Al-Karkh: the Development of an Imāmī-Shīʿī Stronghold in Early Abbasid and Būyid Baghdad (132-447/750-1055)

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-315
Author(s):  
Nassima Neggaz

Abstract Following the foundation of Baghdad by Caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 136-158/754-775) in 145/762, the neighbourhood of al-Karkh attracted many Imāmī scholars, becoming the centre of the Imāmī wikāla (network of deputies of the Imām) in the late 3rd/9th century, and then the heart of the Imāmī ḥawza (seminary) and the rationalist school of theology which developed under the Būyids (333-447/945-1055). Al-Karkh also became the centre of a popular movement of Imāmī-Shīʿa; from the Būyid period onward, the latter played a significant role in the social and political life of the city until its fall under the Mongol invasion of 656/1258. From the point of view of the micro-history, this article investigates the incubation of the Imāmī-Shīʿī movement in this suburban area of the city, bringing together topography and social history data from medieval geography manuals, historical chronicles, local histories, biographical dictionaries, poetry, and travellers’ accounts. More than a quarter, al-Karkh acted as a city within Baghdad; repeatedly destroyed and burnt down, its history sheds light on urban life in the Abbasid capital, and on the development of Imāmī-Shīʿism during its formative period.

Author(s):  
I. S. Tomilov

The study reviews scientific literature concerning the cities of the Tobolsk province in the late XVIII – early XX centuries. The article  features the works of scientists, published in the pre-revolutionary  period and affecting different sides of the subject in question. The  results of the research indicate that before 1917 the scientific works  were mainly concentrated on such aspects of urban life as  demography, trade, administration, urban space, education, local  government, and periodicals. The authors did not distinguish the  concept of «social life» as a separate phenomenon, limiting the  study of its individual components. The methodology includes the  use of techniques and tools of local, systemic, comparative- historical, and problem-chronological methods, as well as  developments «history of everyday life» and «new Imperial history». In general, the article emphasizes the expansion of scientific  knowledge about the social history of Siberian cities in the post- reform and late Imperial periods, reveals the influence of the  researchers ' views on the integration of urban life. The scope of the  study is not limited to the interest of historians, urbanists and local  historians to the subject of study. Historiographical analysis is  relevant from the point of view of modern discussions about the  prospects of urban studies, and can also be used in the preparation  of textbooks and summaries on Siberian history. 


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 609-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Kuschnir

Drawing the city is a proposal for an ethnographic research project in Rio de Janeiro. I begin by mapping the production of an international group calling themselves ‘urban sketchers,' whose collective project extols drawing as a form of looking, knowing and registering the experience of living in cities. Next I show the connections between art and anthropology, as well as their relation to cities and to Rio de Janeiro in particular. The sources and bibliography on the themes of the social history of art, drawing, visual anthropology and urban anthropology are also discussed. Setting out from the latter area, I present the possibilities for undertaking an ethnography that contributes to our comprehension of the graphic and symbolic narratives of urban life.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Besin Gaspar

This research deals with the development of  self concept of Hiroko as the main character in Namaku Hiroko by Nh. Dini and tries to identify how Hiroko is portrayed in the story, how she interacts with other characters and whether she is portrayed as a character dominated by ”I” element or  ”Me”  element seen  from sociological and cultural point of view. As a qualitative research in nature, the source of data in this research is the novel Namaku Hiroko (1967) and the data ara analyzed and presented deductively. The result of this analysis shows that in the novel, Hiroko as a fictional character is  portrayed as a girl whose personality  develops and changes drastically from ”Me”  to ”I”. When she was still in the village  l iving with her parents, she was portrayed as a obedient girl who was loyal to the parents, polite and acted in accordance with the social customs. In short, her personality was dominated by ”Me”  self concept. On the other hand, when she moved to the city (Kyoto), she was portrayed as a wild girl  no longer controlled by the social customs. She was  firm and determined totake decisions of  her won  for her future without considering what other people would say about her. She did not want to be treated as object. To put it in another way, her personality is more dominated by the ”I” self concept.


1966 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 82-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough

Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afshin Marashi

AbstractThis article investigates the evolution of print culture and commerce in Tehran during the first half of the 20th century. The first section examines technological changes that facilitated the commercialization of texts and then details the history of early print entrepreneurs in the Tehran bazaar. The second section examines the expansion of the book trade between the 1920s and 1940s, tracing the emergence of modern bookstores in a rapidly changing Tehran. I argue that patterns of change in print commerce between 1900 and 1950 contributed to the emergence of mass culture by midcentury. This new mass culture involved the social and political empowerment of a diversity of new reading publics in the city, and enabled the emergence of new forms of popular politics.


1989 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 30-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Katznelson

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.


Author(s):  
Deborah Kamen

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. Through close analysis of various forms of evidence—literary, epigraphic, and legal—this book demonstrated that classical Athens had a spectrum of statuses, ranging from the base chattel slave to the male citizen with full civic rights. It showed that Athenian democracy was in practice both more inclusive and more exclusive than one might expect based on its civic ideology: more inclusive in that even slaves and noncitizens “shared in” the democratic polis, more exclusive in that not all citizens were equal participants in the social, economic, and political life of the city. The book also showed the flexibility of status boundaries, seemingly in opposition to the dominant ideology of two or three status groups divided neatly from one another: slave versus free, citizen versus noncitizen, or slave versus metic versus citizen.


Latin Jazz ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 36-63
Author(s):  
Christopher Washburne

This chapter documents the strong ties of the Caribbean and Latin America to the formative period of jazz and how that influence reverberated throughout the twentieth century. It argues that the strong foundational influence of Caribbean and Latin American music on pre-jazz styles makes the birth of jazz synchronous with the birth of Latin jazz. By building on the work of a number of scholars who have recently begun to tackle this complexity through historical studies of immigration patterns and the social and political development of New Orleans throughout the 1700s and 1800s and by conducting a “sonic archeology” of jazz styles throughout the twentieth century, reverberations of jazz’s pre-history are uncovered and shown to resound loudly. Along with a discussion of the social history of New Orleans, the focus is on the function of certain rhythmic cells in the jazz repertoire that are most typically associated with Caribbean and Latin American styles.


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (10) ◽  
pp. 2131-2146
Author(s):  
Gordon Waitt ◽  
Ian Buchanan ◽  
Michelle Duffy

This paper seeks to better understand the lively city with reference to recent analysis of sonic affects, bodily sensations and emotions. The notion of ‘hearing contacts’, as it is usually deployed in discussion of the lively city, emphasises the social interactions with other people in a rather narrow anthropocentric way. Yet, it overlooks the diversity of felt and affective dimensions of city sounds. This paper takes up this challenge by bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of territory into conversation with Greimas’s semiotic square. In doing so, this paper offers a compelling theoretical framework to better understand the sonic sensibilities of listening and hearing to provide a clearer sense of how people decide to attach specific meanings to sound, and which ones they do not. The paper first reviews various theoretical approaches to sound and the city. Next, the paper turns to an ethnographic account of sound and city-centre urban life recently conducted in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. This research seeks to better understand the ways bodily dispositions to sonic affects, materials and cultural norms helped participants territorialise the city centre, distinguishing ‘energetic buzz’, ‘dead noise’, ‘dead quiet’ and ‘quiet calm’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-135
Author(s):  
Niki J. P. Alsford

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a significant expansion of both Deptford in southeast London and the market town of Dadaocheng in northern Taiwan. A factor that unites the two can arguably be found in both historically avoiding becoming part of the cities to which they now belong. The collective desire of their more well-to-do residents to shape an urban modern space that could fit their aspirations transcended national boundaries. Defined as the “urban elite,” the more notable residents were both globally situated and connected. They lived in a modernity that was self-defined and interpreted, one that was differentiated across a range of institutions: family life, economic and political structures, education, mass communication, and individual orientation. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to argue that these arenas should be understood as a narrative of continual design and redesign. What is more, they were essentially marshaled by a rising new urban middle class. The fortunes that they acquired were a result of their connections to the town they helped mold and transform. Using social elite theory, this article will argue that if the social, economic, and political conditions across areas are similar, people will behave in comparable ways with only contextual differences. In the case of Taiwan, attention to this overlooked aspect of its social history is important in helping to situate the island in global comparisons.


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