionary for the period of the first Russian revolution.

The article deals with political and sociological aspects of Russian character, which are not yet sufficiently studied in social and political science. The article discusses in detail the general features and peculiarities of Russian character. The fairy tales and proverbs provide an enormous amount of material for understanding Russian folk character and lifestyle. The article notes that Russia is not only one world but a whole continent, a large archipelago, which cannot be reduced to one state or even social structure. In Russia, it is impossible to unify all regions and leveling them.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was a great person and great human being. He is known not only for his contribution in the field of educational and social reformation, but also for his literary works and contribution in the development of modern Bengali language. He is the pioneer who understood the problem of the then readers in understanding the complicated Bengali language, whose origin was purely Sanskrit. Thus, he took initiatives for simplifying and modernizing this language. Before him there was no such simple, easy and systematic text books for the learners. So, the researcher aims to find out the literary works of Ishwar Chandra, his contributions in the development of modern Bengali language and its present day relevancy in education. To fulfill these aims and objectives the researcher has framed some research questions. This is a Historical and Bibliographical research. Necessary data are collected from the primary and secondary data sources. For the analysis and interpretation of collected data, researcher used documentary analysis method. According to the researcher this research has significance from many aspects. One of them is, it will reveal the contribution of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar as the first writer of Bengal in creating the simple and modern Bengali language. But the study is delimited by the researcher from the time period, i.e. only the time between 1820-1891 is considered as the period under study. After collecting necessary data, the researcher has found that, large number of books has been written by Ishwar Chandra and he has memorable contribution in the development of modern Bengali language. One of his popular creations is “Barna Porichay”. It is also found that he had done many activities like, writing of text books, grammar books, bio-graphical books and was actively involved in the writings of some magazines. Following the third research question, the research has found that Ishwar Chandra’s all activities are not somehow done by him, but those were much planned works. His report regarding the reformation of the educational system of Sanskrit college is considered as the first Educational Plan by the Indians. His works and activities regarding language development and literature support the principles of educational philosophy and psychology even after a long period of three centuries.

Abstract Proverbs are often said to be part and parcel of the cultural, social, and cognitive heritage of a given linguistic community. This very specific nature of proverbs poses a challenge for any contrastive paremiological study which looks for “equivalents” in the target language. Especially difficult cases which escape systematic analysis are novel modifications of well-established traditional proverbs. To illustrate this, consider a proverb such as The early bird gets the worm. Based on this traditional saying, we have nowadays a number of modifications such as The early bird gets the worm, but the late one gets the pizza or The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. Also, a Polish original saying such as Kto rano wstaje, temu Pan Bóg daje, lit. “God provides to those who rise early”, now has a number of variants, including Kto rano wstaje, ten idzie po bułki (lit. “Those who rise early go to a shop to buy rolls”) or Kto rano wstaje, ten jest niewyspany (lit. “Those who rise early are sleepy”). One thing is certain: any attempt to develop a viable contrastive paremiological analysis can hardly ignore the complex and intricate relations between the cognitive, linguistic, and cultural aspects of proverbs compared. What is needed is a multifaceted account of such structures. A translation model which seems to be perfectly suited for this purpose is Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s theory of reconceptualization (2010). Using as a point of departure Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s assertion that that the translation of a proverb from a source language (SL) to a target language (TL) entails “a number of cycles of reconceptualization of the original SL message, expressed eventually in the TL” (2010: 107), we will offer a re-conceptualization-based account of the shift in meaning involving traditional proverbs and their jocular transformations.

In the volume On Behula's Raft published in 2008 by Khondakar Ashraf Hossain, some significant social, cultural, political and historical aspects of Bangladesh figure repeatedly. This paper tries to explain how these aspects are reflected in Hossain's poems through text analysis of the primary material and some other primary and secondary sources. In this volume, Behula myth is found to be re-created and modified to suit Hossain's exploration into and celebration of, and commitment to Bangladesh, his beloved and beautiful motherland. Some important characters have been highlighted in this volume such as Bangabandhu's daughter Sheikh Hasina, a victim of fanaticism named Noorjahan, a legendary Bengali female poet called Kankabati and a Dhaka rickshaw-puller named Abushama to present various socio-politico-economic aspects of Bangladesh. Moreover, Bangladesh's liberation war, political reality, problems and potentials have been depicted in most of the poems in the volume. The paper implies that in On Behula's Raft, Hossain (2008) upholds a Bangladesh consciousness on an epical scale which has rendered great significance to the volume.

The objective of this research is to know more about the complete description of Local Wisdom on the Use of the Minangkabu Proverb Meaning Satire by the Minangkabau Community in Medan. This research uses descriptive qualitative method which can be interpreted as a problem solving procedure that is investigated by describing the state of the object of research at the present time based on the facts that appear or as they are.The sample of this research limited to 8 (eight) Minangkabau informants from the four Kotamatsum Kelurahan. After conducting this research, it was found that the use of the Minangkabau Proverb having meaningful satire by the Minangkabau Society in Medan was more dominant in the Social and Cultural context. This shows that the Minangkabau Society in social interaction with each other always uses a sentence that is decorated, especially the use of the proverbial Minangkabau meaning satire which aims at providing input, criticism and advice in accordance with religious aspects, customs and tradition which are held firmly by the Minangkabau community.

Language is the way of communication and used in different aspects of life. In every country there is a national language which is the state language used in offices and different organizations. Bengali is the state and widely spoken language of Bangladesh however language varies from community to community, race to race, society to society This study shows that there are many indigenous languages in Bangladesh which may be endangered in future specially in the Sylhet area of Bangladesh. The Manipuri language which is not used officially in Bangladesh may be one such language. It has its own alphabets and is spoken in the community. The language has however not been hampered due to COVID 19 and in fact has become more popular during the lockdown. Due to the increase in the popularity of social media (face book group, Cheik Kheik) the Manipuri language in Sylhet, still maintains their ethnic culture and use their language in the home domain.

Abstract In this article, we aim to study the term Estitude by focusing on books by Dumitru Tsepeneag (The Dustying Word), Katalin Molnár (Lamour Dieu) et Nancy Huston (The Lost North). Coming from three different countries (Romania, Hungary and Canada), these three writers are similar as far as their relation to their new creative language is concerned, in this case French. Making use of the new language first presupposes minimalising the importance of one’s native tongue (Romanian, Hungarian and English), but this minimalisation is inappropriate as it indicates one’s exile. At the same time, adoting the French language may prove to be an opportunity, which allows one to research the origins of writing itself : thus, the exiled writer can profit from lingustic calque, lingustic mistakes, literal translation of proverbs and other expressions of his / her native language, of transcript of orality, etc. Being unable to attach himself/herself to a geographical area, the exiled is condamned to live between two countries (the country of origin and the receiving country), between two languages (the native language and the adopted language) and to suffer from a certain complex of superiority. Having a certain social and political experience, s/he stands out among natives, but s/he always runs the risk of being perceived in the « flagrante delicto of strangeness ».

AbstractThis study’s purpose was to make an overview of how ants, bees, wasps, and their products, such as honey are utilized, perceived, and experienced in daily life across sub-Saharan Africa. Ethno-entomological information was collected by interviews with more than 300 people from 27 countries and by literature studies. Queens of the ant Carebara vidua are deliberately eaten and unintentionally bee larvae with honey and sugar ants with sugar. Honey, apart from food, is widely used to treat numerous medical problems and as a stimulant (for the memory) or as a cosmetic. In the Qur’an, the medical value of honey is recognized. Seed stores of ants may be harvested by humans. In Sudan, bee stings are used to cure arthritis as bee venom has bioactive properties. Wasp nests are used to cure inflammations such as mumps. Certain insect properties are used in conveying these treatments to persons it is employed to, such as wasps feed do make dogs vicious. Some stories seem to make no sense like the snake-trapping ants in Madagascar, but a scientific explanation is provided. Certain insects’ looks may inspire people to construct stories or have proverbs such as the very narrow waist of wasps, suggesting sterility. Bee swarms and driver ants are feared all over and believed to be employed (by witchdoctors) to punish. Not all stories of events with bees or ants are similar across sub-Saharan Africa. Social insects are also used to stimulate cohesion between people.

Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as ‘mushāʿira’ in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as ‘waʿz mahfil’ in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners’ experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers’ narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across ‘religious’, ‘political’, and ‘poetic’ realms—and thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.

This article focuses on cultural translation, especially addressing the issue of cultural inequivalences or losses occurring in the translation of “Pallati i Ëndrrave” written by Ismail Kadare. The main aim of this article is to investigate how different cultural aspects of source text are transmitted into the target text, causing cultural losses. As we might know, cultural losses are defined as the losses of cultural norms, social customs, idioms, and proverbial wisdom that are inherited through generations and comprise the identity of the source culture. Such losses occur during the process of correlating the verbal signs of one culture to another different culture and result mainly from misrepresenting the literariness of the source text and its pragmatic forces. Therefore, to present such cases, many examples of cultural losses are given, which are divided based on different type of losses in both version. Thus, in order to illustrate cultural aspects in literature, we analyze figurative language such as culture items, idiomatic expressions, proverbs in two texts: Albanian (the source text) and English (the target text). The analysis of examples have shown that translation of cultural aspects of the source text was communicatively successful, however, it failed to represent the culture-bound words which represent the implicit level of the source text. In this sense, we argue that figurative language and cultural terms of the source text are unfamiliar for target text and they should be looked at from the perspective of a cultural insider.

This paper aims to examine the meeting points between phraseology and humor research, focusing on the role and the functions of fixed phrases in humor discourse. The examples to illustrate certain aspects of usage of fixed phrases for joke purposes are taken mainly from social media such as Facebook and Twitter and include jokes in English, German, Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish. In the course of the investigation, a distinction ought to be made between set phrases (idioms in the narrower sense of the term, proverbs, catch phrases etc.) and fixed phrases in general. Set phrases (phrasemes) have an “added value” regarding their meaning – be it a figurative element, be it ready-made reasoning or behavioral models in short form in the case of adages. In humor discourse idioms – and proverbs – are used mainly for wordplay, in which both the literal and the idiomatic meaning are activated. The wordplay can happen also in verse form. Adages can be transformed or twisted resulting in new parodistic or funny sayings. Fixed phrases outside of the phraseology can be separated into two groups: phrases typical for a particular discourse type and joke frame related phrases. The former, as means to evoke a certain frame, are used in parodistic jokes (e.g., the phrase ladies if he evokes the dating tips frame). The latter constitute a distinct class of fixed phrases which can be found only in the humor discourse: these phrases act as joke formulae und provide a basis for bigger or smaller joke categories. Certain phrases in this group, such as checks notes or nothing like deserve a mention as irony markers with a distinctive evaluative character. The shared feature of all these idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrases is that they are well-known, re-occur in the language and, in that respect, can considered belonging to the sphere of interests of phraseology. Regarding the main functions of fixed phrases in the humor discourse, they can contribute to the social play, provide the cues to switch to a nonserious humor mindset or express evaluation – from mild mockery to aggressive ridicule.

In Mozambique, the Portuguese language, associated with the promotion of national unity and consciousness, has become not only a political-administrative vehicle but also formative of communicative models and a bolster for socio-economic values. By force of the internal structure of the Bantu languages and African imagination, the Portuguese language is dragged toward new, innovative creations, where two aspects can be highlighted: the decomposition of segments of the Portuguese language imitating the Bantu phonetic-discursive sequentialization and metaphoric creation. It is this latter aspect we will be focusing on. The metaphor, provoking breaks in discursive sequence, brings cognitive contributions that are disturbing to our encyclopaedic knowledge. The metaphor, contrarily to metonymy and synecdoche, the metaphor creates categorical conflicts from which new perspectivizations result. The metaphor’s neuralgic crux is to establish negotiations between encyclopaedias. And the “encyclopaedias” focused on (“starting point” or “frame” (Pt. “quadro”) encyclopaedias) are those which result from daily life, from daily concerns, as are “corruption”, the “police” and the “politicians”, economic difficulties, the pleasures of life and the great moral principles of social life. The metaphor found in Mozambican Portuguese generally obeys the parameters of the metaphor: the concrete serves as a basis for abstract things, the physically perceptible is transferred mentally and contemplates all verbal categories: names and verbs, adjectives and phraseologies, idiomatic expressions and proverbs. The semic and classematic aspects are object of unexpected transferences. It is a new ontology in constant gestation.

<p>The nature is real teacher for a person who wish to develop their intelligence. Intelli­gence is a natural quality of live. The universe intelligence are hidden everywhere, and if we have eyes to see, we can see it everywhere. We can learn from animals on how they sleep, they live and their interaction each others. Most people in every traditional culture learn based on their beliefs rather than their reason (Suryadarma, 2012). There are many different ways to look the uniqueness of biodiversity and the interrelationship between humans and their social and biophysical surroundings. <br />People in the past; i.e. hunting and gathering communities were heavily depended on their immediate natural resources to meet most of their basic needs. Therefore, they closely interacted with their environment and thereby, gained a sound knowledge and understand­ing the uniqueness of each species and its underlying ecological processes. Many events in daily life is interesting, in the sense that many phenomena and objects can be directly ob­served. The richness of biological pehenomena in the ecosystems can be directly observed. Some phenomena had recorded as a proverbs, analogy and song. <br />Balinese use the uniqueness of biodiversity resources and ecological phenomena in their daily life to find analogy, proverb and song to reflect their life. Yesudian (1989) declared; that man is the culminating point of the creation but in the man alone are animal, human and divine qualities alive and active together. Which aspects of our nature are to manifest? To manifest the humanity is the purpose of our earthly life (Suryadarma, 2010). This is the rea­son why the Balinese use proverbs, analogy, and song as part of learning process. Learning is processes of our escalation where it processes e.g. it can be analogized with the process of transformation on butterfly life cycle <br />Tsunami is a large ocean waves that washes everything in the shallow water of a shore­line where globalization can be analogized with tsunami process in which the world increas­ingly their activities. Globalization is the fact where the people have been two ways in look­ing at it impact on their life activities. It is the reason why each person use different ways looking of proverbs, analogy in our cultural activities. How develop its in deferent level and different site into better science for better life? How to explore and develop it as sources of biodiversity documentation information because these activities will be developed the fra­grance of ecological wisdom and enter in every one heart.</p>

The Lithuanian picture of house/home is deeply rooted in folk tradition – the ideal home is the rural home of a person’s childhood. In Lithuanian, there are two expressions that are used to designate the concept, the singular namas – which dictionaries tersely define as a building – and the plural namai, which stands for a broader space and a family staying together. The author discusses synonyms (and quasi-synonyms), antonyms (accenting the opposition between familiarity and strangeness), derivatives and collocations of these words. She reports the results of a questionnarie, which show that namas/namai is often mythicised as a paradise on earth, with the important motif of returning home. Proverbs keep guard over patriarchal relations in the family and portray home as a stronghold. Journalistic texts introduce the concept of a cosmopolitan home, open to the world. The features of the Lithuanian base picture of namas/namai are discussed according to the basic semantic aspects: social, psychosocial (sacralisation of home), mental, physical and functional (home as a shelter protecting individuals from the strange world they fear). Two profiles of the Lithuanian home are identified in the study: a romantic rustic profile grounded in the lasting relationship with the family, and a European, intelligentsia profile located wherever there are (any) people.

The article deals with the consideration of the paremic text in the modern linguistic paradigm: approaches to the researches are presented, the text-forming and linguocultural potential of individual units is shown. The direct observation method was used as the main method in this work, followed by the use of descriptive-analytical, comparative, contextual and linguistic and cultural methods. The Study is based on examples from lexicographic sources and illustrations from the Internet. The article provides an overview of the main aspects of the paremiological studies. Paremias are considered as a folklore genre, the thematic and ideographic principle of classifying paremias is presented, the aspects of cultural linguistics (linguoculturological) and translation studies are substantiated, and peculiarities of historical and etymological discursive (functional) analysis are shown. Comparative linguistic and cultural analysis is recognized by the authors of the paper as an integrative aspect of the paremiological material description. The article analyzes the text-forming and linguoculturological potential of the paremiology in different languages. As an example of the realization of the text-forming potential of paremias, the functioning of the proverb Не рой другому яму - сам в нее попадешь (упадешь) (He who digs a pit for others may fall himself therein) is studied as the verbal part of the Russian and Lithuanian demotivators. The paper provides a linguistic and cultural analysis of paremias with a toponymical component in different languages. Despite the abundance of various toponyms, which are characteristic for different countries, in these proverbs are dominated the international component, which is associated with the universal laws of human thinking, which makes it possible to find their semantic equivalents in various languages. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that paremias are considered in various aspects from the standpoint of modern humanistic education. With the development of social communications in modern society, an intercultural connection is being strengthened, requiring linguocultural commentary.

The article substantiates the relevance of the formation of children's creative activity with the help of folklore in the process of integration of different types of artistic activities in the theory and practice of preschool education. It is noted that the highest form of human’s activity and at the same time his characteristic is creativi-ty, at the same time creative activity is defined as human activity in a particular type of creativity, which acquires essential and specific features of creativity. As a result we can mention that creativity and activity are interrelated, interpenetrating concepts that influence each other. Different approaches of understanding the essence of the concepts "creativity", "activity" are revealed and the main interpretations of these terms in philosophy, psy-chology and pedagogy are reflected. It is determined that in the studying of creativity there are two approaches: creativity as an activity; creativity as a personality trait. Based on the research of philosophers on the prob-lems of education of social activity, artistic creativity, we consider creative activity as a complex, integral quality of personality, which is a dialectical unity of general, peculi-ar to all types of social activity, and especially specific only as a measure of personality’s activity in art, has two interconnected aspects: external and internal. The external side involves the implementation of ac-tions and deeds which have creative nature. Internal involves a conscious, meaningful attitude to the activities performed, the manifestation of volitional qualities associ-ated with achieving the result. Older preschool age is the basis for the formation of creative activity and children's creativity in general, as the developmental perception of the child is the causative agent of the child's activity and creative activity in gen-eral. One of the means that contributes to younger genera-tion personality’s formation, which carries enormous educational potential, is folk art, because it contains wis-dom, the best people’s moral and aesthetic experience. In addition, it contributes to the formation of children’s crea-tivity. Based on the analysis of research, the possibilities of such types of oral folk art as fairy tales, proverbs and sayings, riddles in the formation of creative activity, based on their nature and content.

Purpose. In the conditions of accelerated development of modernization processes in Kazakhstan, there is increased interest in the study of Kazakh heritage by historians and ethnographers of the 19th – 20th centuries. The purpose of this work is to identify the main scientific issues in the ethnography of the Kazakhs covered in Grigorii Nikolaevich Potanin’s studies. Scientific works of this outstanding scientist in this respect are particularly relevant. Firstly, the researcher was born in one of the fortifications in the Kazakh steppe and had a good command of the Kazakh language as he was familiar with the peculiarities of culture and life of the Kazakh people since his childhood. Secondly, he was a famous ethnographer, a member of the Russian Geographical Society and participated in several scientific expeditions on the territory of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China. This article deals with studying the traditional culture of the Kazakh people by the famous ethnographer G. N. Potanin (1835–1920). We analyze the main works of the researcher devoted to the study of the spiritual culture of the Kazakh people. On the basis of our study, we identify that the study of folklore was one of central and most important issues among the various scientific aspects G. N. Potanin raised. Results. G. N. Potanin focused on studying oral folk art of the Kazakh people including genealogical legends. He analyzed the origin of those legends and their similarities with legends of other peoples. The researcher also collected and recorded fairy tales, proverbs, riddles and tongue twisters of the Kazakh people. G. N. Potanin proved the so-called “eastern hypothesis” of the origin and development of the medieval European epic. In our opinion, G. N. Potanin concentrated on studying oral folk art because it reflects the life of the Kazakh people. The researcher noted a certain influence of Islam and Central Asian culture on the traditional culture of the Kazakh people. He studied ethnic composition, social structure, traditional economy and material culture of the Kazakh people. Conclusion. Thus, the study of Kazakh folklore, including oral and musical creativity, was the main important issue in G. N. Potanin’s research. He made conclusions on the ethnic composition, the traditional system of life support of the Kazakh people. In this small work, we noted only a small range of aspects that are reflected in the work of the great researcher. It is necessary to widen the range of archival materials studied to continue investigating the heritage of this outstanding Russian scientist, a true friend of the Kazakh people.

В работе путем семантического и контекстуального анализа рассматриваются русские паремические единицы, вербализующие понятийную сферу «благодарность», отобранные из сборника пословиц В. И. Даля. Актуальность исследования обусловлена важностью рассматриваемого фрагмента паремического дискурса для выявления характерных черт и особенностей базовых концептов русской лингвокультуры. Формирование данного чувства способствует развитию социальной эмпатии, построению нравственных и ценностных ориентиров членов сообщества. Анализ феномена благодарности, отраженного в архаичном сознании русского народа, позволяет проследить его трансформацию в социуме. В работе рассматриваются некоторые философские и психологические основания феномена «благодарность», основные субсферы метафоризации, базовые метафорические модели, их фреймовые структуры и слоты. Были выявлены метафорические модели субсфер «человек», «природа», «артефакты», «социум». Субсфера «человек» репрезентируется метафорическими моделями «Благодарность - человеческий организм», «Благодарность - действия человека». Метафорические модели субсферы «природа» представлены миром животных, миром растений и небесными телами. Метафорические модели субсферы «социум» содержат слоты, связанные с религией и пенитенциарными учреждениями. Субсфера «артефакты» репрезентируется фреймами «еда и напитки», «одежда», «деньги», «ткани», «инструменты» и некоторыми другими. Самой значительной по количеству является группа антропоморфных метафор, насчитывающая 38 единиц (41,8 %); группа артефактных метафор включает 31 единицу (34 %); природоморфные метафоры составляют 14 единиц (15,4 %) и группа социоморфных метафор представлена 8 единицами (8,8 %). The article considers the semantic and contextual analysis of Russian paroemic units verbalizing a conceptual sphere Gratitude. The units were selected from the book of proverbs by V. Dahl. This conceptual sphere is important to reveal characteristic features of basic concepts in Russian linguoculture. The formation of this feeling and emotion contributes to the development of social empathy, creation of moral values in society. The analysis of the phenomenon of gratitude reflected in the archaic consciousness of Russian people helps to observe its transformation in social continuum. The article considers some philosophical and psychological aspects of gratitude in Russian archaic consciousness, basic metaphorization subspheres, their frame structures and slots; reveals metaphorical models of subspheres Man, Nature, Artifact, Socium. The subsphere Man is represented by the metaphorical models Human Body and Actions Performed by Man. Metaphorical models of the subsphere Nature contain Flora World, Fauna World and Celestial Bodies. Frame structures of the subsphere Socium are verbalized by the slots connected with religion and penitentiary institutions. The subsphere Artifacts is represented by the models Food and Drinks, Clothes, Money, Fabrics, Instruments. The group of anthropomorphical metaphors is the largest one containing 38 units (41,8 %); the second one is the group of artifact metaphors with 31 units (34 %); the third place is taken by phytomorphical metaphors - 14 units (15,4 %) and sociomorphical group is the last one with 8 units (8,8 %).

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan aspek psikolinguistik sosial dalam babasan dan paribasa (peribahasa) Sunda dan gambaran karakter orang Sunda yang ada dalam peribahasa Sunda. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif analisis dengan menggunakan teknik telaah pustaka pada buku kumpulan peribahasa Sunda. Hasil penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa terdapat enam aspek psikolinguistik dalam peribahasa Sunda, yaitu aspek: (1) gotong royong; (2) saling menolong; (3) saling menghargai; (4) tali persahabatan; (5) kekeluargaan; dan (6) harmonis. Selain itu, hasil penelitian ini membahas 59 gambaran watak orang Sunda yang terdapat dalam peribahasa Sunda, yang terbagi dalam lima tipologi watak berdasarkan kebudayaan, watak campuran tipologi, watak khusus, dan watak yang terdapat dalam peribahasa Sunda. Setelah itu, penelitian ini membahas tentang hubungan antara peribahasa Sunda dan aspek psikolinguistik sosial dalam menggambarkan watak orang Sunda. Hasil temuan ini direkomendasikan untuk menjadi referensi tambahan dalam khazanah ilmu psikolinguistik. The research aims to describe the aspect of social psycholinguistics in Sundanese proverbs and the description of the characteristics of Sundanese people embedded in the proverbs. An analytical descriptive method was used coupled with literature review of a compilation book of Sundanese proverbs. Results indicate that Sundanese proverbs contain six psycholinguistic aspects, namely (1) mutual aid; (2) mutual help; (3) mutual respect; (4) partnership; (5) kinship; and (6) harmony. In addition, 59 descriptions of the characteristics of Sundanese people were delineated. These fall into five typology of characteristics based on culture, mixed typology, special characteristics, and characteristics contained in the Sundanese proverbs. Furthermore, the research explores the relationship between Sundanese proverbs and aspects of social psycholinguistics that illustrate the characteristics of Sundanese people. These results are recommended to serve as supplementary reference in psycholinguistics.

The aim of this study was to highlight aspects of the socio-political discourse and communication in Sidaama through the analysis of three selected Sidaama folk media. Folk media include songs, proverbs, folktales, praises, curses, greetings and so on, but this contribution is limited to examples of hano “dance of married adults”, faaro “song (with a wide variety of topics)”, and hayye “lullaby”, a representative but by no means complete selection. Dances are accompanied by poetic discourse that may be used for political and social ends. The selected material was subject to linguistic and contextual analysis, demonstrating the treatment of a variety of political and social topics in the folk media.

This paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of Bengali-speaking rappers called the Cypher Projekt, based in the Indian state of West Bengal, attempted to create an online place for conducting cyphers during India’s harsh lockdowns in 2020. As an integral practice in Hip Hop culture, a rap cypher is akin to a poetry slam and typically held in physical locations where proximity between rappers is key to lyrical improvisation and competitive engagement. The Covid-19 lockdowns imposed throughout India in 2020 forced this community of Indian rappers to explore online environments for conducting the cyphers. However, due to infrastructural constraints related to latency in Internet connections, the cyphers were replaced with informal discussion sessions. These sessions were referred to as the Streamyard cyphers, owing to use of the free version of a web-enabled video-conferencing application called Streamyard. The ethnographic study revealed how the online sessions served as lively informal hangouts for members of the community, in line with several characteristics of Ray Oldenberg’s third place. However, there were other crucial aspects that did not meet the characteristics of a third place, which necessitated the explanatory power offered by the Indian social practice of the adda. The Streamyard cyphers clearly offered a vibrant third place for the undertaking of addas amid the Covid-induced Indian lockdowns of 2020. While Oldenburg’s notion of the third place still holds relevance for the examination of informal sociality, in the Global South, its application requires augmentation with scholarly analyses of social practices in specific sociocultural contexts.

Abstract Background With growth of genomics research in Africa, concern has arisen about comprehension and adequacy of informed consent given the highly technical terms used in this field. We therefore decided to study whether there are linguistic and cultural concepts used to communicate heritability of characters, traits and diseases in an indigenous African population. Methods We conducted Focus Group Discussions among 115 participants stratified by sex, age and socio-economic status and Key Informant Interviews among 25 stakeholders and Key Opinion Leaders among Yoruba living in Ibadan, Nigeria. We used Atlas-ti v.8.3.17 software to analyze the data, using thematic approach. Results The study participants identified several linguistic and cultural concepts including words, proverbs, and aphorisms that are used to describe heritable characters, traits and diseases in their local dialect. These included words that can be appropriated to describe dominant and recessive traits, variations in penetrance and dilution of strength of heritable characteristics by time and inter-marriage. They also suggested that these traits are transmitted by “blood”, and specific partner’s blood may be stronger than the other regardless of sex. Conclusions Indigenous Yoruba populations have words and linguistic concepts that describe the heritability of characters, traits and diseases which can be appropriated to improve comprehension and adequacy of informed consent in genomics research. Our methods are openly available and can be used by genomic researchers in other African communities.

This article focuses on the role of intercultural pragmatics in modern foreign languages teaching and, on the notion, issues of intercultural pragmatics. It also analyses the importance of intercultural communication in the teaching of foreign languages, pragmatic aspects of intercultural communication, the interdependence of linguistic and cultural phenomena. While pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, intercultural pragmatism is developing as a new supplement to pragmatics. The process of intercultural communication includes linguistic and socio-cultural elements. The importance of intercultural communication in the study of a foreign language is that it eliminates cultural misunderstandings, mistrust and helps to adapt to other civilizational traditions of intercultural communication. Nowadays, according to communicative language teaching the main focus is on the development of communicative competence in foreign languages teaching. Sociolinguistic and pragmatic competencies are the integral aspects of this competence. Cultural and social factors are important in developing intercultural communicative competences in order to avoid difficulties that may arise in understanding interlocutors of different cultural backgrounds. Knowledge of the components of a language and cultural foundations such as phraseological units, words and proverbs help to overcome difficulties in intercultural communication and lead not only to understanding of “foreign” culture through “own” culture, but also the pragmatic factors that arise in this case. Given that English is the lingua franca in the world, there are many problems with intercultural pragmatics in the process of communication in this language. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the development of intercultural communication competence in the process of teaching English. However, there are a number of problems in the process of teaching a foreign language. The problem can be divided into linguistic, lingua-didactic and methodological aspects.

The method of diagnosing interpersonal interactions of curators and students is designed to study the perception of curators and students in the academic group about themselves and the curator, as well as to study the relationship between curators and students of the group. The method determines the type of attitude to the curator in self-assessment and mutual assessment. The technique is constructed according to the type of Likert scale. The statements in the form of small crafts in Ukrainian folklore are selected for evaluation - proverbs and sayings, which in content are the quintessence of folk ideas about human relations, and in form - concise and easy to understand. In addition, a statement in "metaphorical" form is subjectively easier to evaluate than a direct answer. There are variables that determine the type of attitude to the curator: "Understanding and democracy"; "One step ahead: attentiveness and foresight", "Efficiency, teamwork efficiency". These characteristics reflect various aspects of interpersonal interaction in the academic group, where the curator may pay attention to each of the participants in the educational process, and may be careless and biased; can organize team activities, express their ideas and wishes; predict the likelihood of problematic, conflict situations and manage the process of their resolution, and may, conversely, be passive, inactive, critical of social phenomena and others, provoke conflicts and misunderstandings. The interpersonal interaction of the curator and students is analyzed in a three-dimensional space, which is created by axes: understanding and democracy - misunderstanding and despotism; attentiveness and foresight - inattention and short-sightedness; efficiency, effective teamwork - passivity, unproductive teamwork. The method can be used to assess the behavior of the curator in the assessment of students (from the outside), for self-assessment of the curator and the description of the ideal curator. Depending on the level of diagnosis, the instructions change.

06–579El-Yasin, Mohammed K. (Yarmouk U, Irbid, Jordan; majlouny@yahoo.com) & Abdulla K. Al-Shehabat, Translating proverbs. Babel (John Benjamins) 51.2 (2005), 161–173.06–580Flowerdew, John (City U Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; enjohnf@cityu.edu.hk) & Alina Wan, Genre analysis of tax computation letters: How and why tax accountants write the way they do. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.2 (2006),133–153.06–581Francis, Norbert (Northern Arizona U, USA; norbert.francis@nau.edu), The development of secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness in second language learners. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 37–60.06–582Gimenez, Julio (Middlesex U, London, UK; jgimenez@mdx.ac.uk), Embedded business emails: Meeting new demands in international business communication. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.2 (2006), 154–172.06–583Hamston, Julie, Pathways to multiliteracies: Student teachers' critical reflections on a multimodal text. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Australian Literacy Educators' Association) 29.1 (2006), 38–51.06–584Hassan Al-Saqqaf, Abdullah (Sultan Qaboos U, Muscat), The linguistics of loanwords in Hadrami Arabic. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.1 (2006), 75–93.06–585Hüllen, Werner (U Duisburg-Essen, Germany;werner.huellen@uni-essen.de), Foreign language teaching – a modern building on historical foundations. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 61–87.06–586Léwy, Nicolas (U Neuchâtel, Switzerland; nicolas.lewy@unine.ch), François Grosjean, Lysiane Grosjean, Isabelle Racine & Carole Yersin, Un modèle psycholinguistique informatique de la reconnaissance des mots dans la chaîne parlée du français [A computational psycholinguistic model for word recognition in French connected speech]. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 15.1 (2005), 25–48.06–587Macken-Horarik, Mary, Hierarchies in diversities: What students' examined responses tell us about literacy practices in contemporary school English. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Australian Literacy Educators' Association) 29.1 (2006), 52–78.06–588Nelson, Mike (U Turku, Finland; mike.nelson@utu.fi), Semantic associations in Business English: A corpus-based analysis. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.2 (2006), 217–234.06–589Siepmann, Dirk (Universität-GH Siegen, Germany; dsiepmann@t-online.de), Collocation, colligation and encoding dictionaries (Part II: Lexicographical aspects). International Journal of Lexicography (Oxford University Press) 19.1 (2006), 1–39.06–590Thue Vold, Eva (U Bergen, Norway; eva.vold@roman.uib.no), Epistemic modality markers in research articles: A cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 61–87.06–591Williams, Ian A. (U de Cantabria, Santander, Spain; williams@unican.es), Thematic items referring to research and researchers in the Discussion section of Spanish biomedical articles and English-Spanish translations. Babel (John Benjamins) 51.2 (2005), 124–160.06–592Williams, John N. (U Cambridge, UK; jnw12@cam.ac.uk), Incremental interpretation in second language sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press) 9.1 (2006), 71–88.06–593Winter, Jo & Anne Pauwels (U Western Australia; jewinter@cyllene.uwa.edu.au), Men staying at home looking after their children: Feminist linguistic reform and social change. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 16–36.

Whichever way you look at it, self is bound up with consciousness, so it seems useful to review some of the more significant existing conceptions of this relationship. A claim by Mikhail Bakhtin can serve as an anchoring point for this discussion. He firmly predicates the formation of self not just on the existence of an individual consciousness, but on what might be called a double or social (or dialogic) consciousness. Summarising his argument, Pam Morris writes: 'A single consciousness could not generate a sense of its self; only the awareness of another consciousness outside the self can produce that image.' She goes on to say that, 'Behind this notion is Bakhtin's very strong sense of the physical and spatial materiality of bodily being,' and quotes directly from Bakhtin's essay as follows: This other human being whom I am contemplating, I shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against me, cannot see himself: parts of his body that are inaccessible to his own gaze (his head, his face and its expression), the world behind his back . . . are accessible to me but not to him. As we gaze at each other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes . . . to annihilate this difference completely, it would be necessary to merge into one, to become one and the same person. This ever--present excess of my seeing, knowing and possessing in relation to any other human being, is founded in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of my place in the world. (Bakhtin in Morris 6 Recent investigations in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind lay down a challenge to this social conception of the self. Notably, it is a challenge that does not involve the restoration of any variant of Cartesian rationalism; indeed, it arguably over--privileges rationalism's subjective or phenomenological opposite. 'Self' in this emerging view is a biologically generated but illusory construction, an effect of the operation of what are called 'neural correlates of consciousness' (NCC). Very briefly, an NCC refers to the distinct pattern of neurochemical activity, a 'neural representational system' -- to some extent observable by modern brain--imaging equipment – that corresponds to a particular configuration of sense--phenomena, or 'content of consciousness' (a visual image, a feeling, or indeed a sense of self). Because this science is still largely hypothetical, with many alternative terms and descriptions, it would be better in this limited space to focus on one particular account – one that is particularly well developed in the area of selfhood and one that resonates with other conceptions included in this discussion. Thomas Metzinger begins by postulating the existence within each person (or 'system' in his terms) of a 'self--model', a representation produced by neural activity -- what he calls a 'neural correlate of self--consciousness' -- that the individual takes to be the actual self, or what Metzinger calls the 'phenomenal self'. 'A self--model is important,' Metzinger says, 'in enabling a system to represent itself to itself as an agent' (293). The individual is able to maintain this illusion because 'the self--model is the only representational structure that is anchored in the brain by a continuous source of internally generated input' (297). In a manner partly reminiscent of Bakhtin, he continues: 'The body is always there, and although its relational properties in space and in movement constantly change, the body is the only coherent perceptual object that constantly generates input.' The reason why the individual is able to jump from the self--model to the phenomenal self in the first place is because: We are systems that are not able to recognise their subsymbolic self--model as a model. For this reason, we are permanently operating under the conditions of a 'naïve--realistic self--misunderstanding': We experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves. What we have in the past simply called a 'self' is not a non--physical individual, but only the content of an ongoing dynamical process – the process of transparent self—modeling. (Metzinger 299) The question that nonetheless arises is why it should be concluded that this self--model emerges from subjective neural activity and not, say, from socialisation. Why should a self--model be needed in the first place? Metzinger's response is to say that there is good evidence 'for some kind of innate 'body prototype'' (298), and he refers to research that shows that even children born without limbs develop self--models which sometimes include limbs, or report phantom sensations in limbs that have never existed. To me, this still leaves open the possibility that such children are modelling their body image on strong identification with human others. But be that as it may, one of the things that remains unclear after this relatively rich account of contemporary or scientific phenomenology is the extent to which 'neural consciousness' is or can be supplemented by other kinds of consciousness, or indeed whether neural consciousness can be overridden by the 'self' acting on the basis of these other kinds of consciousness. The key stake in Metzinger's account is 'subjectivity'. The reason why the neural correlate of self--consciousness is so important to him is: 'Only if we find the neural and functional correlates of the phenomenal self will we be able to discover a more general theoretical framework into which all data can fit. Only then will we have a chance to understand what we are actually talking about when we say that phenomenal experience is a subjective phenomenon' (301). What other kinds of consciousness might there be? It is significant that, not only do NCC exponents have little to say about the interaction with other people, they rarely mention language, and they are unanimously and emphatically of the opinion that the thinking or processing that takes place in consciousness is not dependent on language, or indeed any signifying system that we know of (though conceivably, it occurs to me, the neural correlates may signify to, or 'call up', each other). And they show little 'consciousness' that a still influential body of opinion (informed latterly by post--structuralist thinking) has argued for the consciousness shaping effects of 'discourse' -- i.e. for socially and culturally generated patterns of language or other signification to order the processing of reality. We could usefully coin the term 'verbal correlates of consciousness' (VCC) to refer to these patterns of signification (words, proverbs, narratives, discourses). Again, however, the same sorts of questions apply, since few discourse theorists mention anything like neuroscience: To what extent is verbal consciousness supplemented by other forms of consciousness, including neural consciousness? These questions may never be fully answerable. However, it is interesting to work through the idea that NCC and VCC both exist and can be in some kind of relation even if the precise relationship is not measurable. This indeed is close to the case that Charles Shepherdson makes for psychoanalysis in attempting to retrieve it from the misunderstanding under which it suffers today: We are now familiar with debates between those who seek to demonstrate the biological foundations of consciousness and sexuality, and those who argue for the cultural construction of subjectivity, insisting that human life has no automatically natural form, but is always decisively shaped by contingent historical conditions. No theoretical alternative is more widely publicised than this, or more heavily invested today. And yet, this very debate, in which 'nature' and 'culture' are opposed to one another, amounts to a distortion of psychoanalysis, an interpretive framework that not only obscures its basic concepts, but erodes the very field of psychoanalysis as a theoretically distinct formation (2--3). There is not room here for an adequate account of Shepherdson's recuperation of psychoanalytic categories. A glimpse of the stakes involved is provided by Shepherdson's account, following Eugenie Lemoine--Luccione, of anorexia, which neither biomedical knowledge nor social constructionism can adequately explain. The further fact that anorexia is more common among women of the same family than in the general population, and among women rather than men, but in neither case exclusively so, thereby tending to rule out a genetic factor, allows Shepherdson to argue: [A]norexia can be understood in terms of the mother--daughter relation: it is thus a symbolic inheritance, a particular relation to the 'symbolic order', that is transmitted from one generation to another . . . we may add that this relation to the 'symbolic order' [which in psychoanalytic theory is not coextensive with language] is bound up with the symbolisation of sexual difference. One begins to see from this that the term 'sexual difference' is not used biologically, but also that it does not refer to general social representations of 'gender,' since it concerns a more particular formation of the 'subject' (12). An intriguing, and related, possibility, suggested by Foucault, is that NCC and VCC (or in Foucault's terms the 'visible' and the 'articulable'), operate independently of each other – that there is a 'disjunction' (Deleuze 64) or 'dislocation' (Shepherdson 166) between them that prevents any dialectical relation. Clearly, for Foucault, the lack of dialectical relation between the two modes does not mean that both are not at all times equally functional. But one can certainly speculate that, increasingly under postmodernity and media saturation, the verbal (i.e. the domain of signification in general) is influential. And if linguistic formations -- discourses, narratives, etc. -- can proliferate and feed on each other unconstrained by other aspects of reality, we get the sense of language 'running away with itself' and, at least for a time, becoming divorced from a more complete sense of reality. (This of course is basically the argument of Baudrillard.) The reverse may also be possible, in certain periods, although the idea that language could have no mediating effect at all on the production of reality (just inconsequential fluff on the surface of things) seems far--fetched in the wake of so much postmodern and media theory. However, the notion is consistent with the theories of hard--line materialists and genetic determinists. But we should at least consider the possibility that some sort of shaping interaction between NCC and VCC, without implicating the full conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis, is continuously occurring. This possibility is, for me, best realised by Jacques Derrida when he writes of an irreducible interweaving of consciousness and language (the latter for Derrida being a cover term for any system of signification). This interweaving is such that the significatory superstructure 'reacts upon' the 'substratum of non--expressive acts and contents', and the name for this interweaving is 'text' (Mowitt 98). A further possibility is that provided by Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus -- the socially inherited schemes of perception and selection, imparted by language and example, which operate for the most part below the level of consciousness but are available to conscious reflection by any individual lucky enough to learn how to recognise that possibility. If the subjective representations of NCC exist, this habitus can be at best only partial; something denied by Bourdieu whose theory of individual agency is founded in what he has referred to as 'the relation between two states of the social' – i.e. 'between history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and history incarnate in the body, in the form of that system of durable dispositions I call habitus' (190). At the same time, much of Bourdieu's thinking about the habitus seems as though it could be consistent with the kind of predictable representations that might be produced by NCC. For example, there are the simple oppositions that structure much perception in Bourdieu's account. These range from the obvious phenomenological ones (dark/light; bright/dull; male/female; hard/soft, etc.) through to the more abstract, often analogical or metaphorical ones, such as those produced by teachers when assessing their students (bright/dull again; elegant/clumsy, etc.). It seems possible that NCC could provide the mechanism or realisation for the representation, storage, and reactivation of impressions constituting a social model--self. However, an entirely different possibility remains to be considered – which perhaps Bourdieu is also getting at – involving a radical rejection of both NCC and VCC. Any correlational or representational theory of the relationship between a self and his/her environment -- which, according to Charles Altieri, includes the anti--logocentrism of Derrida -- assumes that the primary focus for any consciousness is the mapping and remapping of this relationship rather than the actions and purposes of the agent in question. Referring to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, Altieri argues: 'Conciousness is essentially not a way of relating to objects but of relating to actions we learn to perform . . . We do not usually think about objects, but about the specific form of activity which involves us with these objects at this time' (233). Clearly, there is not yet any certainty in the arguments provided by neuroscience that neural activity performs a representational role. Is it not, then, possible that this activity, rather than being a 'correlate' of entities, is an accompaniment to, a registration of, action that the rest of the body is performing? In this view, self is an enactment, an expression (including but not restricted to language), and what self--consciousness is conscious of is this activity of the self, not the self as entity. In a way that again returns us towards Bakhtin, Altieri writes: '>From an analytical perspective, it seems likely that our normal ways of acting in the world provide all the criteria we need for a sense of identity. As Sidney Shoemaker has shown, the most important source of the sense of our identity is the way we use the spatio--temporal location of our body to make physical distinctions between here and there, in front and behind, and so on' (234). Reasonably consistent with the Wittgensteinian view -- in its focus on self--activity -- is that contemporary theorisation of the self that compares in influence with that posed by neuroscience. This is the self avowedly constructed by networked computer technology, as described by Mark Poster: [W]hat has occurred in the advanced industrial societies with increasing rapidity . . . is the dissemination of technologies of symbolisation, or language machines, a process that may be described as the electronic textualisation of daily life, and the concomitant transformations of agency, transformations of the constitution of individuals as fixed identities (autonomous, self--regulating, independent) into subjects that are multiple, diffuse, fragmentary. The old (modern) agent worked with machines on natural materials to form commodities, lived near other workers and kin in urban communities, walked to work or traveled by public transport, and read newspapers but engaged as a communicator mostly in face--to--face relations. The new (postmodern) agent works mostly on symbols using computers, lives in isolation from other workers and kin, travels to work by car, and receives news and entertainment from television. . . . Individuals who have this experience do not stand outside the world of objects, observing, exercising rational faculties and maintaining a stable character. The individuals constituted by the new modes of information are immersed and dispersed in textualised practices where grounds are less important than moves. (44--45) Interestingly, Metzinger's theorisation of the model--self lends itself to the self--mutability -- though not the diffusion -- favoured by postmodernists like Poster. [I]t is . . . well conceivable that a system generates a number of different self--models which are functionally incompatible, and therefore modularised. They nevertheless could be internally coherent, each endowed with its own characteristic phenomenal content and behavioral profile. . . this does not have to be a pathological situation. Operating under different self--models in different situational contexts may be biologically as well as socially adaptive. Don't we all to some extent use multiple personalities to cope efficiently with different parts of our lives? (295--6) Poster's proposition is consistent with that of many in the humanities and social sciences today, influenced variously by postmodernism and social constructionism. What I believe remains at issue about his account is that it exchanges one form of externally constituted self ('fixed identity') for another (that produced by the 'modes of information'), and therefore remains locked in a logic of deterministic constitution. (There is a parallel here with Altieri's point about Derrida's inability to escape representation.) Furthermore, theorists like Poster may be too quickly generalising from the experience of adults in 'textualised environments'. Until such time as human beings are born directly into virtual reality environments, each will, for a formative period of time, experience the world in the way described by Bakhtin – through 'a unified perception of bodily and personal being . . . characterised . . . as a loving gift mutually exchanged between self and other across the borderzone of their two consciousnesses' (cited in Morris 6). I suggest it is very unlikely that this emergent sense of being can ever be completely erased even when people subsequently encounter each other in electronic networked environments. It is clearly not the role of a brief survey like this to attempt any resolution of these matters. Indeed, my review has made all the more apparent how far from being settled the question of consciousness, and by extension the question of selfhood, remains. Even the classical notion of the homunculus (the 'little inner man' or the 'ghost in the machine') has been put back into play with Francis Crick and Christof Koch's (2000) neurobiological conception of the 'unconscious homunculus'. The balance of contemporary evidence and argument suggests that the best thing to do right now is to keep the questions open against any form of reductionism – whether social or biological. One way to do this is to explore the notions of self and consciousness as implicated in ongoing processes of complex co--adaptation between biology and culture -- or their individual level equivalents, brain and mind (Taylor Ch. 7). References Altieri, C. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: a Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. Ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bourdieu, P. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Crick, F. and Koch, C. "The Unconscious Homunculus." Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Ed. Thomas Metzinger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Deleuze, G. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Metzinger, T. "The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective." Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Ed. Thomas Metzinger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Morris, P. (ed.). The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Mowitt, J. Text: The Genealogy of an Interdisciplinary Object. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Poster, M. Cultural History and Modernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Shepherdson, C. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000. Taylor, M. C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wallace, Derek. "'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt. Chicago Style Wallace, Derek, "'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Wallace, Derek. (2002) 'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt ([your date of access]).

Introduction I am a transmigrant who has moved back and forth between the West and the Rest. I was born and raised in a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, but I spent several years of my childhood in Pakistan. After my marriage, I lived in the United States for a year and a half, the Middle East for 5 years, Australia for three years, back to the Middle East for another 5 years, then, finally, in Australia for the last 12 years. I speak Bengali (my mother tongue), Urdu (which I learnt in Pakistan), a bit of Arabic (learnt in the Middle East); but English has always been my medium of instruction. So where is home? Is it my place of origin, the Muslim umma, or my land of settlement? Or is it my ‘root’ or my ‘route’ (Blunt and Dowling)? Blunt and Dowling (199) observe that the lives of transmigrants are often interpreted in terms of their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which are two frameworks for thinking about home, homeland and diaspora. Whereas ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, ‘routes’ focuses on mobile, multiple and transcultural geographies of home. However, both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are attached to emotion and identity, and both invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intrinsically tied to a sense of self (Blunt and Dowling 196-219). In this paper, I equate home with my root (place of birth) and route (transnational homing) within the context of the ‘diaspora and belonging’. First I define the diaspora and possible criteria of belonging. Next I describe my transnational homing within the framework of diaspora and belonging. Finally, I consider how Australia can be a ‘home’ for me and other Muslim Australians. The Diaspora and Belonging Blunt and Dowling (199) define diaspora as “scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and the places”. Cohen emphasised the ethno-cultural aspects of the diaspora setting; that is, how migrants identify and position themselves in other nations in terms of their (different) ethnic and cultural orientation. Hall argues that the diasporic subjects form a cultural identity through transformation and difference. Speaking of the Hindu diaspora in the UK and Caribbean, Vertovec (21-23) contends that the migrants’ contact with their original ‘home’ or diaspora depends on four factors: migration processes and factors of settlement, cultural composition, structural and political power, and community development. With regard to the first factor, migration processes and factors of settlement, Vertovec explains that if the migrants are political or economic refugees, or on a temporary visa, they are likely to live in a ‘myth of return’. In the cultural composition context, Vertovec argues that religion, language, region of origin, caste, and degree of cultural homogenisation are factors in which migrants are bound to their homeland. Concerning the social structure and political power issue, Vertovec suggests that the extent and nature of racial and ethnic pluralism or social stigma, class composition, degree of institutionalised racism, involvement in party politics (or active citizenship) determine migrants’ connection to their new or old home. Finally, community development, including membership in organisations (political, union, religious, cultural, leisure), leadership qualities, and ethnic convergence or conflict (trends towards intra-communal or inter-ethnic/inter-religious co-operation) would also affect the migrants’ sense of belonging. Using these scholarly ideas as triggers, I will examine my home and belonging over the last few decades. My Home In an initial stage of my transmigrant history, my home was my root (place of birth, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Subsequently, my routes (settlement in different countries) reshaped my homes. In all respects, the ethno-cultural factors have played a big part in my definition of ‘home’. But on some occasions my ethnic identification has been overridden by my religious identification and vice versa. By ethnic identity, I mean my language (mother tongue) and my connection to my people (Bangladeshi). By my religious identity, I mean my Muslim religion, and my spiritual connection to the umma, a Muslim nation transcending all boundaries. Umma refers to the Muslim identity and unity within a larger Muslim group across national boundaries. The only thing the members of the umma have in common is their Islamic belief (Spencer and Wollman 169-170). In my childhood my father, a banker, was relocated to Karachi, Pakistan (then West Pakistan). Although I lived in Pakistan for much of my childhood, I have never considered it to be my home, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country. In this case, my home was my root (Bangladesh) where my grandparents and extended family lived. Every year I used to visit my grandparents who resided in a small town in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Thus my connection with my home was sustained through my extended family, ethnic traditions, language (Bengali/Bangla), and the occasional visits to the landscape of Bangladesh. Smith (9-11) notes that people build their connection or identity to their homeland through their historic land, common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions. Though Pakistan and Bangladesh had common histories, their traditions of language, dress and ethnic culture were very different. For example, the celebration of the Bengali New Year (Pohela Baishakh), folk dance, folk music and folk tales, drama, poetry, lyrics of poets Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindra Sangeet) and Nazrul Islam (Nazrul Geeti) are distinct in the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Special musical instruments such as the banshi (a bamboo flute), dhol (drums), ektara (a single-stringed instrument) and dotara (a four-stringed instrument) are unique to Bangladeshi culture. The Bangladeshi cuisine (rice and freshwater fish) is also different from Pakistan where people mainly eat flat round bread (roti) and meat (gosh). However, my bonding factor to Bangladesh was my relatives, particularly my grandparents as they made me feel one of ‘us’. Their affection for me was irreplaceable. The train journey from Dhaka (capital city) to their town, Noakhali, was captivating. The hustle and bustle at the train station and the lush green paddy fields along the train journey reminded me that this was my ‘home’. Though I spoke the official language (Urdu) in Pakistan and had a few Pakistani friends in Karachi, they could never replace my feelings for my friends, extended relatives and cousins who lived in Bangladesh. I could not relate to the landscape or dry weather of Pakistan. More importantly, some Pakistani women (our neighbours) were critical of my mother’s traditional dress (saree), and described it as revealing because it showed a bit of her back. They took pride in their traditional dress (shalwar, kameez, dopatta), which they considered to be more covered and ‘Islamic’. So, because of our traditional dress (saree) and perhaps other differences, we were regarded as the ‘Other’. In 1970 my father was relocated back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was glad to go home. It should be noted that both Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated from India in 1947 – first as one nation; then, in 1971, Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. The conflict between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan (then West Pakistan) originated for economic and political reasons. At this time I was a high school student and witnessed acts of genocide committed by the Pakistani regime against the Bangladeshis (March-December 1971). My memories of these acts are vivid and still very painful. After my marriage, I moved from Bangladesh to the United States. In this instance, my new route (Austin, Texas, USA), as it happened, did not become my home. Here the ethno-cultural and Islamic cultural factors took precedence. I spoke the English language, made some American friends, and studied history at the University of Texas. I appreciated the warm friendship extended to me in the US, but experienced a degree of culture shock. I did not appreciate the pub life, alcohol consumption, and what I perceived to be the lack of family bonds (children moving out at the age of 18, families only meeting occasionally on birthdays and Christmas). Furthermore, I could not relate to de facto relationships and acceptance of sex before marriage. However, to me ‘home’ meant a family orientation and living in close contact with family. Besides the cultural divide, my husband and I were living in the US on student visas and, as Vertovec (21-23) noted, temporary visa status can deter people from their sense of belonging to the host country. In retrospect I can see that we lived in the ‘myth of return’. However, our next move for a better life was not to our root (Bangladesh), but another route to the Muslim world of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. My husband moved to Dhahran not because it was a Muslim world but because it gave him better economic opportunities. However, I thought this new destination would become my home – the home that was coined by Anderson as the imagined nation, or my Muslim umma. Anderson argues that the imagined communities are “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; Wood 61). Hall (122) asserts: identity is actually formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth. There is always something ‘imaginary’ or fantasized about its unity. It always remains incomplete, is always ‘in process’, always ‘being formed’. As discussed above, when I had returned home to Bangladesh from Pakistan – both Muslim countries – my primary connection to my home country was my ethnic identity, language and traditions. My ethnic identity overshadowed the religious identity. But when I moved to Saudi Arabia, where my ethnic identity differed from that of the mainstream Arabs and Bedouin/nomadic Arabs, my connection to this new land was through my Islamic cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, this connection to the umma was more psychological than physical, but I was now in close proximity to Mecca, and to my home of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mecca is an important city in Saudi Arabia for Muslims because it is the holy city of Islam, the home to the Ka’aba (the religious centre of Islam), and the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad [Peace Be Upon Him]. It is also the destination of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Therefore, Mecca is home to significant events in Islamic history, as well as being an important present day centre for the Islamic faith. We lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia for 5 years. Though it was a 2.5 hours flight away, I treasured Mecca’s proximity and regarded Dhahran as my second and spiritual home. Saudi Arabia had a restricted lifestyle for women, but I liked it because it was a Muslim country that gave me the opportunity to perform umrah Hajj (pilgrimage). However, Saudi Arabia did not allow citizenship to expatriates. Saudi Arabia’s government was keen to protect the status quo and did not want to compromise its cultural values or standard of living by allowing foreigners to become a permanent part of society. In exceptional circumstances only, the King granted citizenship to a foreigner for outstanding service to the state over a number of years. Children of foreigners born in Saudi Arabia did not have rights of local citizenship; they automatically assumed the nationality of their parents. If it was available, Saudi citizenship would assure expatriates a secure and permanent living in Saudi Arabia; as it was, there was a fear among the non-Saudis that they would have to leave the country once their job contract expired. Under the circumstances, though my spiritual connection to Mecca was strong, my husband was convinced that Saudi Arabia did not provide any job security. So, in 1987 when Australia offered migration to highly skilled people, my husband decided to migrate to Australia for a better and more secure economic life. I agreed to his decision, but quite reluctantly because we were again moving to a non-Muslim part of the world, which would be culturally different and far away from my original homeland (Bangladesh). In Australia, we lived first in Brisbane, then Adelaide, and after three years we took our Australian citizenship. At that stage I loved the Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour in South Australia, and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but did not feel at home in Australia. We bought a house in Adelaide and I was a full time home-maker but was always apprehensive that my children (two boys) would lose their culture in this non-Muslim world. In 1990 we once again moved back to the Muslim world, this time to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. My connection to this route was again spiritual. I valued the fact that we would live in a Muslim country and our children would be brought up in a Muslim environment. But my husband’s move was purely financial as he got a lucrative job offer in Muscat. We had another son in Oman. We enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle provided by my husband’s workplace and the service provided by the housemaid. I loved the beaches and freedom to drive my car, and I appreciated the friendly Omani people. I also enjoyed our frequent trips (4 hours flight) to my root, Dhaka, Bangladesh. So our children were raised within our ethnic and Islamic culture, remained close to my root (family in Dhaka), though they attended a British school in Muscat. But by the time I started considering Oman to be my second home, we had to leave once again for a place that could provide us with a more secure future. Oman was like Saudi Arabia; it employed expatriates only on a contract basis, and did not give them citizenship (not even fellow Muslims). So after 5 years it was time to move back to Australia. It was with great reluctance that I moved with my husband to Brisbane in 1995 because once again we were to face a different cultural context. As mentioned earlier, we lived in Brisbane in the late 1980s; I liked the weather, the landscape, but did not consider it home for cultural reasons. Our boys started attending expensive private schools and we bought a house in a prestigious Western suburb in Brisbane. Soon after arriving I started my tertiary education at the University of Queensland, and finished an MA in Historical Studies in Indian History in 1998. Still Australia was not my home. I kept thinking that we would return to my previous routes or the ‘imagined’ homeland somewhere in the Middle East, in close proximity to my root (Bangladesh), where we could remain economically secure in a Muslim country. But gradually I began to feel that Australia was becoming my ‘home’. I had gradually become involved in professional and community activities (with university colleagues, the Bangladeshi community and Muslim women’s organisations), and in retrospect I could see that this was an early stage of my ‘self-actualisation’ (Maslow). Through my involvement with diverse people, I felt emotionally connected with the concerns, hopes and dreams of my Muslim-Australian friends. Subsequently, I also felt connected with my mainstream Australian friends whose emotions and fears (9/11 incident, Bali bombing and 7/7 tragedy) were similar to mine. In late 1998 I started my PhD studies on the immigration history of Australia, with a particular focus on the historical settlement of Muslims in Australia. This entailed retrieving archival files and interviewing people, mostly Muslims and some mainstream Australians, and enquiring into relevant migration issues. I also became more active in community issues, and was not constrained by my circumstances. By circumstances, I mean that even though I belonged to a patriarchally structured Muslim family, where my husband was the main breadwinner, main decision-maker, my independence and research activities (entailing frequent interstate trips for data collection, and public speaking) were not frowned upon or forbidden (Khan 14-15); fortunately, my husband appreciated my passion for research and gave me his trust and support. This, along with the Muslim community’s support (interviews), and the wider community’s recognition (for example, the publication of my letters in Australian newspapers, interviews on radio and television) enabled me to develop my self-esteem and built up my bicultural identity as a Muslim in a predominantly Christian country and as a Bangladeshi-Australian. In 2005, for the sake of a better job opportunity, my husband moved to the UK, but this time I asserted that I would not move again. I felt that here in Australia (now in Perth) I had a job, an identity and a home. This time my husband was able to secure a good job back in Australia and was only away for a year. I no longer dream of finding a home in the Middle East. Through my bicultural identity here in Australia I feel connected to the wider community and to the Muslim umma. However, my attachment to the umma has become ambivalent. I feel proud of my Australian-Muslim identity but I am concerned about the jihadi ideology of militant Muslims. By jihadi ideology, I mean the extremist ideology of the al-Qaeda terrorist group (Farrar 2007). The Muslim umma now incorporates both moderate and radical Muslims. The radical Muslims (though only a tiny minority of 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide) pose a threat to their moderate counterparts as well as to non-Muslims. In the UK, some second- and third-generation Muslims identify themselves with the umma rather than their parents’ homelands or their country of birth (Husain). It should not be a matter of concern if these young Muslims adopt a ‘pure’ Muslim identity, providing at the same time they are loyal to their country of residence. But when they resort to terrorism with their ‘pure’ Muslim identity (e.g., the 7/7 London bombers) they defame my religion Islam, and undermine my spiritual connection to the umma. As a 1st generation immigrant, the defining criteria of my ‘homeliness’ in Australia are my ethno-cultural and religious identity (which includes my family), my active citizenship, and my community development/contribution through my research work – all of which allow me a sense of efficacy in my life. My ethnic and religious identities generally co-exist equally, but when I see some Muslims kill my fellow Australians (such as the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) my Australian identity takes precedence. I feel for the victims and condemn the perpetrators. On the other hand, when I see politics play a role over the human rights issues (e.g., the Tampa incident), my religious identity begs me to comment on it (see Kabir, Muslims in Australia 295-305). Problematising ‘Home’ for Muslim Australians In the European context, Grillo (863) and Werbner (904), and in the Australian context, Kabir (Muslims in Australia) and Poynting and Mason, have identified the diversity within Islam (national, ethnic, religious etc). Werbner (904) notes that in spite of the “wishful talk of the emergence of a ‘British Islam’, even today there are Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab mosques, as well as Turkish and Shia’a mosques”; thus British Muslims retain their separate identities. Similarly, in Australia, the existence of separate mosques for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arab and Shia’a peoples indicates that Australian Muslims have also kept their ethnic identities discrete (Saeed 64-77). However, in times of crisis, such as the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and the 1990-1991 Gulf crises, both British and Australian Muslims were quick to unite and express their Islamic identity by way of resistance (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 160-162; Poynting and Mason 68-70). In both British and Australian contexts, I argue that a peaceful rally or resistance is indicative of active citizenship of Muslims as it reveals their sense of belonging (also Werbner 905). So when a transmigrant Muslim wants to make a peaceful demonstration, the Western world should be encouraged, not threatened – as long as the transmigrant’s allegiances lie also with the host country. In the European context, Grillo (868) writes: when I asked Mehmet if he was planning to stay in Germany he answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, of course’. And then, after a little break, he added ‘as long as we can live here as Muslims’. In this context, I support Mehmet’s desire to live as a Muslim in a non-Muslim world as long as this is peaceful. Paradoxically, living a Muslim life through ijtihad can be either socially progressive or destructive. The Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji relies on ijtihad, but so does Osama bin Laden! Manji emphasises that ijtihad can be, on the one hand, the adaptation of Islam using independent reasoning, hybridity and the contesting of ‘traditional’ family values (c.f. Doogue and Kirkwood 275-276, 314); and, on the other, ijtihad can take the form of conservative, patriarchal and militant Islamic values. The al-Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden espouses the jihadi ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian who early in his career might have been described as a Muslim modernist who believed that Islam and Western secular ideals could be reconciled. But he discarded that idea after going to the US in 1948-50; there he was treated as ‘different’ and that treatment turned him against the West. He came back to Egypt and embraced a much more rigid and militaristic form of Islam (Esposito 136). Other scholars, such as Cesari, have identified a third orientation – a ‘secularised Islam’, which stresses general beliefs in the values of Islam and an Islamic identity, without too much concern for practices. Grillo (871) observed Islam in the West emphasised diversity. He stressed that, “some [Muslims were] more quietest, some more secular, some more clamorous, some more negotiatory”, while some were exclusively characterised by Islamic identity, such as wearing the burqa (elaborate veils), hijabs (headscarves), beards by men and total abstinence from drinking alcohol. So Mehmet, cited above, could be living a Muslim life within the spectrum of these possibilities, ranging from an integrating mode to a strict, militant Muslim manner. In the UK context, Zubaida (96) contends that marginalised, culturally-impoverished youth are the people for whom radical, militant Islamism may have an appeal, though it must be noted that the 7/7 bombers belonged to affluent families (O’Sullivan 14; Husain). In Australia, Muslim Australians are facing three challenges. First, the Muslim unemployment rate: it was three times higher than the national total in 1996 and 2001 (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 266-278; Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 63). Second, some spiritual leaders have used extreme rhetoric to appeal to marginalised youth; in January 2007, the Australian-born imam of Lebanese background, Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, was alleged to have employed a DVD format to urge children to kill the enemies of Islam and to have praised martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad (Chulov 2). Third, the proposed citizenship test has the potential to make new migrants’ – particularly Muslims’ – settlement in Australia stressful (Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79); in May 2007, fuelled by perceptions that some migrants – especially Muslims – were not integrating quickly enough, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test bill that proposes to test applicants on their English language skills and knowledge of Australian history and ‘values’. I contend that being able to demonstrate knowledge of history and having English language skills is no guarantee that a migrant will be a good citizen. Through my transmigrant history, I have learnt that developing a bond with a new place takes time, acceptance and a gradual change of identity, which are less likely to happen when facing assimilationist constraints. I spoke English and studied history in the United States, but I did not consider it my home. I did not speak the Arabic language, and did not study Middle Eastern history while I was in the Middle East, but I felt connected to it for cultural and religious reasons. Through my knowledge of history and English language proficiency I did not make Australia my home when I first migrated to Australia. Australia became my home when I started interacting with other Australians, which was made possible by having the time at my disposal and by fortunate circumstances, which included a fairly high level of efficacy and affluence. If I had been rejected because of my lack of knowledge of ‘Australian values’, or had encountered discrimination in the job market, I would have been much less willing to embrace my host country and call it home. I believe a stringent citizenship test is more likely to alienate would-be citizens than to induce their adoption of values and loyalty to their new home. Conclusion Blunt (5) observes that current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling and how it shapes one’s identity and belonging. Such geographies of home negotiate from the domestic to the global context, thus mobilising the home beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Similarly, in this paper I have discussed how my mobile geography, from the domestic (root) to global (route), has shaped my identity. Though I received a degree of culture shock in the United States, loved the Middle East, and was at first quite resistant to the idea of making Australia my second home, the confidence I acquired in residing in these ‘several homes’ were cumulative and eventually enabled me to regard Australia as my ‘home’. I loved the Middle East, but I did not pursue an active involvement with the Arab community because I was a busy mother. Also I lacked the communication skill (fluency in Arabic) with the local residents who lived outside the expatriates’ campus. I am no longer a cultural freak. I am no longer the same Bangladeshi woman who saw her ethnic and Islamic culture as superior to all other cultures. I have learnt to appreciate Australian values, such as tolerance, ‘a fair go’ and multiculturalism (see Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79). My bicultural identity is my strength. With my ethnic and religious identity, I can relate to the concerns of the Muslim community and other Australian ethnic and religious minorities. And with my Australian identity I have developed ‘a voice’ to pursue active citizenship. Thus my biculturalism has enabled me to retain and merge my former home with my present and permanent home of Australia. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of Housing and Population, 1996 and 2001. Blunt, Alison. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Cesari, Jocelyne. “Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution.” In John L. Esposito and Burgat, eds., Modernising Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2003. 251-269. Chulov, Martin. “Treatment Has Sheik Wary of Returning Home.” Weekend Australian 6-7 Jan. 2007: 2. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting Old-Age Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Farrar, Max. “When the Bombs Go Off: Rethinking and Managing Diversity Strategies in Leeds, UK.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6.5 (2007): 63-68. Grillo, Ralph. “Islam and Transnationalism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (Sep. 2004): 861-878. Hall, Stuart. Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Huntington, Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order. London: Touchstone, 1998. Husain, Ed. The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw inside and Why I Left. London: Penguin, 2007. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. ———. “What Does It Mean to Be Un-Australian: Views of Australian Muslim Students in 2006.” People and Place 15.1 (2007): 62-79. Khan, Shahnaz. Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002. Manji, Irshad. The Trouble with Islam Today. Canada:Vintage, 2005. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. O’Sullivan, J. “The Real British Disease.” Quadrant (Jan.-Feb. 2006): 14-20. Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. “The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43.1 (2007): 61-86. Saeed, Abdallah. Islam in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman. Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2002. Vertovec, Stevens. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. 2000. Werbner, Pnina, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Wood, Dennis. “The Diaspora, Community and the Vagrant Space.” In Cynthia Vanden Driesen and Ralph Crane, eds., Diaspora: The Australasian Experience. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005. 59-64. Zubaida, Sami. “Islam in Europe: Unity or Diversity.” Critical Quarterly 45.1-2 (2003): 88-98. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid. "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Aug. 2007) "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. 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