Friends and rivals: knowledge, institutions, and relationships

Biruni ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
George Malagaris
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Ibn Sina ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Formation ◽  
Ongoing Support

Biruni appreciated that his research rested on intellectual achievements that originated many centuries earlier and required ongoing support to thrive. He often mentioned that Arabic science sprang from Near Eastern and Hellenistic traditions. In the medieval Islamic world, patrons promoted institutions of learning and developed relationships with clients, among them scholars with special capabilities, such as Biruni. Biruni saw himself as a participant in an interregional discourse which incorporated the thought of Muslim and non-Muslim peoples alike, with their multitude of ideas and languages. Yet, not all went harmoniously and disputes could resonate negatively far into the future, as in the case of Biruni’s debate with Ibn Sina. Whether on the institutional or individual level, or through affective or antagonistic relations, these dynamics of intellectual ferment reveal a social history of intellectual formation in Biruni’s age.

Book Reviews

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 1032-1034
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Global History ◽  
Financial Bubbles ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
The Future ◽  
Boom And Bust ◽  
History Of

Maria Stella Chiaruttini of Department of Economic and Social History University of Vienna of reviews “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles” by William Branch and John D. Turner. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the history of financial bubbles, proposing a new metaphor and analytical framework that describes their causes, explains what determines their consequences, and may help predict them in the future.”

Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004, 248 pp., $55, £35, ISBN 1-86064-865-7.

2004 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 856-858
Author(s):  
Eric Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social History ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
History Of

Sami Zubaida's Law and Power in the Islamic World is a fascinating politico-social history of the relations between Islamic law and the procession of political masters who have ruled the Middle East since the Prophet's death. One message is clear: the notion of an omnipotent shariءa, passed from caliph to caliph for fourteen centuries, is a myth held by both Islamist radicals and their Western critics.

The Future of Ethnicity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Bryce
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Future ◽  
Transatlantic Relationship ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
Plural Society ◽  
History Of Migration

The introduction discusses the importance of the future in shaping ethnic communities in Buenos Aires. Underlining the significance of temporality and the future for the social history of migration offers new perspectives on how state institutions developed, how a culturally plural society formed, and how immigrants and families participated in that society. Ethnicity is an unstable category worthy of analysis in itself, and that, as a result, ethnic communities should similarly be studied with that point in mind. The introduction also discusses the transnational turn in German historiography, which has highlighted how people and ideas outside the nation-state influenced conceptions of the nation during the Imperial and Weimar periods. German-speaking immigrants in Buenos Aires actively embraced the transatlantic relationship that groups in central Europe sought to establish, but they had their own ideas about their relationship with their nation of heritage and their nation of residence.

Social and Environmental History in the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Warde
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée

This chapter takes seriously the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’—the concept of the period of history from which human activities have had global effects on the environment—and looks at it historically, across the longue durée, noting that the environment is itself a concept with a history of its own. The chapter argues that environmental history is very largely entwined with social history and that this poses a challenge for historians. Should we think of ‘the social’ and ‘the environmental’ as two different (albeit connected) spheres, or should we reconceptualize what ‘society’ and ‘environment’ might mean, both historically and for the future?

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. xiv-2
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Balentine
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Functions ◽  
Analytical Approaches

The conceit in the title of this volume is that ritual, however expansively it may be defined, is ineluctably tethered to religion and worship. It has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order—numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other—gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. The focus of this Handbook is on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, particularly on the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Near Eastern antecedents. Within this context, attention will be given to the development of ideas in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinking, but only insofar as they connect with or extend the trajectory of biblical precedents. The volume reflects a wide range of analytical approaches to ancient texts, inscriptions, iconography, and ritual artifacts. It examines the social history and cultural knowledge encoded in rituals and explores the way rituals shape and are shaped by politics, economics, ethical imperatives, and religion itself. Toward this end, the volume is organized into six major sections: Historical Contexts, Interpretive Approaches, Ritual Elements (participants, places, times, objects, practices), Cultural and Theological Perspectives, History of Interpretation, Social-Cultural Functions, and Theology and Theological Heritage.

Responsible for Destiny

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 198-226
Author(s):  
Katherine Ward ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

Historizing is the way Dasein takes up possibilities and roles to project itself into the future. It is why we experience continuity throughout our lives, and it is the basis for historicality – our sense of a more general continuity of “history.” In Being and Time, Heidegger identifies both inauthentic and authentic modes of historizing that give rise, respectively, to inauthentic and authentic modes of histori­cality. He focuses on historizing at the individual level but gestures at a communal form of historizing. In this paper, I develop the concept of co-historizing in both its authentic and inauthentic modes. I argue that Heidegger’s unarticulated concept of inauthentic co-historizing is what necessitated the planned (but unfinished) second half of Being and Time – the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.” I consider what it means to take responsibility for our destiny as a people and specifically as a community of philosophers.

Construction of the racialised and colonised other: global comparatives in imperial and colonial archaeology

Antiquity ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (369) ◽  
pp. 823-826
Author(s):  
Uzma Z. Rizvi
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Military Government ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Convincing Argument ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Colonial Archaeology ◽  
French Military ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Whereas Sarr and Savoy (2018) focus on artefacts taken from various African countries after 1885, Incidental archaeologists, considers “the first four decades of the French conquest and pacification of Algeria under the authority of the French military Government General” (p. 24). Throughout the volume, Effros presents a convincing argument in which the social history of military infrastructure lays the groundwork for the future of the French civilising mission. She is clear about the magnitude of the task that the book is engaged in; it provides links between early French archaeologists and epigraphers and their place within the development of the disciplines. It also considers the ways by which romanticised narratives, created by French officers, about the classical archaeology of Algeria led to irresponsible destruction of antiquity, violence against local resistant populations and classifications that became constitutive of colonial archaeological interest and practice.

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