Subjective Well-Being of Russian Female Personnel as an Indicator of Socio-Psychological Age

The present work is theoretical and empirical research on the socio-psycho- logical age of female personnel at enterprises with different organizational cultures. The main indicators of socio-psychological age include the level of commitment to organizational values, readiness for organizational changes, involvement in labor activity, and fatigue. The respondents are female employees of two large industrial enterprises. The female personnel working in a market-hierarchical type of organizational culture with an expressed innovative component reflect characteristics of a younger socio-psychological age while those working at an enterprise with a hierarchical-clan type of organizational culture display characteristics of a more senior socio-psychological age

Chinese Prayer Chant to the Goddess of Fertility

The article examines the prayer chant to the Goddess of Fertility performed by a blind singer and accompanied by the stringed instrument banghu and foot castanets in the temple of the Spirit of the Tanshan Dong Yue mountain, in Puxian county Shangxi province of the Republic of China. The video of the chant was recorded in April 2011, during the days before the Temple festival in honor of Dong Yue, a tradition that has been revived in the modern China. We publish the text of the chant not only in the Russian translation but also in Chinese. There are three graphic variants of the Chinese text presented — in Chinese characters, in standardized Pinyin, and in transcribed Pinyin that gives an idea of the actual pronunciation and allows the reader to trace dialectical specificity of the song. The article includes the music of both the chant and the instrumental accompaniment together with their ethno-musicological characteristics. The musical structure of the instrument and the modal specificity attribute this piece to the musical style of Northern China. The Authors analyze the verse and the strafica of the chant. They argue that its metrical structure consists of couplets (except for the last three line stanza), with instrumental wagering played in between that is characteristic of the ancient Chinese lyrics. The analysis of the text’s contents and imagery reveals that it reflects popular notions of Songzi nannan, the Goddess of Fertility. It also shows that the chant dates back to the feudal China: it predicts the fate of the future son of the young couple that ordered the chant by describing his future life of the “official” and the “noble man,” the image that has been developed on the basis of Confucian canons within the two millennia of Chinese history