scholarly journals Mushroom art in South Africa and Zimbabwe – Emil Holub: 1847–1902

Bothalia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Sharp ◽  
Rob S. Burrett

Emil Holub was a nineteenth century, Austro-Hungarian Czech, medical doctor with wide-ranging interests in ethnography and the natural sciences. During visits to southern Africa in the 1870s, he meticulously recorded everything that he encountered. Amongst his vast collection of artifacts, natural history specimens and notes were several sketches of fungi. These illustrations are reproduced here to document this valuable historical knowledge, tentatively identifying them in the context of the habitats through which Holub travelled.

Zootaxa ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4623 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-89
Author(s):  
KYU-TEK PARK ◽  
WILLY DE PRINS

The Lecithoceridae of southern Africa are reviewed, based on material preserved in the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, Pretoria, Republic of South Africa. A total of 22 species are recognized including three new species: Idiopteryx jansei sp. nov., Lecithocera minyodes sp. nov. and Protolychnis natalensis sp. nov. Isotypa Janse, 1954 syn. nov. is synonymized with Idiopteryx Walsingham, 1891 and Homaloxestis lophophora Janse, 1954 stat. rev. is raised to species rank, separating it from H. cholopis Meyrick, 1906. In addition, Lecithocera ochrometra Meyrick, 1933 is transferred to Torodora Meyrick, 1894 as T. ochrometra (Meyrick, 1933) comb. nov., Lecithocera officialis Meyrick, 1911 is excluded from Lecithocera Herrich-Schäffer, 1853, and Dragmatucha proaula (Meyrick, 1908) is newly reported from Kenya. It is revealed that the male genital figure for Homaloxestis cholopis (Meyrick, 1906) by Janse (1954) was erroneously illustrated, based on a different species which is probably undescribed. Another miss-placed figure of the genitalia by Janse (1954) was also found for Lecithocera aenicta Janse, 1954. Diagnosis, descriptions (only for the new species), depositories of types, and distribution data of all the known species are provided. Images of adults, male and/or female genitalia, and the venation of a few species are illustrated. 


2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Houle

AbstractMuch of the credit for the vitality of Christianity in southern Africa has gone to the African Initiated Churches that date their birth to earlier 'Ethiopian' and 'Zionist' movements. Yet far from being compromised, as they are often portrayed, those African Christians remaining in the mission churches often played a critical role in the naturalization of the faith. In the churches of the American Zulu Mission, the largest mission body in colonial Natal, one of the most important moments in this process occurred at the end of the nineteenth century when participants in a revival, led in part by a young Zulu Christian named Mbiya Kuzwayo, employed the theology of Holiness to dramatically alter the nature of their lived Christianity and bring about an internal revolution that gave them effective control of their churches.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 537-556
Author(s):  
David T. Schwartz

This paper examines Allen Carlson's influential view that knowledge from natural science offers the best (and perhaps only) framework for aesthetically appreciating nature for what it is in itself. Carlson argues that knowledge from the natural sciences can play a role analogous to the role of art-historical knowledge in our experience of art by supplying categories for properly 'calibrating' one's sensory experience and rendering more informed aesthetic judgments. Yet, while art history indeed functions this way, Carlson's formulation leaves out a second (and often more important) role played by art-historical knowledge over the last century - namely, providing the context needed for interpretations of meaning. This paper explores whether natural science can also inform our aesthetic experience of nature in this second sense. I argue that a robust sense of meaning from our aesthetic experience of nature is indeed made possible by coupling our aesthetic experience of animals with knowledge from the natural science of animal ethology. By extending the scope of Carlson's analogy to include interpretations of meaning, my argument shows that the cognitive, scientific model can accommodate a wider range of aesthetic engagement with nature than previously recognised.


1969 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. P. Walshe

The origins of African political consciousness in Southern Africa can be traced back to the first half of the nineteenth century, to the impact of the Christian missions and to the development of a non-racial constitution in the Cape. As the century progressed, mission-educated Africans came to exercise a limited but real influence within Cape politics, and the Native policy of that Colony was seen to contrast favourably with those policies developing in the Boer Republics and Natal. By the turn of the century a new African élite had emerged, committed to non-racial ideals gleaned from Christianity and supported by the theory, and to some extent the practice, of Cape politics.


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Hayes

The Orthodox diaspora has, paradoxically, spread Orthodox Christianity throughout the world, but has not contributed much to Orthodox mission. Even after the third or fourth generation of immigrants, church services are generally held in the language of the countries from which the immigrants came. This is certainly true of South Africa, where most of the Orthodox immigration has been from Greece and Cyprus, with smaller groups of Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Lebanese and Romanians. Though there were immigrants from these countries in southern Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that Orthodox clergy arrived and churches were built, first in Cape Town and then in Johannesburg. It was only in the twenty-first century that clergy began to be ordained locally in any numbers. The churches therefore tended to be ethnic enclaves, and apathetic towards, or even opposed to, mission and outreach to other ethnic communities.


2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW R. GOODRUM

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 404-421
Author(s):  
Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel

This article attempts to shed light on the complex interdependencies between science, art and popular visual culture in the context of nineteenth-century natural history museums. Natural history museums are still underestimated agents for (artistic) scientific visualizations. Built as ‘visual narrators’ they became a form of mass media that conveyed scientific knowledge to diverse audiences. This article is a first attempt to bring order into the broad field of science visualization and to describe its significance for the popularization of the natural sciences. The visual outreach of museums such as the Natural History Museum Vienna went far beyond their circle of visitors. By creating and presenting first rank artistic imaginaries, they inspired highly circulated teaching devices such as school wall charts, textbooks or models, thus influencing our collective visual memory. These images subconsciously shaped the way we perceive the world as it is and as it could have been. 


Philosophy ◽  
1947 ◽  
Vol 22 (82) ◽  
pp. 153-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. Walsh

Philosophy of history is not a subject which has hitherto attracted much attention in this country. Preoccupation with the methods and achievements of the natural sciences, and distaste for the sort of rationale of history as a whole which Hegel and others offered under the title in the early nineteenth century, have served to make most British philosophers accord its problems only the most casual recognition. It is therefore all the more interesting to find an English writer of unusual powers both of argument and expression, who was himself an historian of distinction in his special field, devoting a large part of his philosophical thinking to the problems of historical knowledge and their wider implications. Unfortunately, R. G. Collingwood was not able to begin the major work on philosophy of history, to writing which, as we are told in the introduction to the present book, he had looked forward for twenty-five years, until his powers were seriously affected by bad health, and he did not live to complete it. But though the full results of his thinking on the subject are lost, we are now able, thanks to the skilful work of his friend Professor T. M. Knox, to study what is in effect an extensive interim report on it. Professor Knox has produced The Idea of History largely on the basis of lectures which Collingwood prepared in 1936, supplemented by two essays already published which date from the same period and a certain amount of material from the unfinished Principles of History written in 1939.


2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 581-593
Author(s):  
David Sepkoski

One of the best arguments for approaching the history of information processing and handling in the human and natural sciences as a “history of data” is that it focuses our attention on relationships, convergences, and contingent historical developments that can be obscured following more traditional areas of focus on individual disciplines or technologies. This essay explores one such case of convergence in nineteenth-century data history between empirical natural history (paleontology and botany), bureaucratic statistics (cameralism), and contemporary historiography, arguing that the establishment of visual conventions around the presentation of temporal patterns in data involved interactions between ostensibly distinct knowledge traditions. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.


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