Before the Eradication of God: the Yoruba Smallpox Deity Shonponna in t m aLuko's One Man, One Wife

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 266-281
Author(s):  
Frederick Hale

AbstractThe Yoruba deity Shonponna, feared as both the bearer of smallpox and the one to whom one could turn for protection therefrom, has been the subject of sporadic international, scholarly enquiry for more than a century. William Bascom, Anthony D. Buckley and others went well beyond late nineteenth-century British colonial observations in their attempts to understand the enduring appeal of this dreaded deity, the banning of whose worship in Nigeria did not prevent adherents from crossing into Benin to continue it. In his novel of 1959, One man, one wife, Yoruba novelist and public health authority Timothy Mofolorunso Aluko offered an internal perspective by illuminating further dimensions of the place of Shonponna in the rapidly changing religious matrix of western Nigeria. This account features a plot that unfolds in the 1920s and 1930s, when Anglican missionaries were adding an increasingly prominent and influe.tial factor to the scene, and therein exploring the confrontation of traditional religious beliefs and practices with Christianity, partly during a smallpox epidemic which intensifies the clash of these two systems.

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Agostoni

This article explores why alongside sanitary legislation and public health works, Mexican physicians of the late nineteenth century attempted to transform the habits, customs and day to day activities of the population. It stresses the importance that the teaching of the principles of private and public hygiene had for the future of the country, how this education was to be carried out, and why some members of the medical profession believed that the hygienic education of mothers/women was an unavoidable requirement for the progress of the nation. Este artíículo analiza por quéé durante las déécadas finales del siglo diecinueve, el gremio méédico mexicano consideraba que era absolutamente indispensable que los habitantes del paíís, y en particular las mujeres de la capital, contaran con una cultura de la higiene. No sóólo era fundamental sanear y ordenar a la ciudad de Mééxico mediante obras de infraestructura sanitaria, y emitir leyes que regularan la salubridad de la nacióón, sino que era igualmente importante, y quizáás máás urgente, que los habitantes transformaran sus háábitos y costumbres de acuerdo con lo establecido por la higiene púública y privada. Asimismo, el artíículo examina los méétodos mediante los cuales se procuróó crear una cultura de la higiene, y por quéé la madre de familia fue considerada como una aliada imprescindible para la empresa de los higienistas.


Modern Italy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-419
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Bruner

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.


Author(s):  
Judith Vitale

Summary This article argues that the widespread use of opiate-compounded medicines in late-nineteenth-century Japan was partly a result of Meiji period (1868–1912) public health policies. An overview of the status of opiates in Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is intended to explain possible reasons: pharmaceutical reforms in the 1870s and 1880s were based on Edo-period (1603–1868) protostructures of regulated drug manufacture; in contrast, the Meiji government failed to introduce Western clinical practice within a short span of time. As a result opiates, marketed as Western ‘modern’ medicines, were smoothly integrated into pre-existing beliefs, according to which drugs and diets maintained bodily health.


Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.


Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.


2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1015-1020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Watson Andaya

In his provocative essay, Prasenjit Duara argues that prior to the nineteenth century, the web of maritime trade networks infused the ill-defined area we call “Asia” with a genuine coherence, providing a conduit for cultural flows that readily permitted interactive relationships and the mutual adoption of new beliefs and practices. By the late nineteenth century, however, the imperial powers sought to ensure their global dominance by creating regional blocs consisting of territories that were economically subservient to the metropole. The consequent focus on the establishment of territorial boundaries encouraged a “nationalist congruence between state and culture” that gathered pace over the next hundred years. Only now are we beginning to see an Asia where interdependence and increasing cultural contact, carrying echoes of past connectivities, have opened up new opportunities by which a “transnational consciousness” can and should be encouraged.


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen L. Harris

Abstract With the Chinese presence on the African continent being perceived and portrayed as a new global phenomenon there has been a concomitant, albeit sporadic and nuanced, emergence of an aversion to things Chinese, gradually permeating popular consciousness. In a postcolonial world these anti-Sinitic or Sino-phobic sentiments are crudely reminiscent of the late nineteenth century colonial cries of the “yellow peril”, which culminated in acts of exclusion and extreme prohibition that singled out and targeted the Chinese in the various colonies across the Atlantic and Pacific including South Africa. This article, however, proposes to trace the genesis of some of anti-Sinicism to a pre-industrial period by considering developments in colonial Southern Africa. It will show how in the early Dutch settler and British colonial periods at the Cape, when the number of Chinese present in the region was miniscule, negative feelings towards the Chinese as the “other” were already apparent and evident in the reactions to them prior to the arrival of the large numbers which came to America, Australasia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.


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