Work In Early Twentieth Century Research Articles

The Journalist and the Manipulator: Walter Lippmann, Karl Mannheim, and the Case for a “New Objectivity” to Check Demagoguery

Prior to Donald Trump’s presidency, many scholars viewed the 1930s through the 1960s as the period when demagogues such as Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace posed the greatest threat to the American republic. Concerns about the public’s vulnerability to the emotional manipulation practiced by demagogues were, however, present from the founding forward, becoming particularly acute at the dawn of the modern age. This article argues that two important early twentieth century works, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, maintained that the demagogue’s most effective tool was the creation of an absolutist, often personalistic, mythology. Mannheim contended that journalists could combat the corrosive influence on the public of demagogues’ absolutist rhetoric by practicing a “new objectivity,” an approach to interpreting and explaining phenomena that encouraged “the broadest possible extension of [the public’s] horizon of vision.”

The Laws and Customs of the Yorùbá People by E.A. Ajisafe Moore (Undated, M. A. Ola Fola Bookshops, Abeokuta, Nigeria. 87 pages. Price $21.95 on Amazon.com)

The Laws and Customs of the Yorùbá People chronicles the prevalent customary practices and native laws of the Yorùbá people who have their ancestral home in South Western Nigeria and descendants in several cities around the world by virtue of forced and voluntary migrations. The book draws from extensive research – including painstaking collection of materials from several sub-groupings within the Yorùbá ethnic group. Ajisafe Moore acknowledges in the preface that the laws and customs of the Yorùbá people vary within the different Yorùbá sub-groupings. The book however sought to address customs and laws that are generally applicable across the entire Yorùbá ethnic group. It is not clear when The Laws and Customs of the Yoruba People (henceforth Laws and Customs) was actually published. The author’s reference in the preface to 1906 as the time when he commenced his research efforts for the book provides a first pointer to possible publication of the work in early twentieth century. Other sources such as the LitCaf Encyclopedia list laws and customs as being published in 1924, eight years after the publication of the first edition of Ajisafe Moore’s self-published work, History of Abeokuta in 1916 (reissued in 1948 and 1964 and now part of the United Kingdom’s Royal Collection Trust). James S. Coleman’s Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (1958) cites Laws and Customs as one of the “tribal and national histories of major ethnic groups” published in English in 1946 (Coleman, 1958: 327). Kash and Klare Bookshop, Lagos, Nigeria was listed as the publisher. Tis latter 320 Akinloye Ojo and Kingsley Opia-Enwemuche publication date of 1946 meant that Laws and Customs was a posthumous publication for Ajisafe Moore who passed away in 1940.

Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India

B. R. Ambedkar, the scholar, activist, and chief architect of the Indian constitution, in his early twentieth century works, referred to the untouchable quarters in India as ghettos. He recognized that untouchability was manifested through combining social separation with spatial segregation. Ambedkar’s theorization of untouchability can be applied along with feminist and Dalit scholars’ theories of the relationship between dynamic spatial experiences and the reworking of caste hierarchies to understand how securing control over productive assets, such as land, has altered social and spatial segregation in rural Bihar. Combined with narratives of the past and present, maps drawn by Bhuiyan Dalit women depicting the physical spaces they occupy in their village (i.e. housing, community center), the locations of sources of water and electricity, and the quality of the resources to which they have access demonstrate that gaining control over land following the Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) of the late 1970s helped end the most overt and readily discernible forms of caste-based discrimination. Nevertheless, resource discrimination and spatial and social segregation continue, albeit more covertly. The logic of untouchability still undergirds social interactions in rural Bihar, preventing Dalits from fully realizing their rights as guaranteed by law.

Scientific conclusions need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors

We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim we draw upon the literature studying the norms of assertion, and consider how they would apply if one attempted to hold claims made in scientific papers to their strictures, as assertions and discovery claims in scientific papers seem naturally analogous. We first use a case study of William H. Bragg’s early twentieth century work in physics to demonstrate that successful science has in fact violated these norms. We then argue that features of the social epistemic arrangement of science which are necessary for its long run success require that we do not hold claims of scientific results to their standards. We end by making a suggestion about the norms that it would be appropriate to hold scientific claims to, along with an explanation of why the social epistemology of science—considered as an instance of collective inquiry—would require such apparently lax norms for claims to be put forward.

The Rope

The Rope

Confusions about \u2018Inner\u2019 and \u2018Outer\u2019 Voices: Conceptual Problems in the Study of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

Both in research on Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVHs) and in their clinical assessment, it is common to distinguish between voices that are experienced as ‘inner’ (or ‘internal’, ‘inside the head’, ‘inside the mind’, ...) and voices that are experienced as ‘outer’ (‘external’, ‘outside the head’, ‘outside the mind’, ...). This inner/outer-contrast is treated not only as an important phenomenological variable of AVHs, it is also often seen as having diagnostic value. In this article, we argue that the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ voices is ambiguous between different readings, and that lack of disambiguation in this regard has led to flaws in assessment tools, diagnostic debates and empirical studies. Such flaws, we argue furthermore, are often linked to misreadings of inner/outer-terminology in relevant 19th and early twentieth century work on AVHs, in particular, in connection with Kandinsky’s and Jaspers’s distinction between hallucinations and pseudo-hallucinations.

How Race Might Help Us Find "Lost" Women's Writing

Abstract: This essay argues that the underrepresentation of women writers in the institution of early modern literature is an academic symptom of a larger social prejudice against women. It finds an earlier example of a robust academic response to prejudice on the field—a response that reached beyond the field's borders to engage with the social engines driving that prejudice—in the early twentieth-century work of Dr. Carter Woodson to help build the field of African American history. While denying any exact analogy between Woodson's situation and that facing contemporary scholars of Renaissance women's writing, the paper does argue that an effective way forward from the current impasse might be an adaptation of Woodson's explicitly antiracist politics for feminist ends, with scholars combining a consistent political critique of misogyny with consistent efforts to build intellectual community for themselves and to work for the institutional stability that can support it.

Wife, Mother, and Worker: The Decision to Work in Early-Twentieth Century São Paulo

This article examines the degree to which working-class women embodied the roles of wife, mother, and worker in early-industrial São Paulo, Brazil (1900–1930). By juxtaposing employment evidence from the Jafet textile factory with personal stories and anecdotal evidence, the article highlights the complex decisions these women made to return to and remain in the formal labor market. As workers, these women could work toward personal and family goals and gain some degree of personal satisfaction. For middle-class women, formal employment was often mutually exclusive from being a wife and mother. This was not the case for working-class women; nationality, however, impacted the degree to which working-class women entered the formal labor market. Married women in Spanish households sought employment in times of extreme economic necessity. In contrast, Italian mothers were more prominent in textile factories than either women of other nationalities or their single Italian cohort.

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería

Race unmasked: biology and race in the twentieth century

Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in Twentieth Century By Michael Yudell (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014) (274 pages; $40.00 cloth)In Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in Twentieth Century, historian Mike Yudell analyzes race concept and role that scientists have played in c ontributing to idea of race over twentieth century. He explores assumptions of racial science, defined as the use of science, both by scientists and laypersons alike ... as part of a greater arsenal of oppression (p. 115). Using primary sources of books, research studies, and other writings by prominent eugenicists, geneticists, and evolutionary biologists, he argues that racial rooted in biological notions of difference did not die out after World War II and, in fact, has persisted into twenty-first century. As well, has played a critical role in formulations of ideas about race and America's changing views of African Americans. Although people have tried to use to justify racial difference, science they used was no more real than saying that race is real. Science was only real to extent that scientists said it was so.Yudell traces idea of race back to eighteenth century when Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus established racial classification systems based on biological traits such as skin color or hair texture. His categories of Asiaticus, Africanus, Europeaeus, and Americanus were infused with distinct physical and behavioral characteristics. Yudell's primary interest is twentieth century, however, and his first chapters explore thinking of eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Charles Davenport. Galton examined hereditary traits both within and between humans, and he had a significant impact on formation of race as a biological concept. Supported by his Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Davenport applied Galton's eugenic doctrines to immigration policies and Black/White differences. By rooting human differences and perceived inferiorities in blood relationships, these eugenicists used scientific method to preserve White supremacy.Significantly, Yudell contextualizes this early twentieth-century work within push to formulate new immigration policies and activities of anti-Black groups such as Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1920s. Eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, for example, actually advised KKK, while other eugenicists disseminated their ideas that were used to enforce segregation for some and exclusion for others based on inferior traits. Ideas about racial difference also were put on public display through American Museum of Natural History meeting in 1921. Models, diagrams, and research presentations in 131 exhibits asserted subtle but distinct differences between Blacks and Whites that reinforced immutability of bodily characteristics. Yet some biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists challenged assumptions of racial science. Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, for example, rebuked White supremacists and eugenicists at museum gathering. The National Association for Advancement of Colored People, formed in 1909, became more vocal in 1920s, with W.E.B. duBois attacking racial even as genetics began to replace eugenics as authority on race concept.Yudell continues thesis that biological assumptions in racial drove researchers in twentieth century by focusing on National Research Council studies that investigated impact of interbreeding between Blacks and Whites (p. 60). Contextualized in lieu of demographic shift of Blacks from South to northern cities after World War 1, studies included human intelligence testing and mechanical aptitude tests to develop an approach to organic differences regarding pathology. For example, in hopes of using intelligence testing to help people adjust better and thereby serve a positive social function, Joseph Peterson's study on Blacks was a 'gentleman's' way of articulating racism (p. …

On the Threshold of Modernity: Invernizio, Negri and the Portinaia

One of the most maligned figures of Italian popular culture, the stereotype of the portinaia is that of a nosy, aggressive — and omniscient — figure, perhaps best typified in Ettore Scola's 1972 film, Una giornata particolare, but present throughout modern Italian cultural production. The following essay conducts a study of the figure in two very different early twentieth-century works: Carolina Invernizio's turgid serial novel, La figlia della portinaia (1900) and Ada Negri's evocative memoir, Stella mattutina (1921). In both, the figure of the portinaia — along with the configuration of the space she inhabits, the portineria — becomes a threat to the boundaries of male subjectivity and at the same time a promising site for the formation of a female subject.

Changing styles, affective continuities and psychic containers: Corrado Govoni's early poetry

This article focuses on the relationship between the representation of femininity and aggressiveness (both stylistic and thematic) in Corrado Govoni’s early twentieth-century works, from the erotic-symbolist sonnets of Le fiale (1903) [The Phials] to the Futurist-nationalist fury of L’inaugurazione della primavera (1915) [The Inauguration of Spring]. Drawing on a number of post-Kleinian psychoanalytical notions, it analyses recurrent discourse practices and narrative/rhetorical strategies in the representations of gender, sex and violence, highlighting their ‘affective grammar’. The first section introduces the methodological framework, and then moves on to a contextualized overview of Govoni’s early poetry. The second part undertakes a close reading of a particularly relevant sample of his work, the section from Le fiale entitled ‘Vas luxuriae’. Both sections aim to show that the shift from the literary and cultural tropes of decadence to those of avant-garde nationalism is informed affectively by what, ...

Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (review)

Reviewed by: Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery Aimee Zygmonski Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. By Glenda R. Carpio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; pp. 304. $74.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Glenda Carpio’s accomplished first book, which offers an interdisciplinary analysis of historical literature, recent performances, satirical novels, and biting visual wit, expands the meager bookshelf of African American humor studies. Rather than trying to cover the many facets and variations of the entirety of African American humor, Carpio wisely concentrates on the connections between slavery and black humor. Mel Watkins and Daryl Dickson-Carr have already explored such topics, but this book offers new ways to consider black humor. As Carpio notes, her book does not “provide a historical account” (as Watkins’s collections do), but rather investigates “the relationship between violence and humor” complicating the “distinctions between polite and popular representations of slavery” (28). For Carpio, slavery “becomes such a subject only in the most piercing tragicomedy, one in which laughter is disassociated from gaiety and is, instead, a form of mourning” (7). She also considers how humor responds to manifestations of racism, whether as in the old adage “got to laugh to keep from crying” or in the deep African American tradition of signifyin’. Carpio argues that humor does not simply reflect the tragedy of slavery, but also traces the intricacies of racial discord. She tracks the relationship between stereotypes and humor and considers how the use of stereotypes to critique situations or social injustices can actually liberate the contested stereotype and not merely support its continuity. The artists she discusses offer nuanced variations of black humor, and while each approach is different, Carpio subtly links their work together in the shared art of “conjuring” and their abilities to invoke not only past injustices, but also to contextualize them in the present moment. The book is divided into chapters each of which is focused on one or two figures. These include a historical investigation of the fiction of William Wells Brown and Charles Chesnutt; performances by comedians Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; Ishmael Reed’s satire; the paintings of Robert Colescott and the silhouettes of Kara Walker; and the early plays of Suzan-Lori Parks. Despite Carpio’s assertion that her book is not a history of black humor, the chapter on Brown and Chesnutt does provide a historical context for African American humor and oral culture, focusing on the two authors’ strategic use of humor and the ways in which they appropriate black stereotypes from “vehicles of humor against African Americans Americans to sources of humor by African Americans” (34). Theatre scholars know Brown for his dramatic readings of his play The Escape, while the writings of the less-familiar Chesnutt recall the early twentieth-century work of satirist George Schuyler (Black No More) and Ishmael Reed (whom Carpio later discusses in detail). Carpio argues that both used humor as a “distancing mechanism” (37), and their place in her book prepares readers for the work of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century humorists she considers. The book’s strongest chapter concerns the work of comedian Richard Pryor. In it, Carpio asks whether Pryor’s particular brand of humor “redress[es] American Slavery” (73). Through analysis of recordings of Pryor’s live stage shows, Carpio tracks the comedian’s ability to connect to black audiences through the use of destructive black stereotypes and his own unique performative strategies as a conjurer. For example, his excessive use of the “N-word” offers a “bridge between the divisive past and an equally, if differently, divisive present” (89). Pryor’s subsequent renunciation of the N-word in performances and efforts remove risqué material from them in the early 1980s mirrors the change in comedian Dave Chappelle, known for his equally outlandish and biting wit during the two seasons of his Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central (2003–05). While Carpio does not afford Chappelle the same in-depth analysis as she does Pryor, she links the two performers in style and content, suggesting that their humor seeks a collective catharsis from the effects of racism and offers...

"We are not in the old days now": Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Problem of Sympathy

The nineteenth was the century of human sympathy,--the age when half wonderingly began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which call Myself; when clodhopper and peasant, tramps and thieves, and millionaires and--sometimes--Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touches us so nearly that half gasped with surprise, crying, too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life? And then helplessly peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, O World of Worlds, shall man make you one? W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Upon declaring the nineteenth as the first century of human or at least the in which human sympathy began to be extended to peasants, tramps ... and--sometimes--Negroes (178), W. E. B. Du Bois immediately identifies a problem. (1) Even as his language emphasizes the heartfelt, revelatory urgency of sympathetic connections through which human experience might better be understood and shared, he suggests that what do with this sympathetic recognition prompts a feeling of helplessness. Of the into which we have peered, he asks: how shall man make you one? This question of Du Bois's shows his awareness that such sympathetic recognitions concerning the similarity of human suffering mark the beginning of the work that individuals must do in order to forge a world in which these similarities are not revelations, but rather always already understood. To make the Other-worlds ... one is to demand that the we of Du Bois's prose act upon the revelatory knowledge prompted by sympathy to create a new United States in which the bonds of humanity are not divided by race. That at the turn of the twentieth century Du Bois presents this demand as a question--one wailed, no less--suggests that he is fully aware of the difficulty of attaining this bond. Like Du Bois's early twentieth-century work, Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1902 novel The Sport of the Gods is profoundly interested in the problem of race and sympathy during what historians have called the nadir of race relations in the United States, (or as recent critics have termed it, using Charles Chesnutt's language post- bellum, pre-Harlem). (2) Indeed Dunbar's novel anticipates Du Bois's question and answers it: for Dunbar, will not be made one. I argue that Dunbar's attention to sympathy in Sport helps to explain why. This attention to sympathy, a by-product of the novel's more frequently recognized focus on the modern condition that occurs in the novel, is part of Dunbar's profound awareness of the limited social and economic options that African Americans experience at the turn of the century. His novel offers a radical critique of the affective and socioeconomic contexts that limit sympathetic expression for those who inhabit Du Bois's Other-worlds. The Sport of the Gods does so by focusing on the modern condition, in which individuals are increasingly atomized by self-interest and sympathy is commodified by mass culture. The theater of the modern renders the experience of sympathy and its subsequent effects questionable at best and pernicious at worst, particularly for those who suffer injustice as a result of race. (3) In turn, the relationship between sympathy and the world-altering political change that Du Bois articulates as a product of the nineteenth century becomes temporary, limited, and ultimately illusory in Dunbar's novel. My analysis approaches these issues from two directions: Dunbar's attention to the ways that self-interest limits expressions of sympathy between characters, and his extension of this analysis to that sympathy which is created for readers through texts. By positioning a sensationalized version of his own novel's story at the climax of his plot, Dunbar shows us that though a sympathetic relationship between reader and text is reconstituted and revised by what was called the yellow journalism of the turn of the century, the attention to justice that results from this reportage is based on the demand for profit and effective only within certain limits. …

Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (review)

Reviewed by: Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West Eric Hayot (bio) Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West. By Zhang Longxi. Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 256 pp. $39.95. This book continues the project Zhang Longxi began in The Tao and the Logos (1992) and made explicit in Mighty Opposites (1999): to assert, against those who would argue for the incommensurability of cultures, that whatever differences appear through the lens of anthropological or literary hermeneutics do not cut one kind from another. "I will argue," he writes in the introductory chapter, "that the belief in the possibility of common knowledge and cross-cultural understanding, in the availability of conceptual tools for [End Page 122] the interpretation of human behavior across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time, can indeed come from a genuine appreciation of the equal capabilities of different individuals, peoples, and nations" (11). As in Mighty Opposites, where a distinction between the "identical" and the "equal" grounded in explicitly Heideggerean terms allowed Zhang to insist on the possibility of cross-cultural comparison based on a universalist egalitarianism, Allegoresis aims to undermine the "cultural relativists" who would insist, sometimes from a sense of superiority, sometimes from a desire to protect others from misunderstanding, that no hermeneutic that does not emerge from a given epistemological "inside" can ever fully grasp the structures, habits, meanings, or values of that interiority, much less its obscene and wondrous hopes and possibilities. Readers from Chinese studies will recognize in the book's title a reference to the decades-long debate over the "problem" of metaphor in Chinese literature, a debate more or less settled for me, a non-sinologist, by Haun Saussy's The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1995). The related claim that Chinese literature does not have allegories, and is thus not susceptible to allegorical interpretations (aka "allegoresis") has nonetheless been remarkably hard to bury, and it claws its way out of the grave one more time in Zhang's first few chapters. He dispatches it with a number of vigorous blows from the hermeneutic shovel, moving back and forth between hypercanonical works from a number of traditions—the biblical Song of Songs and the Confucian Shi jing [Book of Poetry] in chapter 2, utopias like More's and Zamyatin's, and the early twentieth-century work of Kang Youwei in chapter 4. (The admirable range of Zhang's references generates for me one small quibble: why subtitle the book "Reading Canonical Literature, East and West," when all the "Eastern" literature is Chinese, and the boundaries of the "West" are so expansive—is the Song of Songs really "Western," or did it become so, and is this a difference worth remarking?) In general, Zhang's procedure is to begin with a recognizably "allegorical" work from the "Western" tradition, to present the history of its reading and interpretation, and then to follow up with texts from the Chinese tradition, which prove in each case to be not only amenable to an allegorical reading (which would suggest that serious critical effort can find allegory anywhere), but in fact to have consistently been subject to allegorical readings by the very people who were not supposed to believe in or have allegory in the first place. Layered over Zhang's interest in the question of allegoresis are a series of comments that attempt to parse the general and situational ethics of allegorical reading, and indeed of literary critical interpretation more generally. These occur often enough, and in enough crucial places, to establish a sort of [End Page 123] shadow thesis behind the book. This second thesis appears most prominently at the beginning of the book's third chapter, when Zhang tells the story of the powerful prime minister Zhao Gao, who in the third century B.C.E. brought a stag into the court and announced to the emperor that it was a horse. Zhao Gao's naming the animal as he saw fit tested the emperor's power and the loyalties of his court. His dislocation of the stag's "literal" meaning made interpretation an allegory of his domination, a domination that became profoundly literal when those who agreed with the emperor...

Less Alienated Labor

Three generations of parents originating from a working-class community inspired their children for upward mobility. This study explores the influence of the labor process in this hope-filled inspiration. Early twentieth-century work for the first and second generations, while arduous and unprestigious, offered them a high degree of control relative to most proletarianized work of the time. Schwalbe’s construct, “natural labor,” derived from his Marx-Mead synthesis, is used to conceptualize enabling aspects of this type of work and to explore the role of lessalienated labor as an enduring source of hope-filled mobility socialization.

SIGEST

Previous article Next article Full AccessSIGESThttps://doi.org/10.1137/SIREAD000043000004000643000001BibTexSections ToolsAdd to favoritesExport CitationTrack CitationsEmail SectionsAboutAbstractSince its inception in March 1999, the SIGEST section of SIAM Review has highlighted excellent papers of broad interest from SIAM's specialized journals, making SIAM readers aware of outstanding work whose content and roots span multiple areas. This issue's SIGEST selection takes that (short) tradition one step further: Christopher I. Byrnes, Sergei V. Gusev, and Anders Lindquist present "From Finite Covariance Windows to Modeling Filters: A Convex Optimization Approach," an expanded, generalized version of their paper "A Convex Optimization Approach to the Rational Covariance Extension Problem," which originally appeared in SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, volume 37 (1998). The SIGEST paper begins with a careful survey of the rational covariance extension problem, tracing its historical developments from the early twentieth-century work of Carathéodory, Toeplitz, and Schur to the present. Connections and applications abound: potential theory, stochastic realization, spectral estimation, trigonometric moments, circuit and systems theory, signal and speech processing, robust control, and mobile communication. The authors have gone out of their way to relate mathematical developments to practical consequences---and to bring theory to life through well-chosen examples. In one instance among many, the authors clearly explain why the easily computable maximum entropy solution cannot capture valleys in the speech spectrum and hence produces "flat" synthesized speech. The scientific contributions of the paper are substantial, including new theoretical results as well as an efficient Newton-based interior method. Of particular interest is the formulation of appropriate spaces leading to an optimization problem that solves the rational covariance extension problem with degree constraints. Appearance of a barrier-like integral analogous to barrier terms in interior methods leads to existence of interior minimizers, a well-posed optimization problem, and a systems-theoretic consequence. We are grateful indeed to the authors for their efforts in giving us an impressive SIGEST paper of wide scope and fascinating content. Previous article Next article FiguresRelatedReferencesCited ByDetails Volume 43, Issue 4| 2001SIAM Review History Published online:04 August 2006 Article & Publication DataArticle DOI:10.1137/SIREAD000043000004000643000001Article page range:pp. 643-643ISSN (print):0036-1445ISSN (online):1095-7200Publisher:Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Conceptualizing Contemporary Health Lifestyles: Moving Beyond Weber

The intent of this article is to move beyond the work of Weber and construct a concept of health lifestyles applicable to the current phase of modernity. Beginning with the early twentieth-century work of Simmel and Weber on lifestyles generally, we move to mid-century to examine Bourdieu's perspective and turn to Giddens for an analysis of late century conditions. We find that Weber's insight concerning the dialectical interplay of choice and chance remains the central feature of the lifestyle concept. We also suggest that in rapidly changing late or postmodern situations, lifestyles not only provide self-identity but also promote a sense of stability and belonging for an individual by providing an anchor in a particular social constellation of style and activity. Our discussion leads us to define health lifestyles as collective patterns of health-related behavior based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances. Consistent with Bourdieu's notion of habitus, we assign priority to chance (structure) over choice.

Victor W. Pagé's Early Twentieth-Century Automotive and Aviation Books

Victor W. Pagé was either the first or one of the first to make a living primarily as a technical communicator in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. His 33 automotive and aviation books published by the Norman W. Henley Company were popular with both the public and critics because they contained timely, comprehensive coverage of novel technology; profuse illustrations; occasional analogies; easy-to-access information; well-established expertise; and sophisticated employment of task orientation. Pagé was able to publish many books quickly because he reused manufacturers' and his own material and methods of organization. He was also able to communicate his novel information effectively because he had both extensive firsthand experience with early automobiles and planes and because he was continually involved in teaching. Victor Pagé's early twentieth-century work demonstrates both what have become mainstream techniques in technical communication and a number of unique rhetorical strategies.

Shows of force: power, politics, and ideology in art exhibitions

It has long been considered a mark of naivete to ask of a work of art: What does it say? But as Timothy W. Luke demonstrates in Shows of Force , artwork is capable of saying plenty, and much of the message resides in the way it is exhibited. By critically examining the exhibition of art in contemporary American museums, Luke identifies how art showings are elaborate works of theater that reveal underlying political, social, and economic agendas. The first section, “Envisioning a Past, Imagining the West,” looks at art exhibitions devoted to artworks about or from the American West. Luke shows how these exhibitions—displaying nineteenth- and early-twentieth century works by artists such as George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Remington, Frederic Edwin Church, and Georgia O’Keefe—express contemporary political agendas in the way the portray “the past” and shape new visions of “the West.” In “Developing the Present, Defining a World,” Luke considers artists from the post-1945 era, including Ilya Kabokov, Hans Haacke, Sue Coe, Roger Brown, and Robert Longo. Recent art exhibits, his analysis reveals, attempt to develop politically charged conceptions of the present, which in turn struggle to define the changing contemporary world and art’s various roles within it. Luke brings to light the contradictions encoded in the exhibition of art and, in doing so, illuminates the political realities and cultural ideologies of the present. Shows of Force offers a timely and surely controversial contribution to current discussions of the politics of exhibiting art.