Conclusion: The Abstractions of Homo Economicus: Now a Stomach, Now an Anus

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Nadia Bou Ali

The modern impasse hails for the Arabic reading subject a crisis in symbolic identification: there is a retreat of the discourse of the master, a crisis in the symbolic and the relationship between language and law comes to fore. The nineteenth century in particular is marked by the emergence of a neurotic subject (Bustani) obsessed with questions of origins (original sin, origins of language, origins of society and habit, origins of culture) and a hysteric subject (Shidyaq) that asks: what do you want of me? The problem of origins does not cease to repeat itself in the corpus of texts from the time, it takes the shape of a compulsive reposing of the questions of beginnings and ends: where does taste come from (inclination, disposition, acquired)? What is the origin of sociality? How does habit originate? What is the origin of language? How to write a history of culture? When and how does culture originate? How does one become a woman?

Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney J. Shep

Emoticons are usually associated with the digital age, but they have numerous precursors in both manuscript and print. This article examines the circulation of emotional icons in nineteenth-century typographical journals as a springboard to understanding the relationship between emotion, materiality, and anthropomorphism as well the pre-digital networks of the “typographical press system.” It draws on literature from textual and typographical analysis, including the history of punctuation. It also demonstrates the ubiquity of emoticons in contemporary society and culture outside the world of computers, text messaging, and chat rooms.


Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.


1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 767-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Vandereycken ◽  
Ron Van Deth

SynopsisIt is common knowledge that puberty is characterized, among other phenomena, by a striking growth spurt. An exploration of the medical literature from previous centuries shows, however, that this feature of adolescence has attracted surprisingly little attention. Although the pubertal growth spurt was known to eighteenth-century physicians, it was neglected for about a century. The influential Belgian scientist Quetelet demonstrated a remarkable scotoma towards the phenomenon. It was only after his death in 1874 that the relationship between puberty and growth spurt became a scientifically established and recognized fact.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.


Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat

This chapter traces the early evolution of nursing from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on how nursing care became both gendered and racialized in civilian society. Focusing on the history of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), it explores the relationship between the military and civilian populace to illuminate trends in nursing practices, debates about work, and concerns about war taking place in the larger civil society. It also examines how war and military nursing needs shaped the evolution of the modern nursing profession and how nursing became embroiled in the politics of intimate care, along with the implications for gender roles and race relations that permeated social relationships and interactions in civilian society. The chapter points to the Civil War as the transformative moment in the history of nursing in the United States, moving nursing from an unpaid obligation to a paid occupation. Finally, it discusses the impact of the introduction of formal nurse training during the last quarter of the nineteenth century on African American nurses.


1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 930-953
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp

Despite renewed scholarly interest in Evangelical Episcopalianism recently, important questions persist about the party's demise in the last third of the nineteenth century. Though church historians have advanced some plausible explanations for its disappearance, these interpretations need now to be tested by more narrowly focused studies of individuals, both committed party men and their less partisan allies. Concomitant questions also linger about the relationship between Evangelicals and the emergent Broad Church movement within the American church and within the Anglican communion generally. Exactly how did Low Church Evangelicals become Low Church liberals by the turn of the century? More importantly, this subject has a broader significance for the history of American Christianity at large. Pursuing the foregoing questions can shed considerable light on the parallel transformation of a moderately Reformed American evangelicalism into turn-of-the-century liberal Protestantism.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Barrett-Gaines

Recent contributions to this journal have taken various approaches to travelers's accounts as sources of African history. Elizabeth de Veer and Ann O'Hear use the travel accounts of Gerhard Rohlfs to reconstruct nineteenth-century political and economic history of West African groups who have escaped scholarly attention. But essentially they use Rohlfs' work as he intended it to be used. Gary W. Clendennen examines David Livingstone's work to find the history under the propaganda. He argues that, overlooking its obvious problems, the work reveals a wealth of information on nineteenth-century cultures in the Zambezi and Tchiri valleys. Unfortunately, Clendennen does not use this source for these reasons. He uses it instead to shed light on the relationship between Livingstone and his brother.John Hanson registers a basic distrust of European mediated oral histories recorded and written in the African past. He draws attention to the fact that what were thought to be “generally agreed upon accounts” may actually reflect partisan interests. Hanson dramatically demonstrates how chunks of history, often the history of the losers, are lost, as the history of the winners is made to appear universal. Richard Mohun can be seen to represent the winners in turn-of-the-century Central Africa. His account is certainly about himself. I attempt, though, to use his account to recover some of the history of the losers, the Africans, which Mohun may have inadvertently recorded.My question is double; its two parts—one historical, one methodological—are inextricably interdependent. The first concerns the experience of the people from Zanzibar who accompanied, carried, and worked for Richard Dorsey Mohun on a three-year (1898-1901) expedition into Central Africa to lay telegraph wire. The second wonders how and how well the first question can be answered using, primarily, the only sources available to me right now: those written by Mohun himself.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.


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