This paper argues that the emergence of humanistic values is not a purely modern phenomenon. If by humanism we refer to secular learning and the development of science, there were periods in the history of Islam when this was encouraged. Humanism in the sense of the respect for ‘human values’ such as democracy is equally widely distributed in time and space, so that the idea that the West, as heirs of Ancient Greece, has a monopoly is quite untenable. Tribal societies often practise versions of direct democracy; representation is an aspect of many more complex regimes. Even with monarchical states, few can afford to neglect public opinion over the longer term. Modern representative democracies moreover often fail to consult their people on major issues such as declaring war. In any case that is only one mode of representation among others and does not have the monopoly of virtue, especially in religiously divided communities. Elsewhere it may be adopted as a legitimating device in a specific context, as I suggested had been the case with Israel.

This inquiry will be limited to an analysis of Turkic borrowings that have been attested in inscriptions found in Mongolia and southern Siberia in the period beginning around the year 700 A.D., as well as in Turkic-Uighur manuscripts, beginning around the year 900 A.D., conserved in northern Tarim (especially in the Turfan region) and in Dunhuang, which is a Chinese outpost on the main road of the silk trade. We will look only at borrowings that predate Islamization, a process that developed rapidly during the eleventh century and of which some borrowings are still part of the language of the Islamic Turkish world. Although most of our study will concentrate on pre-Islamic borrowings that were fully assimilated into written words, we will will also investigate some transcriptions of foreign terms that are mentioned in various manuscripts of a theological bent (most notably of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and Syriac origin and found in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian texts) as well as words of a very technical nature. We will also look at more contemporary terms that are derived from several major semantic fields.

Our age is trying in many ways to deal with the problem of the survival of ethnic minorities. Being confronted with a centralized political power which destroys cultural differences, many of these minorities have become conscious of their originality (which is often hidden away in folklore) and are in search of a new balance with the dominant culture. They try to achieve this new balance by bringing their basic characteristics up to date or even deliberately entering a phase of counter acculturation and adopting an attitude of political liberation much like that of the formerly colonized peoples.

The presence of women in possession cults has frequently been noted. Thus women are usually the priviliged religious participants in Haitian Voo-doo and in the African Bori Hausa. Even allowing for the distinction of whether the role of religious chief is held by a male or a female, it seems women are in the majority in the cases representing almost the totality of those cultists who fall into a trance. In this article we propose to compare the position of women within two possession cults in Brazil. One, Candomblé is of African origin; the other, Umbanda, is a synthesis of African religions, Catholicism, and the spiritism of Allan Kardec. We shall attempt in each case to associate the religious position of women with the social position they exercise in each society.

A considerable body of corroborative evidence, of a linguistic as well as a cultural order, attests to the authenticity of traditional tales referring to contacts between the islands of Oceania and the American continent during the pre-Columbian era.

In the first place, it is well known that there is close resemblance between some words in the languages of the western watershed of South America and those of Oceania, notably the Polynesian. These similarities have to do with words designating certain cultivated plants and other objects.

By a model I understand some familiar kind of object the idea of which we extend by an analogy or metaphor in order to assist our understanding of other things. When we say, “All the world's a stage,” we are using the familiar antics and attitudes of the theatre as a model for thinking about our woes and joys and our activities.

Sometimes a complex model is used by a thinker, by a group, or by a whole age as a guiding pattern suggesting ways of thinking in many areas. One model may even determine an inclusive view about the world from which derive emotional attitudes as well as ruling concepts and ways of thinking for our knowledge of the world. It is often said that the mechanism of a clock served in this way as a ruling model for much thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite their novelty, clockworks were then becoming well known, and they were peculiarly fascinating. Reflection on them made very vivid such notions as regular motion, interchangeable parts, precise mechanical connection, influence by push and pull, and design for specific function.

Modernity has been working since the sixteenth century in western Europe at what Mr. Gauchet has described as the “exit from religion,” adding that Christianity alone has been able to gain the historical position of “the religion of the exit from religion.” It is indeed the case that the other great religions have not felt, as Christianity has, the intellectual, political and legal necessity to revise their theological foundations radically. Islam in particular has not only been shielded from the fundamental criticisms of intellectual and scientific modernity, but the managers of the sacred have formed alliances with nationalist movements engaged in the anti-colonialist struggle to legitimize wars of liberation and post-independence one-party states. It is true that Islam's mechanisms of state control first came into play in the period of prose-lytism of the new religion, chiefly between 622 and 632; but state control turned into the complete takeover of the irreducible autonomy of the religious domain (the spiritual sphere) by all the states that emerged after the 1920s (Ataturk's radical experiment) and even more so after the post-1945 liberations.

Among the tricky questions posed by artistic creation, some relate in particular to the capacity of human beings to reproduce things and to the right they have (or grant themselves) to act in this way. This activity, when aimed for example at identical reproduction, is called “copy” by art critics, historians, and those who take an interest in the aesthetics of objects. I will not attempt to discuss the subtleties involved in the use of different terms to describe the activity of the reproduction of works of art; when an artist “imitates,” is that copying? To what extent is the new work admissible? To what category do users and connoisseurs assign it? These and other questions will be answered in the wider context of my examination of the relationship between the unique and the multiple in African societies. The problems of an original's copy or replica are not viewed in the same light in all parts of the world, not only because of the dictum “truth on our side of the border, error on theirs” but above all because the status of the plastic work is not the same and its existence and validity are not governed by the same laws and customs. However, in all societies that create, the “copy” poses problems which Africa cannot elude and which arise there in a manner at once similar and different from that of contemporary Western societies.

Among the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs is a sign that can be termed and defined as a “Black Hole.” It is a circle (writing being two-dimensional) filled in black, appearing in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts for the first time. Initially serving as a determinative for concepts like “death” or “enemy,” it is also later used for words like “pit,” “hole,” or “cave,” and in a few rare instances this black circle determines the word for the Netherworld (dat) or shade.

Like any construction of the human mind, ideologies and utopias are products of reason and social imagination. The human interactions they feed off are nowadays being intensified by processes of globalization. Utopian projects, which are by nature ambitious, consist of dreams of freedom and equality but the voluntarist character of their implementation very often takes them far from their declared objectives. Thus utopia frequently tips over into ideology. In order to survive, utopia has to go through a process of ‘universalization’ that allows ideas from different cultures to develop and mature in contact with one another. By forging bonds between individuals and cultures, this process could define the outlines of a constantly evolving global civil society. Universalization of conceptualizations that transform and motivate us, such as the global inclusivity of human rights, freedom and justice, builds an ethic of peace for the emergence, beyond frontiers, of an extended society such as that envisioned by the American philosopher John Dewey.

There is now no doubt that cultural contacts took place between the peoples of Asia and America during the Middle or Late Paleolithic Age. In the course of one particular period, betweeen 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, there came from Asia, in successive waves, the first groups who were to populate the American continent.

What still remains a mystery—the “enigma of the Indian race,” is the origin of a second generation of “homo americanus,” the founder of the high cultures. From the lest millennium B.C. onwards, some Central American tribes evolved with unexpected speed towards a superior level of culture, creating class distinctions, a priest-hood, religious creeds, an artisan class producing artistic works of great value, and a body of knowledge almost scientific in character. This development sprang from a basic culture which was possibly even inferior to that enjoyed by peoples in other parts of the world. This prompts several questions.

In the chapter “Fit for Emperors and Kings,” the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu relates the myth of Hun-tun, the emperor of chaos, who died when the seven sense openings were bored into him. The story goes:

At a time when there is general speculation about civilization, or civilizations, as well as on what the relationships are between Western and other civilizations, it is logical to try to define precisely what the men of ancient Greece thought about the question, since Western civilization owes so much to them.

It may be that they did not think about it at all, or at least they thought nothing that could be expressed in modern terms. The fact is that ancient Greece did not have a word for civilization: the French and English words come from Latin, not from Greek, while the first examples given in French and English dictionaries are the privileged example of Greece, “the civilization of Greece.” Did the Greeks use a paraphrase? Or a different word? If we consult a English-Greek dictionary we are surprised to see that the word given for “civilized” is hèmeros) that is, “docile,” “tamed.”

Antoine Meillet demonstrated in 1906 that language corresponds exactly to the definition of a social fact. “Language is… eminently a social fact.” In effect, this is explicitly implied in the definition proposed by Durkheim. A language exists independently of the individuals who speak it, and although it has no reality outside the sum of these individuals, it is nevertheless, due to its general character, exterior to each of them, thus proving that it does not depend on any single person to modify it and that every individual deviation from common usage provokes a reaction.” Meillet shows moreover that the causes for semantic changes are social in character and can be classified into three main types. They are explained by changes in the thing meant, by the transfer of words from one social group to another, and, thirdly, by intrinsic linguistic conditions. In fact the causes are outside the linguistic system itself—the causes for changes of the third type are not the linguistic conditions themselves but lie in whatever has induced these conditions—and this is true of every linguistic system (by system of a language I mean also the relationships between the words and their sense). The division of a society into classes or castes produces differences in vocabulary, grammar, phonetics and phonemics, in style, etc. The adoption of a new language by a people can lead to profound changes through the agency of the substratum. The material and spiritual evolution of a society is followed by the appearance of a great number of new words and new meanings which have repercussions on other parts of the linguistic system, a characteristic aspect of the linguistic development of Europe and of the languages of every society of our time which has become industrialized and has adopted modern Western civilization.

The conflict which has tended recently to crystallize in particular around the name of Martin Heidegger goes back a long way. Where do philosophers stand in relation to political and social reality? What assistance can their problems and insights offer the process of coming to terms with this reality? In the context of the discussions surrounding Farias's book I set out my own position in Paris in November 1987; the full text was later published in German under the heading “Return to Syracuse?” This title referred to the disappointment Plato felt in his own time when, at the invitation of the tyrant of Syracuse, that city's absolute ruler, he had twice gone to initiate the young prince in the basic principles of his thought concerning the just idea of the state and the just ordering of society. Things turned out badly and Plato had considerable difficulty getting back home again. Later still he was to suffer bitter disappointment when his intimate associate Dion, a member of the innermost circle of his academic community, was suddenly murdered by his own friends after heading a victorious operation to liberate Syracuse (one would like to know more about what lay behind that particular assassination).

The twentieth century has seen the appearance, one after the other, of interrelated sciences which go beyond the confines of specific scientific disciplines. For example, there is biochemistry, physical chemistry, and bionics. Within the humanities the science of stylistics also provides an example of a discipline closely related to other ones. In studying the synonymy of the means of expression (the word synonymy here being used in the broadest sense of the word) and above all synonymy in literary language, stylistics occupies a position midway between the theory of literature and linguistics. It is impossible to conceive of a theory of translation which would not take into account stylistics. The translator's role is not to create a new work, with everything that literary creation implies, that is to say, the indissoluble fusion of subject, ideas, esthetics, and images. The translator only recreates an already existing work, making use of processes which belong to another linguistic system. He transcribes the original into another system of signs which are determined by another historical, cultural, and literary context, and especially by another linguistic structure. The object of a theory of translation is not to develop rules and formulas for translators, but to systematize the most general aspects of the translator's work, to distinguish those aspects which lend themselves to analysis.

No problem is more crucial in the history of the Old World than that of the relationship between opposite shores of the Mediterranean. We should like to approach it from a particular though historically central viewpoint: namely, from the connection existing between Canaan and the Aegean basin, or, in other words, between a Semitic Orient or Levant which the Greeks called Phoenicia, and a Europe which was the Occident, the region of Sunset, to the Near-Eastern Semites.

It is some 900 years before Christ that we find the most ancient traces of two innovations which were to have incalculable consequences for the future of mankind. The evolution of civilization has, in fact, been marked by a clean break located at the era when man discovered the rudiments of agriculture and animal husbandry and began to produce his own food. Whereas for the three million years during which he had to provide for his needs exclusively through hunting, fishing and gathering, his progress was extremely slow, the adoption of a new way of life based on agriculture and animal husbandry allowed man to transform himself in less than twelve thousand years from deer hunter into astronaut.

We might begin a search for the possibility of translation with a search for a common moral foundation for both the Eastasian world and the Western world. Answers come easily with a qualified yes or no; for example, we might make a list or table comparing how East and West think about adultery. This is unsatisfying; we ourselves are often unclear what we think and feel about these issues. So, a few of the more circumspect might ask where our own sense of the moral arises. Perhaps we will seek the source of the OUGHT. Our friends from the Orient might ask us what these words moral or OUGHT mean. I do not think the West can as easily convey to the East what it means by sense of obligation as the West imparts technology. Try to translate our word obligation by the Japanese word giri; this translation is suspect since for the West, obligations are obligations only if they grate against the well ingrained inclinations of our being. The Kantian necessary test of authenticity of the true moral act will be if we act against the grain of our inclinations.