scholarly journals Versions of the Natural

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-456
Author(s):  
Sarah Kay ◽  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Science History ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of

This volume explores new ways of understanding medieval and early modern conceptualizations of nature in light of current developments in critical animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, as well as our expanding knowledge of premodern philosophy, medicine, and encyclopedism. The articles engage numerous disciplines, including philosophy, history of science, history of ideas, and Anglo-Saxon, French, and English literary studies; their approaches represent a broad range of Anglophone and Continental European academic traditions. Collectively, the volume brings to light tensions and contradictions in premodern ideas of “nature” and “the natural.” The “versions of the natural” that emerge are more ecological and less anthropocentric than in much previous work in this area, their emphases correspondingly more philosophical, scientific, even secular, than religious or theological. All contributions combine the detailed study of specific texts and problems with wider historical, theoretical, or philosophical inquiry.

scholarly journals What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Stone
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post Humanism

What can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s).

Colonizing Animals

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Saha
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
British Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methodology

Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.

scholarly journals Through the Walls of Time: A Short Reflection on Writing Early Modern Intellectual History

Zutot ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Irene Zwiep
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
History Of

This short piece takes a longstanding problem from the history of ideas, viz. the use of contemporary concepts in descriptions of past phenomena, and discusses its implications for broader intellectual history. Scholars have argued that being transparent about anachronism can be a first step towards solving the issue. I would argue, however, that it may actually interfere with proper historical interpretation. As a case study, we shall explore what happens when a modern concept like ‘culture’ is applied to pre-modern intellectual processes. As the idea of cultural transfer is prominent in recent Jewish historiography, we will focus on exemplary early modern intermediary Menasseh ben Israel, and ask ourselves whether his supposed ‘brokerage’ (a notion taken from twentieth-century anthropology) brings us closer to understanding his work. As an alternative, I propose ‘bricolage,’ again a central analytical tool in modern anthropology but, as I hope to show, one with unexpected hermeneutical potential.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

scholarly journals Towards a (radically) decolonial anthropology: revisiting the Iberian school of peace’s encounter with (the rights of) Amerindians / Rumo a uma antropologia (radicalmente) decolonial: revisitando o encontro da escola ibérica da paz com (os direitos d)os ameríndios

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethânia De Albuquerque Assy ◽  
Florian Fabian Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Reception History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
Culturally Different ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ius Gentium ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Resumo: A resposta da Escola de Salamanca à crise cognitiva gerada pelo encontro entre europeus e ameríndios no século XVI tem se convertido em um dos momentos mais referenciados na historiografia colonial devido ao papel que desempenhou na formação do direito internacional (europeu). Embora a posição tradicional sobre o uso dos direitos naturais da Escola para enquadrar o relacionamento com os ameríndios tenha mitigado a universalidade colonizadora do incipiente ius gentium (europeu), (re)leituras post/descoloniais mais recentes expuseram esse movimento como uma mera estratégia para a subjugação epistêmica dos ameríndios. No entanto, de acordo com suas premissas historicistas, ambas as posições se concentraram no impacto da doutrina de Salamanca sobre a história europeia das ideias e deixaram (relativamente) sub-explorado seu significado como resposta à experiência de alteridade radical em relação ao encontro ameríndio. O recurso a linguagem de direitos dos salamanquianos também pode ser visto como uma maneira de lidar com o desafio perspectivista fundamental que a “razão” culturalmente diferente, ainda que epistemologicamente equivalente, dos ameríndios representou. A sua “solução” de um jusnaturalismo pluricultural historicamente concretizado não era inteiramente coerente nem livre do eurocentrismo. Mas sua gênese contrafactual por meio de uma combinação de realismo universalista escolástico tardio e de multinaturalismo indígena mostra que o encontro ameríndio era intelectualmente muito menos unilateral do que a recepção europeia histórica reconheceria. No entanto, essa abordagem exige não apenas uma virada (sutil) para uma perspectiva etnográfica, mas também uma reconstrução antropológica radical da historiografia do início da era moderna do direito internacional.Abstract: The School of Salamanca’s response to the cognitive crisis which the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians in the sixteenth century generated has become one of the most referenced moments in colonial historiography for the role it played in the formation of (European) international law. While the traditional position on the School’s use of natural rights to frame the relationship with Amerindians argued that it thereby sought to mitigate the colonizing universality of the incipient (European) ius gentium, more recent post/decolonial (re-)readings have exposed this move as a mere strategy for the epistemic subjugation of Amerindia. However, in line with their historicist premises, both positions have focussed on the impact of Salamancan thought on the European history of ideas and have left its significance as a response to the experience of radical alterity vis-à-vis the Amerindian encounte (relatively) underexplored. For the Salamancan’s resort to rights language can also be seen as a way to grapple with the fundamental perspectivist challenge that the culturally different yet epistemically equivalent ‘reason’ of the Amerindians represented. Their “solution” of a historically concretized pluricultural jusnaturalism was neither entirely coherent nor free from Eurocentrism, but its counterfactual genesis through a combination of late scholastic universalist realism and Amerindian multinaturalism shows that the Amerindian encounter was intellectually much less one-sided than its European reception history would acknowledge. Yet, this approach requires not only a (subtle) shift towards an ethnographic perspective but also a (radically) anthropological reconstruction of the historiography of early modern international law.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (18 N.S.) ◽  
pp. vii-x
Author(s):  
Christopher Prescott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Art History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Heritage Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
University Of Oslo ◽  
The University

The articles in the present volume are the result of two workshops held at the Norwegian Institute in Rome that are both robustly disciplinary, but simultaneously raise issues beyond the disciplinary bounds of art history (into philosophy, history of ideas and history) and archaeology (into criminology, heritage studies and contemporary sociology and politics). The first was organised by DniR-researcher Mattia Biffis in October 2019, The Art of Truth: Providing Evidence in Early Modern Bologna. The second section is based on a digital workshop organised by DniR-researcher Samuel Hardy in collaboration with the Heritage Experience Initiative project at the University of Oslo in October 2020, Handling of Cultural Goods and Financing of Political Violence.   On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585. Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

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