scholarly journals THE OBSERVER OBSERVED

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Nico J.G. Kaptein

In his seminal Islam Observed: Religious Developments in Morocco and Indonesia from 1968, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) placed the comparative study of Muslim societies on the research agenda. In view of my knowledge on the history of Islam in Indonesia, it stroke me that the political dimension of religion did not take an important place in the book. This is the more remarkable because during Geertz’s fieldwork in Java in 1953-4 manifestations of political Islam regularly popped up, and Geertz did not only notice those, but also recorded them in his book The Religion of Java from 1960. In this paper I will go into the question of why Geertz did not give a more prominent place to political Islam in his analysis of Muslim cultures, and what concepts of both Islam and religion he used.

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 00-00
Author(s):  
Nico J.G. Kaptein

In his seminal Islam Observed: Religious Developments in Morocco and Indonesia from 1968, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) placed the comparative study of Muslim societies on the research agenda. In view of my knowledge on the history of Islam in Indonesia, it stroke me that the political dimension of religion did not take an important place in the book. This is the more remarkable because during Geertz’s fieldwork in Java in 1953-4 manifestations of political Islam regularly popped up, and Geertz did not only notice those, but also recorded them in his book The Religion of Java from 1960. In this paper I will go into the question of why Geertz did not give a more prominent place to political Islam in his analysis of Muslim cultures, and what concepts of both Islam and religion he used.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 813-827
Author(s):  
Oana Sînziana Păltineanu

This article focuses on Miroslav Hroch's book titled Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe and it tries to build on Hroch's model of small nation-formation mainly on a methodological level. The aim is to incorporate the “subjective” dimension in Hroch's analysis of the “objective” factors that lead to nation-formation, by opening up the discursive level to investigation. I suggest that the comparative study of nation-formation needs to remain connected to the study of nationalism as a phenomenon, including the investigation of the discursive plane, of the political languages, and histories of concepts. In this sense, the article seeks to link Hroch's work to Begriffsgeschichte and to present a range of interpretations on how these two could work together, on a methodological level. The answers come mainly from Reinhart Koselleck's theorizing on the relation between social history and the history of concepts. This article also addresses compatibility problems that aim to encourage a more integrative type of analysis that would entail an in-depth and critical revisiting of Hroch's model. At the same time, Hroch's model proves to be flexible enough to be situated at the intersection of more types of history writing.


Author(s):  
T. А. Alekseevа

Introduction.A new sub discipline of the Theory of international relations – The History of the TIR, is already in place in the scientifc community of international studies. One of the most important problems, stated by the scientists, is the heterogeneity, fragmentation and the lack of fnished structure of the Theory of international relations. This article is devoted to only one of the multitude of questions: what date may be regarded as a “starting point”, the beginning of the discipline from which we should analyze the achieved results?Materials and Methods.While preparing this article, the author used the method of the comparative study of the intellectual traditions in the history of the political and legal thought.The Results of the Study.Nowadays the Theory of international relations is still at the stage of formation with its main features as fragmentation and absence of coherence towards the key moments of its development, including the date of its birth. Therefore, the appearance of the new discipline – History of the Theory of international relations – is quite natural as it helps to build necessary “bridges” and to clarify the details of the international studies development.Discussion and Conclusions.Today none of the existing theoretical or epistemological attitudes can be regarded suffciently complete to pretend for a monopoly in the international studies. Moreover, no real intellectual progress allows this or that theoretical worldview to have the absolute priority. In the context of the quite complicated and contradictory issues that exist in real international relations, no simple or unequivocal explanation is possible. Therefore, it is high time to turn away from the endless interdisciplinary debates and start evaluating the real problems, but it would presuppose, according to David A. Lake, the recognition of different judgments and articulation of the lexicon which is able to identify not only what the various research traditions have in common but also what differentiates them.


Author(s):  
Marko Geslani

The introduction reviews the historiographic problem of the relation between fire sacrifice (yajña) and image worship (pūjā), which have traditionally been seen as opposing ritual structures serving to undergird the distinction of “Vedic” and “Hindu.” Against such an icono- and theocentric approach, it proposes a history of the priesthood in relation to royal power, centering on the relationship between the royal chaplain (purohita) and astrologer (sāṃvatsara) as a crucial, unexplored development in early Indian religion. In order to capture these historical developments, it outlines a method for the comparative study of ritual forms over time.


1989 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 205-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.W. Feast

The Mira variables make important contributions to four of the main problems under discussion at this meeting, (1) stellar pulsation, (2) stellar evolution, (3) the morphology and history of the Galaxy, (4) the comparative study of different galaxies. The Miras also show how these rather different fields of study overlap, so that it is no longer possible to deal with any one field in isolation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD BOURKE

ABSTRACTThis article recovers the rationale behind the project to found a ‘new’ British history undertaken by J. G. A. Pocock in the early 1970s, and contrasts this with the approach adopted in the subsequent historiography. The article argues that British history as conceived by Pocock was intended to transcend the parochialism of national history whilst also rehabilitating the writing of imperial history without succumbing to the temptations of metropolitan whiggism. Pocock's perspective was constructed against the backdrop of a British withdrawal from empire and led him to a neo-Seeleyan interest in the dynamics of imperial expansion and retrenchment. While this process is best understood through the comparative study of empires, any such undertaking raises complex questions about the ultimate subject of historical inquiry and the nature of historical explanation. In addressing these questions, this article distinguishes the ambition to write the history of a polity from the aim of writing histories of ‘party’ as originally formulated by the historians of the Scottish enlightenment whose work has been among Pocock's abiding subjects of investigation.


1978 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-24
Author(s):  
José MÍGuez Bonino

“Christians have in the last few years begun to rediscover the political dimension of the prophetic message and to search in the history of the church for the sporadic surfacing of that prophetic stream. But we have to confess that we are just at the beginning of such a search and that we are far from having either adequately pondered or theologically articulated these insights.”


1980 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oran R. Young

Although we live in a world of international regimes, the scholarly literature on them remains rudimentary, especially in analytic terms. This essay examines the proposition that all international regimes are social institutions, even though there is great variation among them. Among other things, this suggests that regimes are dependent upon the maintenance of convergent expectations among actors; formalization is not a necessary condition for the effective operation of regimes; and regimes are always created rather than discovered. A conceptual framework and a research agenda for the comparative study of international regimes, as laid out in this essay, would guide studies of specific regimes and improve our ability to reach general conclusions about this fundamental, yet poorly understood, international phenomenon.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Markéta Křížová

Abstract The present article represents a partial outcome of a larger project that focuses on the history of the beginnings of anthropology as an organized science at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, in the broader socio-political context of Central Europe. Attention is focused especially on the nationalist and social competitions that had an important impact upon intellectual developments, but in turn were influenced by the activities of scholars and their public activities. The case study of Vojtěch (Alberto) Frič, traveler and amateur anthropologist, who in the first two decades of the twentieth century presented to European scientific circles and the general public in the Czech Lands his magnanimous vision of the comparative study of religions, serves as a starting point for considerations concerning the general debates on the purpose, methods, and ethical dimensions of ethnology as these were resonating in Central European academia of the period under study.


2021 ◽  
pp. 130-139
Author(s):  
Т.В. ГОВЕНЬКО

В статье анализируются методологические взгляды на миф выдающегося русского ученого А.Н. Веселовского (1838–1906). Мифологическая проблематика стала для Веселовского одной из центральных еще в молодые годы, когда он работал над дипломной работой, и оставалась таковой навсегда, о чем свидетельствуют его исследования как теоретического, так и сравнительно-исторического характера о международном фольклоре, средневековой словесности и литературе поздних веков. Отказавшись следовать канонам «мифологической школы», ученый поставил перед собой задачу разработать новый метод научного анализа, который позволит изучать эволюцию и генезис художественных форм как с формальной, так и с идейно-содержательной точек зрения. В этой статье мы ставим перед собой задачу собрать в единое целое суждения Веселовского о мифе, оценить их теоретический потенциал и доказать, что диалектика мифа и есть тот самый метод, благодаря которому он создал уникальную верификационную систему объяснения исторических изменений такого феномена как поэзия. Для раскрытия этой темы наиболее важными для нас являются: дипломная работа ученого (1857), статьи-рецензии «Заметки и сомнения о сравнительном изучении средневекового эпоса» (1868), «Сравнительная мифология и ее метод» (1873), теоретические статьи «Из введения в историческую поэтику. Вопросы и ответы» (1894), «Из истории эпитета» (1895), «Психологический параллелизм и его формы в отражении поэтического стиля» (1898), «Синкретизм древнейшей поэзии и начала дифференциации поэтических родов» (1899), в том числе неопубликованные при жизни Веселовского труды: «Поэтика сюжетов» (1913), «Определение поэзии» (1959) и другие. The article analyzes the methodological views on the myth of the outstanding Russian scientist A.N. Veselovsky (1838-1906). Mythological issues became for Veselovsky one of the central in his young years, when he worked on the graduation work, and turned into his lifelong priority. This is evidenced by his research of both theoretical and comparative historical nature about the international folklore, medieval literature and literature of late centuries. By refusing to follow the canons of the "mythological school", the scientist set himself the task of developing a new method of scientific analysis, which allowed to study the evolution and genesis of artistic forms with formal and ideological as well as meaningful points of view. In this article, we set ourselves the task of collecting judgments of Veselovsky about myth, to evaluate their theoretical potential and prove that the dialectic of myth is that very method, thanks to which he created a unique verification system for explaining historical changes to such a phenomenon as poetry. The most important for our topic is the scholar's diploma work (1857), critical reviews «Notes and doubts about the comparative study of the medieval epic» (1868), «Comparative mythology and its method» (1873), theoretical articles «From the introduction to historical poetics. Questions and Answers» (1894), «From the history of the epithet» (1895), «Psychological parallelism and its form in the reflection of the poetic style» (1898), «Syncretism of ancient poetry and the beginning of differentiation of poetic labor» (1899), including works of Veselovsky unpublished during his lifetime: «Excursions in the Fiction» (1913), «Definition of Poetry» (1959) and others.


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