scholarly journals What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 611-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Weng
Keyword(s):  
National Standard ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Language Reform ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
The Social ◽  
Future Society ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
The Many

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.

Envisioning an Ideal Christian Family in Republican China

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-215
Author(s):  
Yun Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Active Role ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Chinese Christians ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Family ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Domestic Roles ◽  
Theological Thinking

Abstract Amid debates and discussions on the institution of the family in Republican China, foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians played an active role in promoting an ideal Christian family. This article investigates the three waves of prominent theological thinking that underpinned changing ideals of the Christian family throughout the Republican period: Chinese society’s encounter with the gendered ethics of the Christian community in the early Republican period, discussions of domesticity by Chinese Christians amid the social gospel movements of the 1920s, and discussions of domesticity during the National Christianizing the Home Movement. An exploration of Christian publications on domesticity points to a gendered perspective on women’s domestic roles as well as a male-dominated theological construct that attempted to reconfigure the notion of the Chinese Christian family. The discourse on the ideal Chinese Christian family had both secular and spiritual dimensions, shaped by the dynamic transnational flow of ideas and the development of local theological thinking.

Marxism and Its Others

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hall
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
British Government ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Vision ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk

This chapter is written from the perspective of a historian trying to comprehend the complexities of the nineteenth-century societies and to use those conceptual theories that would define the many layers of the social, cultural, and political world. In the absence of Marxism, there has been a tendency to lose interest in the large-scale changes and to resort to micro-histories. A return to Marx is therefore needed to understand how change occurs in the relation between key categories of difference. And while Marx may not have full answers to the questions on the logic of capital and class antagonisms, he nevertheless initiated questions on agency and change. The focus of the chapter is on the United Kingdom and its empire from 1828 to 1833. This was a period when political citizenship and forms of rule at home and across the empire were reassessed; when the forms of conservative aristocratic rule in Britain and the colonies were ruptured; and when the new vision of the nation and the empire was introduced. In all of the places ruled by the UK, emphasis is placed on Ireland, Britain, Jamaica, and India, including Westminster, which is the seat of the British government. Each of the cases is dealt with extensively, with stress on ethnicity, class, race, and gender. All of these cases are examined within the framework of Marxism, wherein the salience of the theory is measured on its capacity to address issues of differences.

Living Paradox in Riverine Bangladesh: Whiteheadian Perspectives on Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir

1969 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naveeda Khan
Keyword(s):  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Physical Entity ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Changing Climate ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many

We begin with the words of rural and riverine women from Bangladesh recalling the events of their children's deaths by drowning. These events are cast as the work of supernatural beings, specifically Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir, who compel the mothers into forgetfulness and entice the children to the water. Is this a disavowal of loss and responsibility? This article considers that the women, specifically those from northern Bangladesh, assert not only their understanding of the losses that they have suffered but also their changing relationship to the river and its changing nature through their evocations of mythological figures. Alongside the many experiences of the river, the article takes note of its experience as paradoxical, with paradoxicality serving as the occasion for the coming together of the mythological, the material, and the social. The article draws upon Alfred North Whitehead to interrelate the strata of myths and their permutations, with the women's experiences of the river, and the river as a physical entity, allowing us to explore how the women's expressions portend the changing climate.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

Pay, Promotion, and Democratization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Seligmann
Keyword(s):  
Officer Corps ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
Lower Deck

As soon as he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, Winston Churchill sought to buttress his credentials as a social reformer by improving conditions for sailors in the Navy and widening the social composition of the officer corps. This chapter examines his efforts towards both of these ends. It shows how he fought against the Treasury and his Cabinet colleagues to offer sailors their first meaningful pay rise in decades. It similarly catalogues the many schemes he introduced to entice people from a wider range of backgrounds, including sailors from the lower deck, to become naval officers. As with enhanced naval pay, this required him to persevere against entrenched interests, but as this chapter will show, his achievements in this area were considerable.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

Cultural interface

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Civic Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Interface ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Church

The chapter contextualizes the literary developments of the second half of the seventeenth century, including the changes in education and print culture. A new vision of court culture, expanding administration, and ecclesiastical reforms provided new contexts for writing, as well as innovations in the theater and in poetry. The spaces represented in Russian literature were, as previously, the monastery and the church. The court moved into the limelight as a center of cultural production. The social reality of the period did not entirely foster the creation of civic spaces or an autonomous literary field, and writing had to adapt to the control of the authorities. Opportunities for the ritual performance of the liturgy and at court expanded considerably during the last decades of the seventeenth under the aegis of Tsar Aleksei. Orthodox proponents of neo-humanist culture who worked in Moscow succeeded in transforming the uses of rhetoric during ceremonial occasions.

Archaeology and the Letters of Paul

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Salah Nasrallah
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
First Century ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Archaeological Materials ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
The Many ◽  
Political Economic

Through case studies of archaeological materials from local contexts, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those whom the apostle Paul addressed. Roman Ephesos, a likely setting for the household of Philemon, provides evidence of the slave trade. An inscription from Galatia seeks to restrain traveling Roman officials, illuminating how the travels of Paul, Cephas, and others may have disrupted communities. At Philippi, a donation list from a Silvanus cult provides evidence of abundant giving amid economic limitations, paralleling practices of local Christ followers. In Corinth, a landscape of grief includes monuments and bones, a context that illumines Corinthian practices of baptism on behalf of the dead and the provocative idea that one could live “as if not” mourning. Rome and the Letter to the Romans are the grounds to investigate ideas of time and race not only in the first century, when we find an Egyptian obelisk inserted as a timepiece into Augustus’s mausoleum complex, but also of Mussolini’s new Rome. Thessalonikē demonstrates how letters, legend, and cult are invented out of a love for Paul, after his death. The book articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains in order to reconstruct the lives of the many adelphoi—brothers and sisters—whom Paul and his co-writers address. It is informed by feminist historiography and gains inspiration from thinkers like Claudia Rankine, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Katie Lofton.

Precursors to Public Choice

2019 ◽  
pp. 796-816
Author(s):  
Iain McLean
Keyword(s):  
Public Choice ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mathematical Skill ◽  
The Many ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter reviews the many appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of axiomatic thought about social choice and elections since the era of ancient Greek democracy. Social choice is linked to the wider public-choice movement because both are theories of agency. Thus, just as the first public-choice theorists include Hobbes, Hume, and Madison, so the first social-choice theorists include Pliny, Llull, and Cusanus. The social-choice theory of agency appears in many strands. The most important of these are binary vs. nonbinary choice; aggregation of judgement vs. aggregation of opinion; and selection of one person vs. selection of many people. The development of social choice required both a public-choice mindset and mathematical skill.

scholarly journals Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110244
Author(s):  
Katrin Auspurg ◽  
Josef Brüderl
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Skin Tone ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

In 2018, Silberzahn, Uhlmann, Nosek, and colleagues published an article in which 29 teams analyzed the same research question with the same data: Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with dark skin tone than light skin tone? The results obtained by the teams differed extensively. Many concluded from this widely noted exercise that the social sciences are not rigorous enough to provide definitive answers. In this article, we investigate why results diverged so much. We argue that the main reason was an unclear research question: Teams differed in their interpretation of the research question and therefore used diverse research designs and model specifications. We show by reanalyzing the data that with a clear research question, a precise definition of the parameter of interest, and theory-guided causal reasoning, results vary only within a narrow range. The broad conclusion of our reanalysis is that social science research needs to be more precise in its “estimands” to become credible.

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