Between Celebration and Ambivalence

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Ross Kane
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
North American ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter’s intellectual history of syncretism examines the field of religious studies from the 1960s to the present. Religious studies’ engagement with syncretism shows its struggles with race and colonialism, since the designation “syncretism” has worked within the framing of a center and periphery that sees white European and North American cultures as central and other regions as peripheral. Its engagement with syncretism also shows the field’s tensions over ways one might responsibly interpret other cultures. In particular, is a social scientific approach to research or a humanist approach more respectful of informants’ cultures? Finally, the chapter explores disagreements about whether to use the term “syncretism” at all.

Clio’s New Cultural Turn and the Rediscovery of Tradition in Asia

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Cultural Turn

This study describes the changes in historiography from the positivistic conception of history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the social scientific approach to hermeneutics and the search for meanings in contemporary cultural studies. While discussing how intellectual history has been redefined in terms of cultures as structures of meaning, the essay emphasizes the importance of the re-discovery of tradition, especially the study of Chinese history in its own terms as a tradition with it own cultural characteristics.

Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

WHY LITTLE THINKERS ARE A BIG DEAL: THE RELEVANCE OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 269-280
Author(s):  
CORINNE T. FIELD
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Over Time

Why should intellectual historians care about children? Until recently, the answer was that adults’ ideas about children matter, particularly for the history of education and the history of conceptions of the family, but children's ideas are of little significance. Beginning with Philippe Ariès in the 1960s, historians took to exploring how and why adults’ ideas about children changed over time. In these early histories of childhood, young people figured as consumers of culture and objects of socialization, but not as producers or even conduits of ideas.

Liberalism Is Not Enough

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Marie Averbeck
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Initial Content ◽  
The 1960S

In this intellectual history of the fraught relationship between race and poverty in the 1960s, Robin Marie Averbeck offers a sustained critique of the fundamental assumptions that structured liberal thought and action in postwar America. Focusing on the figures associated with “Great Society liberalism” like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, David Riesman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Averbeck argues that these thinkers helped construct policies that never truly attempted a serious attack on the sources of racial inequality and injustice. In Averbeck’s telling, the Great Society’s most notable achievements--the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--came only after unrelenting and unprecedented organizing by black Americans made changing the inequitable status quo politically necessary. And even so, the discourse about poverty created by liberals had inherently conservative qualities. As Liberalism Is Not Enough reveals, liberalism’s historical relationship with capitalism shaped both the initial content of liberal scholarship on poverty and its ultimate usefulness to a resurgent conservative movement.

Al Fārūqī between the History of Religions and Islamic Theology

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract Ismāʿīl Rājī al Fārūqī (1921–1986) played a considerable role in the academic study of Islam as it was developing in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper is a critical examination of how he employed the categories of religion and religious studies in his scholarly, dialogical, and Islamist work. The paper follows his ideas of religious traditions, their truth claims, and ethical engagement in the world. For Al Fārūqī, these constituted the main foundations of all religions, and provided a distinctive approach to the study of religions. Al Fārūqī was critical of the then prevailing approaches, asserting that they were either too subjective or too reductionist. He offered an approach to the study of religions based on a Kantian approach to values. Al Fārūqī’s method and theory, however, could not escape the bias and prejudice that he tried to avoid. Following his arguments, I show that his reflections on religion and its systematic study in academia charted an approach to religions, but also provided a language for a particular Islamic theology that delegitimized other approaches, particularly experiential ones, in modern Islam.

scholarly journals JOHN STUART MILL: LAW, MORALITY, AND LIBERTY

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 879-891 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. S. JONES
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

Ever since the resurgence of the sub-discipline in the 1960s, the foremost achievements of the history of political thought have dealt with the early modern period. The classics of the genre—Laslett's edition of Locke, Pocock'sMachiavellian Moment, Skinner'sFoundations—have all dealt with that period, and it is hard to think of any works on the nineteenth century that have quite the same stature. Of all the canonical political thinkers, John Stuart Mill is perhaps the one who has proved resistant to the contextualist method. There is a vast literature on Mill, and many historians have written penetratingly about him—Stefan Collini, William Thomas, Donald Winch—but there has hitherto been no historically grounded study of his thought to rival, say, John Dunn on Locke or Skinner on Hobbes, or even a host of learned monographs. Before Varouxakis's book, no study of Mill had been published in Cambridge University Press's flagship series in intellectual history, Ideas in Context. But all that has changed. In these two works, published more or less concurrently, we have two triumphs for contextualism. They demonstrate in impressive detail just why it matters in reading Mill to get the history right.

scholarly journals The Study of Religion and the Canadian Social Order

2021 ◽  
pp. 000842982110419
Author(s):  
David Seljak
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Religion In Canada

In his book From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada, Aaron Hughes provides a unique analysis of how the study of religion developed throughout the history of Canada by examining the evolution of its institutional context, that is, from faith-based seminaries and theological colleges to secular departments of religious studies. He situates these institutional changes in the development of the Canadian social order. In this uniquely Canadian context, the study of religion moved, Hughes notes, “from religious exclusion to secularism, from Christocentrism to multiculturalism, and from theology to secular religious studies.” While this is an important and original argument, Hughes offers only a cursory analysis of the unique developments in francophone Quebec universities (as he readily admits) and ignores the study of religion in other disciplines. Moreover, while Hughes traces the motivation for the transformation of the study of religion in the 1960s to the new ethno-religious diversity of Canada, I argue that it should be traced to a growing liberal cosmopolitanism that had infiltrated Canadian society, including its churches, seminaries, and theological colleges. Hughes does not adequately explore the religious roots of why Canadian Christians decided to secularize the study of religion. Finally, while Hughes examines patriarchy and colonialism in his analysis of the study of religion in earlier periods, he drops these topics in his discussion of the secularization of the study of religion, which did not address either of these issues sufficiently.

scholarly journals Legitimizing Claims of Special Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
David G. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
Significant Function ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Special Knowledge ◽  
Social Scientific

A significant function of the category “religion” is demarcating and insulating particular claims of special knowledge — but too often, Religious Studies serves to mystify and defend this function, rather than critically analysing it. Drawing on categories in which claims of special knowledge are central, including Gnosticism, conspiracy theories and esotericism, this paper will look at the history of Religious Studies scholars operating within epistemes which it should be critiquing. Yet a focus on multiple and overlapping knowledges, and competition over epistemic capital, suggests a possible future for the social-scientific study of religion.

scholarly journals LENGTHY REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORICAL FATE OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA. REVIEW ON THE BOOK: PASCHENYA V. N. INTELLIGENTSIA, ITS ROLE IN THE HISTORY OF RUSSIA AND CRIMEA

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (73) (3) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
V. V. Akimchenkov
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Historical Essay ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
History Of ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia

V. N. Paschenyi’s attempt to present a historical essay on the fate of the Russian intelligentsia in 1783-1991 is analyzed. The author’s concept is considered. The conclusion is made about the discrepancy between the title and the content of the book, about his primitivization of the scientific approach to the history of Crimean studies. Numerous factual and conceptual errors of V. N. Paschenyi are named. It is proved that the book is a pile of facts from Russian history, sometimes unrelated to each other. The lack of reliance on sources on the history of Crimean studies, the author’s ignorance of the historiography of the issue led him to create an untenable version of the monograph on the intellectual history of the Crimea.

MODERNISMS ENDLESS: IRONIES OF THE AMERICAN MID-CENTURY

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-219
Author(s):  
DANIEL WICKBERG
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Ayn Rand ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Problems ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Intellectual History

Mid-twentieth century American intellectual history is in the midst of a boom; a younger generation of historians, now half a century distant from the era, and less inclined than their immediate forerunners to be committed to a vision of the 1960s as a critical turning point in modern culture, is reshaping what has been an underdeveloped field. Recent studies of thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Ayn Rand, Lionel Trilling, and Whitaker Chambers, and subjects such as postcapitalist social thought and pollsters in mass society, to name a few, have regenerated interest in an arena that had once been dominated by studies of the New York Intellectuals and Richard Pells's useful summaries and evaluations of prominent intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The newer intellectual history of this period appears to be premised on several ideas: that the so-called “liberal consensus” of the era was an ideological product of liberalism itself, rather than an adequate description of the contours of thought; that thinking in terms of clear and sharp distinctions between right and left doesn't help us understand the ways in which ideas, sensibilities, and intellectual commitments were configured at mid-century; that there is a great deal more continuity in social, political, and cultural thought than an image of the 1960s as cultural watershed would allow; and that the mid-century decades are, in the most profound sense, the first years of our own time, with all the characteristic epistemic, moral, and critical problems that have characterized thought and culture in the world in which contemporary Americans live. What the Progressive Era was for mid-century historians and intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry May, the mid-century, and particularly the early Cold War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, is, for the historian of today, the root of the destabilizing conundrums of modernity, particularly the puzzle of the role of critical intellect in a mass-mediated environment of socialized knowledge, feeling, and being.

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