The Indian Loom, Climate Change, and Democracy

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-240
Author(s):  
Uzramma
Keyword(s):  
Textile Industry ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Cotton Lint ◽  
The Past ◽  
Small Scales ◽  
History Of

Abstract Weaving on the handloom in India remains in the twenty-first century a large industry practiced by several million people, including, besides weavers themselves, others engaged in supporting activities. Indian hand weaving is a potentially viable ecological textile industry for the future, particularly if factors such as environmental damage and social costs are included in measuring viability. However, Indian hand weaving suffers from the perception that it is a relic of the past. Too, in the market it is undercut by cheaply made machine-produced cloth fraudulently sold as handmade. Research into the history of hand weaving revealed that there were two distinct modes of production, one in which expensive cloth was made for the elite, and another in which ordinary cloth was made for ordinary people. Since the making of expensive fabrics needed expensive raw materials, the weavers were dependent on an investor to supply these materials, creating a hierarchic dependency. The vernacular production of cloth, on the other hand, was democratic with lateral relations between the different stages of production. Malkha has simplified spinning by avoiding bale-pressing cotton lint, a technology introduced in colonial times to carry cotton long distances from the field. Malkha spinning centers are substantially smaller in size than conventional mills, closer to the small scales of Indian cotton farming and hand weaving.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Statistics and Economic History

1941 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kuznets
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Study ◽  
Statistical Research ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Inquiry ◽  
Analytical Tools

This paper deals with the relation between statistical analysis as applied in economic inquiry and history as written or interpreted by economic historians. Although both these branches of economic study derive from the same body of raw materials of inquiry—the recordable past and present of economic society—each has developed in comparative isolation from the other. Statistical economists have failed to utilize adequately the contributions that economic historians have made to our knowledge of the past; and historians have rarely employed either the analytical tools or the basic theoretical hypotheses of statistical research. It is the thesis of this essay that such failure to effect a close interrelation between historical approach and statistical analysis needs to be corrected in the light of the final goal of economic study.

1. On the Philological Genius and Character of the Neo-Hellenic Dialect

1875 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 31-31
Author(s):  
Blackie
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Present State ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Of Greece

The Author showed by a historical review of the fortunes of Greece, through the Middle Ages, and under the successive influences of Turkish conquest and Turkish oppression, how the Greek language had escaped corruption to the degree that would have caused the birth of a new language in the way that Italian and the other Roman languages grew out of Latin. He then analysed the modern language, as it existed in current popular literature before the time of Coraes, that is, from the time of Theodore Ptochoprodromus to nearly the end of the last century, and showed that the losses and curtailments which it had unquestionably suffered in the course of so many centuries, were not such as materially to impair the strength and beauty of the language, which in its present state was partly to be regarded as a living bridge betwixt the present and the past, and as an altogether unique phenomenon in the history of human speech.

Who Made Notable Contributions to the Development of English Law or its Literature

1957 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-162
Author(s):  
H. A. Hollond
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Law School ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Inns Of Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Law ◽  
National Biography

These notes on thirty-six judges and chancellors, prompted by memory of my own requirements fifty years ago, were prepared for distribution on stencilled sheets to the students attending my lectures on legal history at the Inns of Court. My aim was to provide both indications of the principal achievements of each of the lawyers named, and also references to readily accessible sources of further knowledge.The editor of this journal has kindly suggested that it would be useful to its readers to have my notes available in print.It is not nearly as difficult as it used to be for beginners to find out about the great legal figures of the past. Sir William Holdsworth, Vinerian professor at Oxford from 1922 to 1944, placed all lawyers in his debt by his book, Some Makers of English Law, published in 1938. It was based on the Tagore lectures which he had given in Calcutta.Sir Percy Winfield, Rouse Ball professor at Cambridge from 1926 to 1943, gave detailed information as to the principal law books of the past and their editions in his manual The Chief Sources of English Legal History (1925) based on lectures given at the Harvard Law School. Twenty-four of my judges and chancellors have entries in his book as authors.By far the most numerous of my references are to Holdsworth's monumental History of English Law, in thirteen volumes, cited as H.E.L. The other works most referred to are The Dictionary of National Biography cited as D.N.B.; Fourteen English Judges (1926) by the first Earl of Birkenhead, L.C. 1919–1922; and The Victorian Chancellors (1908) by J. B. Atlay.

States via Markets and Markets via States

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Herman Mark Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Exchange Relationships ◽  
The Past ◽  
Binary Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
State And Market

Theories that the state and market are in a conflictual and binary relationship read the history of the past 30 years as a triumph of the market and a withering of the state. The underlying alleged conflict between state and market misrepresents history and reality. States and markets are commingled forms of power; each cannot exist without the other. States and markets operate on different logics and constantly mutate in response to changes in their environment. States constantly face competitive threats and need markets to generate revenue in efficient ways; market actors face competitive threats and need states to stabilize production and exchange relationships. States and market actors both need each other as a place to externalize threats to their legitimacy.

Certeau, Michel de (1925–86)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Conley
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
South America ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Philosophy ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Policies

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.

scholarly journals The Adaptability Paradox: Constitutional Resilience and Principles of Good Government in Twenty-First-Century America

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 354-369
Author(s):  
Stephen Skowronek ◽  
Karen Orren
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
First Century ◽  
Institutional Adaptation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Good Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Twenty First Century

Faith in the resilience of the US Constitution prompts many observers to discount evidence of a deepening crisis of governance in our day. A long history of success in navigating tough times and adapting to new circumstances instills confidence that the fundamentals of the system are sound and the institutions self-correcting. The aim of this article is to push assessments of this sort beyond the usual nod to great crises surmounted in the past and to identify institutional adaptation as a developmental problem worthy of study in its own right. To that end, we call attention to dynamics of adjustment that have played out over the long haul. Our historical-structural approach points to the “bounded resilience” of previous adaptations and to dynamics of reordering conditioned on the operation of other governance outside the Constitution’s formal written arrangements. We look to the successive overthrow of these other incongruous elements and to the serial incorporation of previously excluded groups to posit increasing stress on constitutional forms and greater reliance on principles for support of new institutional arrangements. Following these developments into the present, we find principles losing traction, now seemingly unable to foster new rules in support of agreeable governing arrangements. Our analysis generates a set of propositions about why the difficulties of our day might be different from those of the past in ways that bear directly on resilience and adaptability going forward.

scholarly journals The Under-Appreciated Rodent: Harbingers of Plague From the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Dna Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Bubonic Plague ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Rat ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Dna Analysis ◽  
Long Term Trends

The history of the rat and the wider rodent family in relation to bubonic plague suggests multiple ways in which different research disciplines can contribute to the understanding of mortality, morbidity, and epidemics in the past: For instance, demographic approaches can can clarify long-term trends in, and disruptions to, patterns of mortality; the study of psychological responses to disease since 1850 can lend insights into past disease behaviors; and archaeological discoveries and the still-developing technology of ancient dna analysis can help in the determination of causes and effects. As the link between the black rat and bubonic plague shows, without the collaboration of interdisciplinary methods, our understanding would surely suffer. The history of plague and the Black Death encompasses far more than the involvement of rats, but the enduring sylvatic reservoirs of plague infection that the rats and their many rodent cousins constituted in the past, and still constitute, should not be blithely discounted.

scholarly journals An Act of War? The Interview Affair, the Sony Hack, and the Hollywood–Washington Power Nexus Today

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
TONY SHAW ◽  
TRICIA JENKINS
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Us ◽  
The One

Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.

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