Global Modernity and Sexual Science

Author(s):  
Pablo Ben

This chapter examines how the social history of urbanization influenced the emergence of sexual science by focusing on the case of male homosexuality and female prostitution during the period 1850–1950. It first considers the notions of sexual chaos and order that emerged within nineteenth-century anthropology and how they were related to urbanization, with an emphasis on the case of Buenos Aires. It then discusses some aspects of the global history of transportation and urbanization and how it affected prostitution and homosexuality in different parts of the world. It also explores the simultaneous emergence and similarity of the so-called cities of sin and how they became incubators of a sexual science in which the evolution or devolution of human society was debated in sexual terms and described as a fact of daily life. The chapter suggests that “civilization encourages prostitution” as the sexual drive is increasingly put under control.

Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.


1997 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Pavlo Pavlenko

The last centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, the first centuries after that, were enveloped in the history of mankind as a period of the total crisis and the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization, a crisis that covered virtually all spheres of the social life of the Roman world and which, as ever before, experienced almost every one, whether he is a slave or a free citizen, a small merchant or a big slave or an aristocrat. As a reaction to the crisis, in various parts of the empire the civil wars and the slavery uprising erupt in different parts of the empire. Under such conditions of life, the world around itself no longer seemed to man to be self-sufficient, harmonious, stable, "good" and warded by a cohort of traditional deities. Yes, and the gods themselves were now turned out to be incapable, unable to change the unceasing flow of fatal doom.


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-182
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Cashner

Church ensembles of Spaniards across the Spanish Empire regularly impersonated African and other non-Castilian characters in the villancicos they performed in the Christmas Matins liturgy. Although some scholars and performers still mistakenly assume that ethnic villancicos preserve authentic Black or Native voices, and others have critiqued them as Spaniards’ racist caricatures, there have been few studies of the actual music or of specific local contexts. This article analyzes Al establo más dichoso (At the happiest stable), an ensaladilla composed by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla for Christmas 1652 at Puebla Cathedral. In this performance his ensemble impersonated an array of characters coming to Christ’s mangers, including Indian farm laborers and African slaves. The composer uses rhythm to differentiate the speech and movement of each group, and at the climax he even has the Angolans and the angels sing together—but in different meters. Based on the first edition of this music, the article interprets this villancico within the social and theological context of colonial Puebla and its new cathedral, consecrated in 1649. I argue that through this music, members of the Spanish elite performed their own vision of a hierarchical and harmonious society. Gutiérrez de Padilla was himself both a priest and a slaveholder, and his music elevates its characters in certain ways while paradoxically also mocking them and reinforcing their lowly status. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “three worlds of the text,” the article compares the representations imagined within the musical performance with archival evidence for the social history of the people represented and the composer’s own relationships with them (the world behind the text). Looking to the world projected “in front of” the text, I argue that these caricatured representations both reflected and shaped Spaniards’ attitudes toward their subjects in ways that actively affected the people represented. At the same time, I argue that Spanish representations mirrored practices of impersonation among Native American and African communities, especially the Christmastide Black Kings festivals, pointing to a more complex and contradictory vision of colonial society than what we can see from the slaveholder’s musical fantasy alone.


Panta Rei ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
Josué Javier Justel Vicente

La presente contribución pretende revisar de qué manera la Historia Social, entendida como corriente historiográfica, ha penetrado en el mundo de los estudios cuneiformes y en la Historia de Mesopotamia. De esta manera, se ha realizado una exhaustiva revisión de la bibliografía disponible, sobre todo la referida a los veinticinco últimos años. El resultado principal es que esta tendencia historiográfica ha sido fructífera para el estudio del mundo cuneiforme, si bien dependiendo de periodos y temas ha tenido desigual fortuna. Además, se proporciona una visión (personal) de las líneas de investigación que, en el futuro, podrían seguir desarrollándose en el marco de la Historia Social de la antigua Mesopotamia. This contribution aims at revising how social history, understood as a historiographical current, has entered the world of cuneiform studies and the history of Mesopotamia. A thorough review of all the available literature has been carried out, especially those studies published during the last twenty-five years. The main outcome is that this historiographical trend has been rather fruitful within the framework of cuneiform studies – yet with unequal results, depending on periods and topics. Finally, a (personal) vision is offered of the areas of research that, in future, may be further developed in the context of the social history of ancient Mesopotamia.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 510-535
Author(s):  
Heloisa Pontes

This article argues that anthropology should not avoid studying the world of art and the specialized fields of cultural production. To do this it is necessary to examine the relationship between ethnography, language and social processes, as well as the way in which we make use o four sources (written, oral and visual) in our research. While this is the basic argument of the text, it also moves into a discussion of the sources that are available for the social history of the theater and Brazilian intellectual life from 1940 to 1960: photographs, interviews, reminiscences, biographies, autobiographies as well as books and theater repertories.


Author(s):  
Konrad Hirschler

This chapter writes the social history of a scholar of late Mamluk Damascus who was a highly prolific writer, but never part of the social elite of his city. It moves away from the unhelpful term ‘religious scholar’ and considers in detail how such a middling scholar was able to sustain a sprawling family by a range of economic activities. That his books were hardly copied and hardly circulated was to a large extent linked to the fact that he was the last dinosaur of a mode of scholarship that was on the verge of disappearing, post-canonical hadith scholarship.


1976 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-160
Author(s):  
T. F. Mulcrone

In almost every history of the Negro in the United States one can find an account of the incidental contributions of Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) to the social history of Ms race. But no chronicle is readily available of the scientific life of Banneker as a student of mathematics, almanac compiler, surveyor, and astronomer. The object of this article is to provide such an account of the scientific activity of Benjamin Banneker, whom W. Douglas Brown called “the first American Negro to challenge the world by the independent power of his intellect,” and to indicate how close Banneker comes to approximating the composite picture of the mathematician in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century.


Author(s):  
Fadhlurrahman Fadhlurrahman ◽  
Afi Parnawi ◽  
Anaas Tri Ridlo Dina Yuliana Yuliana ◽  
Muh Alif Kurniawan

Problems in the world of education are always in the spotlight. Because with education there will be many suitable and quality leaders. But education is not yet fully capable of forming a leader who is reliable and tough. This manuscript seeks to examine the social history of society more deeply at the time of the Caliph Umar bin Khattab and how the next generation should follow steps. He succeeded in making regulations in the world of education and issues at that time and had thoughts on problems in the world of government. This illustrates the magnitude of Caliph Umar bin Khattab's view and role in solving problems at that time. This research uses a descriptive analysis method to explain Umar bin Khattab's thoughts in Islamic education, and then the content analysis method is used to find basic ideas, development, and renewal as well as serving as caliph. For example, in education, the author found that Umar bin Khattab had thoughts about God. The discussion about God is the basis of Islamic education. They were then developed with his ideas and understanding of the cosmos (universe) to the fields of economics, law, and government so that this thought and civilization deserves to be reconstructed in the present. Keywords: Reconstruction of Civilization Islamic Education, Umar bin Khattab in Islamic Education


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


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