8.7 The festival of Durga Puja in Calcutta Although Hindus are not required to attend temples on set days in the week, the Hindu year is punctuated by days dictated by the lunar calendar during which puja (worship) should be offered to a particular deity or deities. Hindu festivals often combine the marking of the changing of the seasons
8.5 Looking for Hinduism in Calcutta
8.4 Hinduism in eastern India: religion in Calcutta The Hinduism of Bengal, as in other regions of India with their own languages and distinctive historical traditions, has absorbed and retained many local elements which make it peculiarly the Hinduism of Bengal. The city of Calcutta has exerted its own considerable influence upon the surrounding region. Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, was founded in 1690 originally as a British trading post on the Hugli, a stretch of the Ganges (or Ganga), a river sacred to Hindus (see Author(s):
6.3 Setting things apart The tendency within religious behaviour to set things apart from the everyday does not just apply to time and place but also to ideas of authority (leaders and texts), to beliefs more generally, to institutions and to aspects of behaviour as, for example, in dress and diet. In fact, the concept of ‘religion/religious’ is often set over and against the concept of the ‘temporal’ and the ‘secular’, which both suggest an outlook that is concerned solely with this world, the here and n
5.1 ‘Religion’ and ‘the religions’: two new notions I want to begin our closer discussion of the question ‘what is religion?’ by looking briefly at the history of the use and meaning of the term. You may be surprised to find how recently the word ‘religion’ has taken on the meanings attached to it today. Contemporary scholars of religion emphasise not merely the cultural breadth but also the antiquity of religious activity. Yet, the term ‘religion’ as we understand it today is very much a Western concept. Learning outcomes When you have completed this unit you should: be able to discuss some of the ways in which the concept of ‘religion’ has been and is used in the study of religion; have gained some practical experience in the study of religion through exploring examples of religious activity in Britain and India on ‘special days’; be able to identify and to evaluate critically the motives, concerns and methods that typically distinguish the academic study of 3 Principal artists and works Michelangelo, Slave, known as Rebel, sculpture, c.1513, acquired 1794 Michelangelo, Slave, known as Dying or Asleep, sculpture, c.1513, acquired 1794 Venus de Milo, sculpture, late Hellenistic, acquired 1827 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, painting, 1501–6, acquired 1519 Cimabue, Maestà , painting, c.1270, acquired 1814 Diana of the Louvre (also known as Diana of Versailles), sculpture, Roman copy of Greek o 2.1 Introduction The original TV programme was divided into an introduction and seven sections, each preceded by a simple question that appears on screen. To help you to explore this material, we have split the programme into eight clips, each associated with an activity. Once you have completed all the activities, you will have viewed the TV programme in its entirety and considered some of the questions explored in the original OU course. 5.2 The aftermath of the Holocaust In interwar Europe ethnic Germans had been in an overwhelming majority in the populations of both Germany and Austria. In addition, the two largest minorities spread across the states of interwar Europe, and particularly the states of the centre and east, had been Germans and Jews. The war and the Holocaust produced ‘solutions’ to the questions of both minorities. The Jews of central and eastern Europe who survived were often unwilling to return to their former homes; indeed, many of thos 4.2 Who to blame Browning developed his work on Police Battalion 101 into a book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992b). The same material was subsequently used, and reinterpreted, by Daniel J. Goldhagen for Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996). Goldhagen points the finger of blame for the Holocaust precisely at Germany. The Holocaust was, he stresses, a German phenomenon, and he argues that it built on what he det 1.3 Eugenics Just as anti-Semitism was not unique to Nazi Germany, neither were ideas of racial superiority or attempts to create a society peopled by ‘better’ human beings. Politicians, scientists and social commentators in many European countries expressed concern about the ‘degeneracy’ of their respective ‘national stock’ in the years before World War I. Sir Francis Galton – scientist, anthropologist, cousin of Charles Darwin and inspired by his work – had coined the word ‘eugenics’ 1.2 Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism was not an invention of the twentieth century, nor was it simply a German phenomenon. In the years before 1914 violent pogroms were directed against Jews, who were made scapegoats for the problems of the Russian Empire. The flight of Jews from the east, first to escape the violent prejudices unleashed periodically in Tsarist Russia and then to escape the upheavals in the aftermath of World War I, sharpened the anti-Semitism which was already to be found in the west of Europe. Th Introduction This unit explores the Holocaust, as the destruction of European Jewry is commonly known. The mass killing represented by the Holocaust raises many questions concerning the development of European civilisation during the twentieth century. This unit, therefore, covers essential ground if you wish to understand this development. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course 10 Comparing and contrasting Often you will find that an assignment asks you to ‘compare and contrast’ poems. There's a very good reason for this, for often it is only by considering different treatments of similar subjects that we become aware of a range of possibilities, and begin to understand why particular choices have been made. You will have realised that often in the previous discussions I've used a similar strategy, showing, for example, how we can describe the rhyme scheme of ‘Love From the North’ as si 8 Voice Is the speaker in a poem one and the same as the writer? Stop and consider this for a few moments. Can you think of any poems you have read where a writer has created a character, or persona, whose voice we hear when we read? Wordsworth's The Prelude was written as an autobiographical poem, but there are many instances where it is obvious that poet and persona are different. Charlotte Mew's poem, ‘The Farmer's Bride’ (1916) begins like this: 3 Rhythm All speech has rhythm because we naturally stress some words or syllables more than others. The rhythm can sometimes be very regular and pronounced, as in a children's nursery rhyme – ‘JACK and JILL went UP the HILL’ – but even in the most ordinary sentence the important words are given more stress. In poetry, rhythm is extremely important: patterns are deliberately created and repeated for varying effects. The rhythmical pattern of a poem is called its metre, and we can analyse, or â 1 Approaching poetry What is the point of analysing poetry? One simple answer is that the more we know about anything the more interesting it becomes: listening to music or looking at paintings with someone who can tell us a little about what we hear or see – or what we‘re reading – is one way of increasing our understanding and pleasure. That may mean learning something about the people who produced the writing, music, painting that we are interested in, and why they produced it. But it may also mean under 1.1.2 Egyptian calculation The earliest Egyptian script was hieroglyphic, used from before 3000 BC until the early centuries AD. Initially an all-purpose script, it was eventually used only for monumental stone-carving and formal inscriptions. It had been superseded (by abou 1.1.1 The Rhind papyrus For a literate civilisation extending over some 4000 years, that of the ancient Egyptians has left disappointingly little evidence of its mathematical attainments. Even though the classical Greeks believed mathematics to have been invented in Egypt – though their accounts are far from unanimous on how this happened – there are now but a handful of papyri and other objects to convey a sense of Egyptian mathematical activity. The largest and best preserved of these is the Rhind papyrus (Ext Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: know something about how hieroglyphs were used to represent numbers and the nature of the problems that have survived; understand that Egyptian calculation was fundamentally additive. Operations such as doubling and halving being used for multiplication and division; appreciate the advanced understanding of mathematics in Ancient Egypt in relation to the manipulation of fractions; consid
Box 1 A note on Egyptian scripts and numerals
