The Dilemma of ‘Science’: ‘Tradition’ and Archaeology in Early Twentieth-century Bengal

2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110017
Author(s):  
Sheena Panja
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
Independence Era

The study of history as a genre became important not only as an academic concern but to recover the lost pride and dignity of the indigenous people in a colonized land. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal, the study of the past assumed prime importance in the context of nationalism to counter the disdain of colonial historians and revive national pride. History as a ‘scientific’ discipline functioned as a tool in this regard, where the vernacular emerged as the principal medium of communication. Individuals from diverse backgrounds debated whether a more rigorous understanding of the past through Western ‘scientific’ methods could supplant the information from traditional texts and legends. Material culture or ‘hard’ evidence considered more suitable for a ‘modern’ objective historical account gained precedence over the traditional texts, dismissed as imaginary and mythical. A heated debate emerged between two groups, the archaeologists who believed in the objectivity of material evidence and the traditionalists who subscribed to the view that classical literature was not irrelevant to understanding the past. However, this division remained nebulous, and both groups remained in a liminal interstitial space engaging and contesting with their notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘science’. It was from this contested space that emerged an ambivalent archaeological method which formed an important characteristic of Indian archaeology in the post-Independence era.

Neither remnants nor commodities: Spirit objects in early twentieth century Chinese regional fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352110644
Author(s):  
Mark McConaghy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Rural People ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Inanimate Matter ◽  
Regional Fiction

This paper examines the regional fiction of early twentieth century China in order to understand how such texts presented the object world of rural life. In doing so it addresses a gap in the historiography of material culture in modern China, which has emphasized urban commodity regimes and has paid far less attention to the ways in which pre-existing object practices endured into the time of the modern Republic. Building off of the methodological insights of scholars such as Bill Brownand Janet Poole regarding the contribution that literary study can make to historical understandings of material cultures, this paper argues that the regional texts of Lu Xun, Xu Qinwen, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu were bewitched by overlapping life worlds: one represented by the secular rationalism of the text's narrators, and the other represented by the animistic practices of the rural others they encounter, which was expressed through objects such as joss sticks, temple doorsills, and ancestral alters. These literary works reflected upon how objects were used to make meaning in ways that were not reducible to urban commodity fetishism or remnant “superstition.” As presented in these works, spiritual objects remain powerfully active parts of the affective worlds of rural people, collapsing binary distinctions between living language and inanimate matter, the human and the ghostly, the past and the present. For the narrators of these texts, these object practices invoke a complicated mixture of modernizing critique and empathetic recognition. As such, these texts allow readers to witness the early expressions of a complex dialectic of rejection and recognition/accommodation that has marked the attitude modernizing states in China have taken in relation to animistic material cultures over the past century.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

scholarly journals ‘From Zionism to Communism’: Emilio Sereni and the Consiglio di Gestione in postwar Italy

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Andrea Bonfanti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Previous Experience ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Postwar Italy

This essay demonstrates that it is impossible to appreciate the actions of the Italian communist Emilio Sereni without considering his Zionist background. Anyone who is interested in understanding the complexities of communism in the past century and to avoid simplistic conclusions about this ideology will benefit from the study. The problem at stake is that researchers often approach communism in a monolithic manner, which does not adequately explain the multiform manifestations (practical and theoretical) of that phenomenon. This ought to change and to this extent this essay hopes to contribute to that recent strand of historical research that challenges simplistic views on communism. More specifically, by analysing the Management Councils that Sereni created in postwar Italy, we can see that many of their features in fact derived from, or found their deepest origins in, his previous experience as a committed socialist Zionist. The study, then, also relates Sereni to and looks at the broader experiences of early twentieth-century Zionism and Italian communism in the early postwar years.

Christianity, Plurality and Vernacular Religion in early Twentieth-Century Glastonbury: A Sign of Things to Come?

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
Marion Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Considerable Heterogeneity ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Vernacular Religion ◽  
Important Time ◽  
To Come ◽  
Shed Light

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.

We Worked and Made Beautiful Things

2019 ◽  
pp. 80-97
Author(s):  
Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

During the early twentieth century, Kiowa people expertly deployed material culture as symbols of themselves as a people. Beadwork specifically illustrated the significance of kinship and is use and exchange among people, which constructed family relationships and a sense of belongingness. Beadwork and other expressive forms were highlighted in the American Indian Exposition, a fair, and an event, which provided a venue of public display that encouraged intertribal competition. The chapter also examines the representation of young women as American Indian Exposition princesses.

Swanscombe: A Standard Stone-Age Sequence for Britain?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Geological Survey ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Apparent Loss ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Age Sequence

In the early twentieth century, Palaeolithic research seemed to be flourishing on the Continent. Commont was carrying out groundbreaking work in the Somme, and rich hauls were being recovered from the reindeer-caves of France and Spain. France could also boast a research centre: the Institute of Human Palaeontology, where Boule, Breuil, and Obermaier held posts. Britain, though, was weighed down by nostalgia: unfavourable contrasts were being drawn between current research and the glorious decades of the past when Evans and Prestwich had brought such renown to British investigations. This apparent loss of impetus was noted abroad. Boule considered the British to have sunk into insularity after 1875, never to regain their early brilliance; in 1912, Breuil remarked at a luncheon party in Cambridge that no one in England knew anything about prehistory. The British Museum’s Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age, published in 1911 at the height of Commont’s work, declared: ‘the French system has now been revised in the light of recent discoveries, and is the basis of all Continental classifications’. It was regretted that the English river drifts had still not received any systematic excavations, and that the implements in these sediments still lay in confusion. This Guide was produced by Reginald Smith of the British Museum under the direction of Charles Hercules Read (1857–1929). In 1912, the same year that Breuil made his disparaging comment, Read arranged for Smith to excavate in one of the most productive Palaeolithic localities of the Thames Valley: Swanscombe village. Smith was assisted by Henry Dewey (1876–1965) of the Geological Survey, but the negotiations that gained Dewey’s help would also reveal differences of opinion between their two respective institutions about the value of Palaeolithic research. The connections drawn by Smith to the Continental sequence after working at Swanscombe would lift the gloom about British backwardness. These connections would also help draw the Palaeolithic and geological sequences closer together.

scholarly journals The origins of quantum biology

2018 ◽  
Vol 474 (2220) ◽  
pp. 20180674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnjoe McFadden ◽  
Jim Al-Khalili
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Enzyme Catalysis ◽  
Quantum Biology ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Avian Navigation

Quantum biology is usually considered to be a new discipline, arising from recent research that suggests that biological phenomena such as photosynthesis, enzyme catalysis, avian navigation or olfaction may not only operate within the bounds of classical physics but also make use of a number of the non-trivial features of quantum mechanics, such as coherence, tunnelling and, perhaps, entanglement. However, although the most significant findings have emerged in the past two decades, the roots of quantum biology go much deeper—to the quantum pioneers of the early twentieth century. We will argue that some of the insights provided by these pioneering physicists remain relevant to our understanding of quantum biology today.

scholarly journals Henry Caldwell Cook, creativity and democratic learning

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-241
Author(s):  
John Howlett
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Educator ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
Democratic Learning ◽  
Archival Study

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the life and work of a forgotten progressive educator – (Henry) Caldwell Cook who was an English and drama teacher at the Perse School in Cambridge, UK. By looking at his key work The Play Way (1917) as well as the small number of his other writings it further seeks to explain the distinctiveness of his thinking in comparison to his contemporaries with a particular focus upon educational democracy. Design/methodology/approach The work was constructed primarily through a reading of Cook’s published output but also archival study, specifically by examining the archives held within the Perse School itself. These consisted of rare copies of Cook’s written works – unused by previous scholars – and materials relating to Cook’s work in the school such as his theatre designs and a full collection of contemporary newspaper reviews. Findings The paper contends that Cook’s understanding of democracy and democratic education was different to that of other early twentieth century progressives such as Edmond Holmes and Harriet Finlay-Johnson. By so doing it links him to the ideas of progressivism emergent in America from John Dewey et al. who were more concerned with democratic ways of thinking. It therefore not only serves to resurrect Cook as a figure of importance but also offers new insights into early twentieth century progressivism. Originality/value The value of the paper is that it expands what little previous writing there has been on Cook as well as using unused materials. It also seeks to use a biographical approach to start to better delineate progressive educators of the past thereby moving away from seeing them as a homogenous grouping.

scholarly journals A Presence of the Past: The Legal Protection of Singapore's Archaeological Heritage

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tsen-Ta Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Early History ◽  
Cultural Artifacts ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

AbstractSingapore is not well known for its archaeological heritage. In fact, chance finds in the early twentieth century and systematic archaeological excavations since the 1980s conducted at sites around the Singapore River have unearthed artifacts shedding light on the island's early history. In addition, the value of archaeology for a deeper knowledge of Singapore's British colonial past is increasingly being recognized. Nonetheless, Singapore law provides only a rudimentary framework to facilitate archaeological investigations and protect cultural artifacts. This article considers how the National Heritage Board Act (Cap. 196A, 1994 Rev. Ed.), the Planning Act (Cap. 232, 1998 Rev. Ed.), and the recent Preservation of Monuments Board Act 2009 (No. 16 of 2009, now Cap. 239, 2011 Rev. Ed.) may be strengthened in this regard.

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