Chapter 17. Human History as Natural History in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Human History

Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Friedrich Hölderlin

In an age of climate change, the work of the decidedly philosophical poet Friedrich Hölderlin has gained renewed urgency in its emphasis on the forces of nature that produce life and at the same time threaten to devour it. Although Hölderlin gives these forces various names throughout his poetry (e.g., Zeus and the Titans, love and strife, Father Aether and the depths), on one point he remains clear. Human history is bound up with natural history, and it falls to the poet to strike a balance between opposing tendencies. The thirteen essays by distinguished scholars in this volume analyse Hölderlin’s concept of nature and its relation to his poetry, theory of tragedy, essays on poetic form and notion of divinity.

7. Fluid Histories

2020 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Prasenjit Duara
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Human History ◽  
Temporal Scales ◽  
Natural Histories

In Chapter 7, Prasenjit Duara thinks with the circulating waters of oceans to articulate the complex confluence of human and natural histories, particularly with reference to Asian contexts. Whereas the fragmentation of human and natural histories contributes to ethical and political failures to address environmental issues, Duara’s oceanic metaphor demonstrates how human history, including the study of history (i.e., historiography), overlaps with natural history, while these histories nonetheless operate on different temporal scales.

Human history as natural history

1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-110
Author(s):  
Lee Cronk
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Human History

scholarly journals VICTORIAN ECOCRITICISM FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 667-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Williams
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Human History ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
The Earth

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity's detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept's abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural history? Such questions have already commissioned a range of critical projects that attempt to reframe the Anthropocene itself: as a trope of science fiction, given how humans are “terraforming” the planet (Heise 215–20); as an object for media archaeology, considering the “signatures” that our aggregate actions are leaving in the physical strata of the earth (Boes and Marshall 64–67); and as a challenge to the categorical distinctions by which historical study is practiced, with its blurring of “human history” and “natural history” (Chakrabarty 201–07).

scholarly journals Marxist Anthropology: Principles and Contradictions

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 424-449
Author(s):  
Lawrence Krader
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Human History ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cultural Order ◽  
Abstract Labor

Any anthropology that calls itself Marxist must have as its starting point the intermediation of labor between human society and nature. The labor is abstract labor; as concrete labor it is work. The society in question is not society in general or the human community in abstracto, but a particular, historical society, whether primitive or civilized. The question that is posed thereby is twofold: first, it is the problem of the place in nature of the human kind, or the problem of location; second, it is the historical problem of the transition of humanity from the natural to the cultural order. Nature has its history, as does the human society, but the unit that we take for the observation of natural history is far wider than the unit of observation of human history. In the former case it is the biological species whose history is taken up; in the case of human history it is the communal life of the village, and the social life of the tribe, city or nation. The time period of natural history is geological time, which is one or more orders of magnitude greater than the time periods of ethnography and historiography.

scholarly journals A Natural History of Hygiene

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie A Curtis
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Animal Behaviour ◽  
Human History ◽  
Hygiene Behaviour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Times

In unpacking the Pandora’s box of hygiene, the author looks into its ancient evolutionary history and its more recent human history. Within the box, she finds animal behaviour, dirt, disgust and many diseases, as well as illumination concerning how hygiene can be improved. It is suggested that hygiene is the set of behaviours that animals, including humans, use to avoid harmful agents. The author argues that hygiene has an ancient evolutionary history, and that most animals exhibit such behaviours because they are adaptive. In humans, responses to most infectious threats are accompanied by sensations of disgust. In historical times, religions, social codes and the sciences have all provided rationales for hygiene behaviour. However, the author argues that disgust and hygiene behaviour came first, and that the rationales came later. The implications for the modern-day practice of hygiene are profound. The natural history of hygiene needs to be better understood if we are to promote safe hygiene and, hence, win our evolutionary war against the agents of infectious disease.

Landscape and Environment in British Fiction and Nonfiction Prose since 1945

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Weston
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Rural Settings ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
The Way

The creative writing of landscape and environment is riding high on the research agendas of a number of scholarly fields. In literary studies, ecocriticism has seen attempts to map a set of characteristics that constitute an environmentally oriented text, often with the result that nonfiction writing (or, less often, poetry) is the form prioritized. By contrast, fiction has been seen as less capable of embracing landscape and environment because it is concerned first and foremost with human affairs and has taken the narrative shapes that typically accompany this emphasis. However, the postwar and contemporary period has seen extensive formal experimentation running counter to this set of assumptions. First, novelists concerned with landscape and environment have found ways to demonstrate the implication of human history in natural history. Second, nonfiction writers have recognized that they might profitably deploy literary forms and techniques usually associated with fiction in their writing of landscape and environment. The upshot has been a generic coalescence and the emergence of landscape writing as a category that straddles habitual divisions in the way that literary forms are conceived. The plasticity of the environment—for better or worse—has registered in urban and rural settings, as well as those that fall somewhere between this (perhaps outmoded) binary. The increasingly unavoidable knowledge of the consequences of human actions upon the environment form an important context for the falling away of older forms such as the nature novel and act as a spur to re-conceptualize both places and ways to write about them.

The Evolution of Society

Antiquity ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 31 (124) ◽  
pp. 210-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Gordon Childe
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Human History ◽  
General Acceptance ◽  
Organic Evolution ◽  
History Of

With the general acceptance of the doctrine of organic evolution continuity between human history and natural history was also accepted. The latter became just the latest chapters in a single historical record with archaeology bridging the gap between the record of the rocks and the written record. The content of these latest chapters may be termed social evolution, and the Darwinian mechanisms of variation, adaptation, selection and survival may be invoked to elucidate the history of man as well as that of other organisms. But while the use of these terms may emphasize the continuity of history, it may also cause confusions and, in fact, misled some early anthropologists and archaeologists when they tried uncritically to apply Darwinian formulae to human societies or artifacts.

scholarly journals After the deluge: new universalism and postcolonial difference

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-373
Author(s):  
Mustapha Kamal Pasha
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Human History ◽  
Human Finitude

This article probes the promises and anomalies of a new universalism proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as an apparent retort to the challenge of the Anthropocene. Revising established understandings of temporality and human agency imagined within modernity, the new universalism depicts a radically different horizon shaped by interconnections produced by the subsumption of human history into natural history. A key element of Chakrabarty’s new universalism is his dramatic repudiation of the reputed postcolonial claim of difference which hurriedly dissolves the afterlife and persistence of coloniality on a global scale in favour of a yet-to-be-forged planetary consciousness. Chakrabarty’s new universalism raises profound questions for rethinking International Relations (IR). However, without due cognisance of sedimented difference, Chakrabarty ends up reciting the secular-liberal story of one-world universalism. It is argued here that a differentiated universalism organised around the notion of human finitude can simultaneously attend to postcolonial concerns and the challenge of the Anthropocene.

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