Living in the Material World: Cosmopolitanism and trade in early twentieth century Ladakh

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE H. FEWKES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Material World ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Multiple Cultures ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Philosophical Framework

AbstractThe historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community—largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated—was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan.

Trick Cyclists? Recontextualizing Rwandan Dynastic Chronology

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 191-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Newbury
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
The Way

Chronology used to be an object of great interest among African historians because it was seen as essential to history, it provided exactitude where so much else was analytic, and it was such a difficult feature to handle in oral accounts. More recently, historical analysis has been concerned more with processes and periods than with defined events and dates. Although deemed to be useful when available, precise chronology is now seen as less essential to historical reconstruction; it is accepted that chronologies are subject to interpretation and debate, and that these debates themselves illuminate the way in which local communities reconstruct—and historians understand—history.This paper addresses such issues of debate, contestation, and negotiation—that is, it explores the nature of intellectual hegemony—but it does so across cultural boundaries. It thus illustrates a fundamental contradiction in the manner by which historians have treated cultural units defined as distinct: while as independent polities they have been assumed to be culturally autonomous, source material from one is often drawn on to fill in the gaps of others. This procedure was especially common where there were powerful kingdoms whose political boundaries were assumed to be rigid and inviolate. The states of the western Interlacustrine area, each believed to be ruled by an established dynastic line whose origins reached far back into antiquity, provide an exemplary illustration of this process.By the early twentieth century, at the time of European conquest, Rwanda was one of the most powerful of these states, having either conquered and absorbed, or at least dominated, many of the distinct kingdoms with which it formerly competed.

Sound of Body: Music, Sports and Health in Victorian Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Exercise ◽  
Physical Fitness ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
New Ideas

ABSTRACTThis article explores ways in which music intersected with the growth of sports in Victorian Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there have been valuable studies of music and sports recently, their main emphasis has been on popular music and contemporary sporting events; a study of the period when playing and watching sports began to acquire its present-day shape has yet to be undertaken. This article moves towards that by examining connections between music and sports through broader social and cultural developments, in particular new ideas about morality, health and physical fitness. It situates commentaries about the healthfulness of music in relation to nineteenth-century discourses about sport, in addition to contextualizing notions of singing and health in the increasing professionalization of Victorian medicine. Finally, this article extends and relocates early twentieth-century encapsulations of singing as physical exercise in the context of concern over degeneration in national fitness.

Rooted in Place, Constructed in Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-53
Author(s):  
Sonia Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Nuevo Leon ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Since the turn of the twentieth century, men and women from the greater Mexican borderlands have shared labor concerns, engaged in labor solidarities, and employed activist strategies to improve their livelihoods. Based on findings from archival research in Mexico City, Washington, DC; Texas; Tamaulipas; and Nuevo León and by engaging in transnational methodological and historiographical approaches, this article takes two distinct but related cases of labor solidarities from the early twentieth century to reveal the class and gendered complexities of transnational labor solidarities. The cases of Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican farmer and immigrant from Tamaulipas living and working in Texas in 1901, and Caritina Piña, a Tamaulipas-born woman engaged in anarcho-syndicalism in the 1920s, reveal the potential of cross-class and gendered solidarities and underscore how a variety of social contexts informed and shaped labor movements. Excavating solidarities from a transnational perspective while exposing important limitations of the labor movement sheds light on the gendered, racial, and class complexities of such forms of shared struggle; but, equally important, reminds us of how much one can learn about the power of larger, global labor movements by closely examining the experiences of those residing on nations’ edges.

The Science of Sexual Difference

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michiko Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
New Ideas

This chapter examines theories of male–female difference and female identity in Japan by focusing on the intersection of sexology and feminism in the country during the early twentieth century. In particular, it shows how sexologist Ogura Seizaburō and feminist Hiratsuka Raichō drew upon European conceptions of sexual difference, especially those developed by Havelock Ellis, to proffer new ideas about female characteristics and sexuality. The chapter also offers a fresh perspective on Ogura's contribution to the development of early feminism in Japan and considers how he and Hiratsuka strategically used sexology for their own purposes. It argues that while theories of sexual difference have more often supported a maternalist ideology, their use also served other purposes, such as the prioritizing of sex over racial difference.

Selling Home

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
Abigail McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Home Deliveries ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Window Displays ◽  
Market Density ◽  
The City

This essay explores the emergence of new forms of retail in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bombay, an era which saw the development of new shopping districts, department stores, showrooms, and retail culture in the city. In a city known for its market density and commercial vibrancy, elite retailers tried to reach out to consumers in new ways, enticing them in from the street with window displays, standardized product lines, and novel assemblages of goods, while also contacting consumers directly through catalogues, flyers, designs sent on request, and home deliveries. Focusing on major department stores like the Army and Navy Stores and Whiteaway Laidlaw, major nationalist concerns like the Bombay Swadeshi Store and Godrej and Boyce, as well as smaller showrooms featuring fewer ranges of goods, the essay argues that novel retail strategies efforts helped to shape not just how things were sold but what was desired in Bombay—noting in particular how efforts to sell domestic furnishings promoted new ideas about what the home should be.

Constitutionalism in Poetry, Poetry in Constitutionalism: Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm’s Imagining of Contemporary Constitutional Movements

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Urs Gösken
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Constitutional Revolution

This paper focuses on the sociocultural and historical context in which the Egyptian poet Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (c. 1872–1932) represented contemporary constitutional movements in the Muslim world, with special emphasis on developments in the Ottoman Empire and in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Egypt – back then, at least nominally, still a part of it – and extending to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. References in Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm’s poetry to constitutionalism in Japan will also be discussed in order to point out that the poet, while closely following constitutional movements in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran, in fact viewed constitutionalism as an historical process transcending geographical and cultural boundaries. Therefore, we shall also try to identify the general idea of history underlying Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm’s portrayal of constitutionalism. Comparative references to constitutional poetry in Iran of that time are intended to point out the supra-regional dimension both of constitutionalism itself and of poetical modes of imagining it. Likewise, this approach is designed to make the point that constitutional poetry in the Muslim world at that time was more than just poetic commentary on constitutional movements; it was itself part of them.

‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 1039-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALAVIKA KASTURI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis paper examines a fundamental premise of Anglo-Hindu law on succession between 1860 and 1940, that kinship was emblematic of secular modes of living, to analyse its implications for the assertion of masculinity within ascetic orders in northern India. Legal discourses engaged with rights to succession within ascetic orders, by functioning on the assumption that the renunciatory life of ascetics was antithetical to sexuality and domesticity. This institutionalization of law, that defined asceticism and fixed ascetic masculinities within a legal frame, occurred with the consent of ascetic orders concerned with the ownership and distribution of property, even though sexuality and gender played a central role in shaping relationships within sacred spaces. Myriad ties embracing the language of kinship shaped ascetic orders. Bonds of sentiment and sexual attachment over-lapped with, sustained, and produced the bonds tying spiritual preceptors to their disciples. Relationships within ascetic families, consisting of men, their female companions, children and relatives, along with their attendant obligations were validated through rights of ownership and inheritance to property. Taking advantage of Anglo-Hindu law by the early twentieth century, ascetic orders sought to ‘purify’ their genealogies through the medium of property disputes fought in colonial courts. By manipulating the legal meanings ascribed to asceticism, masculinity and renunciation, these orders effaced unwanted members from their orders with varying degrees of success, especially women and children.

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