Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie O'Rourke

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]


Articult ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Leila F. Salimova ◽  
◽  

Modern scientific knowledge approaches the study of the physical and aesthetic bodies with a considerable body of texts. However, on the territory of the theater, the body is still considered exclusively from the point of view of the actor's artistic tools. Theatrical physicality and the character of physical empathy in the theater are not limited to the boundaries of the performing arts, but exist in close relationship with the visual and empirical experience of the spectator, performer, and director. The aesthetic and ethical aspect of the attitude to the body in the history of theatrical art has repeatedly changed, including under the influence of changing cultural criteria of "shameful". The culmination of the demarcation of theatrical shame, it would seem, should be an act of pure art, independent of the moral restrictions of society. However, the experiments of modern theater continue to face archaic ethical views. The article attempts to understand the cultural variability of such a phenomenon as shame in its historical and cultural extent using examples from theater art from antiquity to the present day.


Author(s):  
Norman G. Lederman ◽  
Judith S. Lederman

AbstractThis review traces the history of research on the teaching and learning of nature of scientific knowledge (NOSK), and its implications for curriculum and instruction. Initially, the complex rubric of NOSK is clearly conceptualized, while recognizing that there is no singularly accepted definition. As part of this conceptualization NOSK is distinguished from the body of scientific knowledge and science practices/inquiry, the latter of which is often conflated with NOSK. The empirical research on NOSK related to teaching, learning, and assessment is briefly reviewed, followed by a discussion of the challenges that teachers face and a delineation of research foci that can help alleviate teachers’ challenges. Finally, a variety of important questions yet to be answered are delineated and explained.


Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 87-118
Author(s):  
David Wills

What is called the “temporal technology” of the human can be analyzed as a relation between time and blood. The death penalty reveals that relation not as a natural one but as a “prosthetic” one, whereby time gets attached to the human body in such a way that it mimics the flow of blood but at the same time shows that flow to be mechanically produced. That conclusion is reached by tracing a history of mortal time that links Socrates to Heidegger and by examining in detail Hegel’s promotion of blood as a figure for dialectical sublation in general, a blood that is simultaneously inside and outside the body. As a result, blood is “shed” by means of an execution whether it involves the guillotine or lethal injection.


Leprosy ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Charlotte A. Roberts

This chapter introduces leprosy, an infection that is still misunderstood and considered a neglected tropical disease but declining in frequency, according to the World Health Organization. The bacteria that cause leprosy, Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis, are outlined, as well as how a relative strength of a person’s immune system determines how leprosy affects the body. Although leprosy is curable, associated stigma and disability remain common challenges for people with the disease in parts of the world. The goals and structure of the book are outlined, ten myths that still pervade society at large are listed, and the use of the word “leper” discussed. Based on World Health Organization data, the chapter also explores the frequency of leprosy today, where the infection remains a challenge, and the history of detecting and reporting evidence for leprosy in living populations. Finally, the reasons why bioarchaeologists have an interest in this infection are explored.


Author(s):  
Elisabeth El Refaie

This chapter critically reviews the traditional notion of embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), arguing that it is characterized by a somewhat inflexible view of the way the human body shapes one’s thinking. Probing more recent developments in CMT, including dynamic systems approaches and cross-cultural studies of metaphor, and confronting these with key theories from phenomenology, psychology, social semiotics, and media theory, the original notion of dynamic embodiment is developed. Accordingly, the degree to which people draw on their own bodies when producing and interpreting metaphors depends not only on the cultural practices and the specific actions in which they are engaged at any given moment, but also on the degree to which they are consciously aware of their physicality, as well as the affordances of the modes and media they are using to communicate.


2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.


Author(s):  
Richard M. Titmuss

This chapter discusses the transfusion of blood. Beliefs and attitudes concerning blood affect in varying degrees throughout the world the work of transfusion services in appealing for and recruiting blood donors. A deeply rooted and widely held superstition is that the blood contained in the body is an inviolable property and to take it away is sacrilege. In parts of Africa, for example, it is believed also that blood taken away cannot be reconstituted and that the individual will therefore be weakened, be made impotent, or be blinded for life. The growth of scientific knowledge about the circulation of the blood, the composition and preservation of blood, and the distribution of blood group genes throughout the human race has provided a more rational framework. However, it is only more recently that scientific advances have made a blood transfusion service an indispensable and increasingly vital part of modern medicine.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 101-128
Author(s):  
Barbara Arciszewska

As we continue to probe the boundaries of architectural history and to seek new approaches to the complex legacy of the past, we have to reassess the body of knowledge produced thus far, exposing its often-hidden agendas in order to be aware of our own engagement with today’s ideologies. The architectural history of Central Europe, although usually marginalized, serves as a particularly instructive field in which to study the mutability of ideological positions and their impact on interpretation. Scholarship on the Wilanów Palace near Warsaw (c. 1677–96) (Figs 1 and 2) offers some of the most interesting examples of architectural history’s appropriations, oversights and extraordinary intellectual constructions devised solely in order to claim a relationship with the glorious past, or to sever ties with certain aspects of it, depending upon the contemporary ideological agendas. This material demonstrates how a single building has been used over the years to express diverse concepts of national identity, either by subjecting that building to certain physical modifications, or by making it serve as a point of departure for narratives that emphasize different characteristics of precisely the same physical fabric. The vocabulary of classical architecture employed in Wilanów was particularly well suited to such cultural practices. Classicism – the paradigmatic architectural language, positioned at the nexus of the indigenous and the foreign – has traditionally been associated with discourses of national identity. It was a universal idiom of authority, easily reflecting diverse (or even conflicting) social agendas, its visual vocabulary lending itself to a succession of new meanings, in line with shifting expectations and ideological priorities. In Wilanów the classical and the universal were continually redefined in an attempt to express in visual form the national and the particular.


2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Bryan

A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of mental history of mankind.– L.H. MorganNow you try and say what is involved in seeing something as something. It is not easy.– Ludwig WittgensteinIn this paper I argue that a comparison of English and Aboriginal conceptions of property yields insight into the ontologically specific grounds that inform institutionalized socio-cultural practices like property. Where the foundations of English conceptions of property are highly rationalistic, Aboriginal conceptions eschew categorization and are indicative of a highly nuanced and different way of understanding the worldliness of a human being. As such, a comparison of such conceptions becomes not simply a comparison of ways of owning and possessing, but a cross-cultural comparison of ways of relating to the world at large for what are ostensibly economic purposes.To argue this is to assume that there is much more going on within culture that is determinative of ways of being than to simply assume that all cultures share universal cultural traits. In this paper I therefore discuss some of the philosophical foundations that underlie Western conceptions of the human’s relation to the world as embodied in principles of property law, as well as looking at the philosophical significance of that view. I also look at the way various Aboriginal peoples in Canada understand their own relationship to the world-at-large as it is expressed in what they understand as the property regimes of their society.


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