The Younghusband-Waddell Collection and Its People: the Social Life of Tibetan Books Gathered in a Late-colonial Enterprise

Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Cultural Biography ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.

scholarly journals The “digital subjects” of twenty-first-century education: On datafication, educational technology and subject formation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicitas Macgilchrist
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Core Skills ◽  
Worked Example ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Diffraction Patterns

How are young people constituted as subjects in schools today, as digital technology becomes increasingly widespread? Buzz words for twenty-first-century education include “creativity”, “critique”, “collaboration”, “communication”, or sets of core skills that are often linked to the now classic flexible, entrepreneurial selves of neoliberal imaginaries (Miller & Rose, 2008; Sennett, 1998). This chapter overviews recent critical scholarship on education and technology in the twenty-first-century, highlighting three aspects: practices, datafication and subject formation. It then explores subjectivation in more detail, looking closely at one worked example to map the kinds of future students imagined in current policy (in Germany and across Europe). Mainstream policies for education in a digital world foreground three digital subject figures: The User, the Critic, and the Maker. Each of these, in some ways, re-establishes dominant power relations and relations of inequality in today’s schools. On the margins of the policy discourse are, however, further subject figures which interrupt dominant imaginaries: The Expert, the Ecosoph, and the Social Designer. The chapter suggests that these marginal subject figures illustrate diffraction patterns in today’s world in which we can think otherwise about what constitutes a livable, legitimate life.

scholarly journals Thomas Piketty’s Book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, Karl Marx and the Political Economy of the Internet

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 413-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Tax Avoidance ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has resulted in a sustained political and academic debate about capitalism in the 21st century. This article discusses the relevance of the book in the context of Karl Marx’s works and the political economy of the Internet. It identifies 3 common reactions to Piketty’s book: 1) dignification; 2) denigration of the work’s integrity; 3) the denial of any parallel to Marx. I argue that all three reactions do not help the task of creating a New Left that is urgently needed in the situation of sustained capitalist crisis. Marxists will certainly view Piketty’s analysis of capitalism and political suggestions critically. I argue that they should however not dismiss them, but like Marx and Engels aim to radicalise reform suggestions. In relation to the Internet, this paper discusses especially how insights from Piketty’s book can inform the discussion of tax avoidance by transnational Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. For establishing an alternative, non-commercial, non-capitalist Internet one can draw insights about institutional reforms and progressive capital taxation from Piketty that can be radicalised in order to ground radical-reformist Internet politics.“The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the social democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal-the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labor. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the social democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim” (Rosa Luxemburg 1899, 41).

Conclusions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Marinopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Terms ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Political Epistemology ◽  
Scientific Politics

This book has aimed to examine dialectics in modern epistemology and to compare it with critical theory, not ‘in order to’ but ‘because’ the latter can offer innovative means of dialectical theorizing. In this way, critical theory has the potential to advance twenty-first century epistemology.The book attempted to avoid old and traditional modes such as ‘biographies’ of scientific terms or historical elaboration or evaluation of epistemological arguments. I also challenged the de-scientification and pre-modern approaches that have returned to the epistemological fore. It is essential for a critical theory of the twenty-first century that it can articulate a political epistemology through the dialectical potential. The book attempted to present and ground the argument that a retreat to de-theorization for the sake of the partiality of empiricism, as well as the post-modern approach, signifies not a space of post-modernity, but rather the process of de-modernization that begins with the instrumentalization of the sciences and extends to the social and the political. In order to avoid social and scientific instrumentality and pre-modern positions, the construction of scientific politics has to be criticized under the perspective of a political epistemology.

scholarly journals The Geographies of Poverty: Modernist Photo Texts in the Age of Social Media

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donal Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Social Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Twenty First Century

This essay explores the representation of economic precarity in the twenty-first century, and particularly how new media technologies have impacted such representations, through two photo-text projects: Matt Black’s American Geography (2014-Present) and Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye’s When Living is a Protest (2015-Present). Both adapt the visual style of New Deal documentary practiced by photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Gordon Parks – a genre that Jeff Allred refers to as the “modernist photo text” – to document the after-effects of the 2008 Great Recession; and both specifically were created to circulate on Instagram, the image-and-text based social media platform initially launched in October 2010. Black’s and Roye’s Instagram series exemplify a resurgence in documentary following the financial collapse of 2008. At the same time, they offer limit cases for the way that “born digital” literary and visual art can re-imagine modernism’s insistence on media specificity for twenty-first century artistic works, especially those keyed to capturing the social life of economic crisis.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

CHAM MUSLIMS IN HO CHI MINH CITY TODAY

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phu Van Han
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Ho Chi Minh City ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Insight Into

After more than 30 years of national reform, Ho Chi Minh City has made great changes in economy, living standards and society for all population groups, including the Cham Muslim community. The study clarifies the social characteristics, community development trends in the current sustainable development process of the Cham Muslims. At the same time, explore the adaptability of the community, clarify the aspects of social life and the development of Cham Muslims in Ho Chi Minh City. Thereby, providing insight into a unique cultural lifestyle, harmony between religion and ethnic customs, in a multicultural, colorful city in Ho Chi Minh City today.

New International Factors of Twenty First Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Saif Nasrat Tawfiq Al - Haramazi
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Ease Of Use ◽  
First Century ◽  
International Context ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Important Input ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
International Interaction

There are many non-traditional additions to the influential works in the international or international context, which have expanded and become very large.  Some of them have not entered into this field of international relations. Hence the need to supplement, renew and add new concepts There digital (electronic) factor, has become the key to the hard and soft domination of international units, and an important input in international relations, especially the twenty-first century. We have been able to explore the reality of the international interaction based on (cooperation, competition, conflict). In conclusion, the global system will remain state-based and international organizations. At the same time, it will continue to be born and no states in its interactions with the ease of use of digital technology by individuals on the planet..

American Custom, Ritual, and Holidays

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-276
Author(s):  
Jack Santino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.

Social Policy Review 18

2006 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Society ◽  
Policy Review ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century

A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. This book examines the underlying problems that pose the greatest threat to British society in the twenty-first century.

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