Approaching selfhood

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.     

Von Vielschichtigkeiten und Verschränkungen “Kulturen der Wissenschaft – Wissenschaften in der Kultur”

On Multiple Levels and Linkages: Introduction to the Symposium ‘Cultures of Sciences – the Sciences in Culture’. – The article presents briefly approaches to cultural history and cultural studies that seem potentially useful to or have recntly been applied in historical studies of the sciences. The first section discusses three such approaches: discourse analysis, symbolic artefacts (images and text), and cultures of scientific practice. Each of the three approaches raises issues of its own, and all of them share a common problem characteristic of cultural and social history in general: linking micro and macro levels of analysis. The second section presents three approaches to resolving this dilemma by focusing on specific linkages between cultures of science (or culture in the sciences) and general history: scientific thought and practice as norms for professional behavior, for example in fields of knowledge dominated by women; spaces of knowledge, for example the city; and linkages of cultural, media and economic history in fields such as radio and television.     

Rethinking Twentieth‐Century Guadalajara

This paper discusses the impact of the conference ‘Las Olvidadas: Gender and Women's History in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico’ that took place at Yale University in May 2001, into my own work on women's political mobilisations. It points out from where I departed and how it changed my perspective from women's history to gender history by focusing on women workers in the tortilla industry, a union cacicazgo (political bossism), civic culture, narratives, cultural memory and female political trajectories after the granting of women's suffrage in 1953 in Jalisco.     

Historical Perspectives on Pre-Colonial Irrigation in Southern Africa

Abstract

One of the basic areas of interaction between water as natural resource and human societies as agents of cultural transformation is the technology of irrigation. In Africa at least 66 per cent of the available water is used for purposes of irrigation. For more than 4 000 years irrigation has secured food supplies for humans on a continent that is noted for its relative shortage of sufficient natural water supplies.

There is a remarkable hidden power of water in the history of southern Africa. This is particularly the case when we consider the development of early irrigation technologies of Iron Age farmers. The small irrigation furrow of the subsistence farmer was just as important to an insular community of Bantu-speaking people in pre-colonial times, as is the sophisticated irrigation technology in present-day South Africa. Currently there is a paucity of information about pre-colonial indigenous irrigation technology. This can be ascribed to a number of factors of which the invasion of modern Western traditions in the nineteenth century is perhaps the most important. A number of other factors for the apparent blind-spot is also presented in this study.

In southern Africa there are traces of indigenous pre-colonial irrigation works at sites such as Nyanga in Zimbabwe; the Limpopo River Valley; Mpumalanga; and South Africa's eastern Highveld. Reference is also made in this article to specific strategies of irrigation used by Iron Age communities, prior to the advent of a colonial presence. Finally, attention is also drawn to pre-colonial land tenure and state formation against the backdrop of Wittfogel's theories on hydraulic society.     

Behçet Kemal Çağlar's Kur’ân‐ı Kerîm'den İlhamlar (Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān): A Kemalist's Personal,Poetic Response to the Qur’ān

Behçet Kemal Ça?lar, 1908–1969, is the author of a commentary of the Qur’ān, Kur’ân‐? Kerîm'den ?lhamlar (‘Inspirations from the Holy Qur’ān’), published in 1966. This work can be described as a poetic reflection on the Qur’ān. It does not adhere to rendering every line or verse, but instead insists on maintaining a rhythmic cadence and end‐rhyme. Although it resembles a translation in some ways, Ça?lar refuses to call his work a translation. This paper begins by introducing Ça?lar and his text, a brief history of Turkish translations of the Qur’ān, then Ça?lar's approach is contrasted with the aims of translators of the Qur’ān. Ça?lar's text is studied in more detail, providing a sample of the Turkish text and a translation of it into English, focusing on Ça?lar's reflection on Sūrat ?aha. Through this study, it becomes clear that as a result of his prioritizing the literary aspects of the Qur’ān in his reflection, Ça?lar's book has an advantage over literal translations of the Qur'an and it can be useful for Qur’ān translation. At the same time, Ça?lar's book is a reflection of a desire to develop a Turkish Islam—a manifestation of Islam that came from Turkey, that reflected its language and culture and that was intelligible to its people.     

Gender and Translation: Writing as Resistance in Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo

This essay argues that translation in Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) (1947), as well as in related pieces, functions for Primo Levi as a key means for claiming and potentially repairing manhood. In its capacity to reposition meaning, translation functions as a powerful vehicle for affirming agency, particularly gendered agency. What emerges in Levi's writings, particularly in Se questo's “Canto of Ulysses” chapter, is the figure of the translator as resistance fighter: the man who uses his intellect, his love of languages and other men, and his desire to communicate in order to combat the assault on humanity perpetrated by Nazism and sustained by its legacy. In this Levi's writing exists on a continuum with the cultural work of the founding members of Giustizia e Libertà and, accordingly, complicates Italy's postwar understanding of partisan activity. Throughout Se questo è un uomo and related works, translation proves a vital if imperfect means for reclaiming manhood and for asserting the possibility of friendship across cultural, regional, ethnic, and gender boundaries.     

Re-writing Protestant history in the novels of Glenn Patterson

This article considers the representation of the history of Belfast in Glenn Patterson's 2012 novel The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. It situates this novel within the context of Patterson's previous work and the history of the Northern Irish novel, as well as with the representation of maritime Belfast in the Titanic centenary year. This novel will be read as a recovery and rehabilitation of a Protestant history which could be problematic for Patterson, an avowedly liberal writer, but instead this context allows for an exploration of the uses of history in contemporary Northern Irish cultural and political discourse.     

Emerging opportunities: nanoelectronics and engineering research in a South Korean university

The Seoul National University Nanoelectronics Institute (SNI) was established in 1996 by an interdisciplinary team of university researchers working together to develop a practical fabrication method for ‘tera-level’ single-electron semiconductor devices. The technical and organizational experiment of the SNI ended abruptly with the Asian financial crisis of 1997 as LG Semiconductor, SNI's patron, faced difficulties. This paper places this episode within the historical context of the development of science and technology in post-liberation South Korea as it coped with the overwhelming forces of globalization since the late 1970s. As the global high-tech trade war escalated in the 1980s, the South Korean government pursued the ‘technology drive policy,’ which emphasized the importance of directed basic research in university laboratories. The increased public and private support for university research transformed a few elite universities from teaching-oriented to research-focused institutions, especially in engineering and science. The new generation of research-intensive academics spearheaded the new national strategy of leapfrogging into the cutting-edge of global technology for the first time in the nation’s modern history.     

IMAGINATION AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORY: AN ESSAY CONCERNING KOSELLECK'S CONCEPTS OF ERFAHRUNGSRAUM AND ERWARTUNGSHORIZONT

Reinhart Koselleck is an important thinker in part for his attempt to interpret the cultural changes resulting in our modern cultural outlook in terms of the (meta)historical categories of experience and expectation. In so doing he tried to pay equal attention to the static and the changing in history. This article argues that Koselleck's use of “experience” and “expectation” confuses their metahistorical and historical meaning, with the result that his account fails to do justice to the static, to continuity in history, and mischaracterizes what is distinctive of the modern era. As well as reconfiguring the categories of experience and expectation, this essay also introduces a third category, namely, imagination, in between experience and expectation. This is done to render intelligible what is obscure in Koselleck's account, and as a stimulus to a study of history that divides its attention equally between the static and the changing. In fact, it is argued that the category of imagination is pre‐eminently the category of history, on the concrete historical as well as the metahistorical level.     

Defences of classical learning in St. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana and Erasmus's Antibarbari

New information technology can be an invaluable aid to research in the history of ideas provided it is built on scientific foundations. This article discusses the case of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and analyses its use of earlier dictionaries (the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, Chambers's Cyclopaedia and Moréri's dictionary). It also shows how neglect of existing research in the history of ideas and ignorance of how these eighteenth-century European publications were elaborated, combined with inappropriate use of software for detecting plagiarism, have led to totally mistaken findings. These findings, widely publicised thanks to the Internet, constitute a real danger for future research. The article concludes that the intellectual community urgently needs to invest seriously in the digital humanities in order to safeguard future research.     

Robespierre's Éloge De Gresset: Sources of Robespierre's Anti‐Philosophe Discourse

One of the most important debates in the field of eighteenth‐century French intellectual history concerns the ideological significance of the rise of the cult of the Great Frenchmen. Taking this debate as a frame of reference, the paper attempts a close reading of Robespierre's Éloge de Gresset (written in 1784, published in 1785). Usually dismissed by Robespierre scholars, this text is, in fact, a very important document offering clues not only to Robespierre's intellectual formation, but also his appropriation of what he regarded as the official and conventional rhetoric of his age. These questions engage the larger debate regarding the origins of the French Revolution, in particular its ‘cultural origins’, and its intellectual origins, defined as the distillation of and interactions between competing representations of society and its relation to the public sphere. The thesis proposed is that Robespierre's eulogy of Gresset indicates that his anti‐philosophical ideas came from a much broader array of sources than previously believed. Among these sources, Gresset's 1740s–1750s polemics against the philosophes pointed the way towards the type of criticism of the Enlightenment that underpinned Robespierre's cultural revolutionary politics.     

Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftsphilosophie – Einführende Bemerkungen

History of Science and Philosophy of Science. Introductory Remarks. This article introduces two special issues of the journal History of Science Reports (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte) with contributions on the relationships of history and philosophy of science since the seventeenth century. The introduction begins with a brief reminder of Thomas Kuhn's provocative discussion of the relationship in the 1970s, placing it in the context of the debate of the period over whether the foundation of university departments for History and Philosophy of Science in the United States had led to a mere “marriage of convenience” or something more. Following this the paper briefly outlines the transformative impact of the “practical turn” in both philosophy and history of science since the 1990s, and contends that the relationship of history and philosophy of science has nonetheless become increasingly distant over time. This is due in large part to the professionalisation of history of science and to the recent turn to cultural approaches in that field; both trends have led to the adoption of strictly historicist rather than analytical perspectives on knowledge. General historians, too, are paying more attention to the increasing impact of science and technology, but have at most instrumental use for philosophical perspectives. Thus, the distinct possibility arises that the debate between historical and analytical approaches in philosophy of science is becoming a conversation within one discipline rather than a dialogue between two disciplines: what was once a ?marriage of convenience”? could end in respectful separation or amicable divorce. The article concludes with brief summaries of the articles published in the two special issues, indicating their relations to specific aspects of the broader topic at hand.     

Alphonse Aulard Revisited

Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928) institutionalised and professionalised the practice of history. Beyond this undisputed contribution, however, Aulard's place in historiography remains contested. Scholars' perceptions that anti-clerical and radical-republican commitments skewed his research findings, and that he chose narrowly to study history as a series of constitutional, institutional and political developments in stark contrast with his student Albert Mathiez, have divided opinion regarding the beliefs and significance of Aulard. Yet Aulard's work and the cultural and political contribution it made have become a source of inspiration for a generation of scholars now studying revolutionary and European history. Based for the first time on an examination of his private papers, professional activities and oeuvre in tandem, this article revisits Aulard, and, using a post-analytic hermeneutics, re-reads his work in order to show how in his age Aulard advanced a demonstrably original contribution to historical research. He likewise left behind him a neo-Jacobin legacy more attentive to raison d'état than party division and championing international, liberal democracy and human rights. Multifaceted commitments therefore both explain the content of Aulard's oeuvre and help to understand contemporary developments, and suggest future directions, in historical enquiry.     

5. INDIA,ITIHASA, AND INTER‐HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one‐upmanship, we encounter a presumptuous‐ness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one's own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one's own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, neuter the possibilities of knowledge‐sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the chinese know as history. accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense‐generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse.     

“WITHOUT THINKERS … NO THEORIES OF THE WORLD”

Tim Crane's books Aspects of Psychologism and The Objects of Thought present a perspective on human intentionality based on internalism about mental contents. Crane understands intentionality as the defining aspect of the mental. The theory of intentionality that he formulates is similar to that of John Searle when it comes to ontological commitments, but it is also marked by a more traditional approach that retains the concept of intentional objects as its central aspect. In this review I examine the implications of Crane's internalism for the philosophy of history, by comparing his views with some well‐known arguments in favor of externalism about mental contents, such as Hilary Putnam's “Twin Earth” and Tyler Burge's “arthritis” mental experiments. Although internalism about mental contents such as Crane's is a minority view among contemporary analytic philosophers, I argue that it has significant advantages when it comes to the philosophy of history, because it is much better aligned with standard interpretive procedures in historical research. At the same time, externalism about mental contents typically results in inappropriate contextualizations and approaches that most practicing historians will find awkward. More generally, it is possible to argue that over decades, analytic philosophers’ externalist tendencies have significantly contributed to the reduced interest in their views among philosophers of history. The final section of the article reviews the implication of Crane's views on nonconceptual contents of human perception for art historiography.     

Examining the Olympics: heritage,identity and performance

A major aspect of Ireland's history is the continual problems of a sectarian nature, yet the issue of 'the troubles' gets scant consideration in the permanent exhibitions mounted in Northern Ireland's museums, and is only beginning to emerge in more temporary exhibitions and statements about museums. In addition, the belief that cultural heritage plays a significant part in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland has long been expressed in statements on education policy and local government programmes. However, the concept of using museums for exploring this history for a positive outcome has not, despite the scale of the political problem, been a high-profile issue in Northern Ireland's museums nor has it had a great deal of academic attention. This paper is a contribution to this gap. It assesses the role that Northern Ireland's museums play in the current political context. It evaluates the reasons why, since their foundation, museums in Northern Ireland have largely chosen to avoid controversial issues in their displays. It considers how attitudes are changing and how museum professionals are tentatively beginning to engage with political issues and enter into dialogue on subjects such as cultural and political identities in Northern Ireland.     

Countering the hegemony of the Irish national canon: the modernist rhetoric of Seán O'Faoláin (1938–50)1

ABSTRACT. The telling and re‐telling of national history has long been recognised in studies of nationalism as one of its key legitimising and mobilising strategies. In this article I illustrate how a rhetorical approach can effectively explore this dynamic and emotive dimension of nationalist ideology by examining the rhetorical strategies in the Irish liberal intellectual, Seán O'Faoláin's, attempts to reconstitute the popular canon of Irish history in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, I show that contrary to depictions of O'Faoláin as a European liberal who employed rational argument to undermine and encourage the rejection of Irish nationalism and its emphasis on rhetorical narratives of the past, O'Faoláin's challenge to the Irish national canon reveals that he himself mobilised historical narrative to promote his own modernist version of Irish liberal nationalism and demonstrated in the process that he was one of the most skilful rhetors of his day.     

David's 'Hatred' for the Lame and the Blind (2 Sam. 5.8A)

Abstract

Scholars have often dismissed the rendering of veyigga' batsinnor (2 Sam. 5.8) as 'get up the water shaft' or 'get up the water canal' on the grounds that it has no natural connection with David's expressed 'hatred' for 'the lame and the blind'. This article argues that such a dismissal is perhaps hasty, and that David's reference to the physically afflicted alludes to the custom of their gathering at pools and springs (which were widely held to possess healing powers).     

“An Ancient Celtic world had filled the air”: the Celtic turn in Louis MacNeice’s mid-century radio writing

This article focuses on the specific meanings and figurations of Celtic identity, myth and history in three works by Louis MacNeice: his long poem Autumn Sequel (1954), written for broadcast on the BBC, and his two late radio plays They Met on Good Friday (1959) and The Mad Islands (1961). It will demonstrate that the poet moves from expressing an archaic and insipidly romanticised form of Celticity in Autumn Sequel, to depicting a significantly more sophisticated Celtic character and identity in They Met on Good Friday and The Mad Islands; both dramas, it will be argued, are informed by a more thoroughly archipelagic conception of cultural formation and identity in the British and Irish isles. In all three texts, MacNeice’s radiogenic engagement with Celtic material functions as a means of interrogating, though not always successfully, the forms and potentialities of human agency, community, and artistic activity within a post-war climate of political disenchantment, social fragmentation and perceived cultural vacuity. The essay will also demonstrate that MacNeice’s Celtic themed radio writing is an important aspect of the poet’s lifelong exploration of his psycho-cultural genealogy and a means of further clarifying his complex maternal and paternal inheritance.