Constructing Cathay

2002 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-290
Author(s):  
W.K. Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Vicarious Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Brokers ◽  
Cultural Brokerage ◽  
Source Of Information

As relation between China and the West changed precipitately in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a heightened demand in the West for knowledge about the “Flowery Kingdom”. But until well into the twentieth century, virtually the only direct source of information about China and the Chinese came from missionaries, in which respect they were often lauded as “cultural brokers”. As missionary communication of their experience provided Western readers with a vicarious experience of China, their cultural brokerage inexorably shaped Western popular perceptions of China and the Chinese in the West. These perceptions, when channeled politically, often had a defining effect on the nature and manner of the Western presence in China. This essay examines the China writing of John Macgowan, a veteran missionary from the London Missionary Society. What is interesting about Macgowan’s cultural brokerage is that unlike other missionaries (e.g., Arthur Smith) who often struggled with the difficulties between the missionary enterprise and Western expansionism, Macgowan uninhibitedly affirmed the intimacy between Mission and Empire. His writings on China and Chinese life — their social behavior and habits of thought, their relation with the living environment, the religious and cultural values by which they ordered their lives — therefore gave strong credence not only to the necessity, viability, and nobility of the christianizing project but ultimately to the sanctity of Western presence in China. In other words, Macgowan’s brokerage of his China knowledge exemplified the processes in which knowledge was legislated and communicated to establish the ideological conditions of the Western expansionism in China.

Shund and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-War Poland

2003 ◽  
pp. 188-212
Author(s):  
Nathan Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Tabloid Press

This chapter describes Jewish popular reading in inter-war Poland, looking at shund and the Polish tabloid press. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the Polish press was developing rapidly, sensationalist newspapers began to proliferate. While this type of press had been widespread in the United States and western Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, it first emerged in Poland only in 1910, with Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier) in Kraków. In Warsaw, the first tabloid newspapers, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (Information and Telegraphic Courier) and Ekspres Poranny (Morning Express), appeared in 1922. In 1926, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny changed its name, now printed in red, to Kurier Czerwony (Red Courier). In time, the colour red became emblematic of sensationalist newspapers in Poland, and they were nicknamed czerwoniaki (Reds), similar to the ‘yellow’ press in the West.

{ Epilogue }

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-220
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The West ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Entire Nation ◽  
William Cullen ◽  
Fictional Story

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.

Food of the Woods and Plains

Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Wild Rice ◽  
Maple Syrup ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
Local Ecology ◽  
European Agriculture

The chapter is comparative, exploring how Erdrich’s Birchbark series offers a counternarrative to Wilder’s Little House books through Ojibwe food and foodways. It showcases the competing cultural values of the two nineteenth-century families in the stories as well as those of their twentieth-century writers. Wilder chronicles the transplantation of European methods of agriculture into the American Midwest with its attendant restructuring of the environment. Erdrich’s Birchbark series works as a challenging counter-history to Wilder’s colonialist affirmation and depicts a people whose foodways have long worked in concert with their local ecology (as the author’s research into Ojibwe practices of cultivating wild rice and, maple syrup, and berrying, as well as buffalo hunting, made clear.) Through food, Erdrich remaps the region, recreating it as it was before the invasion of European agriculture, producing a richer comprehension of the region’s food and foodways than Wilder’s pioneer vision.

Intra-Asian Competition and Collaboration against the West: The N.Y.K. Bombay Line, Tata & Sons, and Indian Cotton at the End of the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-293
Author(s):  
Shigeru Akita
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Chinese Market ◽  
The West ◽  
Cotton Industry ◽  
Export Industry ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Economic Exploitation

Abstract The traditional and orthodox interpretation of the British Raj (colonial rule in India) characterizes it in terms of the economic exploitation of India. However, recent historical studies have focused on the revival or development of the Indian cotton industry at the turn of the twentieth century. This article pays special attention to the rapid development of the Indian cotton-spinning industry as an export industry for the Chinese market and its implications for intra-Asian competition.

Future Impossible Communities

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Jossianna Arroyo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The West ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Key Interventions

This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.

GOOD TASTE AND SWEET ORDERING: DINING WITH MRS BEETON

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Beetham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Physical Sense ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Domestic Advice

In his bookDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in order to understand the workings of culture “in the restricted, normative sense” we must not only relate our discussion to the broad anthropological meanings of the concept, we must also relate it to “taste” in the physical sense. We must, he argues, bring “the elaborated taste for the most refined objects . . . back into relation with the elementary taste for the flavours of food” (Bourdieu 99). Bourdieu is writing of twentieth-century France and not nineteenth-century Britain. It may seem anachronistic to juxtapose a quotation from his work with one from an 1861 volume of domestic advice. However, his argument that social distinctions can be understood through a discussion of the material and cultural values attached to food resonates with Beeton's argument that “the rank which a people occupy . . . may be measured by their way of taking their meals.”

Lieutenant Henry Pottinger and 150 Years of Baloch History

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-148
Author(s):  
Brian Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
The West ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Vast Area

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the UK dispatched a number of envoys, agents and spies into the vast area between northern India and the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The information gathered by these adventurers provided the basis for British policy for the next hundred years, right down to the Great War of the twentieth century. Their publications have served as major sources of historical data, especially for Afghanistan, Iran and the area that later became Pakistan. But how their larger social context conditioned their work has not been examined sufficiently. In this chapter, I will focus on the adventures of Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, whose brief was one of the most challenging. However, he was well aware of being one of a number of Englishmen of different social classes who were doing similar things. What we learn about any one of them will shed additional light on the activities and significance of the work of the others, and in turn help us to understand the relationship between these countries and the West as it has evolved from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Brokering Culture and Power in a Media-Driven World: Parents of Adolescents in Northern Thailand

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (8) ◽  
pp. 972-990
Author(s):  
Jessica McKenzie ◽  
Joseph Rooney ◽  
Cassandra Stewart ◽  
Rachel Castellón ◽  
Cristina Landeros ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Cultural Socialization ◽  
Northern Thailand ◽  
Cultural Brokers ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
A Value ◽  
Context Data ◽  
Cultural Brokerage

Exposure to modern media alters cultural values and individual identities. Little is known, however, about whether and how media use alters cultural socialization processes in family relationships. In this study, 20 urban Thai parents of adolescent children took part in individual interviews in which they discussed media use in their families. Thematic analysis of interview data indicates that adolescents act as cultural brokers for their parents in a media-driven culture, and that this brokerage engenders adolescent agency, power, and the renegotiation of traditional age-based hierarchies in the Thai context. Data also indicate that parental power and authority are maintained and reasserted by way of parents placing restrictions on adolescent media use and mobilizing their children’s technological desires as opportunities to teach culturally salient lessons about necessity—a value that reflects central tenets of the late Thai King Bhumibol’s Sufficiency Economy and of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. Findings suggest that media use can both transform and maintain traditional cultural values and family dynamics in northern Thailand. More broadly, this study carries implications for the psychological science of globalization by applying the concept of cultural brokerage to communities undergoing rapid technological change.

The Recuperation of Sovereign Rights by Asian Countries, circa 1870–1945: From Capitulations to Equal Relations, the Dutch Experience

Itinerario ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. A. Bootsma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Far East ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Dutch Experience

Western expansion in Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century resulted in two different groups of Asian countries: those which fell victim to European colonialism and those which managed to maintain the basis of their sovereign rights. This contribution will concentrate on the second group, including not only the countries of the so-called Far East but those of the Middle Eastern Ottoman Empire as well. The link between these two otherwise separate worlds is the concept of consular jurisdiction. It originated in the Islamic world and was transplanted by the West to China, Japan and Siam in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, it became the touchstone in the relations of the Asian countries with the West in their struggle for equality.

NATO Retrospect

1961 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
The West ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Party Differences ◽  
The New Deal

NatoHas appeared under many labels since its creation — Guardian of Peace, Pawn of Power Politics, Savior of the West, and Harbinger of War. All of them probably have some validity. But no matter which sobriquet is most applicable, the most significant feature of the alliance may be that it has survived twelve years of continuous challenges. By its survival it has become the symbol of America's abandonment of isolationism. In an age in which foreign policy plays the kind of role in domestic politics that would have been unthinkable in the nineteenth century, NATO represents a coherence in foreign policy that transcends party differences. Conceived under the Republican 80th Congress, put into effect by President Truman and Secretary Acheson, and expanded by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles, NATO now takes its place with the New Deal as a major factor in American life in the mid-twentieth century.

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