The life style of Chinese scholars in the years of political turbulence - Examinations of Li Sichun’s Jinling Diary,Wu Mi’s Diary and Hu Shi’s Diary

After the abolishment of China’s Imperial Examination System and the founding of the Republic of China, the exterior mode of the Chinese scholars’ life, such as their academic research and ways of making a living, changed dramatically, but their real life style, including their habits, hobbies and tastes, did not show fundamental change. From the unpublished diary of an important but non-famous scholar Li Sichun of Sichuan University, with a close reference of Wu Mi’s and Hu Shi’s diary at approximately the same time, one can see that Chinese scholars kept their traditional literate life style and tastes until the 1940s. Therefore, we can make a conclusion that the social transition did not affect many scholars’ real life as profound as many present studies have claimed.     

The Cyclical Views of Human History in Thucydides’ Archaeology and Sima Qian’s Historical Records

Many previous thinkers have imagined that there was a glorious or harmonious period in the past better than the world of their own time, but Thucydides and Sima Qian do not describe the early stages of human society as a Golden Age. I suggest that Sima Qian marks a separation between the mythical stories and the historical spirit in China, just as Thucydides did in Greece. Further, they both presented a modified cyclical view of human history. For a better understanding of the basic characteristics of Greek and Chinese historiographies, this paper discusses the cyclical views of human history underlying ancient Greek and early Chinese historiographies through a comparative study of Thucydides’ and Sima Qian’s texts. I analyze some similarities and differences between the two great historians’ conceptions of historical process, and I conclude that Thucydides believes human intelligence develops through a historical spiral, while Sima Qian focuses on dynastic cycles with a strong moral concern.     

The Discourse of Fengsu in the Song Literati’s Writing: The Example of Boat Racing

The category of “customs,” or fengsu, was important for the literati of the Song dynasty in writing local histories. It covers local practices of festival rituals, weddings and funerals, rites for passage into adulthood, sacrificial rites, and the like. The main purpose behind the literati’s efforts to record fengsu was not to acknowledge local variations but to censor local customs and transform society. This paper looks at these type of texts as a discourse that is meant to promote the correct, standard performance of rites and suppress those deemed improper. It uses boat racing in Song records of fengsu as a case study to illustrate how the imperial spectacle of boat racing in spring was propagated and how the linkage between the death anniversary of Qu Yuan and Duanwu were reinforced. Meanwhile, the popular ritual of boat racing during the summer, which bore distinct violent and shamanic attributes, was strongly criticised. Through these efforts by the literati, a normative discourse of the boat-racing ritual was repeated and reinforced in the fengsu recording.     

Are universities ready for interculturality? The case of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ (Ecuador)

This article focuses on the creation of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ in 2003, and its evolution up until its final suspension from the university system in Ecuador. I reflect on the difficulty of implementing educational approaches based on locally situated cultural identities that involve epistemologies different from those which are hegemonic in academic spheres on the global level. From the point of view of the indigenous movement, the current situation is solely the result of the ignorance and arrogance of the state, which ‘has led to a backlash against the gains made by indigenous people that has even led to a decline in terms of indigenous rights’, calling the current government a government of ‘a new colonization’ (Salvador). However, interviews conducted in the years after the closure of Amawtay Wasi bring to light certain discourses and opposition that go beyond the obvious intellectual and political reluctance of the current government to maintain the Amawtay Wasi Intercultural University.     

Lester B. Pearson’s Temple University Speech Revisited: The Origins and Evolution of the Proposal for a Bombing Pause

Lester B. Pearson’s speech at Temple University in April 1965 suggesting a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam enraged United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, who in private the next day at Camp David strongly rebuked the Canadian prime minister. While their stormy encounter has become the stuff of legend, just how the controversial proposal for a bombing pause appeared in Pearson’s speech in the first place has received far less attention. Making use of new archival material, including the private diary of Canadian Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Marcel Cadieux, among other original sources, this article revisits previous accounts of the Temple speech, offering new details on the origins of the proposal for a bombing pause and examining the hitherto unknown but crucial drafting changes that were made prior to its becoming public. In doing so, this article sheds new light on one of the most significant events in the history of Canadian–American relations.     

The Elephant and the Tiger Ants: Rethinking the Channels and Themes of Biafra’s Visual Propaganda (1967–70)

The short-lived separatist campaign for an independent nation of Biafra that resulted in the Nigerian civil war has provoked significant studies and provided a pool of new understandings on the exacerbation and management of internal conflicts in modern societies. The generation and circulation of ideologies that instigate these conflicts have remained an enduring area of interest to varying shades of scholars who seek to understand the negotiation of highly polarized positions between constructed nationalities. This article adopts studies in iconography, and critical analysis, to review the narrative constructions of the themes and channels of visual propaganda employed by the separatist establishment for the prosecution of the war for secession and self-determination. By doing so, it also seeks to draw inferences from the formal artistic development that elicited the conceptual thinking behind the images and their application in a range of conventional and unconventional publicity media in Biafra and internationally. It also aims to establish pictorial connections with the historical facts of the war to enrich the interpretation and comprehension of the subtleties of the war. Biafran visual propaganda artefacts described in this article testify to an attempt by the Eastern Nigerian political elite to select from the common fears of its populace to hang on to a secessionist agenda during the civil war.     

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.     

Christian colleges amid political changes: The University of Nanking’s reorganization and registration (1927-1928)

Jinling University, or the University of Nanking, was created in 1910 from the merger of three Christian missionary schools in Nanjing (Nanking). After a period of smooth development in the second decade of the twentieth century, the University of Nanking had to face huge challenges in the 1920s when nationalism and revolutionary movements gained momentum in China. After the Nanjing Incident in 1927, the university was forced to deal with all the serious challenges of running a new school. Within two years, the University of Nanking underwent comprehensive reform, which included the reorganization of the school administration, the establishment of a board of directors, the accession of the university’s first Chinese president, and the completion of a process of government-mandated registration. All this ultimately led the University of Nanking into a new era. The university reacted to the registration requirement and the internal administrative reshuffling in a process of gradual, interlocking responses. This process reflects the general nature of relations between church universities and the Chinese government during this important historical moment, though the unique characteristics of the University of Nanking’s own experience are also apparent.     

The challenge of the oceanic feeling: Romain Rolland’s mystical critique of psychoanalysis and his call for a ‘new science of the mind’

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the ‘oceanic feeling,’ a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which he wrote just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud – less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda – were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical ‘science of the mind’ that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science.     

The Invention of Prehistory and the Rediscovery of Europe: Exploring the Intellectual Roots of Gordon Childe’s ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (1936)

Journal of World Prehistory - This article re-examines the ‘neolithic revolution’—Gordon Childe’s great contribution to prehistoric archaeology. Childe first articulated his...     

The ‘radical humanism’ of ‘Cap Anamur’ / ‘German Emergency Doctors’ in the 1980s: a turning point for the idea,practice and policy of humanitarian aid

Abstract

Historiographies of humanitarian aid and aid agencies alike had suggested an ever-growing politicization and militarization following the end of the ‘cold war’. But already in the 1980s, the field of humanitarian aid underwent extensive changes; new aid agencies no longer relied on Christian ideas of charity or leftist internationalism, short-term aid gained new importance and an ever-growing disaster awareness can be observed. The relief organization ‘Cap Anamur ’/’ German Emergency Doctors’ (GED) was founded in 1979 with the purpose of saving the so-called ‘boat people’. Typical for its time, it ascribed to a pure and innate humanitarian impulse summarized under the term ‘radical humanism’. Using the example of GED the article sets out to scrutinise the policies of this new humanitarianism that can be summarized as ‘controlled demerging’. The article brings into focus humanitarian aid as such, its own logic deriving from a particular idea of humanitarianism, considering both site-specific practices and also specific policies that are not necessarily congruent with political or economic interests. It becomes clear that the basis for the new political meaning humanitarian aid gained from the 1990s onwards was already laid by the humanitarian-aid agencies themselves.     

William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) and the study of religion in Enlightenment England

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society.     

The ‘schemes’ of Piero de' Pazzi and the conflict with the Medici (1461–2)

This article opens up an important but overlooked chapter in the political and diplomatic history of Florence, as well as that of fifteenth-century Franco-Italian relations more broadly. In late 1461, the city of Florence elected ambassadors to go to France to congratulate King Louis XI on his accession to the throne. Intended as a purely ceremonial mission, the Florentine diplomat Piero de' Pazzi ignored his commission and pursued policies that explicitly promoted French interests in Italy. By doing so, Piero sought to improve the standing of his own family, both domestically and abroad, at the expense of the Medici regime in Florence and the anti-French Italian League that the Medici supported. This article offers for the first time a full investigation of a surprisingly early example of tensions between the Medici and the Pazzi, tensions that famously erupted in the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478.