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This article attempts to trace the relationship between René Girard’s mimetic theory and re- search on the nature of imitation in cognitive sciences. It is divided into four parts. The first one defines the basic concept of the French thinker’s theory, i.e. that of mimetic desire, in the context of such notions as biological, cultural and psychological mimicry. The second refers to the research conducted in the area of developmental psychology on mimetic behaviours of infants. The third part shows how imitative behaviours are reflected in the activity of neurons. The fourth chapter describes the most recent findings, which directly relate to the theory of René Girard’s mimetic desire.
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The discovery of mirror neurons may be one of the most important discoveries of recent years. The new theory helps explain the foundation of the existing trends in psychotherapy. The article contains an attempt to clarify some of the assumptions of transactional analysis with the conceptual theory of mirror neurons. The article contains a brief reference to the educational process.
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The development of modern nationalism and anti-Polish policy of the Prussian authorities contributed to the deterioration of Polish-German relations in West Prussia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Religious differences also did not favor non-confrontational coexistence of both nations. At that time an important role in shaping national consciousness of Pomeranian Poles played a Polish newspaper. Press repeatedly served as educational. On the pages of Polish newspaper, journalists were informing readers about the German policy and ways of fighting from germanization. The journalists also were presenting themselves as defenders of the Polish language and the Catholic faith. As a result, they were showing the Germans through the prism of national and religious differences. On the pages of the Polish press Germans Protestants and Germans Catholics were shown otherwise. This article treats about how the Polish journalists were shaping the imagination of Poles about the German Protestants and Catholics in West Prussia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the face of intensifying conflict based on nationality.
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The paper concerns problems of representation of society and ideological structure implied in the most popular Polish soap-opera M jak miłość (L is for Love). The series is presented in the perspective of cultural negotiation proposed by Stuart Hall and Christine Gledhill and John Fiske’s theories of cultural reification. The analysis shows that although the series is considered as realistic it avoids discussing issues that may seem controversial from moral or economical point of view. The ways of life presented in the show are strongly connected to patriarchy and not as diverse as they may seem. Viewer’s freedom of negotiation of pleasure is therefore limited to those that are accepted in the mainstream morality. As the series is extremely popular in Poland it has a very strong impact on society. In those terms it serves as the instrument of prevailing mainstream ideology of capitalism and patriarchy avoiding any chance of transgressive visualizations.
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The text aims to analyse the patterns of immigrants’ settlement in Warsaw agglomeration, especially their settlement in the area of the city of Warsaw. The subject of the study is: the emergence of places where immigrants concentrate and a relation between their places of residence with other types of concentration; factors that determine the places of immigrants’ residence and how migrants operate in the urban environment, as well as a relation between the places of immigrants’ settlement and their economic activity and its localization, cultural characteristics and the adapted acculturation strategies. To study these problems the authors use the example of the population of the Vietnamese and Ukrainians possessing a permission for settlement in the Mazowieckie Province. The article discuses differences in the patterns of settlements of both groups and shows the emergence of small clusters in the case of the Vietnamese.
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(stanowiska wśród „elit” miasta)
The article contains a presentation of the empirical results of the qualitative research among cultural elites of Szczecin. The reconstruction of positions adopted by respondents on the issue of „what heritage should be cultivated in Szczecin?” is presented. The multiplicity of these positions indicates the unsolved problem withthe Past, expressed as tension between two heritages interpreted in national categories („the German” and „the Polish” one). This tension and ways of making up with it do have some consequences for producing a „collective identity” of the city and for the processes of „symbolic domination” over the territory.
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Although Indians constitute less than one percent of the population of Brazil, they are an important part of the ethnic structure of the country. Presented article shows their participation in growing tourist industry year by year. Culture of the indigenous people is increasingly exposed “for sale” as a tourist attraction. In Brazil which is a country with the largest number of tourist visits in the continent ethnic tourism with their participation is more and more important. Theoretical framework refers to the concept of Commercialization of Strangeness and described by Dean MacCannell the issue of Marketing of Wildness which is a commercial utilization of tribal cultures.
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Mihai Stelian Rusu’s book, Romanian National Memory. The Discursive Making and Remakings of the National Past, published at the European Institute in 2015, which forms the subject-matter of this review, constitutes a substantial contribution to the scholarship focused on the Romanian politics of the past. Grounded in solid scholarship, the book examines the avatars of the Romanian collective memory in conjunction with Romanian identity, discovered and rescaled in relation to the requirements of the eras it went through. The book’s centerpiece – its pièce de résistance – consists in an analysis of history textbooks under many aspects, from the moment of their appearance to present day, accompanied by a sensible presentation of political and cultural contexts that have made them possible. For these reasons, the work is a solid reflection on the concept of nation and the phenomena that permanently accompany it.
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This text explores the affective politics of race and disability that underpin the post-socialist developments in the Czech Republic. Firstly, I interrogate “mental retardation”, as a discursive and material practice of differentiating human life according to presumed value. To make the argument, the text follows practices of “mental retardation” through several discursive and material locations: cultural imaginations of “ferality”, controversy spiked by the use of “protective”/“cage” beds in institutional care and the concept of lege artis, i.e. the principle of necessary and (medically) possible care. Travelling through these locations, I argue, secondly, that racialised and ableist notions of worthy human life have been central to the post-socialist affective politics of abandonment. In other words, the text shows how the politics of re-negotiated belonging and attachment to liberal democracy in the post-socialist Czech Republic were predicated upon structures of abandonment and the de/valuation of disabled and racialised lives. And lastly, the text lays out the legacies of colonial domination even in the contemporary intersectional comminglings of race and disability as it is echoed in the current practices of “mental retardation”.
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Le mariage représente le moment le plus important de la vie de chaque être humain. Le rituel nuptial implique des séquences qui le précèdent et d'autres séquences qui le suivent. Il y a toute une symbolique variée et très complexe dans cette cérémonie. La documentation et l'accès que l'on a eu à l'information ont révélé un grand nombre d'aspects significatifs: l'intérêt pour la dot, pour la situation materielle de la famille qui va se consolider. Un autre aspect implique tous les possibles obstacles au mariage – et c'est ici le rôle du prêtre orthodoxe qui a l'obligation d'exiger à ses croyants de révéler tout ce qui pourrait empêcher la réalisation du mariage. C'est lui qui annonce officiellement l'union des jeunes, si quelqu'un connaît un certain obstacle, celui-là est obligé d'informer le prêtre tout premièrement, puis, par l'entremise du prêtre, l'entière communauté rurale en sera informée et le mariage n'aura pas lieu. Si rien et personne ne fait obstacle, les parents se rendent visite les uns les autres pour s'informer principalement sur la situation materielle et pour s'accorder sur la dot et sur l'organisation du mariage.
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The increase of individual life expectancy merges several generations in time, namely, they are coexisting in the same time – so are developing vertical kinship ties. Decline in fertility and birth postponement towards advanced age, in turn, narrow the horizontal kinship ties. Meanwhile, the increase in the intensity of migration progressively separates generations in space. All these demographic processes combined are not only changing the structure of families, but also the social relations among its members. The aim of the research is to reveal what meanings are given by members of transnational families to intergenerational communication. To achieve this purpose, the following tasks were formulated: 1) to reveal what meanings are given to meetings (mutual visits) of different generations belonging to transnational family; 2) to identify how technical tools helping to maintain everyday communication practices in transnational family are perceived; and 3) to describe the evaluation of family’s transnational status and emigration of a family member. Theoretical resources of the study are concepts of transnational family and intergenerational communication. Study’s empirical resources include data of the research project “Trajectories of Family Models and Social Networks: Intergenerational Perspective “(No. VP1-3.1-MES- 07-K-01-106). 60 in-depth individual interviews were conducted in the summer of 2012 in six selected regions of Lithuania (the research included 30 women, 30 men, 15 informants from four birth cohorts: 1950-1955, 1960-1965, 1970-1975, and 1980-1985). The study results showed that different meanings are given to the meetings (mutual visits) of different generations belonging to transnational family: regular visits of children living abroad to their parents is an obligation, tradition; visit of parents residing in country of origin is one of the many activities their children are interested in; transnational family get-together is a tool to make a pleasant surprise for parents; children’s visit to their parents is a tool of parent’s life periodization. Informants perceived meetings of transnational family members as a significant social practice that supports family unity. In order to do common every-day-social-practices in transnational families, at the same time to maintain the integrity of family, an entire arsenal of modern communication technologies is applied: internet programme Skype, telephone, letters, e-mails, messages on Facebook. It seems that the expectations of transnational family members are met in the best way by the internet programme Skype and opportunities of smartphones to convey images. The study revealed specific interpretation of families in transnational condition. The evaluation of families disunited by emigration processes expressed by the informants is solidly negative in cases, when they are reasoning about the transnational family as a unit, and positive-concerned-negative in cases, when they are thi
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The article is the interpretation of two Bruno Schulz’s stories: Visitation and Birds. The key context for this reading is matriarchate theory by Johann Jakob Bachofen. In the Schulz’s text the patriarchate established by the father is a secondary system to the dominating narrative of matriarchal order identified by Adela. The father is a lonely hero in this spin, overpowered by a mission called by Schulz as “metaphysical“.
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The paper deals with the problem of political identity of contemporary urban social movements in Poland. They are clearly not homogenous and their nature is hybrid. The main criterion of differentiation between them is the interpretation of the idea of the right to the city (RTTC) and of urban democracy, which helps to identify significant differences between the three main wings of Polish urban social movements: neo-anarchist movement, tenants movement and middle-class movements. They differ according to their organisational forms, the degree of institutionalisation, strategy, and, finally, how they define the key urban issues. The paper also deals with the issue of a “(r)evolutionary” rhetoric widely spread among urban activists. It indicates progressive functionalisation of the RTTC and urban democracy ideas. On the one hand, both of them are just empty signifiers in Laclau’s terms and are being increasingly used as a fashionable political label. On the other hand, however, thanks to the functionalisation of the idea we can consider urban social movements, in all their diversity, to be a significant driving force of modernisation.
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The demand for trained enterprise resource planning (ERP) system professionals has motivated to incorporate these systems into university curriculum. This paper analyzes the Microsoft Dynamics business software suitability for student training. A full statistical functional power comparison analysis of more than 130 top accounting and business management solutions was performed using the Accounting Library and other decision support systems. The Microsoft Dynamics business management software was determined to be among the top-ranked solutions that meet the typical requirements of a broad range of business. As a result of the analysis of functionality, users’ opinion, global and local market share, consulting partners’ network, implementation methodology, availability of training materials and certification, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics NAV systems have been selected for student training at the Faculty of Economics of Vilnius University.
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The aim of the article is to examine if the form of ownership is a base of social identifications as important as a space of living. Author presents results of own research, conducted in Szczecin in Social Housing Associations area. The results show that forms of ownership become important part of social identity, even more than location in urban space.
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The article presents a global situation of children. All over the world millions of children do not have fulfilled they basic needs (food, drinking water, medical treatment), work heavily, fight in military conflicts, do not learn in school, live in the streets. What is the future for children what can we do to improve they developmental possibilities — these are questions asked in the paper.
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Bögre Zsuzsanna és Kovács Teréz életút-interjúja Beluszky Pállal II.
"I was always a little bit of an outsider" Life-time interview with Pál Beluszky II.
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