Sanitized Modernity: Rural Public Health in Mid-Twentieth Century Khuzestan

Existing histories of public health in Iran often center on elite or urban narratives. This paper shifts the focus to Iran’s villages by examining the twentieth century public health history of rural northern Khuzestan. It argues that Khuzestani villagers desired, rather than resisted, modern medical services. However, vertical decision-making and the prioritization given by public health planners to economic concerns over social well-being led to the uneven distribution of services and failure to fulfill the expectations of Khuzestan’s villagers. This paper uses memoirs, official reports, correspondence, and other records from the Development & Resources Corporation, along with reports from Iran’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health, to bring a richer picture of Iranian villagers’ twentieth century history into focus.     

20世纪中国历史思考的现代性情结

“现代性“是在“现代化“过程中逐渐呈现出来的现代社会的属性,是对传统社会的性征“化成现代“的表征。现代性内涵就思想观念层面而言,主要包括线性不可逆的时间观、民族国家的政治观、科学理性的认知观。当它们用于认识和解释历史时,便分别体现为进化史观、民族国家的历史叙事观以及科学主义的历史知识观。自20世纪初以来的现代中国史学研究受到这种内在的现代性取向的强大影响,渗透着浓厚的现代性情结。     

Maps,Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth Century

While the history of cartography has freed itself from debilitating debates over the scientific and artistic status of maps, considerations of the relationship between art and cartography have continued to focus largely on pre‐modern maps, avoiding critical examination of twentieth‐century art and science in cartography and leaving intact the impression that these followed distinct paths in the modern period. In this paper, however, I have drawn on theoretical work in Science Studies and taken account of modern art's separation from aesthetics to suggest that an examination of art and cartography in the twentieth century should focus on mapping practices rather than on maps as such. A summary overview of modern‐art movements and selected works indicates a continued, if critical, engagement of avant‐garde artists with cartography, and the examination of more popular newspaper artwork produced in the context of the intensely modern visual culture of mid‐twentieth century Los Angeles indicates a similarly close connection between modernity, art and cartography.     

Taking Southern African Ceramic Studies into the Twenty-First Century: A Zimbabwean Perspective

I advocate in this contribution the need to emphasize the social milieu of pottery production, use, and distribution as a means of gaining a meaningful understanding of the significance of ceramics from archaeological contexts. Je préconise dans cette contribution le besoin de souligner le milieu social de la production, de l'emploi et de la distribution de poteries en tant que moyens de gagner une compréhension sérieuse de l'importance de céramiques venant de contextes archéologiques.     

Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.     

Reimagining the Iglu: Modernity and the Challenge of the Eighteenth Century Labrador Inuit Winter House

The Inuit sod winter house or iglu has undergone a host of alterations over the past millennium, as housing styles were accommodated to changing local milieus during the colonization of the Eastern Arctic. Many of these changes relate to subtle shifts in gendered work and household social relations, and in Labrador from the eighteenth century some appear to reflect engagements with a more or less hostile European discourse on architectural modernity. Far from a static form subjected to convulsive contact-era transformations, however, dwellings were gradually remade in the context of a long-running Inuit effort to house work and sociality within a meaningful space.     

The Political Thought of David Walsh: A Symposium

Abstract

David Walsh has published a trilogy of books on the ideological, political, and philosophical trajectories of modernity. He confronts the crisis of modernity and argues that modernity has the resources within itself to reestablish a collective commitment to the order of existence. This symposium offers four essays reflecting on and responding to Walsh's assessment of modernity and its prospects.     

On Greenfield's Review of The Encyclopedia of African and African American Religions: A Response

Jack M. Potter. Thai Peasant Social Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.