Making time for national identity: theoretical concept and empirical glance on the temporal performance of national identity

Despite global, economic, technological and social transformations, nationality has remained an influential identity category. It still forms the basis for collective self‐determination, political sovereignty and sense of belonging. This article puts forward the concept of ‘Chrono‐Work’ to offer a critical approach to national identity. Employing temporal and performative perspectives, the concept addresses the conditions for establishing and constructing national identity. Drawing on Judith Butler's performance theory, it is suggested that performance of national acts loads national identity with meaning through the construction of a chronological narrative. To complete the theoretical picture, a case study of ‘Chrono‐Work’ among the Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights in Israel is offered. It is shown that national identity is constantly performed through temporal strategies that aim at achieving a chronological order. Therefore, it is suggested that national identity is not given, but rather is the result of continuous ‘Chrono‐Work’.     

Gender, nature, empire: women naturalists in nineteenth century British travel literature

Among the many British women abroad in the late nineteenth century were a number of travellers who toured the American West with a naturalist's pen and sketchbook. California, with its giant sequoias and redwoods, scenic Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada, and the Mediterranean flora of the southern coasts, especially attracted travellers with a naturalist orientation. We examine the botanical and naturalist writings and art of two well-known (and well-heeled) world travellers – Constance Gordon Cumming and Marianne North – and another more obscure British aristocrat, Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, who travelled in California in the late nineteenth century. We examine relationships among these elite women's association with the Romantic aesthetic and naturalist traditions, natural sciences, class-based associations between women and flowers, and emergent environmentalism. The works of these women indicate the process by which natural history rhetorics and styles became embedded within gender, class, and imperial relations; and how the division of natural history into professional and amateur domains relegated women to discursive margins.     

The gender dimension of business elites: Italian women directors since 1934

Abstract

Gender is an important, albeit understudied, dimension in the analysis of business elites. In this paper we analyze the importance of women in the board of directors of listed Italian companies since 1934. We show that women are less represented in boards in Italy than in other comparable OECD countries, but also that listed companies are less open to women than other centres of powers, such as the public administration and liberal professions. In addition, in a country where board interlocking is a key device to ensure separation between ownership and control, very few women hold multiple directorships. We then present the results of a prosopographical study on women directors in seven benchmark years: 1962, 1970, 1978, 1986, 1994, 2002, and 2007. We conclude with a discussion of various policy options to enhance gender diversification on the boards of Italian listed companies.     

Brain physiology and the mind in the nineteenth century

This article explores the integration of research and theory in nineteenth-century neurophysiology. Four generalities combine to explain their integration. They are the core beliefs of the neurologists, the pervasive habit of perceiving mind when observing behavior, the criteria for the existence of mind, and mind as an efficient cause. These generalities help explain specific choices made by certain researchers to work within the traditional model of the nervous system, to reject materialism, and to find intelligence and voluntary behaviors in physiological systems.     

Coping with deviance: Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT. This article highlights two processes that shaped Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century. The first concerns the competition between different nation‐states and the nationalist visions these contests engendered. In a Europe dominated by the norm of the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation, the Swiss authorities, public intellectuals and various political representatives were desperate to display an image of national authenticity to the outside world. The result was a nationalism that combined voluntaristic and organic elements. In the second and main part of this article, the focus turns on citizenship; it is conceived not only as a social and legal institution, but also as a cognitive prism through which people defined their membership in the national community. Remarkably, the authority in granting national citizenship to foreign nationals remained firmly in the hands of the cantons and, above all, the Swiss municipalities. In practical terms, this meant that the Gemeinde provided the institutional and cognitive frame through which nationhood was primarily experienced, imagined and defined. While Switzerland represents a particularly strong case of a communalist polity, it should not be treated as unique. Instead, it should alert us to a potentially fertile yet little‐explored area of research: what might be called the communal embededdness of the national(ist) imagination.     

Children abandoned and taken back: children, women, and families in dire straits in Lyon in the nineteenth century

Abandoning a child was no rare deed in European towns in the nineteenth century, mostly among single women in underprivileged environments. On the other hand, taking this same child back was more unusual. By analyzing the registers of the Lyon hospitals, it is possible to determine the percentage of children taken back by their mothers, how this was actually achieved, and to examine the family status of the mothers at the time of both events. Both of these acts -- abandoning a child and then taking it back -- can be put back in their context in these women's lives, for instance, by looking into the length of time separating the two procedures. To finish with, it appears that the 'Hospices civils de Lyon' encouraged mothers to take the children back and generally had a conciliatory attitude toward them, supposedly in the children's interest.     

Spirometry, measurement, and race in the nineteenth century

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as "black" using standards derived largely from populations designated as "white." This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.     

Dedicated spirits: religious mediators and romantic ideas in the late nineteenth century

This article reconstructs a transatlantic community of discourse that used Romantic ideas to mediate between science and religion in order to create a framework for modern belief. The pragmatist William James, Scottish freelance intellectual Thomas Davidson, and ethical culturalist William Mackintire Salter in the United States, and the psychic researcher Frederic Myers and self‐published philosopher Shadworth Hollway Hodgson in England inherited a supreme concept of immanence from Romanticism, which they brought to their fight against dogmatism in religion and materialism in science. Emphasizing the freedom of the individual mind to believe on the basis of experience, these religious mediators oriented their new science of religions by the compass of democratic values. Their approach to modern belief contributes to the current revision of a strictly declensionist secularization by suggesting, in part, that religion among intellectuals was neither exclusively Christian in the late nineteenth century nor necessarily stifled by the impact of Darwinian evolution.     

An element of thought: phosphorus and mental philosophy in the nineteenth century

Georges Cabanis (1757-1808), through his writings on the relation of the physical and moral, or psychological, aspects of man, left a legacy that made the study of mental activity a part of physiology. His views on the importance of phosphorus to the function of the brain thrust that element into a prominent stream of research that involved many investigators in several countries. Although that particular stream eventually dried up, its influence remained: by the beginning of the twentieth century basic medical science had become well set on studies of the mind-body relationship.     

自由主义与加拿大宪政改革

在19世纪上半期加拿大建立责任政府的过程中,自由主义观念起了重要的促进作用.这不仅表现在自由主义思想对加拿大殖民地人政治意识觉醒的推动上,更表现在英国社会与政坛对英帝国与移民殖民地关系认识的改变上.由于美国独立的教训,维护帝国统一和防止殖民地与母国分离,曾是英国人心中一个不解的结.因此,旧观念支配下的英国统治集团,几乎一致地拒绝了达勒姆关于授予殖民地责任政府的建议.随着英国自身现代政党制度的确立和自由贸易的实现,新的自由主义帝国观开始形成,并直接推动了加拿大的宪政改革.     

The context of migration: the example of Ireland in the nineteenth century

"A classic case where out-migration interacted with many other geographical phenomena is provided by rural Ireland in the nineteenth century. The apparent turning point was the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the areas with the greatest suffering from starvation did not necessarily show the greatest population decline, suggesting that other forces were active. Considerable economic and social changes were already taking place before the Famine: fertility was being reduced, later marriage was becoming established and considerable emigration was already taking place. Immediately after the Famine those areas which had been hardest hit often reverted to pre-Famine conditions and did not show strong population decline until the 1870s. The Famine was a most serious event, but the modernization of Irish rural life, which linked emigration with changes in family structure, agriculture and population numbers, was more important in bringing about geographical change."     

Post-Byzantine hermeneiai zographikes in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in the Balkans during the nineteenth century

Abstract

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters' manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters' manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of 'Europeanization'.