scholarly journals Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-374
Author(s):  
Carla Bittel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Experimental Environment ◽  
Marriage Partner ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an ‘experiment’, testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of ‘practical phrenology’ subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its ‘users’ and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists’ notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as ‘epistemological contests’, audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.

Mind Cure

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Americans ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Political Economic

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.

scholarly journals A Legal History of the New Zealand Jury Service - Introduction, Evolution, and Equality?

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jury System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Introduction

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.

Making Race and Gender Visible in Brazil’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kia Lilly Caldwell
Keyword(s):  
Hiv Prevention ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Prevention And Treatment ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Hiv Vulnerability ◽  
Hiv Aids ◽  
Afro Brazilian

Brazil has been long considered a global leader in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment; however, little is known about the effectiveness of these prevention and treatment efforts for the Afro-Brazilian population. This chapter examines the shift toward greater government action focused on HIV prevention for Afro-Brazilians. The chapter also explores HIV prevention initiatives developed by black women’s organizations and how the dynamics of gender, race, and class shape HIV vulnerability for Afro-Brazilian women. Finally, this chapter examines critiques of racially specific HIV prevention initiatives and the tensions between universalism and race consciousness that have characterized the shift toward focusing on the black population in HIV prevention efforts.

scholarly journals (Non)Religious Diversity and correlation of religious, spiritual and secular in the consciousness of modern man

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-78
Author(s):  
Elena D. Rutkevich
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Spiritual But Not Religious ◽  
Transnational Religion ◽  
Current Context ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Mind

Non-religious diversity is growing in the world nowadays. In the current context it is understood not as a diversity of faiths, religions, non-religions, etc., but as a variety of types of non-religious consciousness and categories of non-religious identity. The article covers only a few aspects of this vast topic. First, the theoretical prerequisites and substantiations for the change in the Western non-religious identity taking place during the transition from the Westphalian to the post-Westphalian system of religious governance and the emergence of a special type of pluralism that is formed in the process of dedifferentiation of religion, globalization and the transformation of the “religion of place and nation” into a transnational religion “without place and nation”, when the ratio of religious, spiritual and secular in the mind of a postmodern person changes. Second, the author analyses the origins and causes of this transformation of non-religious consciousness in the "long 1960s". Third, the author traces the evolution of such types of non-religious diversity as “spiritual but not religious”, “none” and “post-protestants” and the concept of “spirituality” that connects them. The category "spiritual but not religious", sometimes perceived as dubious and unconvincing, appearing in the context of countercultural spirituality, in the author´s opinion, is very important for understanding Western, especially American irreligiousness in general and the processes taking place today in particular. The processes that are associated with the growth of "none" and the proliferation of "post-Protestants" related to the Woke culture, who claim the role of "saviours of humanity", attaching more importance to the "new post-Protestant ethics" (rather than religion and tradition), seeking to politicise religion, to sacralise politics, race and gender relations. Rejecting the "old religion" and proclaiming a "new ethics", moving from the ideals of diversity, universal tolerance and political correctness to "militant moralism and cruel dogmatism”, they confirm the idea of "complex irreligiousness" in the era of "late modernity", that seems to be a sign of the times and requires close attention of scientists.

The Citizens of Incubators

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-273
Author(s):  
Oron Catts ◽  
Ionat Zurr
Keyword(s):  
Human Genome Project ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Genome Project ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Artificial Life Support ◽  
The Human Genome Project

Neolife are technologically created and fragmented life forms that have been manipulated by humans and cannot survive without artificial life support. This essay focuses our attention on one of the main vessels of neolife - the incubator. In recent years, especially as a result of the human genome project and through the field of synthetic biology, there is a shift to obscure the incubator as a surrogate vessel and render it neutral, thereby obscuring how, throughout history, what life is chosen or forced to be put in an incubator reflects on human wants and desires. Neolife can be seen as the entanglement of life with its surrogate apparatus, echoing interests of human-centric control, which affect and effect the larger milieu. By focusing on the incubator as such, we question the very idea of biocitizenship, focused as it is on human life, on intact, whole bodies, and on the distinction between environment and biology. Furthermore, the incubator has, throughout its history, served to reproduce and recuperate the very ideologies of race and gender upon which normative biocitizenship depends, despite the fact that developments in biotechnology and the design of neolife may offer the illusion of a “new citizenship” that breaks free from hegemonic human social constructions of species, gender, race, and class.

Chicano/a Challenges to Nineteenth-Century History

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl A. Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The U.S

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.

Race, Class, and Labor: White Skin Privilege and Oppression

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Harris
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Statistical Information ◽  
White Skin ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article examines the relationship of race and class using the lens of working-class experiences inside the US steel and auto industries. It focuses on the applicability of white skin privilege to the conditions of labor, and introduces the concept of comparative forms of oppression. Additionally, it considerations white skin privilege from the perspective of human rights, and ends with detailed statistical information and consideration of race and gender in relationship to various job categories.

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