The most ordinary events astonish only those who think about them. What can be more natural than two people talking? They are from the same country, they speak the same language, they understand one another. They have things to say to each other and they say them. Anyone who would try to question such evident truisms would be seen as attempting to be a spinner of paradoxes. And yet…

First of all is it as natural as it appears that two people should stop and speak? To an impartial observer of the behavior of one's peers this would not seem to be the case. Most of the people we rub elbows with daily—in the street, in the subway, on a beach, in a hotel or even in the apartment building where we have lived for ten years—are people whom we do not accost and to whom we never speak. In order for people to speak to one another, certain circumstances must exist; there must be a ritual of introduction and a mutual consent that often occurs only after a certain resistance has been overcome. There are important differences to be observed in this respect among different peoples and, within the same nation, among people of different classes. But in every case dialogue is preceded by a preparatory phase of prudent observation, reserve and mistrust during which the partners size one another up and seek to situate themselves in relation to each other.

“Being is an ocean in perpetual agitation,
Of this ocean people perceive but the waves.
On the apparent surface of the ocean, hidden in them,
Look at the surging waves arising from secret depths!”

One of the leitmotifs of the literature of Iranian Sufism is the “quest for the Orient” (istishraq). It is an Orient that is neither localized nor localizable in the realm of positive geography. It escapes our normal perception; it is the mystic Orient, point of Origin and of Return, located at the “heavenly pole” of the cosmic North. It figures in that geographia imaginalis that is perceived only by the power of the imagination. It is located, then, beyond the devastated lands of this sensible world, lands that incarnate troubled and dispersed hearts for Iranian Sufism.

What we intend to do here is to present the obituary as a simple story in which an individual's life makes sense in terms of cultural assumptions on values, on meaningful relations, and achievements. The brevity of the story we consider is made so by the relative dearth of information which an obituary contains. But, in spite of the scarcity of information, the story still reveals a clear orientation: the obituary has meaning only in the context of socio-economic inequality and the exchange facilitated by that inequality. Our task in this paper is to attempt a description of this orientation to an “outsider”. The emphasis is not so much on the structure of the discourse but the cultural knowledge which guides the discourse.

The question of the development of aesthetic perception in relation to works of art and phenomena of nature suggests a differentiation between aesthetic education and art education which will be attempted in this study. At the same time the necessary interrelationship between the two will also be analysed.

Within the realm of structures of society, the caste system, a unique example among all the aspects of human adventure, represents at the level of social morphology, that is in the manner of grouping characteristic of a society, India's most original contribution to human history within all great civilizations, to the point that India's civilization is generally identified by the principal feature of its morphology.

In this paper I shall attempt to analyze some comparative aspects of modern societies which bear on the problem of convergence of modern, especially industrial, societies and the closely related analytical problems of the relations between culture and social structure.

“The ships that invented regions were directed toward the West”, announced Juan de Castellanos in 1587 in his Elegías dedicated to Christopher Columbus, and at the beginning of the 16th century Hernán Pérez de Oliva wrote a Historia de la invención de las Indias. The use of the word invention when speaking of the discovery of America may seem to be a semantic confusion or poetic license, viewed from the contemporary perspective of a discipline with well-defined limits, such as geography, since we usually understand invention as the transformation of things by man's intervention, while discovery is finding something that already existed so as to make it known to others.

What is man? “The feather of an angel was brought and tied to a donkey's tail that the donkey perhaps might turn into an angel”.

Thus writes the greatest of all Persian-writing mystical poets of Islam, Maulânâ Jalâladdân Rûmî (1207-1273) in his conversations, Fîhi mâ fîhi, when pointing to the mystery of man's existence : man is able to attain a rank superior to that of the angels (who have no free will and are eternally good) provided he develops his God-given faculties of reason and love; but he can sink lower than a beast if he neglects his spiritual powers and falls a prey to sensual pleasures and crimes owing to the misuse of his rational faculties.

There are, it is said nowadays, “Renaissances,” in order to emphasize the diversity of expressions in this period of civilization and because of the concern for restoring the originality of the historical situations experienced at that time by the peoples of Europe. It is true that from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries, the Renaissance touched many areas in order to provide a response to challenges of the times. But even though these responses were varied, the world view was the same.