Rousseau's Other Woman: Collette in Le devin du village

Hypatia ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Rita C. Manning

The life and work of Rousseau the musician and aesthetician has been forgely neglected in the debate about Rousseau's views on women. In this paper, I shall introduce a new text and a new female figure into the conversation: Collette, the shepherdess in Le devin du village, an opera written by Rousseau in 1752. We see an ambiguity in Collette—the text often expresses one view while the music expresses another. When we take Collette s music seriously the following picture emerges: the natural desire of women to be free, a fairly active female agency, an incipient rebellion against the social role of women, and a final acceptance of the role of wife. This view of Collette supports the thesis that for Rousseau women are not naturally subordinate to men but are taught to be subordinate because it is required for the maintenance of the patriarchal family, the cornerstone of civil society. We see many glimpses of Collette's true, unsocialized, nature, especially in the melodies she sings, it is in song, the first and hence most natural language of humans, that we see Collette's longing for freedom. But she ends by singing the praises of civil society, albeit a rural society, and thus implicitly accepting the subordination she is destined to suffer at Colins hands.

2018 ◽  
pp. 1060-1068
Author(s):  
Galina A. Dvoenosova ◽  

The article assesses synergetic theory of document as a new development in document science. In information society the social role of document grows, as information involves all members of society in the process of documentation. The transformation of document under the influence of modern information technologies increases its interest to representatives of different sciences. Interdisciplinary nature of document as an object of research leads to an ambiguous interpretation of its nature and social role. The article expresses and contends the author's views on this issue. In her opinion, social role of document is incidental to its being a main social tool regulating the life of civilized society. Thus, the study aims to create a scientific theory of document, explaining its nature and social role as a tool of social (goal-oriented) action and social self-organization. Substantiation of this idea is based on application of synergetics (i.e., universal theory of self-organization) to scientific study of document. In the synergetic paradigm, social and historical development is seen as the change of phases of chaos and order, and document is considered a main tool that regulates social relations. Unlike other theories of document, synergetic theory studies document not as a carrier and means of information transfer, but as a unique social phenomenon and universal social tool. For the first time, the study of document steps out of traditional frameworks of office, archive, and library. The document is placed on the scales with society as a global social system with its functional subsystems of politics, economy, culture, and personality. For the first time, the methods of social sciences and modern sociological theories are applied to scientific study of document. This methodology provided a basis for theoretical vindication of nature and social role of document as a tool of social (goal-oriented) action and social self-organization. The study frames a synergetic theory of document with methodological foundations and basic concepts, synergetic model of document, laws of development and effectiveness of document in the social continuum. At the present stage of development of science, it can be considered the highest form of theoretical knowledge of document and its scientific explanatory theory.


Author(s):  
Eduardo Manzano Moreno

This chapter addresses a very simple question: is it possible to frame coinage in the Early Middle Ages? The answer will be certainly yes, but will also acknowledge that we lack considerable amounts of relevant data potentially available through state-of-the-art methodologies. One problem is, though, that many times we do not really know the relevant questions we can pose on coins; another is that we still have not figured out the social role of coinage in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. This chapter shows a number of things that could only be known thanks to the analysis of coins. And as its title suggests it will also include some reflections on greed and generosity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-455
Author(s):  
Marta Esperti

The Central Mediterranean is the most deadly body of water in the Mediterranean Sea with at least 15,062 fatalities recorded by International Organization of Migration between 2014 and 2018. This article aims at highlighting the rise of a variety of new civil society actors engaged in the rescue of people undertaking dangerous journeys across the sea in the attempt of reaching the southern European shores. The peculiarity of the humanitarian space at sea and its political relevance are pointed out to illustrate the unfolding of the maritime border management on the Central Mediterranean route and its relation with the activity of the civil society rescue vessels. The theoretical aspiration of the article is to question the role of a proactive civil humanitarianism at sea, discussing the emergence of different political and social meanings around humanitarianism at the EU’s southern maritime border. In recent years, the increasing presence of new citizens-based organizations at sea challenges the nexus between humanitarian and emergency approaches adopted to implement security-oriented policies. This essay draws on the findings of a broader comparative work on a variety of civil society actors engaged in the search and rescue operations on the maritime route between Libya and Europe, focusing in particular on Italy as country of first arrival. The fieldwork covers a period of time going between 2016 and 2018. The research methodology is built on a multisited ethnography, the conduct of semidirective and informal interviews with both state and nonstate actors, and the analysis of various reports unraveling the social and political tensions around rescue at sea on the Central Mediterranean route.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
António Carlos Valera ◽  
Thomas Xaver Schuhmacher ◽  
Arun Banerjee

1997 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. CODELL CARTER

In early-nineteenth-century medical literature, one finds an elegant symmetry between causes of disease and causes of death: both were sufficient causes of particular events. However, as I will argue, by the end of the century physicians no longer sought sufficient causes of individual disease episodes – instead almost all of medical research was organized around the quest for necessary causes that were shared by all the episodes of each particular disease. Such causes carried great practical and theoretical advantages: they enabled physicians to control and to explain disease phenomena.One might wonder why there has been no parallel change in our thinking about causes of death; to this very day, causes of death are sufficient causes of particular events. In principle there is no apparent reason why we could not identify necessary causes for classes of deaths – indeed, we sometimes do so. But, in the case of death, such causes hold little interest. Because of how they are used, sufficient causes for individual deaths are more interesting and more important to us than are necessary causes of deaths. Thus, the change in thinking about causes of disease – the change that destroyed the symmetry between causes of disease and causes of death – may not reflect simply progress within a fixed system of medical goals and values, but a profound change in the social role of physicians.


1943 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
J. E. Hulett
Keyword(s):  

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