The Natural History and Cultural History of La Source, 1866

Author(s):  
Felicia McCarren

At its debut in 1866, La Source already had it all: dagger-wielding Muslims dominating veiled women, a flower promising hybridity in a green ecology, and the death of the white spirit, the Source, recuperated as a force for regeneration. In the ballet’s botany, and its cultural thermodynamics, the plot becomes a fable of science and the performance its demonstration.

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 358-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Pugliano

Famed for his collection of drawings of naturalia and his thoughts on the relationship between painting and natural knowledge, it now appears that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) also pondered specifically color and pigments, compiling not only lists and diagrams of color terms but also a full-length unpublished manuscript entitled De coloribus or Trattato dei colori. Introducing these writings for the first time, this article portrays a scholar not so much interested in the materiality of pigment production, as in the cultural history of hues. It argues that these writings constituted an effort to build a language of color, in the sense both of a standard nomenclature of hues and of a lexicon, a dictionary of their denotations and connotations as documented in the literature of ancients and moderns. This language would serve the naturalist in his artistic patronage and his natural historical studies, where color was considered one of the most reliable signs for the correct identification of specimens, and a guarantee of accuracy in their illustration. Far from being an exception, Aldrovandi’s ‘color sensibility’ spoke of that of his university-educated nature-loving peers.



2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 500-503
Author(s):  
Larry Arnhart

John Hibbing's essay is a persuasive defense of biopolitical research. I argue, however, that Hibbing does not go far enough in recognizing the broad vision of biopolitical science as a science of political animals. We need to see this as a science that moves through three levels of deep history: the natural history of the political species, the cultural history of a political community, and the biographical history of political actors in a community. I illustrate this by discussing Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at these three levels of biopolitical science.


2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMUEL J. M. M. ALBERTI

The cultural history of museums is crucial to the understanding of nineteenth-century natural history and its place in wider society, and yet although many of the larger metropolitan institutions are well charted, there remains very little accessible work on the hundreds of English collections outside London and the ancient universities. Natural history museums have been studied as part of the imperial project and as instruments of national governments; this paper presents an intermediary level of control, examining the various individuals and institutions who owned and managed museums at a local level in provincial England, and their intended audience constituencies. The shifting forms and functions of collections in Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester are studied in the hands of private collectors, learned societies, municipal authorities and civic colleges. I argue that the civic elite retained control of museums throughout the nineteenth century, and although the admission criteria of these various groups became ostensibly more inclusive, privileged access continued to be granted to expert and esteemed visitors.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 257-304
Author(s):  
Lauri Linask

The paper organizes the topic of signs in Lev Vygotsky’s various writings into a coherent whole in order to study signs’ role in child development. Vygotsky related conventional signs that have their origin in interpersonal communication, and are subject to cultural history taking place over generations during historical time, to psychological functioning of individual human beings. Vygotsky’s “natural history of signs” is the study of how symbolic activity appears and develops. The paper outlines the process of inclusion of symbols within the behaviour of the child and gives an account of various changes in psychological functions and their interrelations that it brings along. In cultural development specifically human forms of behaviour appear, and children’s relationship to social and material environment is changed qualitatively. Vygotsky outlines the formation of sign use and analyses its developmental steps. Vygotsky’s approach explains how the use of various sign systems shapes both the cognitive processes in the person, the child, and the cognitive development as a whole. Vygotsky’s approach to signs is presented within the conceptual framework of its time.


Antiquity ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 30 (118) ◽  
pp. 68-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sullivan

Little more than thirty years ago, when a writer was invited to contribute an article to an encyclopaedia on the Stone Age in the Philippines, it was possible for the American Museum of Natural History to inform him that, so far as was known, there was no Stone Age in the Philippines. That the position has so greatly altered during the last three decades is largely due to the indefatigable efforts of an American collector and ethnologist, Professor H. Otley Beyer, to whom we chiefly owe such systematic archaeological surveys as have been carried out in the archipelago. Much of his work, however, remains unpublished or is not generally available, so there may be some value in a short summary of what archaeology has revealed of the cultural history of the Philippines during these three decades.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannes Rakoczy

Abstract The natural history of our moral stance told here in this commentary reveals the close nexus of morality and basic social-cognitive capacities. Big mysteries about morality thus transform into smaller and more manageable ones. Here, I raise questions regarding the conceptual, ontogenetic, and evolutionary relations of the moral stance to the intentional and group stances and to shared intentionality.


2001 ◽  
Vol 120 (5) ◽  
pp. A128-A128 ◽  
Author(s):  
H MALATY ◽  
D GRAHAM ◽  
A ELKASABANY ◽  
S REDDY ◽  
S SRINIVASAN ◽  
...  

2001 ◽  
Vol 120 (5) ◽  
pp. A366-A366
Author(s):  
C MAZZEO ◽  
F AZZAROLI ◽  
A COLECCHIA ◽  
S DISILVIO ◽  
A DORMI ◽  
...  

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