Die Entdeckung des Unbewußten um 1900: Wissenschaftshistorische Anmerkungen zu Sigmund Freud

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger has become a common topic in the historiography of (dynamic) psychiatry. But many users of this term have still the opinion that Sigmund Freud was the unique discoverer. In reality there was a scientific context at the fin de siècle, which corresponded intensively with Freud's original concepts and formed their implications (e.g. Darwinism, Neurophysiology). Besides well-documented synchronic analogies Freud implanted diachronic traditions within his psychoanalytic theory. Especially, his main work The Interpretation of Dreams implies Greek mythology as well as natural philosophy of romanticism. Freuds special concepts like ‘transfer’ and ‘resistance’ have to be analysed as historical metaphors.     

Endangered musical heritage as a wicked problem

The issue of the widespread decline and loss of musical heritage has recently found increasing prominence in ethnomusicological discourse, and many applied projects from grassroots to international levels strive to support genres perceived to be under threat. Much recent literature on the subject features rhetoric that draws on metaphors from ecology, including, for example, the ideas of music ‘ecosystems’, ‘endangerment’ and ‘sustainability’. Offering an alternative (though not contradictory) perspective, I here characterise the widespread loss of musical heritage as a ‘wicked problem’– one with complex interdependencies, uncertainties and conflicting stakeholder perspectives, which defies resolution more than some of the ecological metaphors arguably imply. By drawing on theoretical notions of ‘wickedness’ from social policy planning and other areas, I aim to bring interdisciplinary insights to the discussion of strategies to mitigate the global threat to music as intangible cultural heritage. Offering three ‘stories’ about the problem of music genres ‘at risk’ and critiquing each of these stories against the theory of wicked problems, I explore the implications of this conceptualisation for heritage scholars, music researchers, policy-makers and other cultural stakeholders, in terms of moving us closer to realising effective, resilient and innovative approaches to the problem at hand.     

SINGING SUBJECTS AND SACRED OBJECTS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE ‘TRANSFORMATION OF SUBJECTS INTO OBJECTS’ IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN MYTH

In an earlier paper published in this journal Nancy Munn's ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’ was discussed and related to Aranda mythology. This paper commences where the earlier one finished and offers a psychological account of ‘the transformation of subjects into objects’. In particular, it discusses, within a psychoanalytic framework, the relationship between communication, the body and the environment inherent in Aranda myth and rite, suggesting that what Munn calls ‘the a priori grounds’ of the Aboriginal moral order can be understood as a set of dialectical shifts occurring within the life-cycle. These shifts involve the realisation and reconciliation of a number of oppositions, including male and female; earth and sky, death and life; conscious and unconscious; and, in particular, language and speech.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

‘The Heavens are Telling’: Memetic– Calvinian Readings of a Haydn Chord Progression

Abstract

The climax of the chorus ‘The Heavens are Telling’ from Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) employs a harmonic progression that Beethoven later adapted to conclude the first movement of his Symphony no. 2. An earlier (pre-Haydn) version of the progression might be found in a keyboard rondo by C. P. E. Bach. This harmonic unit is regarded as consisting of a sequence of musemes (musical memes): each is a replicated pattern serving as the cultural analogue to the gene. The neural encoding of such patterns is considered in terms of William Calvin’s hexagonal cloning theory, in order to adduce ‘memotypic’ (meme-encoding) evidence to support the ‘phemotypic’ (meme-product) evidence gleaned from musical score-analysis.     

Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women's Crying‐songs

This paper provides an argument that research on women's crying‐songs in north east Arnhem Land can be effectively analysed as a series of shadow‐dances between the researcher, the singer and the performance context. Within this framework, it explores the processes of transmission and reception of a selection of crying‐song texts from one of the most highly regarded female performers in the region. As singing is a powerful force in the making of Yolngu social, spiritual and political life, music making is shown to play a crucial role in authorizing, describing, teaching and controlling social and ancestral knowledge between men and women and by extension the place of the researcher within the community. Through the regulation of knowledge the making and remaking of the singer and researcher is danced out in a web of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation in which processes of ‘strategic formation’ and ‘strategic location’ emerge. Thus, one woman's melodies of mourning are shown to be a musical gift exchange of various shadow‐dances between learning, receiving, performing and mutually engaging in Yolngu ways of knowing and coming‐to‐know.     

The Political Slogan in Communist Czechoslovakia (1948–89)

This article employs an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate the role of the political slogan in Communist Czechoslovakia, with reference to Bakhtin’s concept of hierarchically superior texts, as developed by Alexei Yurchak and Michal Pullmann. It argues that the slogan performed a much wider range of temporally specific functions than has been generally recognized, and that its repetitive and ritualistic character had a major psychological effect on people’s memory and perception of reality (see C. Atkinson and R.M. Shiffrin, and David I. Kertzer). A clear distinction is drawn between denotative and connotative meaning, with detailed attention paid to J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, as elaborated by John R. Searle. The first two sections of the article define the concept and the functions of the ‘political slogan’, with special significance accorded to the use of language to establish a binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (à la John B. Thompson’s notion of fragmentation). The third part identifies the sources and methodology adopted, and lists the principal word tokens identified. Following a brief contextualization of the slogan in the next section, the main body of the study uses corpus-assisted statistical analysis to evaluate the development of different thematic, lexical and semantic referents over three broad time spans (1948 to the mid-1950s, the mid-1950s to 1968, and 1969 to 1989).     

Michel Foucault

Despite his repudiation of antisemitism, Renan influenced the development of antisemitic ideologies in both France and Germany. His typology of ‘Semite’ and ‘Aryan’ was adopted especially in Germany and and combined with biological concepts of race to become the foundation of the concepts of ‘Semitism’ and ‘Antisemitism’. Renan, however, always insisted on a linguistic/cultural definition of race and regarded the biological conception, while it might have had some primitive reality, as outmoded and immoral in European civilization. After 1870 the growth of German racial antisemitism led Renan to elaborate repeatedly on race as a civilisational phenomenon that in modern Europe should have lost its biological origins. His argument that modern Jews were integral members of the French ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’ was profoundly influential on the emergence of the theory of the modern ‘nation’ as the liberal state. Gobineau's theory of race also lent itself to exploitation by racial antisemites, though it was not overtly antisemitic. Unlike Renan, however, Gobineau in his later years inclined to a vague personal antisemitism. The main difference was one of temperament as well as devotion on Renan's part to a liberal idea of the nation, as opposed to Gobineau's aversion to liberalism and modern civilization.     

Wissenschaft und Musik – Einführende Bemerkungen

Science and music. Introductory remarks. The article presents a brief introduction to “Science and Music”, theme of the 44^th symposium of the “Society for History of Sciences” held in Munich in Mai 2007. The text begins with a brief reference to the numerous biographical connections between the two fields, but focuses primarily on topics that reveal music and the sciences to be results of shared cultural practices. Examples include: (1) shared objects in the material sense, meaning the use of particular instruments in both music and the sciences; (2) shared semantics, metaphors, and concepts, for example the use of the concepts like clang or tone color in acoustics and the psychology of audition, or talk of ‘mood’ and ‘harmony’ in both music and in literature; (3) direct interactions between mathematics, physics and music, for example in the electronic music of the twentieth century.     

Multicultural iteration: Swedish National Day as multiculturalism‐in‐practice

This paper examines the creation of ‘national day’ in Sweden in order to understand how such a holiday works to shape the Swedish nation's relationship with diversity. Analyzing parliamentary debates and press coverage, the author finds that official national day coverage tends to invest the nation with progressive and multicultural meanings, foregrounding immigrant voices. However, this multiculturalism is polysemic, vague and subject to contestation, both from far right ‘traditionalists’ seeking to ‘protect’ Swedishness from outside influences and cosmopolitans who see the nation as outdated and dangerous. The creation of a new national holiday can be seen as a ‘democratic iteration’ wherein democracy is restated and reinvested with meanings, and new lines of cleavage are drawn, and also as a ‘multicultural iteration’ where multiculturalism is invested with new meaning. Finally, the author argues that multiculturalism benefits from polysemy in that the concept can then adapt to changing circumstances, and, thus, survive.     

Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

ABSTRACT

In pursuit of a novel perspective on legacies of empire in the present, this introduction addresses prominent debates related to post-imperialism, collective memory, and the construction of historical knowledge, while also reviewing recent trends in post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman studies. First, I examine the insights and limitations of ‘memory studies,’ ultimately proposing a more capacious model of post-imperial ‘ambivalence.’ I then recapitulate Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach to historical knowledge in order to anchor the signal conceptual contribution of the volume, ‘textured historicity.’ This discussion is followed by a meditation on the role of metaphors in conceptualizing post-imperial legacies and a roster of the most common metaphors for post-imperial legacies. Finally, the introduction briefly summarizes the volume’s constituent essays and the rubrics that unite them.     

Die Kunst des Anschlags. Elisabeth Caland und die Physio‐Ästhetik des Klavierspiels

The Art of Touch. Elisabeth Caland and the Physio‐Aesthetics of Piano Playing The issue of how it is possible to play the piano without striking it was raised by Chopin: one must ‘caresser’ and not ‘frapper’ the piano. In her teachings on the art of piano playing, Elisabeth Caland (1862–1929) attempts to articulate a scientifically grounded solution to this complex (kin‐)aesthetic problem. The solution turns on her intuitively discovered ‘lowering of the shoulderblades’ which was documented in 1904, through X‐rays, by the Berlin physiologist René du Bois‐Reymond, and recorded as a way of coordinating movement which had been unknown to physiology up to that time. Caland's physio‐aesthetic of piano playing, which she worked out on the basis of du Bois‐Reymond's observations, turns on the ideal of ‘floating sound’ put forward by her teacher Ludwig Deppe, and on Ferruccio Busoni's technique of piano playing. Her method makes essential use of what Feldenkrais would later call the ‘sixth sense’ (i.e. proprioceptive perception); in fact, it represents the first modern kinaesthetically based conception of piano playing. Caland's doctrine of touch was ahead of its time and it virtually disappeared from discussions of piano technique after 1930. But it has become accessible again through reprints of her most important writings: Deppe's doctrine of piano playing (1897), Sources of power in piano playing (1904), and Artistic piano playing (1910).     

Trance and visibility at dawn: racial dynamics in Goa’s rave scene

The geography of music has recently turned to questions of embodiment and materiality to account for the sensuous specificity of music. Extending this work, this article emphasizes the constitutive work that embodied experience of music and space does for social differences such as race and gender. It criticizes what is perceived as a limited conception of embodiment in non-representational theory. Using ethnographic evidence from the rave tourism scene in Goa, India, it is argued that precisely during the scene's most mystical and hedonistic moments (what will be called the ‘morning phase’), racial dynamics are at their starkest. It is crucial to understand that racial difference is emergent and not automatic. The article then suggests a Deleuzian musicology which conceives music not as form, language or ideology, but as force. Accounting for the richness of musical materiality involves examining the networks of power and inequality through which it necessarily operates.     

Learning to design cultural districts and learning from designing them

Cultural districts are becoming an important field of study to promote a growing number of initiatives for local development. Despite substantial research in this field, knowledge gaps remain, especially with regard to initiatives at supra-urban level. Many policy-makers, funding agencies, local administrators and managers still face important design issues. This paper contributes to the developing body of theory on cultural districts in two ways. Firstly, focusing on concepts from complexity theory, it expands the debate on the conception of cultural districts as complex adaptive systems. Secondly, it highlights the dysfunctional tensions that can arise from conflicting ways of conceiving organizations, organizing and designing among ‘promoters’ and designers. We have been involved for three years in a large project aimed at designing a wide supra-urban cultural district in Italy, financed by a major banking foundation. Adopting an organizational perspective and through participative action research, we develop an explorative case study. Our core argument is that a linear, predictable and deterministic approach to analysis and design presents many limitations for such complex projects, offering learning opportunities from the design experience.     

‘Balding Nevis’: Place Imperatives of an Invisible Cohort within Tasmania's Forest Communities

An under‐recognised cohort within Tasmania's forest communities is identified, one that shares the social and cultural background of Timber Communities Australia's constituency, but holding deeply antipathetic views toward current forest regimes. Deploying ethnographic data gathered in the upper North Esk country in Tasmania's North‐Eastern Tiers, where this cohort seems to predominate, the elements of a deep attachment to place are explicated: these include a desire to return to a past local economy based upon small but labour‐intensive sawmills with viable satellite hamlets, and a concern for water quality, for the integrity of forest ecosystems, and for the wellbeing of individual plant and animal species therein. Overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, lacking political skills, and distressed by the dramatic economic and environmental changes within their community, this cohort is unlikely to organise politically, and is likely to remain relatively voiceless within the fraught dynamics of local politics within riven forest communities. Nevertheless, this ‘third cohort’ suggests wider issues for the politics of place. Its worldview constitutes a potent contemporary articulation of ‘the moral economy’, as described in the 1970s by E.P. Thompson, and extended to a conception of ‘moral ecology’ by Karl Jacoby. It also suggests, contra Doreen Massey, that the identity‐based place theory of the phenomenological tradition is compatible with a conception of places as sites of conflicted meaning, and that it is wrong to assume the vector of change within place to be progressive; rather it is as likely to conduce to a loss of individual and collective agency.     

Cultural insecurity and its discursive crystallisation in contemporary France

This article analyses the emergence in French public discourse since 2010 of the term ‘insécurité culturelle’ (‘cultural insecurity’). It traces firstly the take-up of the term outside France since the 1980s in anglophone written news media. It establishes four received meanings for the term: a ‘pure’ cultural insecurity expressing simply a relation to the arts world; a nationally refracted cultural insecurity that expresses that relation through the prism of relations between nations; an anthropologico-political conception; and a conception related to the human development paradigm. The take-up in France of the term has conformed to the anthropologico-political conception. Developments after 2002 in France created propitious conditions for coupling the semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ‘insecurity’. The term itself was launched from 2010 through the work of two quite different ‘discursive entrepreneurs’ associated with the erstwhile ‘popular left’ current close to the French Socialist Party (Christophe Guilluy and Laurent Bouvet). The article analyses in both linguistic and political perspectives how the expression has been taken up since 2012 in the national press in France. In particular, it explores the debate concerning the purchase of the term on reality, and its current discursive fit with the agendas of the mainstream and far right.     

Beyond ‘State Ibuism’: Empowerment Effects in State‐led Development in Indonesia

This article examines the ways women's processes of self‐formation are indicative (or not) of new possibilities for women's gendered selves in the post‐Reformasi period in Indonesia. It focuses on the development arena to reveal how shifts in state rhetoric, from top‐down guidance based on a patriarchal familial model to bottom‐up, inclusive development based on empowerment, have transformed what is referred to as the ‘topography for self’. The article draws upon theories of personhood a) to show how gendered selves emerge and are contested within particular historical conditions; and b) to develop an alternative framework of ‘empowerment’ that focuses not on capabilities and choice, but on an expansion in the possibilities for self. It argues that models of community‐driven development have provided new opportunities for women to hold and enact socially recognizable subject positions. This constitutes a form of empowerment for individual women but does not necessarily reflect challenges to patriarchy in Indonesia.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'