Who Is He Calling WEIRD?

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Anne E. C. McCants

Abstract In The WEIRDest People in the World, Henrich offers something of a big-think, global, social-science history that covers everything from psychology experiments to anthropological narrative, economic argumentation, and kinship studies, all grounded in a purported history of religious and family law. The book seeks to persuade that the West is cognitively different from the rest of the world and that its uniqueness explains every fundamental aspect of its modern trajectory—its wealth and education distributions, the progress and spread of its innovations, the presence or absence of trust outside its local communities, its formal institutions of democratic governance, and its beliefs about fairness and equality. Even more important for historically oriented readers, the book seeks to uncover how this major cognitive development emerged. The quantitative methods that the book employs to support its sweeping claims, however, are flawed, and its version of European church- and family-law history is inconsistent with the consensus view of specialist historians.

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Muhammad Rafiqul Hoque ◽  
Muhammad Mustaqim Mohd Zarif

Dispute resolution systems are broadly divided into two sides namely Judicial Dispute Resolution (JDRS) and Non-Judicial Dispute Resolution Systems (NJDRS). The first one is more formal, and the latter is informal which is known as Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) all over the world. Though ADR is claimed to be a great innovation of the West, it is found to be practiced in the Islamic Judicial System from its very inception. ADR was practiced throughout the history of Islamic Judiciary as sulh. However, the use of the word sulh in the meaning of ADR needs to be explained in the present judicial context. Scholars sometimes discussed sulh as a system parallel to ADR and sometimes as a process, which creates confusion in its multiuse. Hence, this study aims at eliminating this confusion on the paradoxical use of the term sulh as a system for dispute resolution as well as a process of that system. At present, hardly any study has precisely differentiated between them. Thus, this qualitative study focuses on discussing it primarily from the perspectives of the Quran, documented sources as well as interviews. The major finding of this study is that sulh, comparing with present day ADR, does not need to be used paradoxically. The main contribution of the study is to propose a clarification of sulh in the line of ADR fruitfully. The findings of this study are not only useful in clarifying the exact meanings of the term as used in different contexts but also applicable to solve problems faced by arbitrators involved in various indigenous traditional dispute resolution systems such as shalish in Bangladesh and elsewhere.


2021 ◽  

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions – from plastics to the digital to biotechnology – have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th Century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st Century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds.


2018 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Pekka Sulkunen ◽  
Thomas F. Babor ◽  
Jenny Cisneros Örnberg ◽  
Michael Egerer ◽  
Matilda Hellman ◽  
...  

From its ancient origins in small-scale gaming sites in local communities, gambling in the 21st century has become a global industry and an increasingly standardized pastime across the world. The growth started in the early the 20th century, and accelerated in the past few decades. The history of gambling is a history of regulation. Gambling has always been controlled by political powers and still is in both democratic and non-democratic countries. Islamic and communist regimes have been most negative for moral reasons. Countries dominated by Protestant Christian faith have been critical, because of the value they have placed on work and honesty, even when they have not seen prosperity as a sin. Since the 1980s gambling has been de-regulated in many countries, with the justification that gambling is legitimate economic activity and problem gambling should be the policy target.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Gabriela Goldin Marcovich ◽  
Rahul Markovits

AbstractThis article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.


Archaeologia ◽  
1874 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-241
Author(s):  
Richard Henry Major

In the year 1861 I had the satisfaction of laying before the Society of Antiquaries, and thereby making known to the world for the first time, the important fact that the great continental island of Australia had been discovered in the year 1601 by a Portuguese navigator, named Manoel Godinho de Eredia. Up to that time the earliest authenticated discovery of any part of the great southern land was that made a little to the west and south of Cape York by the commander of the Dutch yacht the Duyfhen, or Dove, about the month of March 1606. Thus the fact which I announced in 1861 gave a date to the first authenticated discovery of Australia earlier by five years than that which had been previously accepted in history, and transferred the honour of that discovery from Holland to Portugal. The document on which this fact, so entirely new to the world, was based, was a MS. Mappe-monde in the British Museum, in which, on the northwest corner of a country which could be shown beyond all question to be Australia, stood a legend in Portuguese to the following effect:— “Nuça antara was discovered in the year 1601 by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, by command of the Viceroy Ayres de Saldanha.” This mappe-monde had the great disadvantage of being only a copy, possibly made even in the present century, from one the geography of which proved it to be some two centuries older. Still, the mere fact of its being a copy laid it open to a variety of possible objections, which fortunately I was able to forestall by arguments that I believe to be unanswerable, and which I think I need not repeat now, as they are already printed in the “Archaeologia,” vol. xxxviii. I will merely say that I had the good fortune at the time to find a happy confirmation of what was stated in the map in a little printed work which described the discoverer as a learned cosmographer and skilful captain, who had received a special commission from the Viceroy at Goa to make explorations for gold mines, and at the same time to verify the descriptions of the southern islands.


1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric J. Sharpe

To the student of the recent history of theological ideas in the West, it sometimes seems as though, of all the ‘new’ subjects that have been intro duced into theological discussion during the last hundred or so years, only two have proved to be of permanent significance. One is, of course, biblical criticism, and the other, the subject which in my University is still called ‘comparative religion’—the (as far as possible) dispassionate study of the religions of the world as phenomena in their own right.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Naoki Sakai

Both Asia and Latin America are regarded as areas in the disciplines of area studies. What must be called into question is the assumption that these areas are primarily geographic designations. This paper investigates in what sense the “area” of area studies connotes a geographic location and how it is differentiated from other terms such as territory. It discusses the history of the modern international world in which the world has been bifurcated into the West, where a system of international law has been applied, and the Rest, where residents have not been protected by international law. Both Asia and Latin America are designations that preserve the legacy of modern colonialism: both are geographic indices for the regions and populations to be “discovered” and posited from the viewpoint of the West. In this respect, Asia and Latin America as “areas” still preserve the microphysics of modern colonial power in their geopolitical referentiality.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa CROUCH

AbstractMyanmar is the only Buddhism-majority country in the world that has developed and maintained a system of family law for Buddhists enforced by the courts. This article considers the construction of Burmese Buddhist law by lawyers, judges, and legislators, and the changes made through legislative intervention in 2015. It begins by addressing the creation and contestation of Burmese Buddhist law to demonstrate that it has largely been defined by men and by its perceived opposites, Hinduism and Islam. Three aspects of Burmese Buddhist law that affect women are then examined more closely. First, Burmese Buddhist law carries no penalties for men who commit adultery, although women may risk divorce and the loss of her property. Second, a man can take more than one wife under Burmese Buddhist law; a woman cannot. Third, restrictions on Buddhist women who marry non-Buddhist men operate to ensure the primacy of Burmese Buddhist law over the potential application of Islamic law. This article deconstructs the popular claim that women are better off under Burmese Buddhist law than under Hindu law or Islamic law by showing how Burmese Buddhist law has been preoccupied with regulating the position of women. The 2015 laws build on this history of Burmese Buddhist law, creating new problems, but also potentially operating as a new source of revenge.


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