Interdisciplining Humanities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Thompson Klein ◽  
Robert Frodeman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
English Word ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Humanities Education ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter surveys the predisciplinary past and more recent inter- and trans-disciplinary developments in humanities. After presenting a snapshot of two disciplines—art history and music studies—it outlines the trajectories of two traditionally text-based disciplines, philosophy and literary studies. While the English word “humanities” derives from a cultural development beginning in ancient Rome, the formation of the modern disciplines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a watershed in this history. Counter-traditions of general and holistic knowledge persisted, but specialization in segmented discipline-based domains increasingly shaped the contours of humanities education and research—to the detriment of older, transdisciplinary elements. Over the course of the twentieth century, a number of developments fostered interactions across the disciplines, extending from the importation of European philosophy and literary studies to postcolonial critique. Today new interdisciplinary fields appear as well as fresh efforts at transdisciplinary cultural and epistemological transformations.

Material Culture and Healing Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Art History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.

scholarly journals The Quest for “Siwilai”: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 528-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thongchai Winichakul
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
English Word ◽  
Royal Institute ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Special Lecture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Geographical Discourse

On 27 december 1932, prince bhidayalongkorn, the President of the Royal Institute of Siam, delivered a special lecture titled “What are the conditions called ‘siwilai’?” [Phawa yangrai no thi riakwa khwam siwilai]. Transliterated from the English word civilized, the term was widely used in public without elaboration. Bhidayalongkorn reported that there was a debate whether Siam was or was not yetsiwilai, often referring to England, China, Haiti, Tibet, and many other countries, but it was not clear what made themsiwilaior not siwilai. He went on debunking the general understanding that wealth, power, territory, monogamy, gender equity, cleanliness, dress, etiquette, or mechanization constituted the notion ofsiwilai. The meaning was slippery, no matter how anybody tried to claim or use it politically (Bhidayalongkorn 1970).

Naomi Seidman

2001 ◽  
pp. 395-399
Author(s):  
Esther Frank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Language And Gender ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines Naomi Seidman's A Marriage Made in Heaven, the first book-length study of the importance of issues of gender to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and to cultural processes. The perspective of the study is comparative. As such it provides new insights into interrelations of gender and Jewish literature and expands our understanding of Jewish cultural development in important ways. Ties between language and gender in Jewish languages have already been noted by Jewish critics such as Shmuel Niger and Max Weinreich. Seidman's study, however, is the first to show how these connections corresponded to and reinforced the culture's social division along sexual lines. It demonstrates how the sexual linguistic system worked in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, and emphasizes how specific intersections between linguistic and gender structures eventually connected language ideologies to ideals of modern nation-building in later decades of the twentieth century.

Significant Form and Aesthetic Emotion

2019 ◽  
pp. 336-352
Author(s):  
Mark Hussey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Neural Organization ◽  
Semir Zeki ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Spectator

The early twentieth-century revolution in visual art that came to be known in England as post-impressionism emphasized the view that artistic creativity resides not only in the making of the artwork, but also in the interaction between the artwork and the spectator, an orientation which the contemporary discipline of neuroaesthetics holds in our time. Clive Bell’s theory of “significant form” provided an approachable way for the British public to integrate their understanding of the new art into existing notions of art history and led to a severely diminished role for representation in visual art. Bell’s theory is identifiable as one manifestation of pervasive changes in the understanding of creativity and perception that were sweeping through Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bell could not say why certain combinations of lines and colors led to the experience of an “aesthetic emotion,” only that they did. Contemporary researchers in neuroaesthetics, such as Semir Zeki, have returned to Bell’s notion to ask whether the experience of aesthetic emotion might be due to some common neural organization. This chapter points to commonalities between the speculations of Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, and those of contemporary researchers into brain processes.

The Introduction of Plantations into East Sumatra and its Socio-economic Impacts, 1863-1929

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 563-576
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Local Resistance ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Fierce Competition ◽  
Plantation Crops ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Economic Regions

The goal of this article is to examine the introduction of plantations into East Sumatra (Indonesia) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Attention is given to the five most important plantation crops, namely tobacco, rubber, oil palm, tea, and fiber. The article analyzes the economic and social transformation of the region as a consequence of the rapid expansion of plantations. Within a short period of time, East Sumatra emerged to become one of the most dynamic economic regions of Southeast Asia. The development of the region and the needs of a source of protection for Dutch planters in face of fierce competition from other Western companies and local resistance encouraged the Dutch colonial government to establish effective authority in East Sumatra. Received 4th June 2020; Revised 15th September 2020; Accepted 26th September 2020

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

Sed ubi Socrates currit? On the Gettier Problem before Gettier

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Risto Hilpinen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Gettier Problem ◽  
Current Belief ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Gettier Problem ◽  
The Way ◽  
Forward Looking

Medieval philosophers presented Gettier-type objections to the commonly accepted view of knowledge as firmly held true belief, and formulated additional conditions that meet the objections or analyzed knowledge in a way that is immune to the Gettier-type objections. The proposed conditions can be divided into two kinds: backward-looking conditions and forward-looking conditions. The former concern an inquirer’s current belief system and the way the inquirer acquired her beliefs, the latter refer to what the inquirer may come to learn in the future and how she can respond to objections. Some conditions of knowledge proposed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century epistemology can be regarded as variants of the conditions put forward by medieval authors.

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