This paper discusses the historiography of the ‘two cultures’ controversy. C. P. Snow’s lament about the ‘two cultures’, literary and scientific, has inspired a wide range of comment—much of which begins by citing Snow and his thesis, before going on to discuss very different things. This paper focuses upon one strand of this commentary, the historical analysis of the controversy itself. A ‘historical’ analysis is defined here as one that resists the impulse to enter the argument on behalf of Snow (...) or Leavis, to conceive of their argument in the terms that Snow defined, or to invoke their argument as a precursor to some contemporary issue. Instead, a historical interpretation registers distance between that day and this, takes the controversy itself as its object of study, and explores the tensions and associations that came to be packed into those now familiar terms. As the fiftieth anniversary of Snow’s Rede Lecture nears, this approach—rather than the repetition of clichés about the bridging of cultures—offers both analytical perspective on the controversy and interpretive possibilities for its examination.Keywords: Two cultures; Literature; Cultural politics; C. P. Snow; F. R. Leavis; 1960s. (shrink)

Historians, the good ones, mark a century by intellectual and social boundaries rather than by the turn of the calendar page. Only through fortuitous accident might occasions of consequence occur at the very beginning of a century. Imaginative historians do tend, however, to invest a date like 1800 with powers that attract events of significance. It is thus both fortunate and condign that Abiology@ came to linguistic and conceptual birth with the new century. Precisely in 1800, Karl Friedrich Burdach, a (...) romantic naturalist, suggested that his coinage Biologie be used to indicate the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological, and psychological perspective.i Many other neologisms of the period (and Burdach issued quite a few) were stillborn or survived only for a short while. Biologie, though, fit the time, and with slight adjustment received its modern meaning two years later at the hands of the Naturphilosoph Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus. In his multi-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802-1822), Treviranus announced: AThe objects of our research will be the different forms and manifestations of life, the conditions and laws under which these phenomena occur, and the causes through which they have been effected. The science that concerns itself with these objects we will indicate by the name biology [Biologie] or the doctrine of life [Lebenslehre].@ii Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, also in 1802, employed the term with comparable intention.iii In the work of both of these biologists, the word became immediately associated with the theory of the transmutation of speciesCa new term in recognition of the new laws of life. Treviranus thought the progressive deposition of fossils.. (shrink)

This article explains the History (past reality), the Historiology (the theories and methods to study the past), and the Historiography (the academic literature) about Cross-Cultural Studies in the U.S.A., from traditional and native subjects (i.e. American Studies), until the current version. It pays attention to religion, as a relevant factor in the evolution of U.S. culture and its model of social relations. En este artículo se explica la Historia (la realidad pasada), la Historiología (las teorías y métodos con los (...) que se estudia dicho pasado), y la Historiografía (la literatura académica al respecto) de los estudios interculturales en los EE.UU., desde las primeras disciplinas tradicionales y nativistas (e.g. Estudios Estadounidenses), hasta los actuales estudios interculturales. Se presta especial atención al factor religioso, pues ha sido muy influyente en el devenir de la cultura estadounidense y en sus relaciones sociales. (shrink)

Examining turning points in historical thought in a variety of cultures, the essay here deal with reorientations in historical thinking in the pre-modern period since Antiquity, mainly in ancient Greece and China and in medieval Christian Europe.

This article contributes to the project of historicizing the emergence of printed books as a mass cultural form in the 20th century and after, in addition to exploring the political-economic struggles both occasioning and occasioned by their constitution as such. In doing so, it both models and reflects on what a possible historiography of technology "after social constructionism" might look like. More specifically, it attempts to account for the behind-the-scenes or "back office" processes through which commodification takes place in the (...) sphere of book distribution, and it does so by focusing principally on communication and information technologies such as the international standard book number (ISBN) and machine readable bar codes. This history, overall, complements the more hopeful narratives of mass culture's democratizing potential, by telling a story about how increased opportunities for middle class social advancement depend on intensified - and intensely technological - work processes for those employed in the sphere of commodity distribution. This essay demonstrates, moreover, how dominant metaphors and frameworks that have guided Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) research (e.g., "actor-networks," "seamless webs," and so forth) must be amended to account better for power, contradiction, and antagonism within the history of technology. (shrink)

This paper surveys the parallel fates of the notion of the empirical in philosophy of science in the 20th century and the notion of experience as evidence in one important line of debate in historiography/philosophy of history. The focus concerns the presumably crucial role some notion of the empirical plays in the assessment of knowledge claims. The significance of 'the empirical' disappears on the assumption that theories either determine what counts as experience or explain away any apparently discordant evidence. One (...) consequence of this has been the suggestion that the analysis of meaning somehow replaces or supplants that played by evidence qua fact. This dispute impacts in parallel ways the turf wars between philosophers of science and practitioners of science studies as well as disputes in historiography between literary theorists and those not so kindly disposed. The parallels suggest why historiographic debate has stalled for three decades. (shrink)

The essays in this collection explore both how the employment of nation-state dominated discourses have caused a re-imagination of the past, and how the past has been re-constructed to accord with nationalist agendas. Although other works have considered in general terms how nations are imagined, this collection takes a different stance and specifically focuses on how 'the past' is used in such imaginations. This collection was conceived in an interdisciplinary spirit, drawing insights from art history, intellectual history, literature, archaeology, heritage (...) studies, political science, and film studies. The authors combine a sophisticated theoretical approach with illuminative case studies from all across the globe, including the Balkans, South Africa, Rwanda, the Yemen, Italy, Turkey, Greece, and Uzbekistan. (shrink)

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their (...) traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking. 1 Hans-Peter Söder, Junior Year in Munich Program (Wayne State University). (shrink)

Rather than a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, translation has become understood as a translingual act of transcoding cultural material--a complex act of communication. Much recent work on translation in history grows out of interest in the effects of European colonialism, especially within Asian studies, where interest has been driven by the contrast between the experiences of China and Japan, which were never formally colonized, and the alternative (...) examples of peoples without strong, centralized states--those of the Indian subcontinent and the Tagalog in the Philippines--who were colonized by European powers. This essay reviews several books published in recent years, one group of which share the general interpretation that colonial powers forced their subjects to "translate" their local language, sociality, or culture into the terms of the dominant colonial power: because the colonial power controls representation and forces its subjects to use the colonial language, it is in a position to construct the forms of indigenous and subject identity. The other books under review here are less concerned with power in colonial situations than with the fact of different languages, cultures, or practices and the work of "translating" between the two--particularly the efforts of indigenous agents to introduce European ideas and institutions to their respective peoples. (shrink)

“Do Anthropocene narratives confuse an important distinction between the natural and the historical past?” asks Giuseppina D’Oro. D’Oro defends the view that the concept of the historical past is sui generis and distinct from that of the geological past against a new, Anthropocene-inspired challenge to the possibility of a humanistically oriented historiography. She argues that the historical past is not a short segment of geological time, the time of the human species on Earth, but the past investigated from the perspective (...) of a distinctive kind of interest, that of uncovering the norms which governed historical agents in different periods of time. The past for the Egyptologist, or for the Roman historian, is not the same past studied by the palaeontologist or the geologist, not because it is infinitesimal short in comparison to geological time, but because the questions asked by historians concerned with the Egyptian or Roman civilization are not the same kind of questions asked by empirically minded scientists. She argues that the accusation that the distinction between the historical and the natural/geological past, rests on unacceptable form of human exceptionalism is based on the conflation of the concept of the historical past with that of the human past and that keeping alive the nature/culture distinction has important implications for praxis. If the distinction between nature and culture is collapsed, and the corollary that historical agents are not distinct in kind from natural agents (such as yeast and microbes) is accepted, then “the anticipation of the future would become a mere spectator’s sport analogous to the activity of predicting the weather”: collapsing the nature culture distinction, D’Oro argues, undermines the possibility of political action against the very threat (climate change) that motivates Anthropocene narratives in the first instance. (shrink)

This dissertation examines existential and ethical dimensions of writing and reading, especially with regard to what it means to historicize, that is think, tell, read and write about the past. A central aim of the dissertation is to show that reading and writing as cultural phenomena involve a transgenerational ethical relationship with absent people, which exceeds the immediate horizon of life of an individual. Growing up in a culture of literacy means gradually coming to understand a life that spans (...) over several generations, relationships with people in a past world who, in their absence, are constantly referred to and invoked in the continued life of posterity. In light of this, historiography appears above all as a way of maintaining a life over generations. In turn, this raises an ethical-existential question of responsibility for the ways in which any posterity talks about and relates to those who are no longer alive. The articles in this dissertation are case studies the purpose of which is to clarify what this responsibility toward the past involves in our culture of literacy. The methodological starting points of the dissertation are mainly to be found in existential moral philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics, and deconstructive phenomenology. The arguments of the articles take shape in dialogue with central thinkers of these philosophical traditions. The thoughts that are critically examined, however, are understood by many scholars to be unproblematic or legitimate, so that it is even more important to point out their possibly difficult ethical implications. Central themes examined in the articles of the dissertation are: the view that written language has a generally ethically unreliable character (Derrida, Ricoeur, Plato); the relationship between writing, burial and the performative culture of remembering (Jonas, Derrida, Ruin, Fritsch); aesthetic temptations in relation to testimonial stories and realistic prose (Lévinas, Levi, White, Žižek); and the problems for responsibility that can arise when an empathetic method or social psychology is used in historical research (Browning, Brison, Wyschogrod). Through an examination of these themes, the dissertation shows several immoral and existentially simplified aspects arising from ways in which posterity’s responsibility has often been understood to be constituted. These simplifications permeate our historical consciousness and are particularly evident in the methodology and theory of historical science, as well as in the philosophy and aesthetics of historiography. The positive argument of the dissertation therefore consists in clarifying how an ethical-existential relationship of responsibility to other people precedes literary mediation, narrativity, and the search for evidence, as these people are the ones that posterity talks about, lives on with, and continues to care about even in their absence. (shrink)

Marxist Historiographies is the first book to examine the ebb and flow of Marxist historiography from a global and cross-cultural perspective. Since the eighteenth century, few schools of historical thought have exerted a more lasting impact than Marxism, and this impact extends far beyond the Western world within which it is most commonly analysed. Edited by two highly respected authors in the field and taking a truly global perspective on this topic, Marxist Historiographies demonstrates clearly the breadth and depth of (...) Marxism's influence in historical writing throughout the world and is essential reading for all students of historiography. (shrink)

Paradigms of historiography of philosophy in India have being changed since late 19th c. till present, depending on the social and cultural context of the history of Indian philosophy as a part of contemporary Indian culture. This change manifests itself in the conceptions of Indian historians concerning the teaching of Buddhist Mahāyāna school of Yogācāra (4th c. and later). Historians of colonial times, basing themselves on the philosophy of Neovedаntism (S. Radhakrishnan, S. Dasgupta), regarded Buddhism as a derivate of (...) late Vedic culture and Yogācāra as a teaching that reflected - though in an essentially transmuted form - the ideology of Upaniṣads. The latter, according to Neovedantists, was based on the postulate of the existence of the single cosmic soul - Brahman, the true human Self (Ātman) being identical to it. Historians of the late colonial and early postcolonial times (P.T. Raju, D.P. Chattopadhyaya, A.K. Chatterjee, partly also S. Dasgupta) brought Yogācāra closer to the teachings of European idealism, mainly to conceptions of G. Berkeley, G.W.F. Hegel, F. Bradley, J.E. McTaggart, trying to demonstrate a principal identity of fundamental problems in Indian and Western philosophy. At the same time, they brought Yogācāra together with the teaching of Brāhmaṇic school, Advaita Vedānta, regarded as another form of Indian idealism. In later times, following the evolution of contemporary Indian culture and changings in its social and political context, historians like D.J. Kalupahana became to analyze Yogācāra as a kind of philosophy of mind. All these facts show the dependence of strategies of historico-philosophical studies in India on its social, political and cultural context: in the Yogācāra teaching mainly those aspects call attention that a historian sees as the closest to the problematic field of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Organized thematically, this important five-volume set brings together key essays from the field of historical studies. Including an extensive general introduction by the editor in the first volume, as well as shorter individual introductions in each of the following volumes, this set is essential reading for scholars and students alike. Coverage includes: 1. Foundations - The Classic Tradition - The Old Cultural History - Economic History 2: Society - Social History - Marxism - Annales - History of Mentalities 3: Ideas (...) - History of Ideas/ Intellectual History - History of Science - History of the Arts - History of Religion - History of Sexuality. 4: Culture - History and Anthropology - Microhistory - New Cultural History - History and Memory - The Poetics of History - Narrativity. Postmodernist Historiography and its Critics 5: Politics - Political History - Imperialism and Postcolonial History - World History - World-Systems Analysis. (shrink)

Zagorin presents a critique of F. R. Ankersmit's postmodernist philosophy of history as fallacious and opposed to some of the fundamental convictions and intuitions historians feel about their discipline. It questions Ankersmit's conclusion that the overproduction of historical writings and continuing generation of new interpretations has obliterated the past as an object of knowledge. It argues that Ankersmit's attempt, in accord with Hayden White, to aestheticize historiography and regard it as a linguistic construction indistinguishable from literature, must sever it from (...) its necessary grounding in reality and truth. It also rejects as groundless Ankersmit's claim to have deconstructed causality, and concludes that the postmodernist conception trivializes historiography and deprives it of its essential function in education and culture. (shrink)

Drawing on recent publications on studies in historiography of philosophy in French-, English-, and German-speaking philosophy, the author clarifies the subject matter and tasks of studies in historiography of philosophy as a historico-philosophical approach, in particular, counting among such subjects the images of philosophy's past constructed by histories of philosophy, as well as the historiographical attitudes of historians of philosophy and the contexts and factors that determine these historiographical attitudes. The article analyses the conceptions and implementations of three projects of (...) studies in historiography of philosophy that have taken place in Ukraine in recent decades: the project of “History of Historico-philosophical Science”, led by Yu. Kushakov in the 1980s and 2000s and dedicated to the study of historico-philosophical conceptions of German and Russian philosophers of the 19th and early 20th; S. Rudenko's study of post-Soviet methodological approaches to the history of Ukrainian philosophy (2012); and the Ukrainian part of the bilateral project “Philosophy in the system of national culture: comparative analysis of historico-philosophical studies in Belarus and Ukraine” (2011-2012), led by V. Yevarousky and S. Yosypenko. Based on the results of the latter project and on his more recent research, the author outlines the socio-political, general philosophical and institutional context in which the historiography of Ukrainian philosophy was formed and functioned during the 20th century; analyses the images of the history of Ukrainian philosophy created by D. Tschižewskij and V. Horskyi, which embody two extreme points in the development of the historiography of Ukrainian philosophy in the 20th century; and points out the changes in the general philosophical and institutional context of historico-philosophical research in independent Ukraine and the consequences of these changes for the further development of the historiography of Ukrainian philosophy. (shrink)

The volume is a collection of papers on certain aspects of Indian history, historiography and culture. The papers are fundamental, insightful and path-breaking to some extent. Combining literary, archaeological, scientific and other perspectives, they cover a range of subjects stretching from ancient to modern India. The volume deals with the Greek historians, the Indian epic and Puranic tradition of historiography, colonial and cultural expansion of the Aryans, the early history of north-west India, society, trade and commerce in ancient India, (...) economic, political and cultural contacts of India with other parts of Asia in ancient and medieval periods, and the 1857 War of Independence in India. It takes up some very interesting and new subjects like role of Brahmanas in the anti-Alexander movement in north-west India and the concept of national integration in ancient India. It explores the sources of history of Uttar Pradesh and the antiquity of Ayodhya and historicity of Rama in an interesting study. The volume will be of immense use to historians and scholars of philosophy. (shrink)

There is a Balinese sense of history, albeit one different from most Western notions of history in that it stresses continuity with patterns from the past, not the past as a "foreign country." Balinese do not narrate events in chronological order for the purposes of writing history, as is the bent of Western scholars. Rather, they tell stories about other things that we would call "mythical" or "legendary" in order to refer to events. Balinese historical writing serves to establish and (...) reflect patterns of social and cultural organization, where things "happen" fortuitously, and truth becomes manifested in the well-performed or well-written text. The textual form of "commemorations" makes the coincidental connections between texts and events quite explicit; they show that most Balinese texts are written as part of a process of writing history. The commemorations intimate that an event is not just an event. It is a moment selected from a temporal continuum by an act of remembering. The texts of Bali were written into the historical moment, in a two-way process of contextualizing and historicizing. (shrink)

This interview – conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months (July to September 2011) between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype – explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and TV (...) presenter. He compiled and produced four double CD album collections of Australian music – Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom (1995) and ABC TV’s hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top (2001). In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound (with soundtrack CD) was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car (2005) has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945–1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year ‘career’ as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work’s development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. (shrink)

Three issues essential to our insight into the concept and function of historical consciousness, and the description thereof, form the core of this book: historical truth, historical comment and criticism, and ideology (including the historian's trustworthiness). Taking as a point of departure the workings of these concepts in Chinese historical thinking, the volume carefully draws comparisons with similar topics in the Western tradition. It thus advocates and shows a truly comparative approach that sets the stage for an intercultural dialogue on (...) this important subject. The first comprehensive work on the political and cognitive dimensions of Chinese historical consciousness set against its Western counterpart. (shrink)

In the 19th century, the history of philosophy becomes the history of a particular science. Modern philosophical historiography is an ambivalent project. On the one hand, we find an affirmative concept of Bildung through tradition and historical insight; on the other, there arises a critical reflection on historical education in the light of an emerging critique of modern culture. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the debate.

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how the ancient collective biographical (...) tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: La pragmatique et la sémantique de l’historiographie révèlent une fragmentation croissante qui s’étend par-delà les écoles jusqu’aux historiens individuels. Alors que les scientifiques normalisent les données pour qu’elles s’ajustent aux théories, les historiens interprètent leurs théories, de manières incompatibles entre elles, pour qu’elles s’ajustent aux différents cas historiques. Les difficultés qui en découlent dans la communication historiographique remettent en cause les philosophies herméneutiques de l’historiographie et redonnent un nouvel intérêt à la question d’une historiographie scientifique. Mais les réponses existantes (...) sont philosophiquement obsolètes. Une façon de reformuler le problème est de partir de la complexité du chaos et de l’unicité de l’histoire. Seule la science peut évaluer si les propriétés d’un domaine donné en interdisent une approche scientifique. Or la science s’étend par réductions méthodologiques explicatives, en ramenant des propriétés d’événements complexes, chaotiques et uniques, qui sont familières, mais d’un niveau plus élevé, à des propriétés ou interrelations non familières et d’un niveau moins élevé. La culture disciplinaire de l’historiographie, cependant, empêche le développement par essais et erreurs de telles tentatives de réductions scientifiques, qui seules permettraient d’évaluer les possibilités d’une historiographie scientifique, laquelle, dans la situation présente, relève de la science-fiction. (shrink)

What caused the eventual decline in later Jewish history of the vibrant historiographical tradition of the biblical period? In contrast to the plethora of historical writings composed during the biblical period, the rabbis of the early common era apparently were not interested in writing history, and when they did relate to historical events they often introduced mythical and unrealistic elements into their writings. Scholars have offered various explanations for this phenomenon; a central goal of this article is to locate these (...) explanations within both the immediate historical setting of Roman Palestine and the overarching cultural atmosphere of the Greco-Roman Near East. In particular, I suggest that the largely ahistorical approach of the rabbis functioned as a local Jewish counterpart to the widespread classicizing tendencies of a contemporary Greek intellectual movement, the Second Sophistic. In both cases, eastern communities, whose political aspirations were stifled under Roman rule, sought to express their cognitive and spiritual identities by focusing on a glorious and idealized past rather than on contemporary history. Interestingly, the apparent lack of rabbinic interest in historiography is not limited to the early rabbinic period. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, Jews essentially did not write their political, diplomatic, or military history. Instead, Jews composed “traditional historiography” which included various types of literary genres among which the rabbinic “chain of transmission” was the most important. The chain of transmission reconstructs the links that connect later rabbinic sages with their predecessors. Robert Bonfil has noted the similarity between this rabbinic project and contemporary church histories. Adding a diachronic dimension to Bonfil’s comparison, I suggest that rabbinic chains of transmission and church histories are not similar though entirely independent phenomena, but rather their shared project actually derives from a common origin, the Hellenistic succession list. The succession list literary genre, which sketches the history of an intellectual discipline, apparently thrived during the Second Sophistic and diffused then into both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Thus, even though historiography was not terribly important to the early rabbis or to most Second Sophistic intellectuals, the succession list schematic, or the history of an intellectual discipline, was evaluated differently. Rabbis and early Christians absorbed the succession list from Second Sophistic culture and then continued to employ this historiographical genre for many centuries to come. (shrink)

In a series of incisive readings of signature historical works, Mark Poster charts the move from social history to new practices of cultural history that are drawing strength from poststructuralist interpretive strategies and raising issues found in feminist and postcolonialist discourse. In the process, he sets forth an outline for a postmodern historiography that can negotiate the contested terrain between the ambiguities of discourse and the pull of the "real." As Poster provides close readings of leading historians and theorists such (...) as Lawrence Stone, Francois Furet, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, key themes animate his work: the often irreducible difference between past and present; the relationship of writing and representation to power and domination; the dissolving distinctions between high and low culture, production and consumption, and reality and fiction; and, most important, a new perspective on human agency and the construction of political subjects. (shrink)

Nombre d’analyses et de réflexions d’Anglo-Saxons (mais aussi de Scandinaves et de Néerlandais) sur les interactions entre genre et culture écrite en Angleterre à la fin du Moyen Âge ont été, ces dernières années, d’une grande richesse. Elles méritent d’être appréhendées dans toute leur complexité et d’être confrontées aux récents questionnements de l’historiographie française. Une grande partie de ces travaux s’est inscrite dans le cadre d’une analyse renouvelée du triptyque « literacy/orality/ aurality » et insiste sur la complexité des (...) contenus et des formes de savoirs féminins et de leurs transmissions à tous les niveaux. Ces études soulignent la multiplicité des situations et des modèles selon les contextes sociaux, politiques et religieux. Elles élargissent et problématisent la notion de literacy ainsi que les rapports de domination hommes/femmes qui en résultent, dessinant un paysage culturel toujours plus dense. (shrink)

Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of "academic memoir." This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara Walker's ephemeral 80,000 (...) pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 92 Heft: 2 Seiten: 413-441.

In the recent past, attempts to revitalize historico-religious studies have challenged the charismatic appeal of some of the most celebrated scholars of the twentieth century. At the same time, the old and ideological frameworks that characterized the field have been critically analyzed and deconstructed. The disciplinary status quo, taken for granted for quite a long time, has been shaken to its foundation, paving the way for new approaches. However, the postmodern tenet of problematizing any authority has also become a convenient (...) shortcut to blur the distinction between scientific signal and nonepistemic noise. Despite this troublesome feature, some scholars have deployed postmodern and poststructuralist tools to study the genealogy, reception, implementation, and diffusion of cultural representations within the aforementioned academic discipline. The present article briefly reviews one of the most recent and remarkable examples of such scholarship, that is, The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000. (shrink)

Ankersmit's articulation of a postmodern theory of history takes seriously both the strengths of traditional historicism and the right of historians to decide what makes sense for disciplinary practice. That makes him an exemplary interlocutor. Ankersmit proposes a theory of historical "representation" which radicalizes the narrative approach to historiography along the lines of poststructuralist textualism. Against this postmodernism but invoking some of his own arguments, I defend the traditional historicist position. I formulate criticisms of the theory of reference entailed in (...) his notion of "narrative substance," of his master analogy of historiography with modern painting, and finally of his characterization of historical hermeneutics. In each case I find him guilty of the hyperbole which he himself cautions against. While it is true that historical narratives cannot be taken to be transparent, in taking them to be opaque Ankersmit puts himself in an untenable position. Finally, Ankersmit seeks to buttress his theoretical case by an interpretation of the new cultural historical texts of authors like Davis and Ginzburg. While this is a concreteness heartily to be welcomed in philosophers of history, I cannot find his construction of this new school's work plausible. (shrink)

In this essay I review four recent monographs on Chinese American history: Xiao-huang Yin's Chinese American Literature since the 1850s, Madeline Hsu's Dreaming of Gold, Dream of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, Young Chen's Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, and Xiaojian Zhao's Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965. Based on both English- and Chinese-language sources, the authors of these four books explore migration processes and the social origins of Chinese immigrants (...) from an international perspective and they reinterpret the cultural values of immigrants as fundamentally open, engaged, and cosmopolitan. Moreover, they characterize the Chinese American community as a dynamic, fluid, and flexible global network and place Chinese America in a larger historical context beyond that of a single nation. They have seriously challenged the American-centered and nation-based research paradigm and promoted a more transnational, transcultural, and multilingual approach to the history of Asian American experience. (shrink)

The division of literature by language and nation has become so common that it seems to be obvious and natural. But it is not so, and moreover this not even a very old practice. But the national literary histories, apart from their political-cultural aims, are without justification since the history of literature in its themes, subjects and forms has rarely been confined to one nation. Quite large cultural areas exist, bound by space and time, in which literary phenomena are inextricably (...) linked. This essay therefore proposes a coherent and unified treatment of the literary traditions of Eastern and Western Europe. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer both an interpretation and a critique of the epistemological foundations underlying one of the most recent approaches to trauma studies: cultural trauma theory. After the First World War, the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, inquired into whether his diagnostic of “traumatic neurosis” could shed light on how collectives deal with unsettling experiences and memories. Throughout the intervening decades, Freud´s insights into collective trauma have attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines within the (...) humanities and social sciences, from literary studies to historiography, memory studies, and, finally – the focus of this paper – cultural and social theory. By underlining the ways in which the proponents of cultural trauma theory – Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelzer, Piotr Sztompka, Bernhard Giesen, and Ron Eyerman – have reframed Freudian ideas regarding the transmission of legacies of collective suffering, the paper considers whether the notion of trauma can be extended to the analysis of cultures and societies. It explores the ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis and contemporary cultural trauma theory to disclose the theoretical assumptions and weaknesses of the latter. (shrink)

“Cultural imperialism” has been an influential concept in the representation of the modern Christian missionary movement. This essay calls its usefulness into question and draws on recent work on the cultural dynamics of globalization to propose alternative ways of looking at the role of missions in modern history. The first section of the essay surveys the ways in which the term “cultural imperialism” has been employed in different disciplines, and some of the criticisms made of the term within those disciplines. (...) The second section discusses the application of the cultural imperialism framework to the missionary enterprise, and the related term “colonization of consciousness” used by Jean and John Comaroff in their influential work on British missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa. The third section looks at the historiography of missions in modern China, showing how deeply the teleological narratives of nationalism and development have marked that historiography. The concluding section argues that the missionary movement must be seen as one element in a globalizing modernity that has altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that a comparative global approach to the missionary movement can help to illuminate the process of modern cultural globalization. (shrink)

By taking the work and life of the historian of mathematics Heinrich Wieleitner as an example, this study aims to highlight the many interrelations between the historiography of mathematics, mathematics education, and science communication in mathematics.By integrating aspects of the history of media, this case study also explores mathematical public relations work in the 20th century and draws attention to the important persons, institutions and contents. The focus is on the Weimar period, in which the self-understanding of mathematics was challenged (...) in different ways by far-reaching cultural debates. The article demonstrates that as a consequence of a changing media landscape, Weimar culture turned out to be a suitable environment for the successful self-presentation of mathematics. (shrink)

The use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is based on a (...) misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward’s notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history. (shrink)

Although Bernard Lonergan is known primarily for his cognitional theory and theological methodology, he long sought to formulate a modern philosophy of history free of progressive and Marxist biases. Yet he never addressed this in any single work, and his reflections on the subject are scattered in various writings. In this pioneering work, Thomas McPartland shows how Lonergan’s overall philosophical position offers a fresh and comprehensive basis for considering historiography. Taking Lonergan’s philosophy of historical existence into the realm of an (...) epistemological philosophy of history, he demonstrates how the philosopher’s approach builds on the actual performance of historians and, as a result, integrates the insights of historical specialists into a framework of functional complementarity. McPartland draws on all of Lonergan’s philosophical writing—as well as on the vast literature of historiography—to detail Lonergan’s notions of historical method, historical objectivity, and historical knowledge. Along the way, he explains what Lonergan means by hermeneutics; by historical description, explanation, ideal-types, and narrative; by evaluative and dialectical analyses; and how these elements are all functionally related to each other. He also delineates the defining features of psychohistory, cultural history, intellectual history, history of ideas, and history of philosophy, indicating how these disciplines play complementary roles in the critical encounter with the past. Ultimately, McPartland argues that Lonergan has established the principles of a historical discipline—the history of consciousness—that weaves together a philosophy of consciousness with rigorous historical research to grasp long-term trends resulting from “differentiations of consciousness.” His work offers a distinct perspective on historical method that takes historical objectivity seriously while providing new insight into the thought of this important philosopher. (shrink)

Currently there is a widely held view that international law and its historiography did not emerge until the nineteenth century, with earlier forms of jus gentium or Völkerrecht being consigned to the status of a superseded ‘pre-history’. It is not widely understood that this view itself belongs to a particular kind of historiography–the dialectical historiography of international law–that was born in 1840s Germany, and wielded this viewpoint as a cultural-political weapon to exclude its rivals from ‘modernity’. In outlining a history (...) of this dialectical historiography, the present article focuses on the reception of Kantian and Hegelian philosophies, understood as species of Protestant rationalist metaphysics, in the juridical-political arena of the German Vormärz. Dialectical histories and theories of international law were the effects and instruments of this reception, which gave rise to the new academic subculture of philosophical international law. This subculture in turn permitted the fashioning of a new intellectual persona, the philosopher-jurist, who could claim to transcend positive treaty-based international law through personal insight into a ‘common international legal consciousness’, and to treat this insight as the threshold of ‘modern’ international law. (shrink)

Considering two recent trends in the Humanities – the cultural turn and the increase of critical sociohistorical reflections on a global level – in this paper it should be looked at their influences especially on philosophy. One of these influences can be located in the emergence of “intercultural philosophy” since the 1990s which calls for a reorientation of philosophy in general. Regarding mainly one of the favored methods, the polylogue, it is important to take into account the postcolonial perspective, too. (...) For such an interculturally and postcolonially motivated approach there are two tasks which are highly relevant: 1) the deconstruction of history in direction towards a new critical historiography and 2) the due reflection of crucial philosophical concepts and categories in direction towards a conceptual decolonization. Mainly the latter, in my opinion, marks a necessary and already overdue project for rethinking the philosophical vocabulary and for overcoming its colonial impact. Perhaps this may finally become a really intercultural philosophical project in which philosophers engage wherever they may be from. (shrink)

Around 1900, historiography of philosophy faced the challenge of opening itself to scientific, social, and cultural history, without giving up what is unique to philosophy: its exclusive claim to i...

The purpose of this article is to identify early and recent Pentecostal studies in the West and to highlight the main difference between them. Today there are more than 250 million Pentecostals in the world, and together with the charismatic movement there are more than 500 million. Having begun to spread in the 20th century, the movement claims to be the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history. In attempts to interpret the phenomenon of the movement's growth, there have been (...) several gradually emerging approaches: explaining the origin of the movement as supernaturally "coming from heaven"; searching for the origins of Pentecostalism in other Christian movements; presenting the emergence of the movement as the result of social and psychological factors such as poverty, marginalization, and the desire to escape from modern society; and the multicultural approach. The paper analyzes the works of Western historians and theologians of Pentecostalism since the second half of the 20th century. The result shows a turning point between early and late studies, namely that late studies aim to revise the history and include participants in the movement around the world, not just in North America, explore the contribution to the development of the movement of local ministers who have long remained in the shadow of Western missionaries, emphasize the diversity of ideologies and social influences that have shaped the movement. It also highlights three major contemporary areas of research: historical, characterized by studies of Pentecostalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; theological, focusing on the development and shaping of theoretical theology as a result of the movement's institutionalization; and religious studies, practiced primarily from the perspective of the sociology of religion. (shrink)