The Document in the Digital

2018 ◽  
pp. 209-273
Author(s):  
Tarangini Sriraman

Considered within the history of documenting welfare beneficiaries in India, the Aadhaar is unprecedented in that the unique number is a digital, portable identity and part of ‘a larger administrative and technological regime’ (Bennett and Lyon 2008) of cloud-based authentication. This chapter argues, however, that the production of this identifier has necessitated miming existing bureaucratic habits of inscription and mobilizing the rhetoric, ritualism and the materiality common to processes of issuing and verifying identification documents. Far from being an ID that is insulated from the host of administratively restrictive genres of identification documents like ration cards and caste certificates, the Aadhaar is relevant only within a paper-based matrix of elite norms of proof, urban spatiality of power brokerage, and the politics of staking out regional identities. Based on an intensive ethnography around a rural poor community, the chapter shows that the current welfare ecology still contingent on address norms requires not so much an electronic number identifier but rather a dynamic interplay of popular, quasi-legal, and legal documents of identity.

Author(s):  
Tom Johnson

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of ‘legal pluralism’. Law in Common provides a way of apprehending this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. The first half of the book explores four ‘local legal cultures’ – in the countryside, towns and cities, the maritime world, and Forests – that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law. The second half of the book turns to examine ‘common legalities’, widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, it offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives. Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century through legality.


2001 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-175
Author(s):  
NIMROD HURVITZ ◽  
EDWARD FRAM

Professional jurists are often inquisitive about the subject matter of their calling and in the course of their careers may well develop fascinating insights into the law and those who interpret it. Their employers, however, be they governments, corporations, firms, or private clients, rarely show similar enthusiasm for such insights unless the hours spent pondering the social or historical significance of this or that legal view have a contemporary value that justifies the lawyer's fee.Thankfully, other members of society are rewarded for mining the legal records of the past. For legal historians, the search often focuses on the changing legal ideas and how legal doctrine develops over time to meet the changing needs of societies. Yet because the law generally deals with concrete matters – again, because jurists are paid by people who are unlikely to remunerate those who simply while away their hours making up legal cases – it offers a reservoir of information that can be used, albeit with caution, in fields other than just the history of the law.A partial reconstruction of the law of any given time and place is among the more obvious historical uses of legal documents but statutes, practical decisions, and even theoretical texts can be used to advance other forms of the historical endeavour. Legal works often reflect the values both of jurists and society-at-large, for while the law creates social values it is not immune to changes in these very values.


TECHNOLOGOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 79-90
Author(s):  
Kamenskikh Mikhail

The article is devoted to studying Russian Bulgarians living in the Urals in the 1940s with the help of archive materials of the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions as well as Perm Krai. During the Great Patriotic War the USS Rcitizens of Bulgarian origin, like many other peoples, were subject to repressions which meant enrollment in labour army and deporting every single Bulgarian of the Crimea. As a result of the semeasures, a significant number of Bulgarians were moved to the territory of the modern Urals. The deported Bulgarians settled in areas of logging (forest exploitation) in the north of Molotov and Sverdlovsk regions, and members of the labour army were employed in the trust organization «Chelyabmetallurgstroi». The Bulgarians were deported along with other peoples of the Crimea. They did not form compact settlement in the new areas but managed to preserve their traditional culture. Some families were even able to organize permanent lodging in the Urals, pursue a career and contribute to the development of the region. The author is convinced that the judicial legal documents kept in archives as well as field trip research results may serve as a significant but not sufficiently appreciated source of investigating the history of deporting Russian Bulgarians. The topicality of the sources grew after the year 2020 when the 75-years’ period of storing documents of the year 1945 expired. Autobiographies, biographic information, interrogation protocols enable to obtain a detailed reconstruction of deportation circumstances and the process of enrollment into labour army, and to see these events through the prism of the repressed people themselves. Researching the history of repression, inparticular – repression of the Bulgarians – has revealed how complex and controversial the policy of the soviet state towards certain peoples during the Great Patriotic War was.


1988 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 409-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janette Mcmillan ◽  
Joseph Noone ◽  
Tom Tombaugh

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has made a wide impact not limited to those persons who have or are likely to contact it. A case history of a man with a near-delusional belief he had AIDS is presented to exemplify the individual issues that concern about AIDS may raise. Thorough exploration of the dynamic interplay of biological, psychological and social factors is recommended in each case before reassurance may be effective. Psychiatric consultation should assist in developing optimal intervention in each individual case.


Author(s):  
Belinda Jack

Reading is an interpretative act and this is not simply the case when it comes to what we think of as more complex writing—religious scriptures, philosophical texts, legal documents, or literary works. The simplest language can need interpretation. Hermeneutics is the discipline that concerns itself with the theory and methodology of interpretation. Its history is crucial to the history of reading and brings to the fore the myriad ways in which reading has been understood across time and space. ‘Making sense of reading’ considers the relationships between rhetoric and translation with reading, and then discusses the study of literature, modern literary criticism, and the concept of rereading.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 500-527
Author(s):  
Michael Bycroft

Abstract Economic historians have shown that the regulations of craft guilds were a source of innovation rather than inertia in the economy of early modern Europe. Historians of science have shown that craftsmen contributed to the scientific revolution in the same time and place. But very little is known about the role of guild regulation in intellectual (as opposed to social, political and economic) change. This paper shows that regulation went hand-in-hand with intellectual change at the Paris guild of goldsmiths in the decades around 1700. In this period the wardens of the guild developed sophisticated techniques for organizing and disseminating their large archive of legal documents. They also published two books on the natural history of precious stones that broke with the learned tradition of writing on this topic. The reform of the archive and the reform of natural history were undertaken by the same goldsmiths, for similar reasons, using analogous literary techniques.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maaike van Berkel ◽  
Léon Buskens ◽  
Petra M. Sijpesteijn
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-49
Author(s):  
Peter J. Grund ◽  
Matti Peikola ◽  
Johanna Rastas ◽  
Wen Xin

In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters <u> and <v> went through a change from a positionally constrained system (initial <v>, medial <u>) to a system based on phonetic value, with <u> marking vowel and <v> consonant sounds. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a dataset of ca. 4,000 examples from over 100 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, MA, in 1692–1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the <u> and <v> usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between <u> and <v>, from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M Kenyon

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Blue Nile town of Sennar, supported by archival and historical documentation, this article explores the history of Zar spirit possession in Sudan, and the light this throws on the interplay of religions over the past 150 years. Life history data supports the argument that contemporary Zar is grounded in forms and rituals derived from the ranks of the ninteenth-century Ottoman army, and these remain the basis of ritual events, even as they accommodate ongoing changes in this part of Africa. Many of these changes are linked to the dynamic interplay of Zar with forms of Islam, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other. In the former colonial periods, political power resided with the British, and Khawaja (European) Christian Zar spirits are remembered as far more important. Today that authority in Zar has shifted to spirits of foreign Muslims and local holy men, on the one hand, and to subaltern Blacks, on the other. These speak to concerns of new generations of adepts even as changes in the larger political and religious landscapes continue to transform the context of Zar.


Professare ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Thiago Ribeiro ◽  
Gabriela Mesa Casa

<p>A inclusão de pessoas com deficiência, a garantia de seus direitos, e consequentemente, o acesso à educação especial, ocorreram de forma muito lenta, tanto em nível mundial quanto no Brasil. Com intuito de contribuir na discussão sobre o tema, o objetivo do artigo é apresentar uma breve contextualização histórica da educação especial, enfatizando com maior atenção o histórico da educação especial no Brasil, além de elencar as principais legislações brasileiras referentes ao tema. Para tanto, no primeiro momento será apresentado os principais tópicos da história mundial relacionados as discussões sobre deficiência e educação inclusiva. Em seguida, será pontuado os principais momentos da educação especial no Brasil. No último tópico, nosso objetivo será apresentar uma breve exposição sobre os principais documentos legais referentes a educação especial no Brasil. Para a realização do trabalho o método utilizado foi o dialético e a pesquisa bibliográfica.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave: </strong>Educação especial. Legislação brasileira. Contexto histórico.</p><p> </p><p align="center"><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>The inclusion of people with disabilities, the guarantee of their rights, and consequently, access to special education, occurred very slowly, both in the world and in Brazil. In order to contribute to the discussion about the theme, the purpose of this article is to present a brief historical context of special education, emphasizing with more attention the history of special education in Brazil, besides listing the main Brazilian legislations related to the theme. To do so, in the first moment will be presented the main topics of world history related to the discussions on disability and inclusive education. Next, the main moments of special education in Brazil will be punctuated. In the last topic, our objective will be to present a brief exposition about the main legal documents referring to special education in Brazil. For the accomplishment of the work the method used was the dialectic and the bibliographical research.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Special education. Brazilian legislation. Historical context.</p>


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