French Invention Research Articles

The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East

The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East

African Art in an Imperial Center - Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art By John Warne Monroe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. 368. $45.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9781501736353); $29.99, e-book (ISBN: 9781501736377).

African Art in an Imperial Center - Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art By John Warne Monroe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. 368. 29.99, e-book (ISBN: 9781501736377). - Volume 63 Issue 1

From Daguerreotype to Autochrome: An Incursion in European, Colonial and Romanian Pharmaceutical and Medical Photography

"Pharmacists have the ability to be chemists and that is the reason they possess the knowledge to make photographs. For that purpose, especially in the 19th century, some pharmacists were photographers, so the two professions are related to a certain extent. The daguerreotype was an invention that was brought to the attention of the public in the summer of 1839 in Paris by Louis Daguerre. Although it was a French invention, it enjoyed a huge success in the United States, and for that purpose the most numerous daguerreotypes derive from the American continent. Some daguerreotypes from the pharmaceutical and medical domain will be presented in this work: a picture of the pharmacist Martin (Gamas), of the physician Charles Abadie and of the physician Gustave Adolphe Raichon. The description of the daguerreotypes will include some other particular examples of empirical restoration from the collection of the author. Another type of photography, important for the history of photography, is the autochrome, one of the first colour photographic process available to the public. It was invented by the Lumière brothers. An example of medical photography from colonial France (Morocco), portraying a case of leprosy, will be presented as well. In the end, some examples from the European and Romanian photography will illustrate the role of the pharmacy and of the pharmacist in the 19th century-early 20th century, as a snapshot of the health professional of that period. In conclusion, the picture speaks for itself and somehow, it can be a vivid time machine for the reconstruction of the past, not only in the fields of pharmacy and medicine, but in any other field as well. Keywords: Daguerreotype, autochrome, pharmacy, medicine, old photography, photography collection. "

‘Sacred groves’- an insight into Dalmatian forest history

The French administration in Dalmatia (1805-1813) was short but is often praised by foresters as advanced in terms of woodland management because of their establishment of so-called sacred groves or sacri boschi. Based on archival sources and 19<sup>th</sup> century maps, this research explores the establishment and demise of sacred groves and places them within the broader forest history of Dalmatia. It reveals that the literal translation of the term sacro bosco as sacred grove (sveti gaj) by the 19<sup>th</sup> century foresters was not precise which caused misrepresentation and misunderstandings of what sacro bosco actually meant. The more appropriate translation would be forbidden groves (zabranjen gaj) as this also reflects the nature of these woodlands, which were in fact woodland sections where exploitation was prohibited. Establishment of forbidden groves was not a French invention since the practice was widely used before the French and during the Austrian Empire (1814-1918). In the second half of the 19<sup>th</sup> century and with the change of official language, the Italian term sacro bosco was replaced with the Croatian term protected area (branjevina).

John Warne Monroe. Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art.

J<scp>ohn</scp> W<scp>arne</scp> M<scp>onroe</scp>. <i>Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art</i>.

Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art. By John Warne Monroe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+350. $45.00 (cloth); $21.99 (e-book).

<i>Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art</i>. By John Warne Monroe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+350. $45.00 (cloth); $21.99 (e-book).

John Warne Monroe, Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art

Comment en est-on arrive la ? Comment l’art d’Afrique subsaharienne a-t-il vecu un mouvement de va-et-vient, de balancier, entre Europe et territoires d’origine, entre decouverte d’un concept radicalement different des canons occidentaux et reappropriation de schemas coloniaux ? Dans Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art, l’historien John Warne Monroe entreprend l’analyse critique de cette geopolitique sur une periode d’une centaine d’annee...

“With Gentle Hand / Touch——”: “The Horrid Blank of Nature” and the New Feel of Reading

ABSTRACT My essay explores the rise of tactile media in France, the antecedents of Braille, and their refractions in Romantic representations of blindness. I begin by interrogating Coleridge’s depiction of Kendal botanist, zoologist, and mathematician John Gough in relation to Robert Southey’s commentary on the French invention of embossed printing for the blind—both published in their 1812 Omniana. What is at stake in the focusing of Gough’s face as “the undisturbed ectypon” of “his own soul”? To answer this, I examine two texts by Wordsworth on which Coleridge had significant influence—“The Blind Highland Boy” and the passage on Gough in The Excursion. Of particular interest is the role of tactile maps in the development of tangible print and revaluation of the blind. Touching maps, I argue, had impressive effects, on the unsighted and sighted—not only answering the inability of the blind to see the world, but also figuring new forms of agency and informing Romantic conceptions of the poet of nature and imagination. The poet of tact emerges with the elision of this medial, material, and pedagogical context.

The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger

Reviewed by: The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger Evan Litwack Anne Emmanuelle Berger. The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-082-35385-2 Anne Emmanuelle Berger's The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender gives us fresh and exciting ways to consider—and consider anew—the conceptual and linguistic traffic between French and American theories of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the centrality of the idiom of performance to the making and remaking of modern feminist and queer knowledge domains. By carefully following "the aporias, the dissonances, even the productive inconsistencies" (4) that emerge as gender theories and their queer theoretical cognates move back and forth across the Atlantic, Berger stages a rigorous transnational account of the complex maneuvers through which concepts travel and travail across national and cultural borders. Unfolding across five somewhat discrete chapters, The Queer Turn in Feminism is distinctively attentive not only to that decidedly American design called "French theory," but also to a newer intellectual formation that is perhaps less widely known to U.S. audiences: the recently christened French invention named "American thought," around which the rise of gender studies has come to prominence in contemporary France. The view that gender is performative has, of course, achieved something of an axiomatic status for scholars working in or in between the fields of [End Page 199] feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. While this widely institutionalized conceptual frame may now bear the unfortunate mark of a certain obviousness, as Berger forcefully reminds us, it is nonetheless crucial. For what remains buried beneath at least twenty-some-odd years of U.S. left critical academic common sense are the variegated Franco-American geohistorical conditions of production, circulation, and reception that have allowed three interdisciplinary knowledge projects—feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies—to share the same language even, if not especially, when they do not speak the same dialect. Judith Butler, for instance, famously put into conversation two nationally marked theoretics when she drew on philosophical resources from Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida (in short, "French theory") in order to contribute to a theatrically tinctured conception of gender (a term germane to the postwar American social sciences). The result, of course, was her now canonical account of gender as "a stylized repetition of acts" rendered socially intelligible by what she termed "the heterosexual matrix" (1990, 192). Berger thus presses us to ask: to what extent is gender performativity, an idea foundational if not altogether constitutive of the "'queering' of feminist thought" (5), a properly French or American formulation? In chapter 1, Berger situates herself as "participant-observer" (3) of sorts uniquely poised to pursue such complex quandaries. A French national who arrived at Cornell University in the 1980s during the heyday of French post-structuralism and its thinking of sexual difference, Berger then returned to France seven years into the next millennium at the very moment that American gender theory was being institutionalized in the French academy. This autobiographical detail is important because it highlights not only Berger's own particular standpoint of critical reception, but also keenly registers a larger historical narrative about gender studies' transatlantic residence and, indeed, resonance. If by 2007, as Berger argues, gender studies had waned in prominence in the U.S. university (she cites as evidence Butler's turn from gender to ethics and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's turn from sexuality to affect), in France, conversely, gender studies now feels "quite current" (2). By calling attention to the entangled temporalities of gender studies' transnational institutionalization, Berger impresses the need to rethink "on the one hand, a politics and a conception of genders and, on the other hand, the languages and cultures in which or from which this politics and this conception are being developed" (4). Berger's second chapter constitutes the centerpiece of The Queer Turn in Feminism. Here, Berger sets as her task to scrutinize how "American gender theory has always been 'queer'" (14). This task is set to work by way...

The Game of the Sphere or of the Universe — a Spiral Race Game from 17th century France

Abstract Simple race games, played with dice and without choice of move, are known from antiquity. In the late 16th century, specific examples of this class of game emerged from Italy and spread rapidly into other countries of Europe. Pre-eminent was the Game of the Goose, which spawned thousands of variants over the succeeding centuries to the present day, including educational, polemical and promotional variants.1 The educational variants began as a French invention of the 17th century, the earliest of known date being a game to teach Geography, the Jeu du Monde by Pierre Duval, published in 1645. By the end of the century, games designed to teach several of the other accomplishments required of the noble cadet class had been developed: History, the Arts of War, and Heraldry being notable among them. A remarkable example of a game within this class is the astronomical game, Le Jeu de la Sphere ou de l’Univers selon Tycho Brahe, published in 1661 by E(s)tienne Vouillemont in Paris. The present paper analyses this game in detail, showing how it combines four kinds of knowledge systems: natural philosophy, based on the Ptolemaic sphere; biblical knowledge; astrology, with planetary and zodiacal influences; and classical knowledge embodied in the names of the constellations. The game not only presents all four on an equal footing but also explores links between them, indicating some acceptance of an overall knowledge-system. Despite the title, there is no evidence of the Tychonian scheme for planetary motion, nor of any Copernican or Galilean influence. This game is to be contrasted with medieval race games, based on numerology and symbolism, and with race games towards the end of the Early Modern period in which science is fully accepted.

Food in time and place: the American Historical Association companion to food history

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface Paul Freedman Introduction: Food History as a Field Warren Belasco Part One: Regional Histories 1. Premodern Europe Ken Albala 2. China E.{ths}N. Anderson 3. India Jayanta Sengupta 4. Out of Africa: A Brief Guide to African Food History Jessica B. Harris 5. Middle Eastern Food History Charles Perry 6. Latin American Food between Export Liberalism and the Via Campesina Jeffrey M. Pilcher 7. Food and the Material Origins of Early America Joyce E. Chaplin 8. Food in Recent U.S. History Amy Bentley and Hi'ilei Hobart 9. Influence, Sources, and African Diaspora Foodways Frederick Douglass Opie 10. Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnics Krishnendu Ray Part Two: Cuisine 11. The French Invention of Modern Cuisine Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson 12. Restaurants Paul Freedman 13. Cookbooks as Resources for Social History Barbara Ketcham Wheaton Part Three: Problems 14. The Revolt against Homogeneity Amy B. Trubek 15. Food and Popular Culture Fabio Parasecoli 16. Post-1945 Global Food Developments Peter Scholliers List of Contributors Index

The Cultural Institutionalization of Photography in France: A Brief History

This article provides a historical overview of the cultural institutionalization of photography in France, with a particular focus on the pioneering initiatives of individual photography enthusiasts throughout the 1970s to promote photographic culture. These efforts were roughly simultaneous with changes in acquisition and exhibition practices on the part of fine art museums and collections with respect to photography, in response to an increasing world-wide recognition of its status as an art form. The article explains how, despite the promotion of photography as a French invention and a contribution to culture (as early as its inception in 1839), an active cultural politics of photography did not emerge until the early to mid-1980s and was an opportune reaction to, and institutionalized framing of, ground-level cultural developments already underway.

Philosophy and the French Invention of Sinology

At a time when Chinese intellectuals and academics are more and more interested in the way Westerners, especially sinologists, approach and study Chinese culture, it seems relevant to pause and reflect on the critical and diversified approaches contributed by European sinologies. Special attention should be paid more particularly to the French tradition, which was the very first to be set up in the early nineteenth century within various prestigious academic institutions that are still very much alive today, but which has been somewhat pushed to the background by the powerful thrust of American, and more generally Anglophone, sinology ever since the aftermath of the Second World War. This article proposes to look at the way the French invention of sinology in the nineteenth century was under the influence of the concomitant rise of philosophy as a specifically European academic discipline.

The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820 (review)

Reviewed by: The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820 Marie Thébaud-Sorger (bio) The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820. By Michel Lynn. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010. Pp. 240. $99. Michel Lynn has published on popular science and consumption culture in eighteenth-century Europe and France. Thanks to the major studies of C. C. Gillispie and recent works by J. M. Hunn (1982), L. Robène (1998), and M. Thébaud-Sorger (2009 and 2010), the history of early ballooning has been extensively investigated, though Lynn seeks to go beyond these works by extending his study beyond France and Britain. Although earlier studies have considered the decades between the invention of the Montgolfier brothers up until 1820, Lynn’s aim is to enlarge the scope, attempting a sketch of the phenomenon on a general European scale and to provide a more global understanding of ballooning in European culture at the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of romanticism. He has accordingly chosen a cross-disciplinary and thematic approach in six parts, based on information gathered mainly from printed sources (journals and short essays). Lynn begins by examining the emergence of aeronautics and moves on to consider the relationship between Enlightenment ideals and the utility of ballooning as well as the relationships among audiences, states, and balloons. Finally, he devotes the last two chapters to consumption. The book provides an enjoyable and general overview of examples for each well-known topic, including gender, fêtes, military uses, deaths and disasters, and material culture. It remains, however, almost impossible to draw conclusions, as the methods employed yield neither broad statistical data nor precise case studies. Why did ballooning appear in some places and not in others? How did it develop and/or spread? The answers to these questions are somewhat blurred by the author’s approach. For instance, the general description of funding processes, such as subscription, lumps dissimilar practices together. Different cultures associated with ballooning emerged in different places, which could have been highlighted by an analysis of the different ways that resources were mobilized in support of ballooning in different countries. There was little in common between the circle of amateurs who undertook flights in provincial towns for no financial gain and the new category of showmen who aimed to make a living from it. Clearly distinct from small-scale experiments, these complex and expensive performances made the involvement of a wider audience, who were both consumers and experts, necessary. This symbolic investment consequently played a huge part in the integration of this invention in society. Later, while it was entertaining the masses in Britain, the “French invention” became a superior tool at the disposal of the French Revolutionary Army, which is interesting considering the fact that British aerostation would lead the field during the first half of the nineteenth century. [End Page 487] To examine its popularity, the author explores ballooning under the rubric of “popular science” rather than exploring technological issues. Yet one could argue that the exhibition of technical knowledge was all part of the enthusiasm of the audiences. Indeed, challenges following the discovery of gases—such as hydrogen—for the construction of these machines fostered changes in processes and materials, such as fabric, varnish, and pipes. The fascination in performance came as much from the fact that the flight embodied the progress of the Enlightenment as it did from the result of the skills and know-how of human hands. Occasionally, some flights would fail and Lynn rightly stresses the interest in these. Even though some expectations remained unfulfilled, which is, according to the author, where the romantic shift occurs, the vast majority of attempts were successful, achieving what was once believed to be impossible. So, some points raised in the book complete the various monographs on the subject, while proposing new assumptions. As Lynn points out, the sublime emerges from the beginning of the flights; the sublime as well as the technological progress go hand in hand, and change according to human advance in the mastery of the elements. Marie Thébaud-Sorger Marie Thébaud-Sorger is a contracted postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Historical Research at EHESS...

American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century (review)

{ 256 } Book Reviews companies such as Repertorio Español, of New York City, or Teatro de la Luna, of Washington, D.C. First published in Drama Review in 1996, the translation by Christopher Winks is excellent. The title sets the tone for this collection with its multivalent meanings, each word ripe for discussion and debate: “stages,” “conflict,” “performance,” and indeed the very term “Latin Ameri­ can,” which the editors point out was a French invention in the time of Napoleon III. Thus, the reader should not expect to find plays that uphold the status quo or fail to question the hierarchy, especially those pieces that have been produced in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries. What binds these disparate plays together is a sense that much remains to be done to improve the lives of the subaltern and even middle-­ class citizens of the countries represented and beyond. A footnote points out that none of the plays are representative of U.S. Latina and Latino playwrights, performers, or collectives, which is understandable , given the limited space and time. However, the footnote lists only two anthologies of plays by U.S. Latinos as representative of the many playwrights who call themselves Chicano, Cuban Ameri­ can, Dominican, or Puerto Rican. Here again the uninitiated in this country may be unaware of the important artistic and political contributions of U.S. Latina and Latino theatre artists. But this minor detail pales in view of the scholarship and creativity of this collection . This volume is most important as a document of well-­ known and virtually unknown plays, rituals, and performances that stand as a testament to a long and vital history. It will remain the standard for years to come and should inspire other such collections. Jorge Huerta — Chancellor’s Associates Professor of Theatre Emeritus University of California, San Diego \ \ Ameri­ can Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. By Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 488 pp. $60.00 cloth. Rethinking gender bias in the theatre has recently come back into sharp focus. In June 2009 more than 160 playwrights and producers met to hear the results of a year-­ long study about bias in the presentation of women playwrights (Patricia Cohen,“Rethinking Gender Bias,” New York Times, June 24, 2009, C1). { 257 } Book Reviews This symposium followed a standing-­ room-­ only town hall meeting in Octo­ ber 2008 at which women playwrights aired grievances about the difficulties of being produced to representatives from leading off-­ Broadway and nonprofit NewYork theatres.Oskar Eustis,artistic director of the Public Theatre,was succinct in his response to this event in a New York Times article: “It’s harder for women playwrights and directors [because] it’s harder for professional women in the United States” (Patricia Cohen,“Charging Bias by Theatres,” October 25, 2008, C1). The authors of Ameri­ can Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century would certainly agree. Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow frame their excellent book with a premise—there are not enough women directors working professionally in Ameri­ can theatre. The authors suggest that one of the major obstacles for women directors is a lack of role models (25). This book goes a long way to correct that particular obstacle by providing fifty profiles of women who have made significant contributions to Ameri­ can directing over the past century . They have extensively documented their profiles, providing sources and representative directing credits at the end of each entry. Also, in appendix C they provide an introductory “General Bibliography on Women Directors” for further reading. The title of the book delimits the study—the authors state that the directors must have been born in the United States or have had the major portion of their careers there, and their achievements must be significant, influential in their own time, and have a pioneering or innovative quality (3). The profiles are prefaced by a concise but thorough introduction that contextualizes the book in terms of similar works, provides a brief history of women managers and directors from Caroline Neuber to Laura Keene, and discusses gender issues that affect the work of women directors. These issues include the “glass ceiling” of Broadway...

Everybody's Noir Humanism: Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade , and The Quality of Hurt

Like Chester Himes, James Baldwin helped invent the noir sensibility at midcentury. In 1949, a young Baldwin published Everybody's Protest Novel, a famous indictment of so-called fiction and its most influential, most monstrous progeny, Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). Critics generally regard this essay as a rejection of the Marxist politics of Wright's naturalism--its insuperable confusion of literature and sociology--and an endorsement of psychological in the Jamesian mode (Baldwin 19). Baldwin's verdict? Fewer pamphlets, more novels. But the essay also crafts a surprising noir archive of sentimental politics, one that aligns the theological of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the tragedy of Bigger Thomas with liberal Hollywood's postwar penchant for problem pictures and the lurid prose of James M. Cain (Baldwin 15). As Baldwin stumps for fiction devoted to the disquieting complexity of the human being, he condemns the violence done to humanity by the spurious emotion of sentimentality joining far-flung cultural products: Both Gentleman's Agreement [dir. Elia Kazan, 1947] and The Postman Always Rings Twice [dir. Tay Garnett, 1946] exemplify this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we find the foreshadowing of both (Baldwin 15, 14, 16). Unlike properly psychological fiction, Baldwin insists, novels are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives [dir. William Wyler, 1946] or the works of James M. Cain are fantasies.... The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe (20). In joining the violent inhumanity of nineteenth-century novels like Stowe's to that of their hard-boiled descendants like Wright and Cain, and to Hollywood's new glut of anonymous, statistically average Joes, Baldwin anticipates recent critical arguments about the shared sentimental genealogy of the hard-boiled novel and the film noir--the despairing turn towards sociological realism in postwar Hollywood that French film critics discovered on the heels of the Nazi Occupation, and at the dawn of the American Century (14). (1) Noir is of course an infamously fuzzy category, a broad discursive formation that consolidated at midcentury, but stretched long before and after its French invention. Paradoxically, the terms of Baldwin's essay sharpen this point by obscuring the matter even further: in 1949, the fiction of Cain, Stowe, and Wright, and the films of Wyler and Kazan, would be perceived as being part of a widespread, vaguely noir sensibility, extending across media, and defined for Baldwin by a shared inhumanity--a noir humanism. In this essay, I consider Himes's own social protest novel Lonely Crusade (1947) in a broader constellation of noir humanism--a phrase I use to describe a particular convergence of psychologizing tendencies at midcentury. Noir humanism yielded a universalizing, quasi-anthropological picture of the human condition as marked by pervasive emotional insecurity, and in Himes's work more particularly, by the violence of sentimental categorization and the exclusionary political formulas of postwar U. S. democracy. Himes's place in the noir tradition is well established, secured by the French publication of his Harlem Domestic cycle in Gallimard's legendary Serie noire, and critically cemented by many superb recent critical studies. (2) Less well understood is the role of Lonely Crusade in Himes's noir vision as crystallized in the postwar period. Often described as Himes's most accomplished or complex novel, a damning kind of praise that has probably helped consign the book to critical oblivion, Lonely Crusade is a messy book, ideologically speaking. Himes put more bluntly in The Quality of Hurt: Everyone hated it.... The left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it (221). …

Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis Nathan Sivin (bio) Volker Scheid . Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. xvii, 407 pp. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-2872-8. Physical science and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrines have been transmuting the doctrines and practice of Zhongyi 中医 for nearly a century. Under the new gospel that believes "to get rich is glorious," the process is, if anything, accelerating. State planners expect Chinese medicine gradually to become an integral part of twenty-first-century thought and attain synthesis with biomedicine (xiyi 西医). Be that as it may, non-Chinese over much of the world make use of Zhongyi's methods and products because-in their eyes-its ancient roots make it intriguingly exotic, because its values are distinct from what they believe are the compromised ideals of modern medicine. Official spokesmen, to meet this expectation of the outside world, translate Zhongyi as "traditional Chinese medicine," TCM for short. Just about every introductory book on the subject begins by emphasizing its multimillennial ancestry. Nevertheless, its ties to early doctrine and practice become ever more tenuous. Scheid makes it clear that to understand what is happening we have to apprehend Zhongyi in many dimensions. The government and its planners, who decide on budgets and medical school recruitment quotas, live in a different mental world from those who practice medicine-not to mention those on whom medicine is practiced. Within the ruling strata, hostility quietly continues to seethe between the champions of Zhongyi and those who consider it a useless relic of the past. And each practitioner, as well as each patient, experiences the world and acts on it differently: "No two doctors diagnose, prescribe, or treat in quite the same way" (p. 9). They define their identities not only by their place in long lineages, but by how they are using biomedical knowledge and technology to reshape their practices. "Traditional" practice incorporates countless new elements. The officially promoted system of "pattern differentiation and treatment determination" (bianzheng lunzhi 辩证论治) was a creation of the last half century, ear acupuncture was a French invention, and the use of standard formulas processed into pills or capsules is becoming increasingly dominant. "Chinese medical case records must carry a biomedical diagnosis. Several doctors informed me that while hospital authorities are lax about the Chinese medical diagnosis, a Western medical diagnosis is obligatory for all records (that is, not only for case records but also for outpatient treatment records, laboratory examination requests, etc.)" (p. 93). In every aspect of medicine, syncretism and ambiguity are the rule. Still, this is not the standardized syncretism the state wants. [End Page 417] As the subtitle of this book implies, its framework has little in common with the main stream of research on the history of Chinese medicine. Most studies see that enterprise as one system, competing with biomedical, popular, religious, empirical, and other systems. They describe its techniques, practitioners, and doctrines, and explain what leads people to choose it. Scheid argues cogently and passionately that it is self-defeating to seek a single system or essence that subsumes all the variation. Such a unity "has long since seeped through the cracks between whatever fragile articulations bind 'Chinese' to 'medicine,' and further to 'contemporary' and 'China'" (p. 19). Scheid is himself an expert Zhongyi; he has practiced his craft since 1984. He is also a deeply learned scholar of early medicine, a sophisticated social anthropologist, and an accomplished critical thinker. This book is a most unusual ethnology, based on participant observation over sixteen months between 1994 and 1999. Its object is not a single institution or group, but the whole state sector of medical practice, education, and regulation. Scheid studies the intersection of ideology with institutional, historical, and personal struggles in Beijing, where that sector is strongest. This is a work of great ambition, far transcending medicine. It denies that Chinese or Western medicine is a system in any essential sense. Both unendingly changing, they are merely "concepts for and against which to form a position and methodology." It posits that "accounting for and describing the plural and often dispersed interactions at local levels that...

La Nouvelle Revue Française in the Age of Modernism

significance of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise twentieth-century French literary publishing has long been recognized and has given rise to an increasing number of studies. turn to sociological approaches to literature, and particularly Pierre Bourdieu's influence French literary history, has also heightened interest reviews, as evidenced by the creation of the review La Revue des revues 1986. This special issue of Romanic Review is thus an extension across the Atlantic of what is a lively field of inquiry France. But it is not only that, for it aims also to export, openly and self-consciously, into the French context a notion--modernism--that is, current usage at least, tightly bound up with the English language and American cultural priorities. If modernite seems unthinkable without reference to the French tradition, le modernisme is, however, much harder to place within those parameters. danger attempting to open trade lines both directions is, of course, that the institutional force behind as something akin to a literary brand is so great that it will swallow La Nouvelle Revue Francaise whole. But that prospect does not reckon with the uncertainties and reservations that eat into modernism, undercutting or countering its potentially expansive force. Propelling La Nouvelle Revue Francaise into the modernist constellation may also have the effect of restraining what has become an increasingly vacuous designation, stretched all number of directions as critics search for ways of identifying the elusive substance of modernism. La Nouvelle Revue Francaise poses a threat to the current ascendancy of this Anglo-American product inasmuch as any claim made now that it is a modernist review risks merely exposing the inconsequential nature of such a claim. pairing of this volume's title does not, therefore, imply any explanatory hierarchy, and the preposition in asks to be understood as a passing through and out the other side. trajectory of the one through the other tells us something about that environment or medium, while the context inflects our understanding of the review's trajectory. They interact ways that challenge the sort of stability that would be implied by reversing the title, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which makes the NRF merely capacious; or by changing the preposition to of, giving The of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which reduces the NRF to being an exemplar of a larger phenomenon. Of course it remains possible to protest that the concept of the modern was first and foremost a French invention. There is undoubtedly a connection to be made between le moderne and modernism, yet it is not clear that this connection would operate most directly via a term like le modernisme. complexity of this lexical map is touched upon by Fredric Jameson his notes on a theory of modernism, which figure at the end of his major work on postmodernism We need fact to inflect the root adjective into three distinct substances--beyond modernism proper, the less familiar one of modernity, and then of modernization--in order not only to grasp the dimensions of the problem, but to appreciate how differently the various academic disciplines, as well as national traditions, have framed it. Modernism has come only recently to France, modernity only recently to us, modernization belongs to the sociologists, Spanish has two separate words for the artistic movements (modernismo and vanguardismo) etc. A comparative lexicon would be a four- or five-dimensional affair, registering the chronological appearance of these terms the various language groups, while recording the uneven development observable between them. A comparative sociology of and its cultures would alone offer an adequate framework for rethinking modernism today, provided it worked both sides of the street and dug its tunnel from both directions. …

The predecessors of the Olympic movement, and Pierre de Coubertin

Coubertin's contribution to the revival of the Olympic Games and the widespread opinion that the modern Games were ‘a French invention’ should be placed in their broad historical context. There are several arguments for and against the assumption that he was the founder, or ‘father’, of the modern Olympics and the Olympic movement. The historical development of the Olympic ideas since the time of Humanism will be discussed, along with the Renaissance and the various attempts to organize Olympic Games before 1896, with a further emphasis on the importance of Neo-Humanism and classical scholarship in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, in order better to understand ancient Greek athletics. Finally Pierre de Coubertin's concept of the Olympic Games and the contributions of the young Greek nation for the rebirth of the famous ancient games after the War of Independence will be analysed.

Pierre de Coubertin: sport and ideology in the Third Republic, 1870–1914

Organized sport was first developed in Germany in the form of the so-called Turnvereine, and in England at the public schools. It came to France later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the modern Olympic Games was a French invention, the result of the ambitions and efforts of an aristocratic admirer of England, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. His ideas and attitudes were in many ways characteristic of fin-de-siècle France.