“Useful Knowledge” in Charles-Alexandre Lesueur’s visual and textual accounts of Missouri in 1826

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Walton
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Direct Observation ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Educational Community ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Way Of Knowing ◽  
Lead Mining

Artist and naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846) valued his work as useful to science generally and to France in particular, including during the time he lived and traveled in North America from 1816 to 1837.  Starting with Daniela Bleichmar’s concept of “visual epistemology: a way of knowing based on visuality, encompassing both observation and representation,” this essay claims that Lesueur’s art and scientific practice adhered closely to a belief in the authority of art from direct observation in nature, and they served different professional, educational, community, and potentially commercial purposes. It charts the conditions under which he produced the art, the purpose(s) of the art, the types of art (sketches, paintings, prints, landscape drawings), and the intended audience through four types of subjects from the expedition to Missouri in 1826:  the challenges of scientific fieldwork, Blacks in Missouri, lead mining, and inland but especially riverside towns.

“Gotta Moan Sometime”: A Sonic Exploration of Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound in North America

Pneuma ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Douglas Daniels, III
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Ambient Sound ◽  
Way Of Knowing

AbstractSound as a historical frame provides a new historiographic turn for Pentecostal studies and a complement to spatial and temporal studies of the Pentecostal past. This article explores how sound serves as a primary marker of early Pentecostal identity, as sound blended the sound of prayer, preaching, testifying, singing, music-making, and silence. Embedded in early Pentecostal sound are primal cries, speech, music, and ambient sound which, for early Pentecostals, functioned as a circular continuum that Pentecostal soundways traveled. Encompassing more than orality, early Pentecostal sound generated a way of knowing that challenged the orality-literacy binary, the hierarchy of senses that privileged sight, and the hierarchy of the races.

scholarly journals The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America /

1904 ◽  
Author(s):  
William T. Hornaday ◽  
Beard ◽  
Keller ◽  
Rungius ◽  
Sanborn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Useful Knowledge

Native Collecting and Natural Knowledge (1798–1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as ‘Centre of Calculation’

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Savithri Preetha Nair
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Colonial Science

AbstractTanjore in South India during the reign of Raja Serfoji II (1798–1832), is a hitherto unexamined episode of both colonial science and of ‘Enlightenment’ in the non-western context. If Joseph Banks, a product of the English Enlightenment, was a metropolitan ‘centre of calculation’ directing and controlling a collecting network in India between the 1770s and 1820, it is argued that Raja Serfoji was his native counterpart, exhibiting similar formal properties, and drawing on those very same ideas and networks of metropolitan practice to systematically produce useful knowledge. This case study demonstrates strongly (among other things) the weaknesses of the centre-periphery model of scientific practice. It shows how the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are not determined by virtue of the geographical location, but by the nature of practice, which is a combined effect of social, scientific and power relations. Thus, this article examines the ways in which it became possible for a small quasi-Indian state in early nineteenth-century South India to leap onto the threshold of modernity, by generating an intellectual ferment of the kind that it did, as a unique native response to the western encounter.

Retracing Assia Djebar's Steps

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-146
Author(s):  
Odile Cazenave
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Professional Experience ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Academie Francaise

There is something daunting about writing an homage to an artist who just died. One is faced with questions of proximity, expertise, and knowledge: questions on how to evoke the person and oeuvre without giving oneself too much prominence, questions on the intended audience and adequate tonality as well as the standpoint one is speaking from. This is especially true with the Algerian writer, filmmaker, historian, and playwright Assia Djebar: “As a Moslem woman, educated in the French system while her country was still under de-facto colonial rule and witness to eight years of brutal war while still in her twenties, Djebar is the only writer of her sex and her generation who has managed an impressive output both before and after her country's accession to independence” (Zimra, Afterword 163). As Clarisse Zimra further reminds us in “A Daughter's Call,” “By the time of her death, Assia Djebar had been writing for nearly sixty years.” The range of her training, her professional experience on three continents (Africa, Europe, North America), and her practice of different genres are just as impressive. She received several prestigious awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1979 for her film La nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978; “The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua”) and the Neustadt Prize (1996), often considered a gateway to the Nobel Prize (for which she was short-listed twice). Elected to the Académie Française in 2005, she is, as Zimra remarks, “une immortelle.”

Notices of publications relating to the history of the Society

1951 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-304
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
American Philosophical Society ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
St Helena ◽  
Period Of Oscillation

Volume 94, No. 3, of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge , published 20 June 1950, contains some papers of great interest to the Fellows of the Royal Society. In particular, Professor Thomas D. Cope has outlined the odyssey of the Royal Society’s clock. In 1760 the Council of the Society ordered clocks to be constructed in preparation for expeditions to St Helena and to Sumatra for the purpose of assisting in the observations to be made of the transit of Venus, due to occur on 5 June 1761. Mr John Shelton was paid £34 16 s .6 d . for his clock on 23 December 1760 ; and it can truthfully be said that the Society seldom made a better purchase. Shelton’s clock went to St Helena in 1761 where it was used by the Rev. Neville Maskelyne, F.R.S., to measure the difference between the force of gravity as observed at Greenwich and at St Helena by the period of oscillation of a pendulum of fixed length. On his way home, the clock was carried to the Cape of Good Hope by Jeremiah Dixon, F.R.S., who set it up there and made a new observation before sailing for England. In 1763, the clock went to Barbados with Neville Maskelyne, for use in testing John Harrison’s marine chronometer; and it also served to make observations on the force of gravity at that place. In 1766, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were in North America, preparing to demarcate a parallel of latitude which ultimately became the boundary between the States of Pennsylvania and Maryland ; a line more popularly known as the Mason-Dixon line. They were also instructed by the Royal Society to measure a degree of longitude, and for this purpose Shelton’s clock was sent out to them. At the meeting of Council at which the decision was taken to send the clock, Benjamin Franklin, F.R.S., was present and was consulted on the best means for its shipment to America.

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