scholarly journals Of lice and men: Charles Darwin, Henry Denny and the evidence for the human races as varieties or species

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Gregory Radick ◽  
Mark Steadman
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Distinct Species ◽  
Social World ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Scientific Collections ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract Charles Darwin never doubted the common ancestry of the human races. But he was open-minded about whether the races might nevertheless be so different from each other that they ought to be classified not as varieties of one species but as distinct species. He pondered this varieties-or-species question on and off for decades, from his time aboard the Beagle through to the publication of the Descent of Man. A constant throughout was his concern with something that he first learned on the Beagle voyage and that, on the face of it, seemed to favour the species ranking: the different races, he was told, play host to distinct species of lice. This paper reconstructs the long run of Darwin's reflections and interactions on race, lice and history, using his extended correspondence with Henry Denny – curator of the scientific collections of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and Britain's leading expert in the natural history of lice – as a window onto the social world whose imprint is everywhere in the pages of the Descent.

Philosophcal review of h. white̕s tropological theory in the context of the new philosophy of history

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Text Organization ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Material ◽  
The Common ◽  
Historical Nature ◽  
Selection Of

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.

The Struggle of My Life

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Student Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Life ◽  
The Common ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Freedom Movement

The present work, The Struggle of My Life: An Autobiography of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, is an English translation of Sahajanand’s autobiography, written in Hindi, Mera Jeevan Sangarsh. It carries an introduction by the translator which briefly deals with the Swami’s life and legacy. It needs to be emphasized that this is not an autobiography in the common run. Its primary focus is not on Swami’s persona; its central theme is the cause of the freedom movement in general and in particular, of the peasant movement under his leadership. It tells of the life and legacy of one of the most uncompromising and fearless freedom fighters and peasant leaders. It covers the social and political history of one of the most crucial periods of our national life, 1920–47. Today, when the Indian peasantry is faced with a number of intractable problems, it reminds them of the struggles of the peasants of yesteryears and the kind of trials and tribulations they went through. It is also remarkable that despite his vast learning and command over Sanskrit, Swami chose to write in simple, colloquial Hindi. That only speaks for his total identification with the masses. Both the teaching and student community as well as general readers would find this book useful, interesting and intellectually stimulating.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Europa 51: The Face of the Star in Neorealisms Urban Landscape

Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Ora Gelley
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Social World ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Roberto Rossellini ◽  
The Face ◽  
Classical Style

Although Europa 51 (1952) was the most commercially successful of the films Roberto Rossellini made with the Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, the reception by the Italian press was largely negative. Many critics focussed on what they saw to be the ‘unreal’ or abstract quality of the films portrayal of the postwar urban milieu and on the Bergman character‘s isolation from the social world. This article looks at how certain structures of seeing that are associated in the classical style with the woman as star or spectacle - e.g., the repetitious return to her fixed image, the resistance to pulling back from the figure of the woman in order to situate her within a determinate location and set of relationships between characters and objects - are no longer restricted to her image but in fact bleed into or “contaminate” the depiction of the world she inhabits. In other words, whereas the compulsive return to the fixed image of the woman tends to be contained or neutralised by the narrative economy and editing patterns (ordered by sexual difference) of the classical style, in Rossellini‘s work this ‘insistent’ even aberrant framing in relation to the woman becomes a part of the (female) characters and the cameras vision of the ‘pathology’ of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the war.

scholarly journals On Memory of Plates and Dishes

Fluminensia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Western World ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

The aim of the article is to discuss how elements of food narratives meals and kitchen tools used for cooking are used in order to consolidate and shape the Croatian cultural memory, especially in the context of its Mediterranean heritage.For this reason, the texts by Veljko Barbieri, collected in the four volumes under the common and significant title Kuharski kanconijer. Gurmanska sjećanja Mediterana, are analysed. His circum-culinary narratives are a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge, references to historical and literary sources, personal memories and literary fiction. They can be easily inscribed in the Croatian (collective and individual) identity discourse since they are able to strengthen the collective (either national and supranational, or geo-regional) identity, and to construct the cultural memory. They also show Croatia's affiliation to the Western world along with its cultural-civilization rooting in antiquity, the Mediterranean region and Christianity, thus forming a part of the founding memory that develops a narrative about the very beginnings of Croatian presence on this land. The gastronomic narratives serve to create the cultural memory and this version of history which is to stabilize the social identity described by Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen. Through his stories, Barbieri shapes memory based on the representation of the past. In the analysed narratives, the memory carriers are dishes and plates which find reference to the oldest history of Croatia rendered by myths and other narratives. Associated with dishes, the pots enable the narrator to recall the past and the identity coded in individual dishes. They also participate in the processes of repeating, storage and remembering which generate a symbiotic relationship between man and thing. The memory carriers that is, food and plates depicted in Barbieri's culinary narratives do not convey their content in a neutral way, but construct their marked images.

scholarly journals Życie międzynarodowe rzeczy. Przedmioty luksusu i codziennego użytku w społecznej historii stosunków międzynarodowych

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-34
Author(s):  
Andrzej GAŁGANEK
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social World ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Prestige Goods ◽  
The Social ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
History Of

The paper discusses the potential of objects, broadly understood luxury ‘items’ and necessities, in order to present uneven and combined development as the foundation of the social history of international relations. The author evidences that this approach to ‘objects’ allows us to achieve, at the very least, the following: (1) to observe the single social world which emerges after the division into ‘internal’ and ‘international’ is rejected; (2) to ‘touch’ the international outside the realm that the science of international relations usually associates with international politics; (3) to examine the social history of international relations, abandoning the approach that dominates in traditional historiography where production processes are privileged over consumption processes; (4) to demonstrate how human activities create internationalism. Discussing apparently different processes related to the international life of broadly understood ‘objects’, such as African giraffes, Kashmiri shawls, silk, the importance of English items for the inhabitants of Mutsamudu, or the opera Madame Butterfly the author identifies similar patterns which, although sometimes concealed, demonstrate the consequences of uneven and combined development for the social history of international relations. Prestige goods express affluence, success and power. They are usually objects manufactured from imported raw materials or materials, with limited distribution, which require a significant amount of labor or advanced technology to create. In contrast to everyday necessities, owing to their high value, prestige goods are exchanged over long distances through networks established by the elite. The analysis of manufacturing, exchange and social contexts related to prestige goods constitutes a significant source for understanding the social history of international relations. The examples in the paper present control over these goods as a source of political power. The control of raw materials, production and distribution of prestige goods is perceived as key to maintaining hierarchical social systems. Objects are inescapably related to ideas and practices. Uneven and combined development leads to meetings between people and objects, either opening or closing the space, allowing for their transfer and domestication, or rejection and destruction respectively. Concentration on the analyses of objects outside of modernization models or comparisons between civilizations and the conscious narrowing of perspective offers a tool with a heuristic potential which is interesting in the context of international relations. Comparative observation of objects (‘single’ elements of reality) via cultures undergoing uneven and combined development protects us from historiographic western exceptionalism. It also shows that the division between the ‘internal’ and ‘international’ unjustifiably splits the social world and makes it impossible to understand.

scholarly journals How “Muslim” are Central Asian Muslims? A Historical and Comparative Enquiry

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-269
Author(s):  
Galina M. Yemelianova
Keyword(s):  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
The Common ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
High Level ◽  
Soviet Central Asia

The article analyzes the social, political, and symbolic functions of Islam in contemporary Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Over many centuries, Central Asians developed a particular form of Islam based on a productive and fluid synergy among Islam per se, their tribal legal and customary norms, and Tengrian and Zoroastrian beliefs and practices. It is characterized by a high level of doctrinal and functional adaptability to shifting political and cultural environments, the prevalence of mystical Islam (Sufism) and oral, rather than book-based, Islamic tradition. These qualities have defined distinctive Islamic trajectories in post-Soviet Central Asia, which differ significantly from those in other Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim communities in the West. At the same time, the common Eurasian space and lengthy shared political history of Central Asians and other peoples of Muslim Eurasia are also reflected in the considerable similarities in their Islamic trajectories.

scholarly journals Co to znaczy być artystą/artystką?

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-99
Author(s):  
Marek Krajewski ◽  
Filip Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Nationwide Survey ◽  
Social World ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Artistic Career ◽  
Depth Interviews

Who is an artist? Questions over how to define this role divided the makers of the project The Invisible Visual: Visual Art in Poland—Its State, Role, and Significance. The authors’ sources of data were the results of a nationwide survey, a survey of graduates of the Polish Academy of Fine Arts in the years 1975–2011, and in-depth interviews with seventy individuals in the field of visual arts. The authors were able to establish, first, that persons working in the art field give different definitions from those beyond its bounds; second, that artists, decision-makers, curators, and critics try to defend the sense and autonomy of their activities against ways of thinking and acting that are typical of other areas of the social world (while they are themselves engaged in disputes over who has a right to call him- or herself an artist and what is and isn’t good art); and third, being an artist is marked by a difficult-to-cross boundary, as is shown by the common necessity of supplementing artistic work by other sources of income and the high risk of failure in an artistic career.

Zwischen Naturgeschichte, Statistik und Gesellschaftsroman. Soziographische Wissensordnungen im Kontext einer europäischen Publizistik im 19. Jahrhundert

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Christiane Schwab
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
Scientific Terminology ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Periodical Publishing

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the rise of market-oriented periodical publishing correlated with an increasing desire to inspect the modernizing societies. The journalistic pursuit of examining the social world is in a unique way reflected in countless periodical contributions that, especially from the 1830s onwards, depicted social types and behaviours, new professions and technologies, institutions, and cultural routines. By analysing how these “sociographic sketches” proceeded to document and to interpret the manifold manifestations of the social world, this article discusses the interrelationships between epistemic and political shifts, new forms of medialization and the systematization of social research. It thereby focuses on three main areas: the creative appropriation of narratives and motifs of moralistic essayism, the uses of description and contextualization as modes of knowledge, and the adaptation of empirical methods and a scientific terminology. To consider nineteenth-century sociographic journalism as a format between entertainment, art, and science provokes us to narrate intermedial, transnational and interdisciplinary tales of the history of social knowledge production.

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