TALL HISTORIES: HEIGHT AND GEORGIAN MASCULINITIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Health And Nutrition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

ABSTRACTHeight is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This paper therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case-study of John Montagu, earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the paper also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

Cameralism, Josephinism, and Enlightenment: The Dynamic of Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–92

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franz A. J. Szabo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
Franz Grillparzer ◽  
Do So

In his great 1848 historical drama,Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburg, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer has Emperor Matthias utter the words that have often been applied to understanding the whole history of the Habsburg monarchy:Das ist der Fluch von unserm edeln Haus:Auf halben Wegen und zu halber TatMit halben Mitteln zauderhaft zu streben.[That is the curse of our noble house:Striving hesitatingly on half waysto half action with half means.]True as those sentiments may be of many periods in the history of the monarchy, the one period of which it cannotbe said is the second half of eighteenth century. The age of Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II was perhaps the greatest era of consistent and committed reform in the four-hundred-year history of the monarchy. What I want to address in this article are some aspects of the dynamic of this reform era, and this falls into two categories. On the one hand, there is the broad energizing or motive force behind the larger development, and on the other, there are the ideas or assumptions that lay behind the policies adopted. As might be evident from the subtitle of my article, I propose to look primarily at the second of these categories. I do so because I think while Habsburg historiography has reached considerable consensus on the first, it has not looked enough on the second as an explanatory hermeneutic.

Transforming skin, changing caste: Technical education in leather production in India, 1900–1950

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahana Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Technical Education ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Leather Industry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
The One ◽  
Traditional Industry ◽  
Pedagogical Methods

State-organised technical education focusing on leather production was introduced in India in the early 1900s. One of its key objectives was to change the entrenched notions about the leather industry—as a ‘traditional’ industry associated with low caste and social status. This article traces the history of this endeavour, locating it within a wider account of the history of technical education in leather production. While some common concerns affected the project in both Europe and India, there were important points of difference, as technical education in leather production in India had to negotiate factors such as the extreme stigma of hides and skins mandated by caste on the one hand, and on the other, their integration within the capitalist colonial economy and their concomitant high profitability. Decisions of who or what were to be taught, and by which pedagogical methods, were produced through these negotiations. The article explores this history through a study of two leading institutions that provided technical education in this field. It highlights how official initiatives of skilling and technical education were, in complex ways, closely mediated by, and in turn mediated their historical context, its social and economic structures, prevailing ideologies and notions of skill.

Zheng Junli, Complicity and the Cultural History of Socialist China, 1949–1976

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 1048-1069 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul G. Pickowicz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Party State ◽  
Mao Era

This article explores cultural producation during the Mao era (1949–76) by focusing on the evolving relationship between artists and the party-state. The emphasis is on state direction of art in the all-important film industry. From 1949, well-known bourgeois Republican-era artists willingly began the complicated, painful and sometimes deadly process of adjusting to Communist Party state building, nation building and political domination. The career of influential film director Zheng Junli is examined as a case study of creative and strategic accommodation to new circumstances on the one hand, and of complicity on the other. Zheng is seen in his dual and contradictory roles as both trusted, ever loyal insider and unreliable, even degenerate, outsider. His Mao-era films, especially the spectacular Great Leap Forward production of Lin Zexu, are analysed in terms of their political thrust and reception in the difficult-to-predict world of the People's Republic.

scholarly journals Patterns in the history of the commentation on the so-called ḥadīth Ibn Masʿūd

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Thomas Eich
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Clear Line

This paper analyzes the so-called Ibn Masʿūd ḥadīth (see below) on two levels: the specific wording of the ḥadīth on the one hand and a significant portion of the commentation written about it since the 10th century until today on the other. This aims at three things. First, I will show how the ḥadīth’s exact wording still developed after the stabilization of the material in collections. Although this development occurred only on the level of single words, it can be shown that it is a reflection of discussions documented in the commentaries. Therefore, these specific examples show that there was not always a clear line separating between ḥadīth text and commentaries on that text. Second, the diachronic analysis of the commentaries will provide material for a nuanced assessment in how far major icons of commentation such as Nawawī and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī significantly influenced following generations in composing their respective commentaries. Third, I will argue that in the specific case study provided here significant changes in the commentation can be witnessed since the second half of the 19th century which are caused by the spread of basic common medical knowledge in that period.

Doping the Voice

2013 ◽  
pp. 153-169
Author(s):  
Melissa Ragona
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Sound Production ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Designer Drugs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Production Technologies ◽  
Narrative Context ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. By examining a brief history of several sound production technologies that preceded Auto-Tune, this essay suggests that a “doping of the voice” occurred—an elusive phenomenon hidden by industry engineers, but amplified by artists who sought to make the voice as pliable and sounding as the instruments that often accompanied it. On the one hand, the dope dealt by the commercial sound industry resembled expensive designer drugs—technologies that promised to make one both sound as well as look better (e.g., early dubbing for film, double-tracking for music). On the other hand, a doping of the voice was practiced by experimental artists (Yoko Ono, Charlemagne Palestine, Hollis Frampton) in order to dirty the voice’s narrative context: grinding its phonemic elements, challenging its purity as signature of the body, and wresting it away from any kind of philosophical or psychological interiority.

Noi credevamo (We Believed): Story and history of emotions

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Patat
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The One

In the last ten years, Noi credevamo (We Believed) (Martone 2010) has been the subject of a very careful criticism interested not only in its historical-ideological implications but also in its semiotic specificities. The purpose of this article is to summarize the cardinal points of these two positions and to add to them some critical observations that have not been noted so far. On the one hand, it is a matter of highlighting how, as a historical film, the work is connected with the history of emotions, a recent historiographical trend that aims to detect the narrative devices of ideological propaganda and the diffusion of feelings since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, the article proposes a new interpretation of Mario Martone’s film, starting with the analysis of phenomena that are not only historical but also technical and structural.

ASPECTS DU "SACERDOCE" EN SYRIE ANCIENNE: REMARQUES METHODOLOGIQUES ET EXAMEN D'UN CAS PARTICULIER

Numen ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-426
Author(s):  
Paolo Xella
Keyword(s):  
Religious Study ◽  
Control Agent ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Emic Perspective

AbstractA historico-religious study focusing on "priesthood" and "priest" has to face many difficulties, in terms of terminology and of content. On the one hand, it is methodologically incorrect to link "priesthood" to debated modern concepts such as "religion" or "cult" which, like the former, need to be (even conventionally) defined each time for every particular culture, and not to be assumed as universal keys of historical understanding. On the other hand, previous studies on the topic - where the aim has been to determine latent forms and/or particular manifestations of "priesthood" in other cultures and also to write a "general history" of this phenomenon - exhibit the total historical irrelevance of such an approach, based only on our modern (Christian) concept of "priest(hood)." In order to limit ethnocentrism and, at the same time, to employ useful conceptual categories, new heuristic parameters must be found. In addition to the criterion indicated by J. Rüpke (the religious specialist as a control-agent within the framework of symbolic systems), I propose to distinguish between professional specialisation and practical (cultic) function. The case study I present here to illustrate some aspects and problems of this research is that of ancient Syrian (Ugaritic) culture, where "priests" in our meaning are difficult to be found, whereas a fully new concept emerges if we look at the issue from a functional (and "emic") perspective.

scholarly journals James Bond’s Biopolitics

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Wieland Schwanebeck
Keyword(s):  
Population Control ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

This chapter traces Foucauldian technologies of power in the James Bond universe and characterises the Bond franchise’s biopolitics in the cultural environment of the 1960s and 1970s, when 007 became a mass phenomenon. The majority of the chapter is dedicated to a case study of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming’s tenth Bond novel (1963) and the sixth film in the EON series (1969). The chapter highlights the intersection between reproduction and fertility on the one hand and the infliction of death and mass genocide on the other, and it examines how James Bond juxtaposes the disciplinary means that are directed against the body (as an organism) on the one hand, and the state-powered regulation of biological processes that control the population on the other. The two versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service amount to the franchise’s most straightforward foray into the realm of biopolitics and would pave the way for the franchise’s subsequent biopolitical and eugenic moments, like when the figure of the genocidal villain gets to articulate the franchise’s own subliminal agenda regarding population control and the future of the (British) species.

Merchants and Trade in Early Modern Iraq

1991 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 53-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Trade Patterns ◽  
Northern European ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The literature on merchants and trade in the early modern Middle East is still rudimentary. Although the period witnessed basic changes in trade patterns of the region, there have been very few regional studies addressing the nature of trade and the various groups engaged in it, either from an internal or local perspective or from an international one (Masters, 1988; Raymond, 1984; Abdel-Nour, 1982). For much of the Arab world there is a gap in the literature between Goitein's and Ashtor's works on the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the eighteenth century on the other when northern European companies acquired a strong foothold in the area (Goitein, 1966, 1967; Ashtor, 1978). For Iraq there exist almost no general works on the early Ottoman period and the Iraqi archives remain inaccessible. Thus, any conclusions on trade and merchants in Iraq during this period are by necessity tentative and general. There are a number of issues that can be raised with respect to early modern Iraq, however, which are relevant to the history of early modern trade in general.

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