scholarly journals Classification revisited: On time, methodology and position in decolonizing anthropology

2021 ◽  
pp. 146349962110117
Author(s):  
Peter Pels
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Critical Reflexivity ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Object Of Study

Renewed calls for decolonizing anthropology in the 21st century raise the question of what work earlier waves of decolonization since the 1960s have left undone. Some of this work should focus on the classification of human differences, which figured prominently in all phases of the discipline’s history: as a methodology in its racist phases, as an object of study during its late colonial phase of professionalization, as self-critical reflexivity in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a renewed critique in the 21st century. Can a universal methodology of studying classifications of human kinds arise from the discipline’s past of colonial stereotyping? I argue affirmatively, through an approach that recognizes time as the epistemic condition that connects past and present positions to present and future methodologies. Firstly, my analysis distinguishes the parochial embedding in colonial culture of Durkheim and Mauss’ ideas about classification from their more universal intentions. This is then developed into a threefold reflexive and timeful methodology of studying classification’s nominal-descriptive, constructive, and interventionist dimensions—a process of adding temporality to the study of classification. Subsequently, Anténor Firmin’s 19th-century critique of racial classifications, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness help to show how this threefold methodology addresses the insufficiently theorized process of being classified and discriminated against through racial categories wielded by the powers that be. These arguments radicalize the essay’s timeful perspective by concluding that we need to avoid modernist uses of time as classification and adopt the aforementioned threefold methodology in order to put time in classifications of human kinds. This reverses modern positivism’s subordination to methodological rules of the epistemic conditions posed by contingent history and shows instead that the universal goals of methodology should be understood as a future ideal.

scholarly journals The Imperial Sociology of the ‘Tribe’ in Afghanistan

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Politics Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Way

The ‘tribe’ is a notion intimately related to the study of Afghanistan, used as a generic signifier for all things Afghan, it is through this notion that the co-constitution of coloniser and colonised is crystallised and foregrounded in Afghanistan. By tracing the way in which the term ‘tribe’ has been deployed in the Afghan context, the article performs two kinds of intellectual labour. First, by following the evolution of a concept from its use in the early 19th century to the literature on Afghanistan in the 21st century, wherein the ‘tribes’ seem to have acquired a newfound importance, it undertakes a genealogy or intellectual history of the term. The Afghan ‘tribes’ as an object of study, follow an interesting trajectory: initially likened to Scottish clans, they were soon seen as brave and loyal men but fundamentally different from their British interlocutors, to a ‘problem’ that needed to be managed and finally, as indispensable to a long-term ‘Afghan strategy’. And second, it endeavours to describe how that intellectual history is intimately connected to the exigencies of imperialism and the colonial politics of knowledge production.

scholarly journals Semantic Indexing of 19th-Century Greek Literature Using 21st-Century Linguistic Resources

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 8878
Author(s):  
Dimitris Dimitriadis ◽  
Sofia Zapounidou ◽  
Grigorios Tsoumakas
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Sequence Length ◽  
Automated Classification ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Domain Expertise ◽  
The 19Th Century

Manual classification of works of literature with genre/form concepts is a time-consuming task requiring domain expertise. Building automated systems based on language understanding can help humans to achieve this work faster and more consistently. Towards this direction, we present a case study on automatic classification of Greek literature books of the 19th century. The main challenges in this problem are the limited number of literature books and resources of that age and the quality of the source text. We propose an automated classification system based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model trained on books from the 20th and 21st century. We also dealt with BERT’s constraint on the maximum sequence length of the input, leveraging the TextRank algorithm to construct representative sentences or phrases from each book. The results show that BERT trained on recent literature books correctly classifies most of the books of the 19th century despite the disparity between the two collections. Additionally, the TextRank algorithm improves the performance of BERT.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

scholarly journals Criminology: Some lines of flight

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Julie Berg ◽  
Clifford Shearing
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Smart Phones ◽  
40Th Anniversary ◽  
The Past ◽  
Domain Of Existence ◽  
James Lovelock ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Space Of Flows

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Taylor, Walton and Young’s New Criminology, published in 2013, opened with these words: ‘The New Criminology was written at a particular time and place, it was a product of 1968 and its aftermath; a world turned upside down’. We are at a similar moment today. Several developments have been, and are turning, our 21st century world upside down. Among the most profound has been the emergence of a new earth, that the ‘Anthropocene’ references, and ‘cyberspace’, a term first used in the 1960s, which James Lovelock has recently termed a ‘Novacene’, a world that includes both human and artificial intelligences. We live today on an earth that is proving to be very different to the Holocene earth, our home for the past 12,000 years. To appreciate the Novacene one need only think of our ‘smart’ phones. This world constitutes a novel domain of existence that Castells has conceived of as a terrain of ‘material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity’ – a world of sprawling material infrastructures, that has enabled a ‘space of flows’, through which massive amounts of information travel. Like the Anthropocene, the Novacene has brought with it novel ‘harmscapes’, for example, attacks on energy systems. In this paper, we consider how criminology has responded to these harmscapes brought on by these new worlds. We identify ‘lines of flight’ that are emerging, as these challenges are being met by criminological thinkers who are developing the conceptual trajectories that are shaping 21st century criminologies.

South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Gulf Of Guinea ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Cabo Verde ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Sao Tome And Principe ◽  
African Slaves

In 2020 Cabo Verde (1557 sq. miles) and São Tomé and Príncipe (621 sq. miles) had a resident population of 556,857 and 210,240 respectively. Both archipelagos were uninhabited when they were settled by Portuguese colonists and African slaves in the second half of the 15th century. The coexistence of Europeans and Africans resulted in the emergence of Creole societies. Due to their differences in geographic position and climate, they developed unequally in economic terms. Santiago, the first of the Cabo Verde Islands to be settled, became a commercial hub for the slave trade from the Upper Guinea coast. São Tomé was also engaged in the slave trade, but in the 16th century established the first tropical plantation economy based on sugar and slave labor. In the 17th century, both archipelagos were affected by economic and demographic decline. Economic recovery did not occur before the mid-19th century. The British established a coal supply station for transatlantic steam shipping in São Vicente, while, enabled by the introduction of coffee and cocoa, the Portuguese reestablished the plantation economy in São Tomé and Príncipe. After the abolition of slavery in 1875 the workforce was composed of contract workers from Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique. As a result, São Tomé and Príncipe became marked by immigration for almost a century. In contrast, pushed by famines and misery, a massive emigration from Cabo Verde began in the 19th century, a feature that has marked the archipelago’s society and identity until the early 21st century. The first anticolonial groups in exile appeared in the late 1950s. An armed liberation struggle in the islands was not possible; however, a group of Cabo Verdeans participated in the armed struggle in Portuguese Guinea. Most prominent among them was Amílcar Cabral (b. 1924–d. 1973). After independence in 1975 the two countries became socialist one-party regimes. In 1990 both archipelagos introduced multiparty democracies with semipresidential regimes. Creole communities also developed in the Gulf of Guinea islands of Bioko (779 square miles) and Annobón (6.5 sq. miles), which belonged to Portugal until 1778 when they became part of Spanish Guinea which subsequently, in 1968, gained independence as Equatorial Guinea. In the 16th century the uninhabited island of Annobón was settled by the Portuguese with African slaves. As a result, the island’s early-21st-century 5,300 inhabitants speak a Portuguese-based Creole, Fá d’Ambó. Bioko (Fernando Po), was the only Gulf of Guinea Island with a native population, the Bubi, and therefore the Portuguese never colonized this island. From 1827–1843 the British navy maintained an antislaving station called Port Clarence (modern Malabo) in Fernando Po. The British recruited workers from Freetown in Sierra Leone, which was the beginning of the development of the Fernandinos, a local Creole community that speaks an English-based Creole language known as Pichi, which is closely related to Krio in Sierra Leone. Currently, there are still about thirty Fernandino families, comprising some 350 people; however, Pichi is spoken by an estimated 150,000 people, since it also became Bioko’s lingua franca spoken by the Bubi majority.

scholarly journals Hebrew, Hebrews, Hubris?: Diagnosing Race and Religion in the Time of COVID-19

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1020
Author(s):  
Richard Newton
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Working Paper ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race And Religion

This thought experiment in comparison ponders a Black man’s conviction that his Hebrew identity would make him immune to COVID-19. Surfacing the history of the claims and the scholar’s own suspicions, the paper examines the layered politics of identification. Contra an essentialist understanding of the terms, “Hebrew” and “Hebrews” are shown to be classificatory events, ones imbricated in the dynamics of racecraft. Furthermore, a contextualization of the “race religion” model of 19th century scholarship, 20th century US religio-racial movements, and the complicated legacy of Tuskegee in 21st century Black vaccine hesitancy help to outline the need for inquisitiveness rather than hubris in matters of comparison. In so doing, this working paper advances a model of the public scholar as a questioner of categories and a diagnostician of classification.

scholarly journals Confessional conversions on the territory of Belarus in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century: overview of historiography

2021 ◽  
pp. 82-89
Author(s):  
Marharyta M. Karol
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
General State ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article examines the stages of the formation of historiography devoted to the problems of confessional conversions in the second half of the 19th century on the territory of the Belarusian provinces. The historiographic trends that formed from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century were identified and analysed. The authour studies the peculiarities of Belarusian and foreign historiography at the present stage, when a large number of works on religious issues has appeared, including confessional conversions. It is argued that in Soviet times, the issue of transitions from Catholicism to Orthodoxy was practically not touched upon. In their approaches and assessments, some researchers continue the traditions of pre-revolutionary historiography, but the majority of modern scientists strive to give an objective picture of religious processes on the Belarusian lands, to show them in the context of general state policy. The relevance of the article is due to the coverage of various points of view on the problem of confessional conversions. It is noted that pre-revolutionary researchers, first of all, sought to prove the voluntariness of conversions to Orthodoxy, but during this period, works were also created in which this thesis was questioned.

scholarly journals Evolution of the framework for 21st century competencies

2013 ◽  
pp. 10-24
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
21St Century ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Conceptual Models ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Ict Competencies

This article presents the successive changes and evolution of the frameworks for 21st century competencies, since the appearance of the first conceptual models during the final years of the last century, and also it is a review of the competencies that are needed in the 21st century with a special focus on the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) competencies. The included frameworks have been elaborated by diverse institutions such as international organizations, private consortia and also governments as a guideline for educational policies in elementary and secondary schools. Later, the frameworks are compared and analyzed according to a classification of the competencies into general categories, in order to visualize some trends and obtain some insights about the direction they are heading. Finally, it provides some suggestions for the conception of future frameworks.

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