Clio’s New Cultural Turn and the Rediscovery of Tradition in Asia

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Cultural Turn

This study describes the changes in historiography from the positivistic conception of history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the social scientific approach to hermeneutics and the search for meanings in contemporary cultural studies. While discussing how intellectual history has been redefined in terms of cultures as structures of meaning, the essay emphasizes the importance of the re-discovery of tradition, especially the study of Chinese history in its own terms as a tradition with it own cultural characteristics.

Between Celebration and Ambivalence

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Ross Kane
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
North American ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter’s intellectual history of syncretism examines the field of religious studies from the 1960s to the present. Religious studies’ engagement with syncretism shows its struggles with race and colonialism, since the designation “syncretism” has worked within the framing of a center and periphery that sees white European and North American cultures as central and other regions as peripheral. Its engagement with syncretism also shows the field’s tensions over ways one might responsibly interpret other cultures. In particular, is a social scientific approach to research or a humanist approach more respectful of informants’ cultures? Finally, the chapter explores disagreements about whether to use the term “syncretism” at all.

scholarly journals Vicarious dissonance and the narrative of the Gospel of Matthew

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Mikko Pisilä
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Functions ◽  
Social Scientific

This article presents a novel social-scientific approach to the Gospel of Matthew, one of the most influential texts in the history of Christianity. This approach combines social-psychological and narrative-critical methodology. The aim is to demonstrate how the gospel narrative functions to transform the social identity of its audience and stimulate group commitment via the social-psychological phenomenon of vicarious cognitive dissonance.

scholarly journals The international congress as scientific and diplomatic technology: global intellectual exchange in the International Prison Congress, 1860–90

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nir Shafir
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
International Congress ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractIn the 1870s, the American prison reformer E. C. Wines attempted to bring together representatives from every country and colony in the world to discuss the administration and reform of the prison, under the auspices of the International Prison Congress. This article tackles the challenge by exploring how the international congress operated as both a social scientific technology and a diplomatic forum that emerged from this short-lived world of amateur social science and diplomacy. It argues that the exigencies of the international congress as a social scientific space forced it to take on diplomatic and political functions that both imprinted a logic of comparability onto the burgeoning international diplomatic system and also caused the eventual exclusion of non-European polities from the congresses. It engages with recent scholarship in history of science specifically to understand the international congress as a technology that mediated intellectual exchange and scientific communication. By examining the challenges posed by the inclusion of non-Western polities in such communication, it attempts to reveal the multiple global histories of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century.

Jumbos and Jumping Devils

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nisha P R
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and post-colonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs, and oral interviews, the author brings out a fascinating account of the transnational landscape of physical cultures, human and animal performers, and the circus industry. This book should be of interest to a wide range of readers from history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to analysts of history of performance and sports in the subcontinent.

Sufis and the Sufi Lodges in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Socio-Spatial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Profiles

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.

scholarly journals The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
Dead End ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Representations Of Space

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

Pierre Bourdieu, the ‘cultural turn’ and the practice of international history

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER JACKSON
Keyword(s):  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
International History ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Cultural Orientations ◽  
Structural Environment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Turn

AbstractThe rise of the ‘cultural turn’ has breathed new life into the practice of international history over the past few decades. Cultural approaches have both broadened and deepened interpretations of the history of international relations. This article focuses on the use of culture as an explanatory methodology in the study of international history. It outlines the two central criticisms often made of this approach. The first is that it suffers from a lack of analytical rigour in both defining what culture is and understanding how it shapes individual and collective policy decisions. The second is that it too often leads to a tendency to exaggerate the importance of the cultural predispositions of individual or collective actors at the expense of the wider structures within which policymaking takes place. The article provides a brief outline of the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu – which focuses on the interaction between the cultural orientations of social actors and the structural environment that conditions their strategies and decisions. It then argues that Bourdieu’s conceptual framework can provide the basis for a more systematic approach to understanding the cultural roots of policymaking and that international historians would benefit from engagement with his approach.

Invisible Bodies

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Material Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay explores the ways in which Lu Gwei-djen (1904–91) served as a gatekeeper for interpreting medicine in China in the second half of the twentieth century. After retiring from science in 1956, Lu set out to write one of the first comprehensive English-language histories of medicine in China. Through a close study of Lu’s work notes and marginalia from later in her life, this essay examines how she carefully articulated the material characteristics of a “Chinese” medicine that gave rise to jingluo, or therapeutic paths often known as “meridians.” I argue that at the heart of this uneasy comparison was the difficult process of translating across multiple expressions of physiology. By placing Lu Gwei-djen at the center of a feminist intellectual history of medicine, this essay further shows how Lu’s translations were influenced by the social hierarchies in which she was embedded, including cultural, gender, and temporal dualities.

Ways and dynamics of reception of Ludwik Fleck’s work in the social sciences

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-210
Author(s):  
Dimitri Ginev
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Cognitive Sociology ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Thought Styles

The problem of how to access and estimate the proliferation of receptions of Ludwik Fleck’s work in domains as diverse as social geography, history of clinical medicine, and cognitive sociology has long remained vexing. The approach suggested in this paper combines the hermeneutics of effective-historical reception with a version of epistemic reconstruction of intellectual history. Special emphasis is placed upon the forms of political contextualization of Fleck’s comparative sociology of thought styles. The author argues that the heterogeneity of receptions is essentially informed by the specificity of the ‘implicit reader’ Fleck assigned to his work. Interestingly enough, it is a ‘reader’ congruent with the post-metaphysical turns in the social sciences. This claim is defended by analyzing particular trajectories of reception of Fleck’s work.

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