Past, Present, Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 28-47
Author(s):  
Claudia Näser
Keyword(s):  
Nile Valley ◽  
African Archaeology ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
History Of

The objects and research fields of the archaeology of Nubia—the topics we pursue, the sources we consult, and the approaches we use in making sense of them—are historically and socially contingent constructs. Present-day knowledge about the Nubian past and the frame within which archaeological practice in the Middle Nile valley operates derive from a history of archaeological interest and work that spans almost two hundred years. They resonate with manifold influences, among which the colonial and imperial aspirations of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries are the strongest. Other dominant themes that permeate the archaeology of Nubia—indeed the construction of the entity “Nubia” as it is used today, also in the present publication—include Egyptocentrism, the divorce from a wider African archaeology, the concept and the practices of archaeological salvage, and the idea of universal heritage. After looking into these aspects, the chapter also deals with the transposition of the archaeology of the Middle Nile valley into the postcolonial present and the potentials and challenges it faces today.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Wrathall
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
History Of

This chapter reviews Dreyfus’s hermeneutical methodology, and the constant interplay between phenomenological description and textual interpretation in his work. It explains why Dreyfus always philosophizes in a kind of dialogue with thinkers in the history of philosophy, and how he interprets these thinkers in such a way as to illuminate through their works contemporary problems in philosophy. It then offers a theory of Dreyfus’s understanding of practices, before reviewing the concept of a background practice as it functions in Dreyfus’s work. For Dreyfus, the background practices embodied in a culture are the key to making sense of the understanding of being that grounds a world.

Powerful Inscriptions: On the Semiotic Phenomenology of BDSM

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Joseph Martin
Keyword(s):  
Future Research ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Sociology Of Deviance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Semiotic Phenomenology ◽  
Sex Wars

BDSM encompasses a range of practices—bondage and discipline (BD), dominance and submission (DS), sadism and masochism (SM)—involving the consensual exchange of power in erotic contexts. This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on BDSM, drawing on the history of academic studies of the phenomenon, ranging from the psychology of perversion, the sociology of deviance, and the feminist “sex wars” to more recent ethnographic and phenomenological turns. The chapter focuses on the importance of discourse and affect for making sense of BDSM, both for those who seek to analyze the phenomenon and for practitioners themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research and other data, the chapter shows how language and discourse are key to answering interconnected questions about the semiotics and phenomenology of BDSM (what these practices mean and how practitioners experience these practices affectively). Thus, a potential “linguistic turn” in BDSM studies is essential for future research on this erotic minority.

Network Visualization

2020 ◽  
pp. 351-367
Author(s):  
James Moody ◽  
Ryan Light
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Network Visualization ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
Underlying Network ◽  
History Of ◽  
Effective Network ◽  
Data Visualizations

This chapter provides an overview of social network visualization. Network analysis encourages the visual display of complex information, but effective network diagrams, like other data visualizations, result from several best practices. After a brief history of network visualization, the chapter outlines several of those practices. It highlights the role that network visualizations play as heuristics for making sense of networked data and translating complicated social relationships, such as those that are dynamic, into more comprehensible structures. The goal in this chapter is to help identify the methods underlying network visualization with an eye toward helping users produce more effective figures.

Colonial vindications. More on the history of South African prehistoric research

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
Nathan Schlanger
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Economic Potential ◽  
African Archaeology ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Archaeology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Power Games

Together with the welcome insights they have brought to the matters at hand, the archaeological dialogues here engaged have certainly made me appreciate where my claims could be modified and my arguments amplified. Since I have already been taxed with a questionable insistence on setting the record straight, and with a penchant for academically coup de poing-ing my way through the archaeological establishment and its established historiography, I may as well persevere and thank the commentators for helping me grasp the following key point: what has been motivating a substantial part of my investigations, I can now better specify, is a growing unease with the well-established paradigm of ‘colonial vindication’. This is not, let me hasten to add, a reference to the genuine injustice done to those indigenous populations whose pasts have been expropriated and denigrated by the colonizing powers (i.e. Trigger's sense of ‘colonial archaeology’). Likewise, there is obviously no denying that the globalization of archaeology in the colonial and post-colonial eras has entailed considerable intellectual and institutional struggles, alongside innumerable power games, financial calculations and scientific compromises – and here Shepherd is surely right to give as example the ‘cradle of humanity’, a shifting zone whose ideological, diplomatic and economic potential Smuts had already fully sized in the 1930s (cf. Schlanger 2002b, 205–6). Rather, what I wish here to open to scrutiny is this apparently long-standing notion that South African archaeology has been systematically ‘done down’, ‘passed over’ and ‘badly used’ (Shepherd's terms) by the metropole – making it quite evident that its history, if not its ethos, should be primarily geared towards securing due recognition and redress.

scholarly journals Garin and Cassirer: Historiography and Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saverio Ricci
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
History Of

Abstract The relation between Garin and Cassirer is still an insufficiently investigated topic, here proposed also in light of their personal connections and documents. This relation represents an important episode in the Nachwirkung of Cassirer in Italy. Garin was deeply influenced by Cassirer’s historical research and philosophical thought, in the shaping of his own research fields and in the methodological debates about the history of philosophy.

On History in Southwest Archaeology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Severin Fowles ◽  
Barbara Mills
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Resource Management ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Southwest Archaeology ◽  
American Military ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
History Of

As an introduction to the Handbook, this chapter examines the question of history in Southwest archaeology in two senses. First, it traces the intellectual history of research in the region: from the nineteenth-century inauguration of Southwest archaeology as an extension of American military conquest, to the museum-oriented expeditions of the turn of the century, to the scientific advances and the growth of culture resource management during the twentieth century, to the impacts of Indigenous critiques and the development of collaborative approaches most recently. Second, the chapter explores the shifting status of “history” as a central goal of archaeological practice. How have archaeologists constructed—or resisted—narratives to account for the contingent unfolding of Indigenous and colonial societies in the region? What bodies of method and theory have guided these efforts? In addressing these questions, the chapter marks and participates in a growing historical turn in Southwest archaeology.

The Chronology of Sudanese Arabic Genealogical Tradition

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 325-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Spaulding
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Old Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Islamic Faith

Modern nationalisms first arose during the later eighteenth century around the wide periphery of the ancient heartland of western culture and gnawed their way inward during the course of the nineteenth century to the core, culminating in World War I, Each new nationalism generated an original “imagined community” of human beings, part of whose ideological cohesion derived from a sense of shared historical experience. Since the actual historical record would not necessarily satisfy this hunger, it was often found expedient to amend the past through acts of imagination aptly termed the “invention of tradition.”One of the many new “imagined communities” of the long nineteenth century took shape in the northern Nile-valley Sudan between the final disintegration of the old kingdom of Sinnar (irredeemable after the death of the strongman Muhammad Abu Likaylik in 1775) and the publication of Harold MacMichael's A History of the Arabs in the Sudan in 1922. The new national community born of the collapse of Sinnar, strongly committed to Arabic speech and Islamic faith, was tested by fire through foreign conquest and revolution, by profound socio-economic transformation, and by the challenges attendant on participation in an extended sub-imperialism that earned it hegemony—first cultural, and ultimately political—over all the diverse peoples of the modern Sudan.One important response of the nascent community to the trials of this difficult age was the invention of a new national historical tradition, according to which its members were descended via comparatively recent immigrants to the Sudan from eminent Arabs of Islamic antiquity.

On the issue of the British presence in Egypt: the business of “Thomas Cook and Son” in the assessment of contemporaries (the last third of the 19th century)

2021 ◽  
pp. 224-232
Author(s):  
Anna Y. Vasileva
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

The purpose of the study is to determine how the development of the tourism business of Thomas Cook and Son in the Nile Valley influenced the perception and assessment of contemporaries of the British presence in Egypt at the end of the 19th century. The relevance of the analyzed problem lies in the fact that the study of the history of tourism in the era of New imperialism allows us to supplement our understanding of the representations of the empire and private busi-ness and their mutual influence. It is substantiated that, according to the views of contemporaries, the activities of the company contributed to the creation of conditions for the economic develop-ment of Egypt, opened these territories to the world, providing free movement along the Nile, and contributed to the spread of the English language, making this country more “civilized” in the eyes of Europeans. We conclude that, at the same time, the handbooks of the company broadcasted the achievements of the imperial policy of Great Britain, reinforcing the idea of the positive conse-quences of the British occupation for Egypt. It is concluded that the commercial success of private business became a visible manifestation of the success of the England’s civilizing mission. The research materials can be used to further study the relationship between the development of mass tourism and the colonial policy of Great Britain.

Is Culture Subjective? On the Issue of Russian Culturology Tradition

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 69-76
Author(s):  
Nikolai A. Shchipkov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

The article examines the main stages of the history of the ideological development of the preconditions of the culturological methodology. The views of N.Ya. Danilevsky and A.N. Veselovsky on the concept “culture” are considered. The article describes the early Soviet experiments of the 1920s regarding the creation of new humanitarian research fields on the example of the GAHN. The main goal of the article is to trace the historical predecessors of the original attitude to the concept of “culture” within the framework of the Russian philosophical and cultural tradition.

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