Jacob Vernet and ‘The Religious Enlightenment’: ‘Rational Calvinism’, the Pastors of Geneva and the French philosophes

Summary

In this article I react to dismissive remarks made about my Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the philosophes (1994) in a recent book by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (2008). Vernet, a distinguished Genevan pastor and theologian, who fell foul of d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau, is one of six figures studied by Sorkin, who claims that the religious dimension of the Enlightenment has been much underestimated and that the philosophes were considerably less significant than has usually been thought. Reacting to the accusation that my treatment of Vernet's theology was superficial and unreliable, I reconsider the latter's major theological works (including his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, Instruction chrétienne, and Pièces fugitives sur l'eucharistie) in an attempt to validate my previous interpretation, and illustrate that Vernet refused to acknowledge ideas that he had actually published. The second part of the article draws more general conclusions, pointing out spectacular errors in Sorkin's depiction of eighteenth-century Geneva and arguing that he has a clear agenda, which, in my opinion, is wrong-headed, easy to refute and—above all—often based on gratuitous accusations and statements lacking any evidence.     

‘The Indian Gift’: A critical debate

In 1986 Jonathan Parry’s ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’ claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and cosmological contexts. Thirty years later, this symposium considers the intellectual milieu in which The Indian Gift was written, and interrogates whether or not the work remains relevant to contemporary research and analysis. The symposium opens with a short introduction that provides some background to Parry’s essay and incorporates material from a recent interview with him. This is followed by critical comments on it by five influential thinkers on gift exchange: James Carrier, Chris Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern and Yunxiang Yan. It ends with a short ‘revisionist’ note by Parry in which he tries to identify some of the limits of the Maussian approach for contemporary anthropology.     

‘An Angel Directs the Storm’: The Religious Politics of American Neoconservatism

Abstract

In his inaugural speech, President George W. Bush suggested that the mission of America to spread freedom and democracy in the world is a divinely authored mission. The intention first announced in Bush's inaugural to globalize an American Christian vision of freedom and democracy, and of free market capitalism, reflects the theological underpinnings of the neo-conservativism of the Bush administration. In this article I trace the remarkable continuities between the neo-conservative political theology of Bush and his acolytes and more mainstream Niebuhrian approaches to democracy and the ‘manifest destiny’ of America. I then subject the emergence of an American imperium, and the political theology associated with it, to a critique in dialogue with early Christian critics of Roman Empire, and with the Christian pacifist tradition as recently retrieved by North American theological ethicists John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.     

The Ethnologist’s Kitchen: Lewis Henry Morgan and the Aztecs

In 1876, The North American Review published ‘Montezuma’s dinner,’ Lewis Henry Morgan’s devastating review of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s second volume of Native Races of the Pacific States. Morgan, who believed that Aztec social organization mimicked that of the tribes of the Great Lakes he had studied closely, sought to dispute the historical accounts of pre-conquest societies proposed by Romantic historians such as William H. Prescott. Morgan’s case against Bancroft and Prescott rested on the still well-entrenched notion that Spanish eyewitness accounts of the Conquest were a weak foundation on which to reconstruct Aztec political and social structures. Even as Morgan’s views on the Nahuas became discredited, ‘Montezuma’s dinner’ continued to be read and referenced, which may have prompted historian Charles Gibson to dispel its inaccuracies and preconceptions once and for all. Although Morgan’s review cannot teach us much about Nahua social organization or dining habits, it nevertheless represents a significant and overlooked chapter in the debate about historical evidence (including written sources and artifacts) that accompanied the configuration of history and ethnology as disciplines.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.     

His Brother’s Keeper: Charles Livingstone and the ‘Failure’ of David Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition

David Livingstone’s Second Expedition to Africa (1858 to 1863) began with lavish promises and expectations and ended ignominiously, with official Britons castigating the once greatly esteemed explorer of Africa. To what extent did Charles Livingstone, an ordained Congregational minister and David’s American-trained younger brother, help to diminish the Expedition’s successes? Were David Livingstone’s promising exploring and scientific efforts compromised by his seemingly troubled, racist, brother? American-trained and an ordained minister, with a supposed ‘ascendancy’ over his elder brother, how did Charles’ prejudices and actions undermine his brother’s leadership and the accomplishments of the Zambezi project?     

The ‘superman’ solution: ‘Super soldiers’ and ‘superheroes’ in the United States military

Current US military research focused on the development of pharmacological ‘super soldiers’ – soldiers enhanced through a variety of pharmaceuticals and biomedical technologies to perform far beyond what unenhanced soldiers can do – draws from and often mimics popular or pop-cultural conceptions of the superhero. These biomedical and pharmacological interventions pose profound ethical problems and possibilities that are solved – in part – by imagining the new US super soldier as a superhero. Drugging soldiers to enhance their ability to fight and survive is a frightening proposition, and one that makes people uncomfortable; the solution is to imagine them as superheroes – as positive representations of the enhanced soldier on the side of good, somehow contained and controllable and fundamentally safe and unfrightening.     

‘Politicals’, Tribes and Musahibans: The Indian Political Service and Anglo-Afghan Relations 1929–39

This article examines the way in which the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier came to constitute a recurrent point of contention and dispute in Anglo-Afghan relations during the period under examination. It argues that while much attention has been paid to the way in which the activities of autonomous tribes of the frontier impacted upon British interests, much of the existing historiography has tended to focus upon the physical confrontation between tribe and state and has hitherto ignored perhaps the most complex aspect of the ‘tribal problem’ during this period; its impact upon the Government of India's diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. The article proposes that the period 1929–39 constituted a particularly challenging context for British policy-makers wrestling with the requirement to formulate a cost-effective tribal policy that would suit the interests of British India without undermining the newly emerged, pro-British but inherently weak Musahiban regime. It argues that while the Government of India avoided any fatal breach in relations with the Afghan leadership, the process of frontier policy-making illustrated some fundamental weaknesses in perspective on the part of that government department most closely associated with the formulation of such policy: the Indian Political Service.     

Translation and World Literature: The Perspective of the ‘Ex-Centric’

Before his death in 2003, Brazilian poet, critic and translator Haroldo de Campos had produced a robust body of work on translation theory, which consistently addressed the problem of subordination of target literatures to their source. His audacious concept of ‘transcreation’ championed that translation should be a creative re-invention instead of a mere reproduction of texts. In this article I demonstrate that De Campos’s translation theory subverts the hierarchical categories and values that have structured the field of world literature. Positioning himself as an intellectual from an ‘ex-centric’ literary culture, situated outside of the centers of global circulation, De Campos critiqued the unequal weight usually assigned to translated and original texts, author and translator, established and ascending traditions. His theory effectively illustrates how power differentials between diverse literary contexts affect the ways in which world literature is conceived. I argue that De Campos’s response to the standing inequality that characterizes translational exchanges involved a literary solution. As a creative act in its own right, imbued with the values of originality and difference, transcreation offered an aesthetic answer to the problems of authenticity, influence and literary dependence.     

‘The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life’: Lewis Carroll and Victorian Psychiatric Practice

An analysis of the numerous connections of Lewis Carroll to the Victorian psychiatric profession reveals their influence on the portrayal of insanity in Carroll’s fiction. Through examining his relationship with his uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, a Commissioner in Lunacy, and collating Carroll’s personal recollections from diaries and letters with correspondences of the Lunacy Commission, this article offers a comprehensive picture of Carroll’s intellectual engagement with Victorian psychiatry. Combining these insights with his literary writings illuminates the psychiatric origins of the ‘Mad Tea-Party’ and characters such as the Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the organization and methods of mid-Victorian pauper lunatic asylums and their treatment of impoverished workers. Likewise, the illustrations of Carroll’s works stood in dialogue with popular imagery of insanity as well as ideas of physiognomy and their diagnostic application in asylum photography by Hugh Welch Diamond. This piece will argue that the framework of Victorian psychiatry provided Carroll with imagery he utilizes to satirize aspects of Victorian moral values. It thus aims to highlight the benefits of re-framing the works of Lewis Carroll beyond the genre children’s literature, and considering them as part of the wider Victorian discourse of the sciences of the mind.     

Heritage and gastronomy: The pursuits of the ‘new tourist’

Abstract

The main thrust of this text is to acknowledge the relationship between gastronomy and heritage as a key motivator for travel. Gastronomy, as a central part of culture, and its influence on other aspects of culture has received scant recognition from the academic world generated by tourism. Gastronomy, heritage and tourism are old friends; the relationship between them is mutually parasitic. Gastronomy's role as a cultural force in developing and sustaining heritage tourism is addressed, as is its increasing role as a catalyst in enhancing the quality of the tourist experience. Today's consumers’ search for an individual lifestyle is changing tourism and the ‘new tourist’ is using the holiday for acquiring insight into other cultures. Recent research and current market trends are examined to reveal the increasing significance of gastronomy to holiday choice. It is argued that gastronomy brings culture and cultures together. Place and setting enhance the food experience and arguably vice‐versa. Heritage and gastronomy combined make for an excellent marriage of tourist resources. The text argues that this combination is both used and viewed by the tourist. As such the tourist becomes engaged in cultural heritage to a deeper level.     

The monumental and the miniature: imagining ‘modernity’ in Astana

This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as a discursive trope employed in legitimating the Nazarbayev government, and one that has various material manifestations in the urban landscape of Astana. The research is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan in Summer 2009, and examines architecture, monuments, and the 2009 Astana Day celebrations. Through a focus on the monumental and the miniature, it highlights their similar roles in transforming symbols of Kazakhstani independence and identity into objects of reverie outside the field of political contestation.     

The Qadi,the Wazir and the Da‘i: Religious and Ethnic Relations in Buyid Shiraz in the Eleventh Century

Shiraz's importance as a Buyid political capitol during the late Buyid period has been mentioned but not thoroughly analyzed. This article attempts to understand Shirazi politics under the late Buyid Abu Kalijar (r. 415/1024 to 440AH/1048CE) by tracing the careers of three prominent figures in his court: the Ismaili propagandist Al-Mu'ayyad fi al-Din al-Shirazi, the Sunni Qadi Abdallah al-Fazari, and Abu Kalijar's Wazir Bahram ibn Mafanna al-‘Adil. Using material from a variety of different narrative sources, it becomes clear that all three individuals used their understanding of court politics and their connections to one or more factions, preferably military factions, to gain sufficient intimacy with King Abu Kalijar to present their own point of view and to exclude other individuals from doing the same. Abu Kalijar was able to maintain sufficient contact with a variety of different factions to prevent the kind of factional warfare that was evident in Baghdad in the same period. By tracing the political strategies of these three men, the article sketches the structure of Shirazi politics and highlights the inclusiveness of Abu Kalijar's court and its relative stability compared to the Baghdad court of the same period.