The Logic of Skull Writing

Nuncius ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-753
Author(s):  
Ricardo Roque

Abstract In this essay I discuss the significance of theories and classifications that appear in the material and graphic form of race and place name inscriptions on human skulls. I argue that human skulls themselves provided a site for the inscription of raciological thought, a privileged location for abbreviating broader conceptions of differences and distributions of ‘human races’. I will draw on the history of race science in 19th-century Europe to explore how and why certain race and place names were inscribed onto skulls, and the effect of this form of inscription on the shaping of theories in the racial sciences during this period. The article especially considers the work of the French anthropologists Armand de Quatrefages and Ernest-Théodore Hamy, who systematically wrote inscriptions on the skulls they were studying in the context of Crania Ethnica, arguably the most ambitious project of global racial craniology undertaken in the late 19th century.

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-533
Author(s):  
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.


2019 ◽  
pp. 256-281
Author(s):  
E.M. Kopot`

The article brings up an obscure episode in the rivalry of the Orthodox and Melkite communities in Syria in the late 19th century. In order to strengthen their superiority over the Orthodox, the Uniates attempted to seize the church of St. George in Izraa, one of the oldest Christian temples in the region. To the Orthodox community it presented a threat coming from a wealthier enemy backed up by the See of Rome and the French embassy. The only ally the Antioch Patriarchate could lean on for support in the fight for its identity was the Russian Empire, a traditional protector of the Orthodox Arabs in the Middle East. The documents from the Foreign Affairs Archive of the Russian Empire, introduced to the scientific usage for the first time, present a unique opportunity to delve into the history of this conflict involving the higher officials of the Ottoman Empire as well as the Russian embassy in ConstantinopleВ статье рассматривается малоизвестный эпизод соперничества православной и Мелкитской общин в Сирии в конце XIX века. Чтобы укрепить свое превосходство над православными, униаты предприняли попытку захватить церковь Святого Георгия в Израа, один из старейших христианских храмов в регионе. Для православной общины он представлял угрозу, исходящую от более богатого врага, поддерживаемого Римским престолом и французским посольством. Единственным союзником, на которого Антиохийский патриархат мог опереться в борьбе за свою идентичность, была Российская Империя, традиционный защитник православных арабов на Ближнем Востоке. Документы из архива иностранных дел Российской Империи, введены в научный оборот впервые, уникальная возможность углубиться в историю этого конфликта с участием высших должностных лиц в Османской империи, а также российского посольства в Константинополе.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Francesco Bono

This essay deals with a number of Italian and Austrian films produced around the mid-1930s as a result of the cinematic cooperation that developed between Rome and Vienna at the time. The essay’s goal is to investigate a complex chapter in the history of Italian and Austrian film which has yet received little attention. The Austro-Italian cooperation in the field of film, which developed against the backdrop of the political alliance between Fascist Italy and Austria’s so-called Corporate State, involved some of the biggest names in Italian and Austrian cinema of the time, including Italian directors Carmine Gallone, Augusto Genina and Goffredo Alessandrini, Viennese screenwriter Walter Reisch, and Italian novelist Corrado Alvaro. In particular, the essay will consider the Italian film Casta Diva (1935) and its debt to one of the most famous Austrian productions of the 1930s, Willi Forst’s film Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933). Further films to be discussed include Tagebuch der Geliebten (1935), Una donna tra due mondi (1936), Opernring (1936), and Blumen aus Nizza (1936). Tagebuch der Geliebten was based on the diary of Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, who lived in Paris in the late 19th century. Una donna tra due mondi starred Italian diva Isa Miranda, Opernring Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, Blumen aus Nizza German singer Erna Sack.These films should be truly regarded as transnational productions, in which various cultural traditions and stylistic influences coalesced. By investigating them, this essay aims to shed light on a crucial period in the history of European cinema.


2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Bryan Gilling

The history of the Assets Co v Mere Roihi decision, a well-known early Privy Council authority on indefeasibility of title under the Torrens system of land registration, illustrates the vulnerability of Maori to irregular land acquisition methods during the late 19th century. It also highlights the inadequacies of the Native Land Court system at the time. The author argues that the policy demands for legal certainty created a hidden and undue cost on the Maori participants: as a result of the case, Maori lost their main opportunity to gain redress for effectively or actually fraudulent dealings in their lands, and for mistakes made by the Land Court.


2001 ◽  
Vol 38 (8) ◽  
pp. 1141-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
G D Osborn ◽  
B J Robinson ◽  
B H Luckman

The Holocene and late glacial history of fluctuations of Stutfield Glacier are reconstructed using moraine stratigraphy, tephrochronology, and dendroglaciology. Stratigraphic sections in the lateral moraines contain tills from at least three glacier advances separated by volcanic tephras and paleosols. The oldest, pre-Mazama till is correlated with the Crowfoot Advance (dated elsewhere to be Younger Dryas equivalent). A Neoglacial till is found between the Mazama tephra and a paleosol developed on the Bridge River tephra. A log dating 2400 BP from the upper part of this till indicates that this glacier advance, correlated with the Peyto Advance, culminated shortly before deposition of the Bridge River tephra. Radiocarbon and tree-ring dates from overridden trees exposed in moraine sections indicate that the initial Cavell (Little Ice Age (LIA)) Advance overrode this paleosol and trees after A.D. 1271. Three subsequent phases of the Cavell Advance were dated by dendrochronology. The maximum glacier extent occurred in the mid-18th century, predating 1743 on the southern lateral, although ice still occupied and tilted a tree on the north lateral in 1758. Subsequent glacier advances occurred ca. 1800–1816 and in the late 19th century. The relative extent of the LIA advances at Stutfield differs from that of other major eastward flowing outlets of the Columbia Icefield, which have maxima in the mid–late 19th century. This is the first study from the Canadian Rockies to demonstrate that the large, morphologically simple, lateral moraines defining the LIA glacier limits are actually composite features, built up progressively (but discontinuously) over the Holocene and contain evidence of multiple Holocene- and Crowfoot-age glacier advances.


Author(s):  
D. Millett

The late 19th century witnessed a remarkable growth of knowledge concerning the functions of the brain. The excitability of the cerebral cortex was first reported by Gustav Fritsch (1838–1927) and Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907) in 1870, followed by the classical investigation of cerebral localization by David Ferrier (1843–1928). Ferrier's identification of cerebral motor 'centres' based on a series of cortical stimulations and ablations was central to the physiological and clinical achievements of cerebral localization in the late 19th century. Cerebral illustrations were an important component of Ferrier's physiological research, synthesizing a great deal of experimental data and suggesting precise locations and boundaries of sensory and motor areas. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the construction of cerebral maps and their role in establishing the utility and veracity of the doctrine of cerebral localization. Two illustrations of the macaque brain based on Ferrier's experimental work were particularly influential. These and other important illustrations accompanied Ferrier's manuscript, 'The localisation of functions in the brain', submitted to the Royal Society in early 1874, but were not produced by Ferrier himself. Rather, they were sketched by E. A. Waterlow (1850–1919), a young painter and acquaintance of Ferrier's who—undoubtedly under Ferrier's guidance—synthesized the experimental data of more than a dozen experiments in these diagrams. Unfortunately, during the contentious review, abstraction and fragmentation of Ferrier's manuscript, Waterlow's monogrammed insignia was omitted from reproductions of his sketches and Ferrier's acknowledgement to him was not published in subsequent works. While circumstantial evidence suggests that Waterlow may have requested that these identifiers be withheld, and while Waterlow has never been recognized for his illustrations of cerebral localization, both the artist and his sketches soon achieved prominence. Waterlow's diagrams were reproduced in Ferrier's widely influential monograph, The Functions of the Brain (1876), where the cerebral centres of Waterlow's macaque brain were directly transposed onto Ecker's diagram of the human brain. These diagrams were reprinted during the late 1870s and 1880s in many textbooks and reviews of cerebral physiology, and provided an important guide to the localization of brain lesions during the early years of neurosurgery. This paper recounts Waterlow's contribution to the history of clinical neurology and physiology, and his independent success as a landscape painter.


2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadir Özbek

This article lays groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), here with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. The gendarmerie, which before 1879 reform the Ottomans called asakir-i zabtiye, was a provincial paramilitary police organization established by bureaucrats of the Tanzimat state during the 1840s on an ad hoc basis. This force later acquired a more uniform and centralized character, becoming the empire's principal internal security organization. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories in which it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and in the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. Although acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.


2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-267
Author(s):  
Iris Seri-Hersch

This is how Ismaʿil bin ʿAbd al-Qadir, a Mahdist chronicler of late 19th-century Sudan, gave a broad Islamic significance to the defeat of Ethiopian armies by Mahdist forces at al-Qallabat in March 1889. Culminating in the death of Emperor Yohannes IV, the four-year confrontation between Mahdist Sudan and Christian Ethiopia (1885–89) had repercussions that transcended the local setting, reaching far into the intertwined history of Sudan, Ethiopia, and European imperialism in the Nile Valley and Red Sea regions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. E12 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Ryan Ormond ◽  
Costas G. Hadjipanayis

The history of neurosurgery is filled with descriptions of brave surgeons performing surgery against great odds in an attempt to improve outcomes in their patients. In the distant past, most neurosurgical procedures were limited to trephination, and this was sometimes performed for unclear reasons. Beginning in the Renaissance and accelerating through the middle and late 19th century, a greater understanding of cerebral localization, antisepsis, anesthesia, and hemostasis led to an era of great expansion in neurosurgical approaches and techniques. During this process, frontotemporal approaches were also developed and refined over time. Progress often depended on the technical advances of scientists coupled with the innovative ideas and courage of pioneering surgeons. A better understanding of this history provides insight into where we originated as a specialty and in what directions we may go in the future. This review considers the historical events enabling the development of neurosurgery as a specialty, and how this relates to the development of frontotemporal approaches.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document