Lord Mansfield’s Voices

Author(s):  
Carolyn Steedman

This chapter examines the emotions experienced in archives by historians and other scholars. It discusses the way in which different disciplinary formations inculcate and teach emotional responses to things, including things found in archives. Voice—language—is treated as a thing—a material object—around which emotion is articulated; other, past emotional responses inhere in it. The case study is Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield (1705–93), who, in many of the cases he adjudicated, wrote his own notes as a kind of a play script, transcribing the evidence of plaintiffs and defendants so that they appear to speak directly out of the past; a long-lost courtroom echoes with the clamorous, insistent voices of poor and middling-sort people. The chapter describes the effect of these voices on the researcher, whose listening is dictated by the accreted stories of the poor that have circulated since the end of the eighteenth century.

PMLA ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Margaret Mead

Among the variety of contributions which modern anthropological research might be able to offer to members of this Association, I plan to stress only one, that which anthropological studies of whole cultures can make to those whose task it is to cherish and cultivate the arts, and especially literature, in the contemporary world. Just because we, the anthropologists, specialize in primitive, usually quite small, societies and take as our focus communities of a few hundred people with an oral tradition which can be no more elaborate than the memories of those few, we are able to include within our study many aspects of human experience which the scholar dealing with a period or trend within a complex high civilization accepts on authority or takes for granted. Yet, to the extent that the scholar who works with the eighteenth century in England must so take for granted the economic arrangements of agriculture or the methods of child care in the nursery, he or she is cut off from watching the intimate interplay between the way a farm laborer is paid or a child rebuked and the images of sophisticated literature, within which these experiences of the poor or immature may be represented by a chain of transmuted images or an explicit counterpoint which cuts them off from the developed consciousness of the small literate elite who inherited and cultivated the literary tradition of the past. Short of time, and very often short of materials, historians have only recently thought it worth while to consider the “short and simple annals of the poor” or the life of children who were neither the subjects of later literary elaboration by a Samuel Butler or a Proust, nor had even the dubious claims of a Daisy Ashford.


2003 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Bayliss

Over the past twenty years, the focus of development policy has shifted from the state to the private sector. Privatisation is now central to utility reform in much of SSA. This paper sets out developments in water privatisation and reviews the evidence regarding its impact. Water privatisation has been carried out to some degree in at least fourteen countries in the region, and many other governments are at various stages in the privatisation process. However, in some cases privatisation has been difficult to achieve, and a few countries have successfully provided water under public ownership. Evidence on the impact of privatisation indicates that the performance of privatised utilities has not changed dramatically, but that enterprises have continued to perform well, or not so well, depending both on their state when they were privatised and on the wider economic context. The evidence points to internal improvements in terms of financial management. However, governments face considerable difficulties in attracting investors and regulating private utilities. Furthermore, privatisation fails to address some of the fundamental constraints affecting water utilities in SSA, such as finance, the politicised nature of service delivery, and lack of access for the poor. A preoccupation with ownership may obscure the wider goals of reform.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Tupman

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess what an overview of theoretical literature and case study material can tell us about the different ways crime has been organised in the past in different cultures and whether this has any impact on the ways in which crime may be organised in the present and the future. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on an examination of Mcintyre’s work on how crime is organised and later political, economic and civil society views of criminality. Brief discussion of case studies involving the UK, The Netherlands, the Arab world, Ethiopia and Russia is used to see how crime was organised there in the past. Findings – There is a greater variety of variables in the way crime was organised historically than McIntyre suggests, and an examination of civil society might pay greater dividends than even looking at politics or economic aspects of organised crime. Research limitations/implications – The study is preliminary. More historical case study material needs to be accessed. Originality/value – There are many research case studies, particularly at PhD level and in subjects other than criminology, such as history, language studies and cultural studies generally, which have not been brought together to present an overall picture. This paper is a first step in that direction.


During the past decade, there has been a rapid growth in studies of the physical properties of the asteroids. In consequence, there now exists a much better basis than there was hitherto for comparing the properties of meteorites, determined in the laboratory, with those of asteroids. The way in which recent measurements of asteroids and meteorites can be interrelated to determine the nature and history of a meteorite parent body is illustrated via a case study of the asteroid Vesta and the Ca-rich achondrite Kapoeta.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 139-156
Author(s):  
François Duchesneau

Using a method which emphasizes the importance of the explanatory systems of the past for the history of science, this article studies eighteenth-century theories of irritability and muscular contraction. The main focus is on Albrecht von Heller and the way his theories are analogous to Newtonian "principles."


Author(s):  
Martina Domines Veliki

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.


Chronos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Rand Abou Ackl

In this article, I discuss a proskynetarion icon of the Holy Land and Jerusalem, called the Kharetat al mousafer, located in Saydnaia Monastery in Syria. The relationship between pilgrimages and proskynetaria, which served as a tool of Christian propaganda, will be discussed with a focus on the Saydnaia proskynetarion as a case study, showing the way of the Melkite painter, Issa al-Qudsi depicted the Holy Land topography. In this icon, the Holy Sepulchre (Church of Resurrection) was also represented, opening a discussion around proskynetaria in Syria during the eighteenth century.


Experiment ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
Maria Taroutina

Abstract Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov’s seminal publications on the Stil Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel’s œuvre “between East and West” by demonstrating that the artist moved beyond the narrowly circumscribed nationalist agenda typically attributed to the work he produced at the Abramtsevo and Talashkino artistic colonies. In addition to indigenous sources, Vrubel also assimilated a number of external artistic influences such as Jugendstil, medieval Gothic and Renaissance ceramics, Japanese and Chinese porcelain, and Egyptian and Assyrian art. Through a close analysis of Vrubel’s orientalist paintings, as well as his cycle of folkloric works such as Mikula Selyaninovich and the Volga (1896), I demonstrate that his aesthetic program crossed multiple boundaries: geographical, temporal, material, and institutional. Through a complex renegotiation of the global and the local, the past and the present, and the traditional and contemporary, Vrubel arrived at a strikingly modernist visual syntax, which paved the way for an entire generation of avant-garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others. Using Vrubel as a case study, this article thus proposes to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern Russian art—a set of ostensibly fixed dichotomies that Dmitry Sarabyanov had repeatedly and successfully challenged in his own work.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Buzelin

Abstract Over the past ten years, the publishing and book selling industries (in Canada and elsewhere) have undergone a process of hyper-concentration that seems to threaten the future of independent publishing. How might this changing environment reflect on the attitudes of independent publishers toward translation and on the way they handle translation projects? This is the question this article seeks to examine. It is based on the first case study of a research programme that consists in following, by use of an ethnographic approach, the production process of literary translations in three independent Montréal-based publishing houses: from negotiations over the acquisition of translation rights to the launch of the translation. The article is divided into three parts. The first explains the rationale, methodology and ethics underlying this research; the second part tells the story of the title under study in a way that highlights the range of actors involved in the production of this translation, their own constraints and concerns, as well as the way publishing, editorial and linguistic/stylistic decisions intertwine. Based on this particular case, the third part discusses some of the strategies a publisher and his collaborators may devise in order to produce literary translations in an independent but network-based, competitive way. Particular emphasis is placed on strategies of cooperation such as co-translation and co-edition publishing, as well as on the role played by literary agents in the allocation of translation rights.


Author(s):  
Bjørnar Olsen

It is common to claim that the past is gone, leaving us with a void that can only be filled by our historical reconstructions. Things, however, object to this modern, historicist conception of an ended past. By stubbornly lingering on they expose us to a present past which constantly gathers and thus sediments into potentially new environments of memory. Drawing on so-called symmetrical archaeology, this chapter explores how the conception of a gathering past allows-and impels-us to rethink the way we conceive of memory and the archaeological exposition of the past. Using the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden as a case study, the chapter considers how the ruins of our own time may trigger critical and involuntary memories-memories that illuminate what conventional cultural history has discarded.


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