The Invention and Reinvention of “Japanese Culture”

1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 759-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Morris-Suzuki

A specter is haunting europe and, indeed, the rest of the world: not, of course the specter of Communism, but of that other big C—Culture. At the 1991 Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Prof. Ying-Shih Yu of Princeton University argued in his keynote address that the most important current trend in historical studies was the recognition of “culture as a relatively autonomous force in history” (Yu 1991, 21). For too long, he suggested, historians have looked at the past through a narrow window shaped by the values of the west, and particularly by the all-powerful western notion of history as the pursuit of “scientific truth.” To break through this constricting frame we need to recognize “that the history of every society or people deserves to be studied not only as a part of world history but also on account of its intrinsic values” (Yu 1991, 26); we need, in other words, to accept Watanabe Hiroshi's notion that every society or region may be “‘particular’ in its own way like an individual” (quoted in Yu 1991, 23).

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.


1893 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 396-401
Author(s):  
Henry Hicks

In a recent article on the Pre-Cambrian Rocks of the British Isles in the Journal of Geology, vol. i., No. 1, Sir Archibald Geikie makes the following statement: “There cannot, I think, be now any doubt that small tracts of gneiss, quite comparable in lithological character to portions of the Lewisian rocks of the North-West of Scotland, rise to the surface in a few places in England and Wales. In the heart of Anglesey, for example, a tract of such rocks presents some striking external or scenic resemblance to the characteristic types of ground where the oldest gneiss forms the surface in Scotland and the West of Ireland.” To those who have followed the controversy which has been going on for nearly thirty years between the chiefs of the British Geological Survey and some geologists who have been working amongst the rocks in Wales, the importance of the above admission will be readily apparent; but as it is possible that some may be unable to realize what such an admission means in showing geological progress in unravelling the history of the older rocks in Wales during the past thirty years, a brief summary of the results obtained may possibly be considered useful.


Itinerario ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonella Romano ◽  
Stéphane Van Damme

Through its focus on the question of circulation, world history attained a central position amongst the historical configurations in the last decade. Indicative of our fundamentally changing world, the past thereby reveals itself to have been shaped by commercial, human and intellectual flows of global dimension. The history of science has been particularly receptive to such methodological developments, especially with regard to works influenced by a markedly social approach to science and knowledge, which has focused for some time on the analysis of intellectual networks. From the French provincial Enlightenment to Athansius Kircher's circles—including the relationships of patronage of mathematicians and court philosophers—social, intellectual and epistemological configurations have been designed, allowing us to consider different scales in the circulation of knowledge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (55) ◽  
pp. 116-133
Author(s):  
Marcus Aurelio Taborda de Oliveira

Abstract The article, in a theoretical-historiographic perspective, discusses the current trend of studies on the history of education of the senses and sensibilities. It begins with the presentation of the theme "sensibilities" and its presence in different historiographical traditions, showing how this approach in the field of History is not new. Then, in its first part, it discusses the recent arrival of the theme in the debates of History of Education in Latin America. In the second part, it presents and situates a set of monographic studies developed by the Center for Studies on the Education of Senses and Sensibilities - Nupes, FAE/UFMG, in partnership with researchers from Brazil and other countries, discussing some of their basic assumptions. The text concludes by discussing the limits, risks, and scope of the history of education of the senses and sensibilities as a trend that balances between academic fad and the possibility of renovating the consecrated forms of investigating the past and the present of Latin American education.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Gabriela Goldin Marcovich ◽  
Rahul Markovits

AbstractThis article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.


1983 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. E. Finer

‘VERY DEEP IS THE WELL OF THE PAST’, WRITES THOMAS MANN, as he begins his Tales of Jacob, ‘Might one not even call it bottomless?’ And indeed so it is if we search out the origins of government down, down, through its many levels in time until we reach only a misty shadow of what might have been some primitive society whose very existence we can but infer from artifacts, from myth and legend – and from an interpolation, unhistorical to be sure for it is mere hypothesis – from what we know of stateless societies still extant in this, our own day.


2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brantly Womack

AbstractAs many distinguished academics and officials have pointed out, the current rise of China is not a completely new phenomenon, but rather the return of China to a position of regional centrality and world economic share that were considered normal less than two hundred years ago.1 This fact underlines the importance of history in putting the present into perspective, and at the same time, to the extent that all history is history of the present, it requires a reevaluation of the structure of China's traditional relationships. Hitherto, China's place in modern social science has been in an exotic corner, a failed oriental despotism. To be sure, traditional China did collapse, and today's China is a different China rising in a different world. We might assume that China is rising now precisely because of its differences from traditional China, that it is the last step toward the end of history rather than a resonance with the past. However, the convenience of such an assumption makes it suspect. If China is simply the latest avatar of Western modernity, then it requires of the West some readjustment, but not rethinking. However, the only certainty about China's rise is that it is a complex phenomenon, and the convenience of constructions such as China-as-Prussia or China-as-Meiji Japan derives from their preemption of open-ended study rather than from their insight into complexity. To the extent that China is China, both past and present require reconsideration.


1989 ◽  
Vol 103 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. W. S. Mair

AbstractThe past history of, and current trend in, stapes surgery are reviewed, and experience from a personal series of 128 procedures over an 18 year period is presented. Results are frequently poorer than many surgeons and their patients anticipate, and more stringent pre-operative case selection and centralisation of surgical activity would appear desirable. Amplification has become a more acceptable management alternative for some patient categories.


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