The participant-photographer

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-195
Author(s):  
Christopher Morton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
Photographic Record ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Visual Engagement ◽  
Insight Into

Chapter 7 examines Evans-Pritchard’s photographic record of the Nuer rite of gorot, witnessed in 1936, and raises questions about the relationship between photography and participant-observation as a core research method in early twentieth-century anthropology. The chapter explores the question of why Evans-Pritchard’s record of this ritual is characterized by a sustained visual engagement with two distinct stages of the rite, and why other aspects of the ceremony are not recorded. In order to explore this question, the chapter proposes the model of Evans-Pritchard as ‘participant-photographer’—a model that understands his involvement with the ritual as being composed of periods of photographic engagement interposed with observation and note-taking. Placing Evans-Pritchard back into the field through a careful examination of his fieldwork records of a particular event enables us to gain a new insight into not just his fieldwork methods, but his proximity, involvement, and perspective on key elements of the ritual as they unfolded.

The Changing Face of Irish Ireland: Séamus Ó Grianna's and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fictions of the Donegal Gaeltacht

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-380
Author(s):  
Ríona Nic Congáil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Insight Into

Séamus Ó Grianna and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, whose lifespans overlapped only briefly, rank among the most prolific Irish writers of the twentieth century. Their bilingualism, moreover, offers them access to two languages, cultures, and viewpoints. Their shared interest in the Donegal Gaeltacht during the revivalist period, and their use of fiction to explore and represent it, provide their readers with a remarkable insight into the changing ideologies of twentieth-century Ireland, and particularly Irish-Ireland, touching on broad issues that are linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, and spatial. This essay begins by analyzing the narrative similarities between Ó Grianna's Mo Dhá Róisín and Ní Dhuibhne's Hiring Fair Trilogy, and proceeds to examine how both writers negotiate historical fact, the Irish language, the performance of Gaelic culture, the burgeoning women's movement, and the chasm between rural and urban Ireland of the revival. Through this approach, the essay demonstrates that the fictions of these two writers reveal as much about their own agendas and the dominant ideas of the epoch in which they were writing, as they do about life in the Donegal Gaeltacht in the early twentieth century.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Japanese Phenomenology

2015 ◽  
pp. 630-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tōru Tani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Nishida Kitaro ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter is an introduction to Japanese phenomenology, which was brought to Japan in the early twentieth century by Nishida Kitarō and others, soon after Husserl launched the movement in Germany. Beginning with a brief historical and cultural overview, the chapter focuses on four major phenomenologists: Sakabe Megumi, Nitta Yoshihiro, Noé Keiichi, and Washida Kiyokazu. Each of the four, each in a different way, articulates a fundamental aspect of Japanese phenomenology: the criticism of subject-object dualism and the attending idea of an autonomous being-in-itself. All attempt to inquire more deeply into the nondual dimensions underlying that dualism: Sakabe through an inquiry into betweenness (aida or awai), encounter, and reflection (utsushi); Nitta by probing the depths of “verticality” and “mediality”; Noé by investigating the relationship between narrative and experience; and Washida by transgressing the borders of philosophy and pursuing more “reversibility” in human relationships.

Border Blurs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reconstruction ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.

‘Even If You Don’t Want to Drink, You Still Have to Drink’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Invented Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.

Of Ears and Norms

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-74
Author(s):  
Leonardo Cardoso
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Sound Level ◽  
International Standards ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
History Of ◽  
Level Meter

This chapter focuses on several attempts to mobilize sound-politics via a range of techniques, devices, and national and international standards. I consider how experts have managed to stabilize two central actors: ears and norms. In the early twentieth century, experts generated the “average normal ear,” which I call Ear 1.0, the first actor. The second actor is the sound level meter, the Ear 2.0, a black box responsible for emulating Ear 1.0 and conveying reliable quantified information. As other authors have already traced the fascinating history of the stabilization of Ears 1.0 and 2.0 in the early twentieth century, I simply summarize some of these debates. The second section focuses on the Brazilian Technical Standards Association (ABNT). In the 2010s, experts faced the daunting task of revising two technical standards for assessing environmental noise. As I show, drawing on participant observation, interviews, and minutes of meetings between 2011 and 2017, this task was difficult because these revisions involved the input of groups with different interests and different understandings of what a technical standard should do.

7. The fortunes of ritual

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stephenson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Causal Connection ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Ritual Theory ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Functionalism ◽  
The Relationship

‘The fortunes of ritual’ charts the history of ritual, its study, and its reception beginning with the Confucian text Liji. This outlines means to counter humanity's fallen state through devices, guides, and practices called li, which are imagined as knots binding society together. Jumping to Enlightenment Europe, ritual came to be viewed as staid and outmoded, a superstitious remnant of a primitive past, a past that prevented humanity from truly advancing. In the early twentieth century, ritual was given some credibility via the Durkhemian tradition of social functionalism and Julian Huxley's causal connection between society's ills and ineffectual ritualization in society. Recent ritual theory articulates the relationship between ritual and group solidarity as seen through participation in contemporary festivals.

scholarly journals Disputing ‘market value’: the Bombay Improvement Trust and the reshaping of a speculative land market in early twentieth-century Bombay

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Shabnum Tejani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Market Value ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Public Purpose ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Future Value ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.

scholarly journals The Age of the ‘Socialist-Wahhabi-Nationalist Revolutionary’: The Fusion of Islamic Fundamentalism and Socialism in Tatar Nationalist Thought, 1898–1917

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Islamic Fundamentalism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship among radical socialism, Islamic balanced reform and Tatar national identity in early twentieth-century Russia. In contrast to previous studies, which either have studied these various intellectual strains individually or have positioned Islamic legal and theological reforms as precursors to the emergence of a secular national identity among Kazan’s Tatars, I will argue that Tatar intellectuals’ positions on theology, socio-economic organization, and national identity were mutually reinforcing. Supporters of nationalism also embraced socialism and Islamic balanced reform because they saw all three ideologies as egalitarian and liberating.

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