The long roots of ibogaine: A journey from plant to pharmaceutical

In this scientific review, pursuing the objective of providing substantiation for the part played by Philippe Pinel’s reform in the history of psychiatry and culture as a whole, we make a critical assessment of Michel Foucault’s position, according to which the true significance of Philippe Pinel for the history of culture should be seen in the context of the ideology of antipsychiatry. Based on the historical-scientific and the sociocultural factual material we describe the civilizational mission of Philippe Pinel’s activity as a medical doctor and scientist on par with such great men of French science as Antoine Lavoisier, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Marie Francois Xavier Bichat, et al.

Capacity Building in the Congo Basin: Rich Resources Requiring Sustainable Development

This special issue of Cultural History focuses on the past, present and future trajectories of cultural history in the United States. In the American academy, cultural history has enjoyed a relatively long, creative and insightful tradition. Since the early twentieth century, practitioners of cultural history in the United States have been, and remain, self-consciously interdisciplinary in their approach to historical research and writing. This tradition of interdisciplinarity, and the concomitant questioning of what constitutes legitimate historical evidence (something particularly evident among ethnohistorians and historians of race, gender, and sexuality), has produced a vast and vibrant historiography that analyses everything from comic books and wrestling to politics and political economy. The methodological agility that is now a hallmark of American cultural history writing prompted cultural historians James Cook and Lawrence Glickman to observe in 2008 that there exists no ‘fixed or finished method for “doing” cultural history’. Indeed, the volume and breadth of monographs and scholarly essays devoted to the cultural history of the United States suggests that the cultural turn of the 1970s and 1980s has seemingly triumphed among American historians and become so commonplace that it is no longer possible to do justice to the political, economic, diplomatic or social histories of the United States without being at least minimally literate in the methods of the cultural historian(s). Thus, while porous disciplinary boundaries may cause heart palpitations among purists who prefer to see political or economic history as discrete methodological approaches to understanding the past, the reality is

13 Ab Imperio, 3/2002 From the EDITORS RUSSIAN SOCIETY: STRUCTURES AND CULTURES In this issue Ab Imperio continues the exploration of the umbrella theme of this year of paradoxes of modernization in the Russian empire and Soviet Union, turning to social and cultural dimensions of history of empire and nation. It is well known what a complex task it is to study the evolution of social structures if approached from the longue duree and societal perspective and to what extent illusory can be the self-manifested changes in culture if taken at face value. The relationship between these two modes of scholars’ encounter with the socio-cultural world stands at the core of the general historical epistemology: on the one hand historians have to deal with the self-description of social structures (institutes, groups and actors) couched in the language of the epoch, on the other hand, there is an ever present temptation to narrate the object of historical investigation (including the process of historical change) in terms of contemporary culture. The problem of reciprocal mental projections and substitutions in the encounter of scholars with the voiceless or outspoken social and cultural phenomena is a point of intersection for all the materials of the current issue. 14 From the Editors Despite the inherent contradiction between the social (structural) and cultural (introspect) perspectives, the symbiosis of social and cultural approach have endured and proved fruitful in the past decade or so, in part due to the blurring of disciplinary boundaries as a result of which cultural and social histories have occupied areas that had long been the domain of political, diplomatic or intellectual history. The explicit dynamism of culture and “representativeness” of social structures allowed to narrate the profound changes in society (in particular, the process of modernization), charting the stages of cultural transformations in relation to the corresponding changes in constellations of social actors and factors. The advance of both social and cultural histories and the fusion thereof influenced the theories of nationalism, which came to address the modern nation formation in the framework of historically emergent linguistic and cultural homogeneity of Western European nations. However, the challenge comes when the optics of social and cultural analysis is applied to history of Central and Eastern Europe. This application invites a reflection on theoretical assumptions of 20th century paradigms of social and cultural history, for it brings about the question of relationship of Central-Eastern European history to Western Europe-tied definition of modernity and the suitability of nation-centered narratives for capturing the history of interaction and encounters in what was the multinational society of a continental empire. Indeed, the very notion of imperial society pleads for critical reflection. It is to be discussed if this category is legitimate given that the boundaries of this social formation are determined by the political frontiers. These frontiers create an ostensibly unitary space, which though includes the significant variation of the nature of social collectivities and relationship as well as different national-cultural areas. Alternatively, one may turn the critical scrutiny to the analytical categories of “society” and “culture” and pose a question to what extent the social and cultural reality behind those categories can be exhausted by the analysis of solidarity, groupness, and homogeneity. The current issue of Ab Imperio is an attempt to take stock of certain new methodological approaches, which evolved in studies of social and cultural history of the Russian empire and Soviet and post-Soviet space, and to map possible directions of modification of conventional analytical concepts necessitated, respectively, by the specific contexts of multinational Russian empire and the Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Theory and Methodology section of this issue features the sequential 15 Ab Imperio, 3/2002 attempts at reflection of relationship between the categories of social sciences and the polyvalent social and cultural reality of social collectivities and cultural solidarity. The section opens by the first publication in Russian of the seminal text by Max Weber, which laid foundations for the modern debate about the formation of social groups and ethnic communities and stressed both cognitive and structural aspects of this process. The most recent attempt to amend the essentialist implications of social and...

The issues of nation and national identity remain a key element in any study of the Middle East. With the recent focus on the linkages between literature and nation in other postcolonial contexts as well as in literary and cultural theory, a thorough study of the variety and complexity of the intersection of the two in this vast region could not have come sooner. Literature and Nation in the Middle East pulls together essays which vary in rigour, disciplinary concerns, and length. They range from a nuanced, theoretically informed and literary analysis of the complex case of Lebanon by Syrine C. Hout to a short and largely panoramic review of ‘marginal’ literatures in the Middle East by Peter Clark. There are pieces by social scientists with clearly no knowledge of the original languages and others who are thoroughly competent linguists (a comparison between Suleiman’s essay on Nazik al-Mala’ika and Jeff Shalan’s piece about the modern Egyptian novel, which ignores completely the original texts as well as any study of the issue written originally in Arabic, reveals the signifi cant gap). Suleiman’s essay brings to light the connection between poetry and nationalism on the one hand and form and content on the other. It shows that al-Mala’ika was tightly associated with various discourses of nationalism in the Arab context (Iraqi republicanism, PanArab Nasserism, Palestinian nationalism and spirituality and nationalism). The essay also advocates a sociology of literature, which takes account of the form. However, the essay limits itself to nationalist literature. And like all the other contributions to the volume, with the exception of Hout’s treatment of Lebanese literature in exile, the essay does not deal with critiques of nationalism in literature. On the other side, Shalan’s essay, while grounded in cultural history, treads safe ground by focusing on two well studied texts, Haykal’s Zaynab and al-Hakim’s Return of the Spirit, in English translation and the wellknown context of Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s. Its fi ndings therefore hardly add insight for the student of Arabic literature. This is not the case with ‘Arabic Poetry, Nationalism and Social Change: Sudanese colonial and postcolonial perspectives’ by Heather J. Sharky, which is one of the most illuminating chapters in the book. Other than studies of Tayeb Salih, who has become a canonical fi gure in post-colonial studies as a whole, Sudan has remained at the margins of research on the Arab world, except in political science and ethnography. This essay traces the impact of poetry on nationalism in the Sudan, making the valid argument that even outside Sudan ‘in the early twentieth century, poetry was still the gold standard for verbal and intellectual skill, so that poetry – not the novel – was the nation’s early proxy’(176). The complex situation of Sudan in terms of linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity makes it a case in point for the study of how a particular discourse, a language and a literary genre emerge as dominant. It also shows the inherent constructive nature of national identity and the role literature plays in this process.

Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern PoliticsClose Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American RelationsThe Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945

Science in the service of colonial agro-industrialism: The case of cinchona cultivation in the Dutch and British East Indies, 1852–1900

Great apes are a good model for human pathology and physiology. Great apes eat several plant species claimed by traditional healers to treat various ailments in folk medicine. Some of the items consumed by great apes have low nutritional value suggesting that health might be improved or regulated by such ingestion as previously postulated. Among the inventoried plant species known to be eaten by bonobos at Lomako Fauna Reserve, at least nine (30%) are used in African Traditional Medicine and scientifically validated as antisickling, anti-parasitic, anticonvulsant, analgesic, vasorelaxant, antimicrobial or hepato-protecting medicinal plants. Zoo-pharmacognosy approach may therefore serve as a new complementary/alternative of ethno-pharmacology method in selecting plants for biopharmaceutical research, especially as source of antisickling new hits. The fact that the permanent access of these vegetarian primates to plants as preventive medication in order to maintain a low level of pathogens and a sub-clinical health status, indicate that bonobos plant foods could serve as a valuable alternative of traditional medicines of pharmacological relevance for human health in Congo basin. It is therefore suggested that great apes plant foods could protect human sickle erythrocyte against hemolysis by inhibiting the polymerization of sickle hemoglobin and radical oxygen species formation within sickle erythrocyte as it does for Plasmodium falciparum infected erythrocytes in bonobos.

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Искусствоведение» — научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, обобщающий результаты исследований ученых всего мира в различных областях искусства, включая музыковедение, культурологию и художественное образование.

Reviews 227 Parergon 20.1 (2003) While her canvas is a relatively restricted one, Freeman has successfully demonstrated her capacity to engage in a close and imaginative reading of some little-studied historical texts. She shows that something interesting can often be drawn from writing traditionally dismissed as monastic curiosity rather than serious historical investigation. Constant J. Mews School of Historical Studies Monash University Gillett, Andrew, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 4), Turnhout, Brepols, 2003; hardback; 8 colour plates, 12 b/w illustrations; pp. xxiv; 265; RRP EUR60.00; ISBN 2503511686. This important book mounts an aggressive assault on the use of ‘ethnogenesis’ models in the study of the barbarians of classical antiquity in both archaeology and philology/history. The historical critique is focussed on the work of Reinhard Wenskus, whose 1961 Stammsbildung und Verfassung is perceived as the origin of a scholarly community that is represented today by Herwig Wolfram, Walter Pohl and Patrick Geary, among others. The ‘culture history’ approach in archaeology is traced to ‘the work of Gustav Kossinna [1858-1931] and others’ (p. 4). The trajectories traced by the volume interlock in various ways: Section I examines cases of the use of’‘ethnogenesis’ in late antique and early medieval studies; Section II provides three archaeological cases which are primarily examinations of the genealogies of influential theoretical positions; and Section III contains two responses, by Walter Pohl and Charles Bowlus. Walter Goffart’s Section I opener, ‘Does the Distant Past Impinge on the InvasionAge Germans?’is a more informal, less academic piece than other contributions . There is charm in his frank use of anecdotal evidence and conversations with colleagues in his discussion of memory and the status of the distant past, and his insistence on the written Graeco-Roman record as the preserver of all that is known about Germanic peoples is well-argued (the case ofArminius being classic, p. 24). Particularly impressive is his analysis of migrations: ‘[c]ertainly, people moved; action generally involves motion. What matters, however, is not the incidental circumstance of changing places, but the broader occurrences that were going on’(p. 29). The second part of the paper is a more targeted critique of 228 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) the work of Herwig Wolfram, concentrating on his ‘vision of an unbroken, millennial, tradition-rich development of the Germanic/German peoples’ (p. 36). With Alexander Callander Murray’s ‘Reinhard Wenskus on “Ethnogenesis”, and the Origin of the Franks’ the density of the volume increases sharply. The footnotes are often more powerful bearers of significance than the text of the papers, and one of the book’s strengths is the vast array of scholarship which is drawn together for the first time for an Anglophone audience. Murray considers three ways in which Wenskus’ work intersects ‘with the prevailing currents of German historiography’ (p. 54): concern to establish continuity between the Germans of the Roman world and modern Germany and German identity; a political connection (which is somewhat unclear, as the argument draws in the Nazi ideas of Otto Hofler, possibly to taint Wenskus by association); and the insistence that ethnic identity is carried by social and political elites. The final third of the essay uses the Franks as a case study, concluding that authors after Gregory of Tours were unaware of the inherited tradition posited by Wenskus ‘because it was not there’ (p. 67). The contributions of Michael Kulikowski (‘Nation versusArmy?ANecessary Contrast?’) andAndrew Gillett (‘Was Ethnicity Politicized in the Earliest Medieval Kingdom?’) are more closely-plotted case studies, Gillett’s containing a valuable fifteen-page tabulation of official evidence for royal titles in the barbarian kingdoms, which concludes that although some ‘ethnic titles’ (such as rex Francorum) are well-attested, the vast majority of titles are without ethnic designations. The final essay in Section II, Derek Fewster’s ‘Visions of National Greatness: Medieval Images, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Finland, 1905-1945’, stands alone, in that its subject matter is outside late antiquity. However, it is a lively and informative piece, with eight wonderful illustrations, concentrating on the paucity of evidence for medieval Finland, and the political motivations of...

The concept of diaspora, often entangled within the nation-state's rigid boundaries, presents a crucial yet often overlooked lens to denaturalise ossified narratives associated with the linear progression towards the centralised ‘neutral’ state. In crossing borders and boundaries, the Algerian diaspora in France occupies a liminal space that continuously reimagines, challenges and deterritorialises notions of ethnicity, citizenship and belonging. Pierre Nora’s seminal work ‘Lieux de Mémoire’ provides an important theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between locations, events and symbols as central to the collective memory of the nation. It is notable that he, being a member of the French settler community in Algeria, was deeply entwined with the history of French colonial rule. However, Nora’s works often anchor themselves in a collective memory that has sanitised the traces of empire as if deemed unworthy of remembrance or simply considered marginal. Whilst Nora’s works are central to the field of memory studies, his perspective risks perpetuating a vision of France that obscures the foundational violence of its colonial enterprise and the enduring liminality of its post-colonial subjects. Although post-colonial perspectives have gained traction within and amongst French academic circles, they often challenge key aspects of French national character. The relegation, erasure and essentialization of ‘non-European’ history are not merely semantic, but emblematic of institutionalised reductionism and dismissal. Ideas of progress and modernity are presented as inherent and universalistic. I propose this constitutes a dual process of historical erasure, firstly the erasure and essentialization of ‘non-European’ history and secondly the erasure of the memory of the atrocities committed during French colonial rule. This dynamic ultimately affirms the positional superiority of France through disseminating a worldview that privileges Western epistemologies. This dual process of erasure is particularly pronounced when understanding the experiences of the Algerian diaspora whose presence actively challenges the memories and imaginaries of French colonial rule and modern claim of neutrality. The Algerian diaspora dispels the myth of a static, territorially bound nation-state by merely existing within French borders. The post-memories and mythification of Algeria in the consciousness of second and third-generation Algerians challenge the assimilationist policies of the French state whilst unsettling what ‘home’ means for these communities. Thus, diasporic memories are a form of resistance, recasting the past in a light that illuminates the pluralistic and often contentious nature of identity and belonging.

This is a convincing example of the possibilities and challenges of writing on issues of health and disease from a social and cultural perspective. In a field that continues to produce more and more monographic works, Saberes, terapias y prácticas delves into the complex zone of medical pluralism. Di Liscia works with a broad definition of medicine—not only scientific and academic discourses, practices, and beliefs, but also those that originate in native and popular medicines. She attempts to deal with the tensions and exchanges among the “ideological blocks of scientific, native, and popular medicines” (p. 5), and she avoids theoretical constructs that, while perhaps serving as useful tools to bring some order to the reconstruction of historical experience, at the same time are unable to grasp their ambiguities and the gray zone where most dimensions of quotidian life take place.Di Liscia’s agenda has at least two merits I wish to underline. The first is a serious concern for popular medicine—a sensitive discussion that reminds the reader that the triumph of scientific medicine is in no way a linear process, even in the Argentine Litoral, a region that embraced modernity with great energy and success, received millions of immigrants, entered a rapid process of urbanization, and achieved high rates of literacy. These concerns are not new—social and cultural historians are becoming increasingly conscious of them—but Di Liscia is able to weave a convincing narrative based on the less-than-abundant primary sources available. The book’s second merit, a truly original contribution, is the incorporation of the problem of native medicine in the Argentine pampas, where Indian issues tend to be discussed as a marginal matter in a historiographical agenda focused on examining the very efficient nation-building policies that sought the extermination of the native population.Saberes, terapias y prácticas discusses an array of problems and issues, always keeping the narrative focused on the tensions and exchanges among scientific, popular, and native medicines. For the first half of the nineteenth century, the discussion of medical practices—above all regarding smallpox vaccination of Indian groups allied with the Rosas government—is a compelling revision of current interpretations. Equally persuasive is the reconstruction of the immediate post-1853 debates about the Indian problem vis à vis the building of the modern nation, discussions in which can be heard some elite voices interested in exploring and understanding Indian medicine potentials. Di Liscia also discusses the discourses that tended to justify the ethnic elimination of the Indians—a topic well worked by historians—and the way the fatal consequences of their diseases were interpreted by the modernizing elite, a truly novel dimension in historiographical terms.The author is very imaginative working with diverse medical options with origins outside of certified medicine but obviously present in people’s daily lives during most of the nineteenth century, times in which the medicalization of society was nascent, and the scientific medical therapies available were largely as ineffective as the alternatives. It is this context that allows the author to explore a number of processes that show a contradictory scenario marked, among others, by the efforts of established physicians trying, to a certain extent, to incorporate popular medicines and practices into the scientific medical realm. She discusses the beginnings of a medical folklore as a “national” discipline that will present in a positive light curanderos criollos, the difficulties in imposing scientific medicine as the only respectable medicine in a liberal period, the relative tolerance or acceptance of competing medical practices by some physicians and certainly the society in general, at the same time when other professionals were insistently constructing the image of the curandero as a dangerous criminal.The book ends with a general chapter focused on the relative triumph of the medicalization process, an outcome of the relatively successful antiepidemic efforts launched in the last decades of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. What this process also facilitated was the consolidation of an image—well accepted among physicians, less so among other lay social sectors—in which popular medicine as medical knowledge ends up labeled as a set of practices and discourses dominated by ignorance and lack of competency.In sum, Saberes, terapias y prácticas is another important contribution in a field that continues to move away from the traditional history of medicine, reaffirming that disease and health are increasingly relevant matters in social and cultural history.

Until the twenty-first century, animals were largely absent in the history of medicine, which was generally interpreted as the history of humans practicing medicine by and for themselves. The ‘animal turn’ across a broad range of scholarship in the last quarter century has changed this trajectory, so that increasing numbers of historians of medicine and science, as well as social and cultural historians, are documenting how nonhuman animals have always played essential roles in ‘human medicine’ and the larger field of human health, with some calling for a new medical history which transcends species. Some of this new curiosity and energy can be attributed to the maturing of the animal rights movement, which has been resurgent since the 1970s, and which from the beginning had the fate of laboratory animals as a prime focus. The substantial recent scholarship on its predecessor, the antivivisection movement of the late nineteenth century, testifies to this influence. Environmental studies have also played their part. The growing awareness that we are in a period of mass extinction caused by human-induced climate change, habitat loss, and overhunting and overfishing, as well as the rising prevalence of zoonotic disease and resulting epidemics, has focused broad attention on links between animal and human health and survival, one of whose outcomes is the One Health movement. Overall, historical scholarship on animals and medicine has concentrated on the West or Global North, although there has emerged in the last decades a smaller historical scholarship on the medicalization of animals in ‘traditional medicine’ or ethnomedicines in Asia, South America, and elsewhere, both in the modern period and the distant past. The largest stream of historical literature in this broad category, however, continues to concentrate on the use of animals in medical research, and is convergent with a much larger philosophical and social science literature on animal ethics, which it complements. This bibliography has taken a broad approach to the topic of animals in medicine and health, beginning with scholarship on the unity between human and veterinary medicine, followed by work on zoonotic disease, zootherapies, and finally animals in biomedical research.

Historical Memory, Neoliberal Spain, and the Latin American Postcolonial Ghost: On the Politics of Recognition, Apology, and Reparation in Contemporary Spanish Historiography Joseba Gabihndo has taught at several universities: Duke University, BrynMawr University , SUNY Stony Brook and University of Florida. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno. He has published several articbs on Hollywood cinema and blockbusters in the context ofghbal culture, Spanish nationalism , postnationalism, masculinity , and queer theory. He hasjustfinishedan essay collection on contemporary Spanish-, American- and French-Basque literature entitledNazioaten hondarrak (The Remnants of the Nation ). He is currently working to finish α cultural and postnational history of Basque literatures from the Renaissance to the twentyfirst century entitbd Before Babel. Historical Memory, European Fundamentalism, and Colonial Ghosts To paraphrase the opening of the Communist Manifesto, a [new] specter is haunting Europe —the specter oÃ- fundamentalism.1 These days the term "fundamentalism" is mostly applied to different forms of resistance to the West, i.e. Muslim fundamentalism. My use of fundamentalism refers to something quite different: legitimations of the West. More specifically, I use "fundamentalism" to refer to the neoliberal turn taken by many European (and American) states which re-imagine themselves in a neonationalist/imperialist fashion. They do so by forgetting their colonial past while turning their internal others into the only racist and fundamentalist subjects . Le Pen's ultra-right politics in France or the welldocumented case of xenophobia surrounding El Ejido in Spain are two clear examples of the kind of ideological processes to which I refer. In this respect I equate fundamentalism with neoliberalism here.2 I will focus on contemporary Spanish historiographical discourse and its central role in articulating this neoliberal, fundamentalist ideology. But before focusing on Spain, I would like to cite several French and German scandals in order to expose the general European scope of this fundamentalist ideology. I have chosen the public form of the "scandal," because a "scanArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 248 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies dal" captures the emerging yet non-hegemonic status of any new ideology—a status that the very nature of the scandal reveals and conceals at the same time. The scandal reflects an abject event or discourse that the majority of the population desires but cannot embrace or rejects but cannot renounce. These scandals are ultimately about the past and its memory. They point to the emergence of a new ideology endowed with a very specific historical imagination: a neoliberal, fundamentalist memory. In November of 2002, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the ex-president of the French Republic and head of the Convention for the Future of the European Union, gave an interview to Le Monde and made several remarks about the rejection of Turkey's application to the EU. He noted that Turkey does not belong in the European Union; in his own words, "it would represent the end of Europe" (Le Monde, my translation). D'Estaing said that Turkey's "capital is not in Europe, 95% of its population is outside Europe; it is not a European country" (Schweizerische , my translation). He concluded that admitting Turkey, an official candidate since 1999, would open the European gates for other North African states: "you will have a Moroccan request (for EU membership), the King of Morocco said it long time ago" (Schweizerische, my translation). One would have to wonder whether French colonial rule in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was European , and rhus, whether the postcolonial effects of France's imperialism are European as well. Ultimately one could interpret d'Estaign's remarks to mean that French postcolonial subjects are no longer European let alone French, even if they live in France or are French citizens. D'Estaign's latest remarks echo those he made in 1990: "Immigration must be totally stopped" (Huntington 201). D'Estaign's declarations attest to more generalized European fears towards the uncanny postcolonial return of the colonial subject which is now transformed into the global harbinger of European demise. His remarks show that Le Pen is not an island phenomena and that we are dealing with a larger ideological problem. Very correctly, the...

The article analyzes forms of authorship that were characteristic of Western culture at specific periods and emerged or disappeared in connection with the emergence or disappearance of the corresponding function of language. The analysis was carried out based on the materials and methodology proposed by Michel Foucault in his fundamental work "The Order of Things," involving the works of other researchers. It is noted that the discreteness of the function of language in culture, as proven by Foucault, undermines not only the notion of the foundational function of the subject but also the notion of the invariance and universality of the author's function. Based on descriptions of the function of language within each of the three "epistemes," it is demonstrated that in different periods of the history of Western culture, "authorship" was understood as various cultural practices that are difficult to reduce to a single concept. In conclusion, three types of authorship that emerged in Western culture during different historical periods were identified, named, and described: "Author-Augur" (late antiquity – mid-17th century), "Author-Creator" (mid-17th century – early 19th century), and "Author-Medium" (early 19th century – 20th century). The article argues that the "death of the author," in the context of "The Order of Things," is a consequence of the decline of the "classical episteme" – conditions of the possibility of knowledge in which "representation" was the only locus of the world's existence, and under the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum," according to Foucault, what was actually implied was: "I think, therefore the world exists." After it was revealed within the "modern episteme" that the being of man is outside the being of language, the classical Creator was replaced by the Medium. The text separately explains how the proposed concept of the "Medium" fundamentally differs from the "Scripter" (Roland Barthes) and from the so-called "Simple Performer of Pure Ritual" (Michel Foucault).