Walking through Dumbarton Oaks

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Robin Veder

Walking through Dumbarton Oaks: Early Twentieth-century Bourgeois Bodily Techniques and Kinesthetic Experience of Landscape places landscape architect Beatrix Farrand’s design for rhythmic steps and landings at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., into the contexts of early twentieth-century practices of walking and notions of aesthetic muscular response. Robin Veder argues that in this period kinesthesia was a recognized sixth sense and a significant aesthetic concern in landscape design and reception. The essay is structured to demonstrate methodologically how the history of the body can be employed to denaturalize and historicize phenomenology, and thus enrich explanations of built environments. Veder explores four frames for understanding the kinesthetic experience of walking through landscape. They are choreographic dictates for how designers wanted bodies to move, individual performances of movement through space, the clothing and muscular habits that constituted bodily techniques for walking, as well as the psychological and physiological aesthetics of kinesthetic empathy.

Author(s):  
Cherniak S. G.

The article is devoted to the study of a personalized approach to the problem of educational and pedagogical forecasting in Ukraine in the early twentieth century. The author emphasizes that a personalized approach to the study of the problem of educational and pedagogical forecasting in the early twentieth century is the main prerequisite for the development of forecasting pedagogical thought, which must be specified. I.Ya. Franco saw the direction of educational influence in the mastery of scientific knowledge, the harmonious improvement of the body in the process of physical labor. S.F. Rusova, as the coryphaeus of preschool pedagogy, laid the foundation for the content of the educational process through the introduction of the native language, national holidays, and Christian values of the Ukrainian people. G.G. Vashchenko took the Christian ideal as the basis for predicting pedagogical phenomena and processes. P.P. Blonsky defended the independent nature of pedagogical science. І.І. Ogienko stressed the importance of native education, the formation of Christian virtue, justice, and diligence. B.D. Grinchenko defended the inseparable connection of education with the life and culture of other peoples. L. Ukrainka had the same opinion. The teacher insisted on the importance of considering the role of the teacher in the public school, sharply raised the issue of the struggle for social and national liberation of the Ukrainian people. T.G. Lubnets is considered the luminary of the theory of pedagogy. H.D. Alchevskaya entered the history of pedagogy in Ukraine as a prominent figure in the field of adult education, organizer of Sunday schools. І.М. Steshenko advocated the nationalization of secondary and higher education. Minister P.M. Ignatiev defined the organizational and pedagogical principles of educational and pedagogical forecasting through the reform of the education system.


Author(s):  
Doran George

This chapter traces the history of the development of Somatics training from its early twentieth-century pioneers through to its contemporary use globally as a system for training dancers. Throughout it pays special attention to the ways that Somatics pedagogy made the case for its efficacy through appeal to the natural body. Pioneering teachers developed Somatics by studying the musculoskeletal functioning of the body, and they argued that this structure was universal, lying beneath any cultural and social influences. At the same time, they incorporated references to mystical Eastern practices and primitive peoples, and in so doing established the Somatics body as white and heterosexual. The chapter considers how Somatics opened dance training to many new bodies and how it excluded other bodies. It also exposes the way that Somatics continually reinvented itself through appeal to a universal naturalness.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the views of a famous British historian G.D.G. Cole on the history of the British workers' and UK socialist movement in the early twentieth century. The arti-cle focuses on the historian's assessment and the reasons for the workers' strike movement intensi-fication on the eve of the First World War, the specifics of such trends as labourism, trade unionism and syndicalism.


Author(s):  
Bill T. Arnold

Deuteronomy appears to share numerous thematic and phraseological connections with the book of Hosea from the eighth century bce. Investigation of these connections during the early twentieth century settled upon a scholarly consensus, which has broken down in more recent work. Related to this question is the possibility of northern origins of Deuteronomy—as a whole, or more likely, in an early proto-Deuteronomy legal core. This chapter surveys the history of the investigation leading up to the current impasse and offers a reexamination of the problem from the standpoint of one passage in Hosea.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.


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