Converting the Hospital: British Missionaries and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Madagascar

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Mission Hospital

This paper examines the attempt of British missionaries on Madagascar to use medicine and the mission hospital as a way to convert the Malagasy people during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In their attempt to educate the Malagasy about the benefits of Western civilization, which was often defined through science as well as Christianity, missionaries were challenged by Malagasy culture and the local environment. To counter the ability of the Malagasy to challenge Western methods through their cultural beliefs and healing practices and so convert the Malagasy to Western ways, British missionaries had to carve out a space isolated from the Malagasy environment. Medicine, particularly the mission hospital, offered a space to champion Western science and Christianity. In their attempt to bring civilization to Madagascar, missionaries directly tied together science and Christianity while domesticating the space of the hospital.

Reflections into the Spirit of the Islamic Corpus of Knowledge and the Rise of the New Science

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dhaouadi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Third World ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Primary Reference

There is no question that contemporary western civilization has beendominant in the field of science since the Renaissance. Western scientificsuperiority is not limited to specific scientific disciplines, but is rather anovetall scientific domination covering both the so-called exact and thehuman-social sciences. Western science is the primary reference for specialistsin such ateas as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics,psychology, and sociology. It is in this sense that Third World underdevelopmentis not only economic, social, and industrial; it also suffersfrom scientific-cultutal underdevelopment, or what we call "The OtherUnderdevelopment" (Dhaouadi 1988).The imptessive progress of western science since Newton and Descartesdoes not meari, however, that it has everything tight or perfect. Infact, its flaws ate becoming mote visible. In the last few decades, westernscience has begun to experience a shift from what is called classical scienceto new science. Classical science was associated with the celestialmechanics of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, the new physics of Galileo,and the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes introduced a radical divisionbetween mind and matter, while Newton and his fellows presented a newscience that looked at the world as a kind of giant clock The laws of thisworld were time-reversible, for it was held that there was no differencebetween past and future. As the laws were deterministic, both the pastand the future could be predicted once the present was known.The vision of the emerging new science tends to heal the division betweenmatter and spirit and to do away with the mechanical dimension ...

scholarly journals A model-based method for detecting persistent cultural change using panel data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Vaisey ◽  
Kevin Kiley
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Survey Responses ◽  
Close Fit

Kiley and Vaisey (2020) recently published a method for assessing whether survey respondents appear to be changing their beliefs between waves or whether they instead appear to be repeating fixed responses with temporary local influences. This question is important because these processes reflect very different theoretical models of the evolution of “personal culture.” That is, if cultural beliefs are primarily public and responsive to external discourse, we should observe more updating as people respond to changes in their local environment. On the other hand, if cultural beliefs are primarily something learned early, then “settled dispositions” should be relatively resilient to change. In this paper, we build on Kiley and Vaisey (2020) and introduce an alternative method for distinguishing between cases where respondents appear be actively updating their responses and situations where respondents’ responses appear to be settled. This method, based on structural equation modeling, provides a close fit to the theoretical models outlined in Kiley and Vaisey (2020) and provides even stronger support for their claim that most survey responses reflect settled dispositions developed prior to adulthood.

A ‘Polis’ in Jerusalem: The Jewish State

1997 ◽  
pp. 432-448
Author(s):  
Yaacov Shavit
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter turns to politics. Here, the return of the Jews to history was also their return to the realm of politics and statesmanship, whether as participants in European politics in various countries or as a new emerging political entity in Palestine from 1882. The idea of a Jewish state could be nourished by the memories of Jewish independence and Jewish sovereignty in biblical and post-biblical times, or by the messianic prophecies, but no one seriously thought of a revival of a Jewish kingdom. Thus it was the European political experience which was the political school of the Zionist movement. When Jews of the late nineteenth century lost faith in absolute enlightened monarchies (or after monarchies gave way to other types of government), the liberal-democratic paradigm of state that they adopted was closer to the political heritage of classical antiquity than to the Jewish political heritage. In that they followed the course taken by Western civilization.

scholarly journals TRANSNATIONAL PROJECTS OF EMPIRE IN FRANCE, C.1815–C.1870

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID TODD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
French Version ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
Informal Imperialism

Rather than renouncing empire after the fall of Napoleon, this essay argues, French liberal thinkers expressed a sustained preference for a strategy based on transnational connections, or what imperial historians describe as informal imperialism. The eulogy of European Christian civilization exemplified by François Guizot's lecture at the Sorbonne in 1828 served not only to legitimize French global ambitions, but also to facilitate cooperation with other European imperial powers, especially Britain, and indigenous collaborators. Liberal enthusiasm for the spread of Western civilization also inspired the emergence of a French version of free-trade imperialism, of which the economist Michel Chevalier proved a consistent advocate. Only when such aspirations were frustrated did liberals reluctantly endorse colonial conquest, on an exceptional basis in Algeria after 1840 and on a global scale after 1870. The allegedly abrupt liberal conversion to empire in the nineteenth century may instead be construed as a tactical shift from informal to formal dominance.

scholarly journals “Choosing to Stay”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Anja Nadine Klopfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The City

Oral histories of the Hurricane Katrina experience abound in stories of conscious decisions to “ride out the storm.” My article explores the narrative of “choosing to stay” as an empowering narrative rooted in assertions of place-knowledge and traces its historical genealogy to the nineteenth century. I argue that claiming agency in New Orleans and articulating a sense of belonging and local identity through professed intimate knowledge of the local environment took shape as a strategy of resistance against dominant discourses of American progress after the Civil War. Ultimately, this counternarrative of connecting to place as “homeland,” drawing on knowledge arising from lived experience, defied the normative twist of modernization, simultaneously reformulating power relations within the city. “Choosing to stay” thus turns out to be a long-lasting narrative not only of disaster, but of place, belonging, and community; without understanding its historical layers, we cannot fully make sense of this particular Katrina narrative.

The Penetration of the Copernican Theory into Feudal Japan

1944 ◽  
Vol 76 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 52-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bolesław Szcześniak
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Far East ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Life ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Matteo Ricci ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
The Universe

Western science began to penetrate to the Far East at the end of the sixteenth century, along with the Christian faith spread by Portuguese Jesuits.Astrology was important in both China and Japan. It included not only a limited knowledge of astronomy, but some philosophy and logic. The advent of astronomical knowledge as understood in Europe was the beginning of a new kind of science, which did not affect the East's traditional view of the universe; although at first information from Europe about medicine, physics, and astronomy reached the Far East along with the doctrines of Christianity, as a means of attracting converts to what the Chinese termed a new philosophy of life. An early propagator of Western civilization in China was the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1553–1610), who taught medicine and astrology together with the principles of Catholicism. Another Jesuit, Francis Xavier, advised his superiors to send a mission consisting not only of the devout but also of the cultured.

Evangelical Religion and Popular Romanticism in Early Nineteenth-Century America

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Gabriel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Starting Point

Arnold Toynbee has described our western civilization in the twentieth century as a rationalistic and secular culture. In the sense that an awareness of the importance of science is the starting point of the thinking of our day the generalization seems true. We prize the realism of the objective, analytical approach of science. In a turbulent and swiftly moving age we have substituted relativism for older values once confidently assumed to have universal validity. We have seen scepticism, born of twentieth-century events, erode an old and dynamic belief in progress. We observe Protestantism, its old orthodoxy shaken, striving to make the Christian tradition meaningful and significant for a materialistic generation. We watch the protagonists of democracy striving to hold fast to essential human values and to protect basic freedoms in an age of fear and power.

Muslim Reformist Action in Nineteenth-century Tunisia

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed El-Tahir El-Mesawi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Complementary Relationship

This article revisits the origins of the Islamic reformist movement that arose in response to the challenges presented by western civilization in the nineteenth century. Tunisia was chosen because the spirit of reform manifested itself in the form of intellectual activity and socio-political action. The article highlights the features of the Tunisian experience before the French occupation in 1881, reveals the cooperation and complementary relationship between religious scholars and statesmen that gave the reform efforts their substance and form, and discusses the dynamic of the forces that were in play and helped determine the attempted reforms’ fate.

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