Jean Comandon Neuroscientist

The microbiologist Jean Comandon is famous for his studies on the movement of the syphilis bacteria as differentiated in various forms by ultramicroscope. He was also a pioneer on the technical application of the microcinematography in laboratory research. His collaboration with clinicians and surgeons in the study of various pathological disorders is little known. From 1918 to the 1920s, he collaborated with such neurologists as André Thomas, Jean Athanase Sicard, and others in the study of various neurological disorders by using cinematography as a scientific tool for understanding the clinical and pathological mechanisms of diseases. These collaborations allowed him to be involved in the beginnings of the French cinematography industry, especially with Charles Pathé who established a small film studio laboratory in Vincennes where a multidisciplinary group improved the application of cinematography in clinical medical practice.     

"That Food of the Memory which Gives the Clue to Profitable Research": Oral history as a source for local, regional, and family history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century

Numerous local, regional and family historians in the nineteenthand early twentieth century collected oral narrations and conductedinterviews as a form to document information that otherwisemight have never been preserved. Family historians, in particular,not only practiced interviewing relatives for family histories,but also encouraged the practice in how-to-do manuals amongtheir peers. While advocating the practice, family historiansalso reflected about the value of "traditionary evidence" collectedthrough interviews and other means. These reflections by familyhistorians mirrored the discussions about the value of traditionsand memories as historical sources among several professionalhistorians at the time. These reflections were shaped by a modernizedunderstanding of tradition, which combined a reverential approachto the authoritarian element of tradition with a critical approachquestioning the validity of tradition. In this context, oralhistory was both a tool to negotiate the value of traditionand a mirror to the contemporary understanding of tradition.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

In Memory of Overcoming the Enemy: The Southern Italian Folk Tradition of the ‘One Hundred Crosses’

This article focuses on a cross-cultural folk practice which is based on a textual charm and referred to as Cento Croci (One Hundred Crosses). By comparing and contrasting three separate versions from three different southern Italian regions, this article demonstrates that the Cento Croci tradition is used to address a universal and enduring safety need by memorializing the defeat of an enemy in a past event which can be traced back to the Crusades. This reason for the practice of the Cento Croci tradition is unaltered by cultural variations which are characteristically superficial.     

Richard Wiseman and the medical practitioners of restoration London

The case histories used to illustrate Richard Wiseman's Several Chirurgicall Treatises (1676) reveal not only pathological and therapeutic detail but much information about the range of occupational relationships between Wiseman and the many London physicians with whom he collaborated on cases (more than forty are identified in an appendix to this article). His interaction with the two physicians with whom he had most to do, Francis Prujean and Walter Needham, exemplifies the extremes of such relationships. With Prujean, an older man and a leading figure in the College of Physicians, a formal and hierarchical relationship was observed, in which distinct occupational lines were maintained. In the case of Needham, a younger physician whose devotion to anatomical study was shared by Wiseman, a friendship developed between the two men that carried over into practice and tended to break down occupational and intellectual distinctions, so that Needham sometimes involved himself in Wiseman's surgical practice, and Wiseman initiated medical research later reported by Needham to the Royal Society.     

Water Mamas among the Makushi in Guyana

Abstract

This article examines folklore concerning water spirits among the Makushi Amerindians in Guyana. Makushi accounts of spirits called ‘water mamas’—twingram or Tuenkaron in Makushi—associate these beings with white people in both past and present. The case is presented here that this folklore reflects Makushi histories and experiences of European contact, colonialism in Dutch and British Guiana, and ongoing relations with Europeans and other outsiders. The themes of abduction, enticement, capricious wealth, and exotic ‘palaces’ found in stories of water mamas relate to these histories and experiences and inscribe them into the present landscape in Guyana. In addition to describing beliefs in water mamas and examining Makushi histories of interaction with Europeans, the article begins to explore the comparative context of this folklore in relation to other beliefs in water spirits across Amazonia and beyond.     

Prohibido Tocar Este Cenote: The Archaeological Basis for the Titles of Ebtun

Ebtun, Kaua, Cuncunul, Tekom, and Tixcacalcupul are a group of related communities on the Yucatán peninsula described in the corpus of Maya-language documents known as The Titles of Ebtun. In this paper I explore transformations in agrarian practice and material expressions of identity after the Spanish invasion by analyzing archaeological variation in the life histories of places over the last 500 years. As new plants, animals, and technologies were adopted, landscape organization changed, and locales took on new meanings. Ebtun’s landscape reflects a historically contingent process that has transformed place and identity, fostering autonomy of cultural practice and renewal of tradition.     

The Limits of Bonhoefferian Responsibility: On Jean Bethke Elshtain's (Mis)Use of Bonhoeffer

ABSTRACT

Jean Elshtain claims that her defense of torture draws from the Christian tradition. To defend this claim, she makes direct appeal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her defense of torture has taken on greater political significance today. This article will refute Elshtain's claim to Bonhoeffer. To do so, this article will first point to Bonhoeffer's explicit rejection of torture in Ethics, then argue that Bonhoeffer's rejection of torture draws from themes initiated in Creation and Fall. Placing Bonhoeffer in conversation with David Decosimo will show that Bonhoeffer holds a distinction between relation-ending and relation-perverting acts. Responsible actors may be called to perform the former class of actions, like tyrannicide, in extraordinary situations. However, the latter class of actions, like torture or rape, constitutes a limit to responsible action that we find no evidence Bonhoeffer is willing to cross. Elshtain, and others who wish to provide “Christian” defenses of torture, must look elsewhere.     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

What's (written) history for?: On James C. Scott's Zomia,especially Chapter 6½

What could still trigger a worthwhile anthropological debate now that eight years have passed since the publication of James C. Scott's The art of not being governed in 2009? In this article, the author proposes a reading involving perhaps the most controversial chapter of Scott's book: Chapter 6½ – ‘Orality, writing, and texts’. Scott means to say that the absence of literacy in a society could result from a preference rather than a deficiency. He describes a project that refuses state formation, putting to use the advantages of flexibility and adaptation that an oral tradition has over a written tradition. Drawing on the case of the Hmong, the author proposes that Scott's argument might have been made more solid had he relied less on a geographical and historically rooted definition of Zomia, and more on a discussion of cultural elements such as egalitarianism and orality.     

The character of English geographyc. 1660–1800: a textual approach

This article re-evaluates the character of geography in England in the 150 years after the Restoration. Most historians have focused either on exceptional geography books or on texts of geographical knowledge, rather than on geography booksper se. Drawing on cultural–historical approaches to the book, this article looks at the character of geography as a textual tradition. This requires an analysis of geography books from three points of view: the texts themselves and the definition of their function and audience; the readership and their sites of reading; and authorship and the milieu of book production. This analysis shows that geography was consistently related to two social and intellectual traditions: a commercial and practical tradition, and a humanistic and scholarly tradition. Such a position allies geography as a textual tradition with recent characterizations of the English Enlightenment.     

HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY: FOUCAULT,CAVAILLÈS,AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE CONCEPT

This paper is concerned with Foucault's historical methodology. It argues that the coherence of his project lies in its development of a set of tools for unearthing the historical principles that govern thought and practice in the epochs that have shaped the present age. Foucault claimed that these principles are, at once, transcendental and historical. Accordingly, the philosophical soundness of Foucault's project depends on his having developed a satisfactory way of passage between the absolutist purism of the transcendental and the mundane contingency of the historical. The paper shows that the key to seeing how Foucault achieved this desideratum lies in a surprising and largely unexplored methodological tradition that he himself explicitly acknowledged: Husserlian phenomenology as it was taken up, modifed, and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, Jean Cavaillès—what I call the phenomenology of the concept. The essay has four parts. The first sketches the two most prominent lines of interpretation of Foucault's methodology and argues that both are inadequate, not least because they both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part lays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Cavaillès's important critique and appropriation of Husserlian method. This serves, in turn, to set the stage for the third part that examines, first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental—their respective continuations of Cavaillès's phenomenology of the concept. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of reading Foucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivation that came to define his work.     

A Complete History of Early Christianity: Taking the “Heretics” Seriously1

The heterodox have been treated unfairly within the histories of mainstream Christian tradition, whether by their ecclesiastical opponents or by recent and current scholarship. This article outlines the place of Christian Gnostic belief and practices in the processes of self‐definition and institutionalization that took place within the early history of Christianity and makes a plea to reinstate the “heretics” to their rightful place in any academic discussion of the history and beliefs of Christianity.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Atlas of Medieval Jewish History: Haim Beinart The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem: Dan Bahat with Chaim T. Rubinstein     

Henry II,liturgical patronage and the birth of the ‘Romano‐German Pontifical’

Variously acclaimed as coepiscopus, saint and Mönchskönig, Henry II of Germany has always had a reputation as a quasi‐religious figure. This article goes a step further, appending to his résumé the creation of the wildly successful liturgical tradition known as the ‘Romano‐German Pontifical’. Formerly dated to the tenth century, its major ordines are here argued to have been cultivated in royal circles in the years 1002–9, before being compiled for the first time as a gift for the new Bamberg Cathedral. The tradition is shown to reflect the king’s concerns, scholarly, political and confessional, as well as projecting an idealistic, Bamberg‐esque notion of Romano‐German unity.     

The uses of memory in African studies

Since the 1950's, African specialists have used memory both as a tool and as an object of research.

Anthropologists were finally becoming aware that all social interaction inherently contains ambiguity and conflict and were coming to terms with the impact of colonialism. They started taking a productive interest in what societies, in their present practice, had to say about and make of their past. Roger Bastide (Les religions africaines au Brésil) made collective memory and its functioning the heart of a rich sociological study, situated in a long historical context.

At the same time, historians were starting to write the history of Africa, an effort largely made possible by a tradition of oral transmission. The first consideration was the documentary usefulness of this oral tradition, more or less institutionalized. Historians evaluated these oral sources according to technical criteria, in order to write source critiques. But the nature of the work led to a changed focus. Historians reduced their emphasis on the gathering of factual data and started treating that data with greater skepticism. They also started to strongly repudiate the implicit model of written sources and archives. They became, instead, more concerned with the various forms of memory and fascinated with the analysis of the workings of memory itself in society, and with what new historical information lay hidden in people's memories. Life histories, and personal memories are also used today.