A Question of Civil Religion: Three Case Studies in the Intellectual History of "May Fourth"

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-160
Author(s):  
Peter Zarrow
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
May Fourth

Magical Thinking

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart McWilliams
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Scholarly Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epistemological Crises ◽  
New Atheism

How do we write about magic? Responding to a renewed interest in the history of the occult, this volume examines the role of magic in a series of methodological controversies in the humanities. In case studies ranging from the ‘necromancy’ of historiography to the strident rationalism of the ‘New Atheism,’ Magical Thinking sets out the surprising ways in which scholars and critics have imagined the occult. The volume argues that thinking and writing about magic has engendered multiple epistemological crises, profoundly unsettling the understanding of history and knowledge in Western culture. By examining how scholarly writing has contended and conspired with discourses of enchantment, the book reveals the implications of magic - and its scholarship - for intellectual history.

Encounters from the Twentieth Century: Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-41
Author(s):  
Jan Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of

The disappointments that flowed from the squashing of the student uprisings in 1968 is discussed as a way to underline a rupture in progressive thinking in the latter years of last century. Of particular concern for Marxists was a loss of faith in the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. It introduces three case studies that form the content of the next chapters, each revealing intellectual differences which became apparent the post 1968 era: (1) Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino; (2) Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot; and (3) the political aesthetic of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). The aim is to offer detailed encounters between left thinkers, not only to reveal a clash of approaches to resisting forms of power, but to offer an alternative for understanding how recent intellectual history has informed contemporary political aesthetics. It is also a way to avoid restaging another history of art, or received canon, to offer instead a non-totalising picture of history. [157]

Sorcery in the Black Atlantic: The Occult Arts in Comparative Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Derby
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
History Of

Three recent volumes—Parés and Sansi (eds.), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic; Paton and Forde (eds.), Obeah and Other Powers; and Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World—set a new bar for scholarship about Caribbean and Latin American sorcery, stressing its contingency as well as its transnational and cosmopolitan aspects. Their richly contextualized case studies of African-derived practices related to illness and health, as well as the quotidian experience of slaves outside the plantation, challenge the most entrenched assumptions about sorcery and extend its use to a range of social actors, not just slaves. In the process, they serve to relocate the practice of sorcery in Latin America within a broad comparative framework that includes Europe and the Americas as well as Africa.

Book Reviews: Turning the wheel of history

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-250
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-century Britain . Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1995. Pp. xii+345, £55.00. ISBN 0-85115-594-5 Michael Hunter assembles in his new volume 15 chapters, under four heads, from articles and book reviews published over the period 1971-1992. Hitherto unpublished material appears in an introduction and two of the chapters. The introduction explains the provenance of the chapters and their historical significance in relation to ‘A new theory of intellectual change’. The new theory suggests that the intellectual history of Britain during the 17th century may be better understood from the individual case studies Hunter offers, rather than broad generalizations supported by accumulated instances, as provided, for example, by Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline and the Decline of Magic (1971).

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter sets the scene for the case studies that follow in the rest of the book by characterising the ‘age of modernism’ and identifying problems relating to language and meaning that arose in this context. Emphasis is laid on the social and political issues that dominated the era, in particular the rapid developments in technology, which inspired both hope and fear, and the international political tensions that led to the two World Wars. The chapter also sketches the approach to historiography taken in the book, interdisciplinary history of ideas.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Entangled Trees and Arboreal Networks of Sensitive Environments

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-126
Author(s):  
Birgit Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Tropical Trees ◽  
Atmospheric Change ◽  
Media Study ◽  
Gutta Percha ◽  
History Of ◽  
Study Perspective ◽  
Nature Perception ◽  
Technological Perspective ◽  
Tall Tower

The article discusses how current mediated conditions change nature perception from a media study perspective. The article is based on different case studies such as the current sensation of atmospheric change through sensible media attached to trees which get published via Twitter, the meteorologist Amazonian Tall Tower Observatory and the use of gutta percha derived from tropical trees for the production of cables in the history of telegraphy. For analysing the examples, the perspective of »media as environments« is flipped to »environments as media«, because this focus doesn’t approach media from a networked and technological perspective primarily but makes productive the elemental character of basic »media« like air, earth and water

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