Bibliographischer hinweis zu s. 146, anm. 74

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Historische Wissenschaftsforschung,heute. Überlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Wissensgesellschaft

Historical Science Studies Today. Thoughts about a History of the Knowledge Society. The article explores theoretical and historiographical approaches in the field of historical science studies, while focusing on the history of the knowledge society. It argues that a straightforward transfer of the concept of knowledge society into the past has to be pursued with care, favorably with an extraction of some analytical key concepts. This extraction is termed ‘decontextualization’ while a second approach, ‘contextualization’, is applied to the study of the knowledge society in its own time, namely the second half of the twentieth century. The latter approach needs to be combined with a history of science studies, especially a history of the concepts explaining and constituting the knowledge society itself. Furthermore, it is proposed to study the operative concepts of innovation and regulation in order to analyze the coupling processes of science, economy, technology, and government.     

Zeitschichten des Klons. Anmerkungen zu einer Begriffsgeschichte

Temporal Layers of the Clone. Remarks on a Conceptual History. This paper aims at a history of the clone concept in 20th‐century life science and culture. The first part of the paper is concerned with conceptual history approaches. Here, the idea of ‘Zeitschichten’ by Reinhart Koselleck is discussed and its implications for the history of science are explored. In the following parts of the paper, I trace the historical dynamics of the clone concept in various fields of 20th‐century life sciences. I argue that the clone concept, which originated in plant breeding around 1900, soon developed into a technical tool in a variety of research areas. With this, specific meanings became attached: the idea of standardization, genetic identity, and mass reproduction. A further connotation of the clone was the idea of stagnancy with respect to processes in time: The clone was seen as something that was exempt from evolutionary changes. In the last section of the paper, I trace the shifting meanings of the clone concept in the 1960s and 1970s, when the clone became a widespread metaphor that pointed to future biotechnologically driven possibilities to reshape the nature of human beings. In this regard, the debates of the 1970s are analyzed as a turning point: Whereas utopian and eugenic visions predominated the debates in the 1960s (when the human clone was seen as something which will occur in a distant future), the 1970s discussion focused on the advent of a biotechnological era and the human clone had became a reality.     

Imperial Nightmares: The British Image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa,c. 1840-74

In the first half of the ninteenth century West Africa became associated with the term 'white man's grave'. This was mostly due to the extremely high European mortality rates resulting from endemic disease, especially malaria. The second half of the nineteenth century is usually described as the birth of tropical medicine, which indicates a development in scientific medicine partially attributed to the empirical experiences of the mid-century. The treatment and prevention of the above-mentioned disease changed substantially in the period. This article discusses the public perception of West Africa in the years between the Niger Expedition in 1841 and the Ashanti campaign in 1874. The two events, which mark the chronological framework of the paper, both played a significant part in the history of malaria as much as in the history of British imperial expansion in the region. Using mostly contemporary printed works, it is argued that despite the development that occurred in the field of medicine and subsequent decline in European mortality, the associated image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa prevailed between the two events for a variety of political, economic and cultural causes.     

Two places and three times: fragments retrieved of India and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.

This article uses memory and specifically my memories to build up a sense of how Australians perceived India in the second half of the 20th century. I focus first on the late 1950s to consider Australian perceptions of India as seen through my eyes as a university student. I then present my observations as a student studying in India in the first half of the 1960s to track the limited awareness of Australia in India. The final section, based mainly on newspaper clippings of the late 1980s, assesses how India featured in Australian perceptions some two decades on and in the very different world of the day – one that was much more knowledgeable but not necessarily significantly more involved.     

健康之旅

<正>4月的一个星期天,朋友来电话:去长寿村吧!于是从天津出发,探访河北邯郸地区武安市的长寿村。长寿村人人长寿,除了山清水秀等自然条件因素外,更重要的是人的心态     

Zeitpfeile,Zeitfaltungen und Diskursanalyse: zu Kontinuitäten der Imaginationslehre

Time Lines, Folded Time, and Discourse Analysis: Continuities of Maternal Imagination. Focusing on a discourse‐oriented history of knowledge, this article deals with the relation between continuity and time. It will discuss concepts of linear and homogenous time and problematize a one‐sided focus on discontinuity and rupture in discourse analyses. After examining notions of continuity, discontinuity, and temporality in the work of Michel Foucault, I will ask how continuous elements can be theorized both as instruments and objects of research, without adopting a linear concept of time. Thus, Michel Serres' concept of folded time will be presented, because it implies a multiple, heterogenous and non‐linear temporality and entails both continuous and discontinuous entities. Thereby relations of power should be considered as factors influencing the shape of the folding. In this way, folded time can serve as a useful tool for discourse analysis, enabling to examine specific and local continuities that vary in different discursive formations. To give an example, I will briefly turn to the concept of women's imagination in pregnancy. According to most historical analyses, this concept declined in the middle of the 18^th century and persisted afterwards only as an outdated remainder in folk knowledge. Nevertheless, a closer examination reveals that knowledge on imagination was actively produced in medical advice literature and some scientific discourses until the first decades of the 20^th century. This demonstrates that an overemphasis both on rupture and on the timeline of academic medicine might conceal continuous elements and the folded time of specific knowledge formations.