Numbing Aesthetics: Taste and Tempers of Peppercorn / Mountain Pepper / Sanshō

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Hair Loss ◽  
Single Unit ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Molecular Components

This article explores a cultural history of peppercorn and its famous characterization as a “numbing spice.” It investigates how the quality of “numbing spice” extended from East Asian cosmologies that engaged with peppercorn, also known as mountain pepper or sanshō 山椒, as a medical, literary, and culinary object. Medieval and early modern encyclopedias in China described how the plant's vivid colors reflected cosmological relationships that promised better health and eternal youth. The plant's desirability represented what I call “numbing aesthetics,” in that its taste was directly tied to its appearance and utility. When burned, boiled, or crushed, forms of peppercorn could treat hemorrhages, hair loss, swollen scrotums, and toothaches. Beautiful peppers were more effective; ugly peppers were less effective. These many types of plants had many kinds of names with origin stories that derived from young girls, young couples, pigs, and frogs. As a social metaphor, pepper dust became a popular metaphor for describing confined concubines. This article later argues that these qualities fell away when biologists attempted to reduce the plant into its active molecular components in the twentieth century. Tokyo-based chemists imperfectly distilled numbing juices from the pepper's bark and fruit to define numbness as a single unit of flavor, even when numbness was not a classical kind of flavor and more closely resembled tingling vibrations. But by becoming a quasi-category of flavor, the molecularization of peppercorn would diminish its long history of cosmological associations that were gendered, practiced, and otherworldly.

Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Democratic Practices ◽  
History Of

This chapter seeks to bring out the interrelated quality of twentieth century discussions of democracy, drawing especially on debates in the 1930s and 1970s. It locates these within the longer history of the British conversation about democracy, a conversation that was both influenced by discussions elsewhere and informed by comparisons with, and imaginings of, other polities. It starts with an examination of the history of debating democracy in Britain and then turns to the British way of doing democracy. It argues that the former is essential to making sense of the latter. It moves on to consider how the British have done democracy, drawing upon an emerging cultural history of democratic practices. The final section offers thoughts on the prospects for the historiography of democracy in Britain, and on what its development so far says about the state of modern British political history.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

Lost (and Found) in Translation: A Cultural History of Translators and Translating in Early Modern Europe

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER BURKE
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Lost And Found ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Special Case ◽  
Made In

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which languages. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the early modern ‘regime’ of translation, in other words the manner (free or literal, domesticating or ‘foreignizing’) in which translations were made.

BANDITS, ELVIS, AND OTHER MYSTICS: An Interview with Paul Vanderwood

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-592
Author(s):  
Eric Van Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
The Political ◽  
State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
San Diego State University ◽  
Power Of God

Paul Vanderwood, Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego State University, died in San Diego onOctober 10, 2011, at the age of 82. A distinguished and innovative historian of modern Mexico, Vanderwood authored or co-authored several books, mostly dealing with the political, social, and cultural history of Mexico between about 1860 and the mid-twentieth century. The four works for which he is best known are Disorder and Progress (1982), The Power of God Against the Guns ofGovernment (1998), Juan Soldado (2004), and Satan's Playground (2010), and they are discussed extensively in this interview.

Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Burke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Consumer Agency ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.

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