Intellectual World Research Articles

The Dislocations of Cultural Translation

The title The Location of Culture suggests that the book's author, Homi K. Bhabha, places an overriding importance on a culture's spatial and geographic situation. Lest Bhabha's readers get too fixated on culture's site and locality, however, the title's emphasis on place is soon qualified by an epigraph from the book's most-cited author, Frantz Fanon, that emphasizes temporality: “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (qtd. in Bhabha xiv). So, while culture must be located, the architecture of The Location of Culture is rooted in the temporal. The place and time of its moments of production are affirmed throughout its essays with a wealth of contemporary references and opening comments like “In Britain, in the 1980s …” (27). No book of theory is more self-consciously embedded in its own space and time. The Location of Culture, published in 1994, is a very English book, written from within the political, cultural, and intellectual world of the London of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which migrant activists from the Caribbean and South Asia such as Bhabha, Salman Rushdie, and Stuart Hall were challenging the verities of a long-established, socialist, masculinist, English intellectual and political culture. The brilliant innovation of The Location of Culture was to create a new language, a new articulation and understanding of minority positions—which is why the response to it has been so overwhelming, from academics, artists, and many others. The work that went into The Location of Culture was intimately related to Bhabha's own milieu and time: the book is the product of his decennium mirabile in London.

The Other Adam Smith by Mike Hill and Warren Montag

Reviewed by: The Other Adam Smith by Mike Hill and Warren Montag Steve Newman Mike Hill and Warren Montag, The Other Adam Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Pp. 416. $29.95. The Other Adam Smith is a wide-ranging, subtle, and daring book. Authors Mike Hill and Warren Montag have set themselves an ambitious goal: to engage with Smith's multifarious oeuvre in a way that acknowledges both its pursuit of [End Page 132] unifying propositions and the elements stubbornly refusing unity, showing how these conflicts emerge out of Smith's own historical moment and how they continue to trouble the various Smiths conjured since his death. Pursuing this "problem of parts rendered whole" within various modern discourses, many of which Smith helps to found—"epistemology, ethics, nationalism, [and] political economy" (6)—the authors repeatedly show how Smith's work is haunted by "the problem of the popular" (8). In chapter 1, Montag and Hill begin with the "pleasing wonder of ignorance" that Smith identifies in his under-studied "Of the Imitative Arts." The repeated movement from surprise to wonder to admiration is identified with a knowing "we" consisting of those engaged in mental rather than physical work. The labor of that "we" is divided further into various disciplines, with belles lettres emerging as the discipline associated with imaginative thinking. And the factitious whole of the intellectual world is itself shadowed by the figure of an undiscriminating, novel-buying public, which depends upon the same tide of print that makes possible Smith's own (di)vision of intellectual labor. Chapter 2 takes up Smith's spectatorial and sociable ethics. Although Smith would seem to be committed to a communal form of sympathy in contrast to the more selfish approaches of Hobbes and Mandeville, a closer look reveals that the scope of this sympathy is severely circumscribed. Its boundaries are marked by the beggar, with his gross embodiment, repulsive poverty, and un-Stoic whinging for sympathy. The excluded beggar is himself a figure for the "tumultuous combinations" that Smith places beyond the pale, the poor multitude within the United Kingdom or the immiserated masses pressed into the service of a rising British empire. The paradoxical individualism of Smith's sympathy is brought into sharper focus by Spinoza, whose truly transindividual ethics allows the subject to feel, and then work to alleviate, the pain and anger of a multitude whose desires are thwarted by an inequitable society (135–38). Historiography is the discursive focus of chapter 3 as Hill and Montag explain how "popular Jacobitism" challenges "stadial historical progress" and represents a wider challenge to the idea of "martial virtue" that Scottish historians hoped would be "a way of canalizing insurgency on behalf of the state monopoly of violence that was also supposed to stem the deleterious effects of capitalist luxury" (25). Along the way, the authors offer a nuanced account of "Jacobite memory work" described by Murray Pittock and others that runs parallel to the questions at the heart of Hume's skeptical epistemology: "the displacement of individual reason by a network of things, the related emphasis of means over ends, and the troubling abundance of chance" (162). Chance is embodied in the unruly multitude, and, again, the novel proves to be its favored genre. But its demotic energy is tamed by the invention of the historical novel, which banishes romance and bloody politics to a past outstripped by the implacable progress of stadial history (209–10). Finally, in chapter 4, the authors brilliantly home in on and then unpack a key element in Smith's political economy—the debate over whether the state should intervene in controlling the price of grain—in order to pose an urgent question: Do Smith and those who seek to take up his mantle believe that people have a right to subsistence, a right to life? The answer turns out to be "no." Smith sees the question as unnecessary, since a properly (un)regulated market will make it impossible for the wages of the multitude ever to fall below what they need in order to buy grain. Smith's would-be heirs, including Malthus and then von Mises and Hayek, purport to "demonstrate...

Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho. By John Dillery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. [xxxviii] + 494.

<i>Clio’s Other Sons: Berossus and Manetho</i>. By John Dillery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. [xxxviii] + 494.

The Routledge Companion to Strabo by Daniela Dueck

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 411 Sesostris, do not become gods because they do not meet Diodorus’ high standards for deifying a ruler, which were inspired by late Hellenistic kings such as Ptolemy xii of Egypt, under whom the Hellenistic ruler cult “had veered increasingly into caricature” (165). However, not all Muntz’s arguments are convincing. To begin with, he underestimates Alexander the Great’s impact on Diodorus and overlooks Diodorus’ high regard for his fellow countrymen (such as Gelon). Furthermore, how does Muntz’s theory fit with Diodorus’ description of Sesostris as a sovereign who expanded his realm, brought peace to his subjects, and let them enjoy it, which is similar to Virgil’s depiction of Augustus? The final section of this chapter engages with Diodorus’ contribution to the debate over ruler cult in Rome and his justification for Caesar’s deification. In Chapter Six, Muntz analyzes Diodorus’ perception of the ideal sovereign. Like several contemporary authors, Diodorus maintains that the Roman republic declined due primarily to the corruption of its leaders, who pursued luxury and wealth. Muntz argues that Diodorus may have indirectly commented on the Roman republic via his account of Assyria, which decayed owing to its depraved rulers, while promoting his preferred form of government—monarchy at its best—via his account of Egypt, which enjoyed prosperity and longevity under its good kings. The final chapter explores how the Roman civil wars affected the composition of the Bibliotheke. Believing that Diodorus completed Books 1–3 between 46 and 42 b.c.e., and accepting the traditional date of 30 b.c.e. for the completion of the entire work, Muntz argues that since Diodorus elaborated on Dionysus and Egypt in his opening books and since his accounts of them contained controversial issues of the late republican period, he thought it dangerous to publish these books in the political climate of the 30s b.c.e. Diodorus’ attempts to adjust his work to rapidly changing political circumstances could well explain the inconsistencies pervading its first pentad. However intriguing, some of Muntz’s conjectures are too speculative. Undeniably, scholars are allowed a certain number of “well-supported speculations” in order to initiate significant readings of the past,5 yet statements such as “perhaps Diodorus did see himself as a supporter of Antony” (244) are not well supported; no notion would be, founded on so many sentences starting with “perhaps.” These reservations aside, Muntz presents a worthy study, one that does justice to an author unjustly depreciated. His appropriately key themes—Diodorus’ originality, his kinship with the intellectual world of Rome, and his use of accounts of barbarians to discuss contemporary issues—are voiced throughout the book, serving as the thread that connects all its chapters. The Open University of Israel Iris Sulimani The Routledge Companion to Strabo. Dirigé par Daniela Dueck. London, New York : Routledge. 2017. Pp. xiv, 407. L'ouvrage dirig e par Daniela Dueck réunit un ensemble d’articles dont l’objectif est de donner une image globale et actualisée de Strabon et de son œuvre, tant pour le grand 5 To use the words of P. E. Bolin, “Imagination and Speculation as Historical Impulse: Engaging Uncertainties within Art Education History and Historiography,” Studies in Art Education 50 (2009) 110–123. 412 PHOENIX public — un public averti et déjà bien versé dans les études classiques tant les articles supposent une bonne connaissance préalable de l’œuvre — que pour le public spécialisé du monde universitaire : faire le point sur certains thèmes privilégiés et offrir quelques nouvelles pistes d’études, sans prétendre à une exhaustivité que le lecteur ne trouvera pas et pour laquelle il ne pourra se passer de lire les introductions et commentaires des éditions et traductions de référence. Les chapitres sont regroupés en quatre parties thématiques : le point de vue de Strabon (partie I, trois chapitres), la Géographie (partie II, subdivisée en six sections et vingt-deux chapitres), l’œuvre historiographique (partie III, un chapitre) et la réception, dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance (partie IV, deux chapitres). Suivent des index : les références a...

The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730 by Margaret DeLacy

Reviewed by: The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730 by Margaret DeLacy Kevin Siena Margaret DeLacy. The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xviii + 305 pp. $100.00 ( 978-1-137-57527-2). Margaret DeLacy has been studying the early roots of contagion theory for many years and has now produced the most important book on the topic to appear for quite some time. Following Edwin Ackerknecht's groundbreaking work, considerable scholarship has explored debates between contagionists and anticontagionists in the nineteenth century, while plague has drawn equal interest in the topic for the Renaissance. In between these poles, however, the issue has been far less studied. DeLacy explores the oft-neglected period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to chart the development of ideas that anticipate—but which remained a long way off and quite distinct from—modern germ theory. Right off the top Delacy must be commended for tackling such an intricate and frankly messy intellectual world. By the Restoration the British medical scene had been strongly influenced by iatrochemistry and would soon feel the impact of Newtonian mechanism but yet still held on to vestiges of humouralism. Contagion [End Page 444] was not a new idea, but DeLacy makes a good case that it took greater form by 1730, thanks to a series of factors that included the influence of the Helmonto-nian belief that diseases were independent entities invading the body, advances in microscopy that led some doctors to believe in animate microorganisms (usually termed animalcules), and the increased presence of medical taxonomies that presented diseases as entities with greater specificity. She points to epidemics like the 1720 Marseilles plague scare and the worrying spread of the cattle disease rinderplast a decade earlier, as well as the advent of inoculation as key events that drew greater attention to the value of contagionism. Readers unfamiliar with the period will likely be astonished at how modern seems a treatise like Benjamin Marten's New Theory of Consumptions, which as long ago as 1720 argued that phthisis (later tuberculosis) was a specific disease spread by contagion thanks to a microscopic organism. But DeLacy correctly resists anachronism. While many of the tools of modern germ theory were at their disposal, almost no seventeenth- or eighteenth-century doctor put them all together. Instead, belief in animalcules, disease-specificity, or medical taxonomy appear here and there, appearing in fits and starts, and almost always contested. What allows DeLacy to make sense of this intellectual stew, and what must be considered her most valuable contribution, is her ability to link proponents of early contagionism to heterodox religion and unconventional medical education. Contagionists were often medical outsiders, especially those who studied abroad because as dissenters they were barred from Oxford and Cambridge and therefore from becoming Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians. Here DeLacy's work follows on the tradition of Charles Webster (in linking seventeenth-century science to radical religion) as well as Hal Cook (by foregrounding the political struggles of the heterogeneous medical world of Restoration London).1 Her careful prosopography demonstrates how doctors with nontraditional backgrounds and education—especially those who had been exposed to Helmontian chemistry—tended to advance contagionist ideas most clearly. Some of her figures may not seem like "outsiders"—eminent doctors like Hans Sloane, Richard Mead, or Thomas Sydenham—but in each case she teases out their backgrounds and demonstrates their similar intellectual roots. My only quibble with this fine book is that the Great London Plague of 1665/6 gets almost no coverage. Surely if there was an event that drew attention to the question of contagion after 1660 this was it. It is notable that during the much later 1720 plague scare (to which DeLacy devotes chap. 9) many of the treatises that rolled off the press were reissues of texts from the earlier crisis, such as Nathaniel Hodges' Loimologia, or, an historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665, With precautionary Directions against the like Contagion (1720, originally 1672). Indeed, the well-known pamphlet war between Hodges and Helmontonian physicians like George Thomson...

Into the Spotlight: New Writing from Slovakia by Magdalena Mullek &amp; Julia Sherwood

Into the Spotlight: New Writing from Slovakia. Ed. Magdalena Mullek & Julia Sherwood. Trans Magdalena Mullek, Julia Sherwood & Peter Sherwood. Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica / Three String Books. 2017. 185 pages. The translators of Into the Spotlight have set out to expand the body of contemporary Slovak fiction available in English, with a focus on the least-translated of living writers. The volume is premised on the diversity of such authors, and this is reflected in terms of generation and gender as well as of style and form; readers will find both short stories and excerpts from novels. Indeed, the translators have taken a risk in that nearly half of the selections are excerpts. Their gamble certainly pays dividends , however, as these fragments stand alone as powerful character studies that also provide a glimpse into the style and intellectual world of the respective authors. In staking a claim for Slovak writers on the center stage of world literature, Into the Spotlight demonstrates the global orientation of contemporary Slovak literature . Most striking in this regard are a pair of perplexing short stories set in Africa. Their author, Marek Vadas, draws on his experiences in equatorial Africa, acting as a cultural interpreter whose stated goal is to transmit the “African way of thinking.” Other selections that fit the rubric of “globalization ” interrogate Slovakia’s transition to capitalism and probe the underside of European integration. ”The First Victory of Superstores,” by Michal Hvorecký, stands out as a ruthlessly satirical study of an architect-cum-marketing guru who has staked his reputation on building superstores in which shoppers can be seen “crying from happiness. They had understood they really could buy everything in this superstore, and they weren’t able to resist buying the displayed merchandise.” Ultimately, the reader is left with a bittersweet knowledge that a large portion of these writers’ work will not appear in English translation. At the same the volume offers hope that we will be reading more from these and other translators of Slovak. And for the time being, Into the Spotlight offers no small consolation in its delightful array of human portraits from Central Europe. Duncan Lien Pennsylvania State University Klaus Böldl. Der Atem der Vögel. Frankfurt am Main. S. Fischer. 2017. 139 pages. In Klaus Böldl’s latest novel, Der Atem der Vögel, the narrator, Philipp, came to the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland two years ago, prior to the story’s beginning, to restore medieval church furniture. This windswept archipelago is characterized by endless horizons , impressive natural spectacles, a harsh climate with constantly changing weather, colorful houses with grass-covered roofs, rainbows, countless sheep, and far fewer human beings. Early on, Philipp meets the local pediatrician, Johanna, and her daughter , Rannva, decides to stay with them but now sees their relationship on a downward slope. While his girlfriend and her daughter are away visiting relatives in Denmark, Philipp passes time on endless walks with a mind keen on minute observations and fragmented memory pieces reminiscent of the ocean’s vast expanse. Although lacking in plot and dramatic twists, Böldl’s prose in Der Atem der Vögel is captivating, with its hypnotically quiet and meditative narrative stream. As in a dream, the Faroe landscape and the memories of Philipp’s childhood—especially of his best friend, Simon, who vanished without a trace at the age of fifteen—blend together and seem to be the ingredients of a longing for his own disappearance. Aimlessly , Philipp passes the days with forays into the Faroe Islands’ small capital as well as hikes on rugged dirt tracks and lonesome roads, through river valleys and quiet moors. Where does this path into the Never end? Böldl’s oeuvre is populated with characters like Lennart (Der nächtliche Lehrer), Johannes (Studie in Kristallbildung), Harald World Literature in Review 82 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 ...

Francis Crick: A Singular Approach to Scientific Discovery

Francis' office window (at the Salk) commanded a panorama of the Pacific. "This grand natural scene was a physical correlate of Francis's intellectual world: wide-ranging, brilliantly lit, a little overawing, but also immensely inviting and above all an exciting place to be." (Mitchison, 2004).

Revisiting the Past and Roberto Fernández Retamar's Calibán

This essay examines Roberto Fernández Retamar's groundbreaking Calibán (1971) and his revision “Calibán revisitado” (1986), within their historical, political, and literary contexts. A few months before the publication of Calibán, the arrest of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla produced dissention among European and Latin American intellectual supporters of Cuba's revolution. Castro's condemnation of “bourgeois intellectuals” became the basis of Fernández Retamar's essay, and Shakespeare's The Tempest best addressed the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed in Cuba and Latin America. Fernández Retamar traced the main characters from their inception in Shakespeare's play to his own essay; for him, the United States exemplifies Prospero and Cuba is Caliban. Fifteen years later, Fernández Retamar revisited his essay—he attacks certain Latin American intellectuals but is conciliatory toward others. Ongoing events in the Cuban Revolution—in particular, the 1980 Mariel boatlift and subsequent efforts by Cuba's youth to abandon the island—provide a framework for understanding why Fernández Retamar revised a position that made him one of the leading critics of Cuba and Latin America's intellectual world.

British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century. Teresa Barnard, ed.

<i>British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>. Teresa Barnard, ed.

In Memoriam: Joël Thoraval (1950-2016)

On 7 March 2016, Joel Thoraval left us, struck down in a few weeks by a devastating cancer that was unfortunately discovered too late. In him sinology has lost an outstanding researcher whose brilliant insights, boundless intellectual curiosity, and encyclopaedic knowledge of a wide range of cultural universes sustained his profoundly original thinking. He will also be remembered by his colleagues and friends as a subtle mind with a ready wit and as a fundamentally modest man.Joel Thoraval was born in Brest in 1950. After his undergraduate days marked by the militant atmosphere of 1968, he enrolled at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he was particularly keen to attend the lectures by Maurice Godelier, to whom he always remained close, while at the same time he continued his studies in philosophy and history. His attraction to Central Asia led him to train himself in archaeology and the languages of that region (Sogdian, Pehlevi, but also Russian), and for his doctorate he left to work as an archaeologist on the Hellenistic site of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan. He was to spend several years there, as a researcher at the French Archaeological Delegation. His stay was interrupted in 1980 by the Soviet invasion, which put a brutal end to his first scientific project. A combination of circumstances then gave him the chance to leave for China, where he began by pursuing his studies in Shanghai before taking up various posts: as Cultural Attache in Beijing (1981-1984), as a research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1984-1991), and then as Cultural Councillor in Hong Kong. In this last position he played a major role in helping Michel Bonnin to set up the CEFC and Perspectives chinoises/China Perspectives. In 1994 he left Asia to join the EHESS China Centre in Paris.Joel Thoraval's research on China developed through several main stages. first of these was devoted to ethnological work in the northwest of Hainan Island, among a population officially classified as Han but offering nonetheless several striking features. This gave rise to a series of studies on the problem of nationality and on relationships of ethnicity within the Chinese world. He analysed these by approaching them through a range of diverse cultural practices, whether based on kinship (lineages), on religion, or on gender relations (with his study on the phenomenon of amorous nocturnal visits). Some of these studies have become classics for generations of students, such as 'Ethnicity' as Applied to the Chinese Cultural World, first published in Perspectives chinoises in 1999.His long stay in Hong Kong, at the Chinese University's New Asia (Xinya) College, allowed him to gain acute insights into the Chinese intellectual world, and especially into the academic communities rethinking Confucian traditions in the light of modern Western philosophy. This gave rise to his twofold interest in the modern Chinese reception of Western ideas and in the ways in which traditional Confucian teachings are currently categorised, theorised, and put into practice. A stay in Japan between 2000 and 2002 enabled him to bring a comparative perspective to bear on his reflections.In addition to his incisive articles on the intellectual debates in mainland China (such as The politics of memory, The dreamt tradition, and Historical consciousness and social imaginary), which demonstrate his gift for perceiving and closely analysing the spirit of an age, his work also focused on Confucian thought in the twentieth century with particular attention to the philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909-1995). He was the first to introduce this thinker to the French public (see especially his Ideal of the sage and strategy: An introduction to the thought of Mou Zongsan). Mou Zongsan was of special interest to him as the ideal embodiment of a type of philosophical fate of contemporary Confucianism while also being an indispensable thinker for understanding the reception of Kant in China. …

Knowing vs. Seeing: Philosophy and Experience

Knowing vs. Seeing: Philosophy and Experience Robert E. Pollack Let me begin with a quotation from Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. It poses the problem I wish to discuss: How may one keep imagination, will, and intellect aligned? This is from a reading in a Colloquium Amy and I are taking this semester at the Heyman Center. … to command that the very professors of astronomy themselves see to the refutation of their own observations and proofs … is to enjoin something that lies beyond any possibility of accomplishment. … Before this could be done they would have to be taught how to make one mental faculty command another, and the inferior powers the superior, so that the imagination and the will might be forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands. What do we do when the will and imagination are being forced to believe the opposite of what the intellect understands? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary tells us, in his 1962 book on the Prophets: Our sight is suffused with knowing, instead of feeling painfully the lack of knowing what we see. The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know. I arrived at Columbia for the first time almost exactly sixty years ago, when I came in from Coney Island's Stillwell Avenue station by subway for my interview in Hamilton Hall. I entered the dorms as a first‐year student—no, freshman—in the fall of 1957, and graduated fifty‐five years ago, a middling member of the class of 1961. That means my fifty‐fifth reunion will be this June, and it also means that I have spent part or all of seven decades here. Tonight, I would like to take your time consider the matters of how one can avoid simply seeing what one knows; and of how, not always but now and then, I have been able to know what I saw, in those very different decades of my life. So here is one story for each my seven decades here, and then a story at the end that speaks to the future in an unexpected way. If you'll have the patience to see where that story takes us, I know you'll have a lot to tell me when I am done. The 1950s I am a sophomore, a physics major, working in the Physics Department. The laboratory I work in is directed by Charles Townes, and he in turn is part of the intellectual world created in Pupin by Isidore Rabi. So when I am not in class or in my room in Hartley, I am in a laboratory on the 8th floor of Pupin. My research advisor is a graduate student recently arrived from City College, Arno Penzias. Our work involves the newly invented technology of coherent microwave radiation, precursor to the laser. Shades of Galileo, we are building antennas capable of picking up very low levels of microwave and infrared radiations from the moons of Jupiter. Penzias has been allowed by Townes to hire me on a Defense Department grant to the laboratory. The previous year the United States and the Soviet Union had initiated a thaw in relations. That led to, among other things, an exchange program between the Schools of Journalism at Columbia and Moscow University. A visiting Journalism student from Moscow, Oleg Kalugin, is given a tour through our laboratories by the University. I am very impressed to meet him; my parents are hard leftists, and in my house, nothing since the fall of Nazi Germany had made any difference to them in their support of the Soviet Union. I even invite him to visit my parents. He does. Later that semester Kalugin finds me and asks me to have a cup of coffee with him. He tells me that my father has told him that I would be glad to share the details of my laboratory's work with him, because he—my father—very much wants me to do that. First I see what I know: I know my father has put me in a spot...

Crossroads Poetics

Crossroads Poetics

Jaddus the High Priest and Alexander the Great – Fact or Fiction? Religion, Politics and Historiography in Late Seventeenth-Century England

The article focuses on outer branch of political and religious conflicts over a story written by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus on meeting of Jaddus, the high priest, with Greek king Alexander and objection of Jewish historians on traditional narrative used by Josephus. Topics discussed include clarification on intellectual world characteristics of 17th century with theology, manuscript of the "Convocation Book" published by William Sancroft, and detachment of history from God by Wagstaffe.

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

From Dialectic of Nature to the Asian Mode: A Pre-history of North Korean Environmental Approach

ABSTRACTNorth Korea is not a nation or field that attracts a great deal of critically minded analysis which would address the processes and moments of its ideological history. This is especially true when it comes to matters of North Korea’s relationship with nature and the environment, and the ideologies which underpin developmental and productive strategies within that nation. The routes which Marxist analysis in general took to connect to the Korean Peninsula are themselves fairly obscure and rarely considered. This paper therefore seeks an examination of the generation of Marxist analysis of nature and of those modes of production which encounter, transform and interact with natural and environmental forms. It considers the work of both Engels and Marx on the subject before tracing the journey those theorisations took into the practices and articulations of later Marxists, communists and socialists tasked with applying Marxist principles more widely in the processes of nation building and governance. In particular, it analyses notions of an Asian Mode of Production and the debate in Marxist circles as to that mode’s veracity and utility. It also encounters briefly the work of Karl Wittfogel, a counter-Marxist theoretician, and his notion of Hydraulic Economy. Finally, the paper traces the journey made by these theoretical structures into the intellectual world of the Korean Peninsula, navigating the debates it generated among early Korean Marxist intellectuals and their embedding or otherwise within the ideological structures and processes of North Korea.

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett. Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2013. 808 pp. $39.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). The intellectual world of Robert Bartlett is dominated by a preoccupation with lines of demarcation. He has made a career of exploring the points where communities and individuals collide, jostle, and slip past one another. He is perhaps best known for his work on the relationship between the Anglo-Normans and the Celtic peoples in the period between circa 1066 and 1300. His biography of Gerald of Wales, for example, dissects the hybrid culture of Britain in the twelfth century. Similarly, his England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225 situates Britain within its broader cross-Channel, European (and cosmological) context. In his most recent work, Bartlett tackles a question first posed by St. Augustine of Hippo: Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? In it, Bartlett continues to explore points of correspondence, but shifts the terrain entirely to the cosmic level, to the place where the antipodal worlds of the living and the dead regard one another across the chasm of death. He wants to know why a certain class of superlative--but dead--human beings, the saints, so thoroughly dominated the devotional culture of Medieval Europe. Bartlett has written on the saints before, but here he addresses medieval hagiography in a far more systematic manner. In answering the book's titular question, this capacious study (almost 800 pages) divides the response into two parts. The first, Developments, is chronologically arranged, while the second. Dynamics, is thematic, exploring in each of its chapters a distinct element of the cult, including relics, miracles, dedications, and so on. With its meticulous research, exhaustive bibliography, and attractive presentation (including maps, figures, tables, glossary, and ten gorgeous colour plates), this ambitious and expansive survey will no doubt become a critical introduction for both scholars and enthusiasts. Part one, divided into four chapters, traces the cult from its origins in Christianity's earliest encounters with the Roman state to the Protestant Reformation. While Bartlett occasionally casts his gaze eastward toward Byzantium, his focus is primarily on Western Europe. At little more than ninety pages, part one covers an immense amount of terrain. Bartlett admits his pace is brisk, but states that he merely intends to offer signposts in [a] vast landscape. Nevertheless, he adroitly rehearses the familiar (and not so familiar) contours of medieval sanctity. In chapter one he locates the origins of the cult in the sufferings of the martyrs, looks at the shift from the martyr-saint to the confessor-saint, explores the origins of hagiography as a literary genre, and identifies revolutionary changes to the cult in the fourth century. In subsequent chapters, Bartlett is similarly comprehensive, tracing, among other things, the conceptual elaboration of the saint as Christianity moved beyond its classical cradle, the institutionalization of holiness under papal auspices in the Gregorian era, the development of mendicant sanctity, and the political uses of the cult. The final chapter of part one explores the ideological collision between the cult of the saints and the architects of the Reformation. At more than 500 pages, part two offers a substantial analysis of the salient characteristics of medieval sanctity. Its eleven chapters can be loosely divided into four thematically related sections. Between chapters five and seven (The Nature of Cult, Saints' Days, and Types of Saints), Bartlett approaches a taxonomy of medieval sanctity. He delineates the structural, temporal, and functional characteristics of medieval cultus and shows how medieval people (and indeed, modern scholars) have erected an informal, but widely understood saintly hierarchy. …

The Reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan: The New Left, The Making, and “Moral Economy”

AbstractThis article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project

European artist-artisans increasingly began to write down their working procedures after 1400, which helped bring into being new modes of gaining knowledge, especially about nature and natural materials. Such technical writings are a valuable source for historians and conservators, although the genre is often regarded as nothing more than straightforward technical recipes. This essay introduces a collaborative teaching and research project, based at Columbia University, which aims to set out a method of reconstruction by which historical evidence can be extracted from these writings, not just about materials and practices, but also about the intellectual world and daily life of the early modern workshop. The goal is a critical edition and English translation of an unusual sixteenth-century technical manuscript, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. In addition, the project strives to reflect on the nature and status of evidence obtained through the method of reconstruction. This essay argues that close study and rigorous reconstruction of this technical recipe collection allows novel insights into the material and mental world of its anonymous author-practitioner.

The little words”: The Close Reading of Really Small Things

As rake-hero Robert Lovelace says in Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48): have often thought, that little words in republic of letters, like little folks in a nation, are most (Richardson 4:206). small to which my title refers are little, nameless, unremembered acts of prepositions and punctuation in works of Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen.1 18th century witnessed significant changes in and typography, and it is worth paying as close attention to early novelists' use of really small things as one does to poets'. Up through 18th century, prepositions were sometimes treated as subclasses of particles, sometimes as their own part of speech, sometimes as cases, and for one 17th century grammarian, as a kind of noun.2 In general preposition was overlooked, hustled around, dismissed, and generally belittled or ignored. author of Compleat Guide to English Tongue (1708) says of adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions: shall speak of three Parts of Speech under one Head, because I han't [sic] much to say of any of (77). seventh edition of Chambers's Cyclopoedia (1751) notes loftily: F. Buffier does not allow preposition to be a part of speech (Chambers 2:416). As Ian Michael explains in English Grammatical Categories and Tradition to 1800, The function of preposition was traditionally 'to be set before' another word; grammarian's eye was fastened not on preposition itself but on word it governed (454). But in second half of 18th century, so-called lesser parts of speech--along with various typographical forms--began to earn a wider respect for their agility in forming new combinations of rhetorical and visual patterns. Ian Michael analyzes rise of English grammar from 16th through 18th centuries, counting thirty-two in 17th century, and 231 in 18th--most of which appeared in second half of century. In 1765, James Elphinston referred to numberless elegancies of which every particular preposition must in its various senses and substitutions be susceptible (qtd. in Lundskaer-Nielsen 225). In 1795, Anne Fisher (the first woman to publish an English grammar) pointed out that composite prepositions give a peculiar Beauty, Fluency, and Elegance to our Language, by Help of which we do all that Greeks and Latins did (95n). But real powers of preposition were most beautifully articulated by William Chauncey Fowler in his 1850 English Grammar: Prepositions, although a secondary and less important part of speech, deserve more attention than is usually paid to them in our common grammars. They exhibit in a striking manner analogy of external or sensible world with internal or intellectual. [... They] express not substance, but form of our ideas [... As] mind supposes a close resemblance between physical and intellectual worlds, so prepositions denoting external relations are also employed to express internal. [...] These relations arrange themselves in antitheses, forming a beautiful system; as, In and out, only absolute relation of space. (Fowler 323) In all language grammars, nouns are defined first because A Noun absolute is name of a thing (Butler 33). Begin with 1708 Compleat Guide to English Tongue intones rather biblically (29). It concludes with the Use of PREPOSITIONS (80). 1740 edition of Thomas Dyche's New General English Dictionary reduces usual eight parts of to four, and calls these four Parts by received Names of a Noun Substantive, a Noun Adjective, a Verb, and an Article (A4v). This recalls School of Languages in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), working busily to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns (157). …

Becker, Coase, Tullock and Manne: A Personal Tribute

I recall a scene in television dramatization of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in which the James Watson character is showing Rosalind Franklin the tinker toy model that he and Francis Crick have constructed. As he tries to explain it to her, she shushes him and says something to the effect that “It is so beautiful and simple it must be true” I love that scene: if it did not happen that way in real life it ought to have!Why do I begin this short essay honoring four of the giants of law and economics who have recently passed with a reference to an entirely foreign intellectual discipline? Because I believe that their work partakes in the same beautiful fundamental quality. All that the mind appears capable of understanding is the simple. The trick of course it to discern that simple clear melody concealed by the cacophony of noise that envelops it. This characteristic of mind to seek out and embrace the simple unitary explanation appears to be fortuitously aligned with the rules of the universe. That is, it seems that there is much that can be understood about the natural and social world by simple elegant beautiful insights.The perverse effect of this is that once the simple melody is heard it often cannot be unheard and may — not very gradually — come to seem obvious and trivial. So I take keyboard in hand to briefly note for the reader the core simple fundamental melodies that these recently departed gentlemen have revealed to us, revelations that given the stickiness of dogma were often not appreciated immediately. For those readers who would like a more thorough discussion of the scholarly impact of these (and other) giants of the field I commend to them the series of essays that Joshua Wright and I edited on the subject. I also note in passing that no slight is intended to other major figures who passed not long ago and are worthy of like honor. In addition I am happy to report that there are still law & economics giants who sleep on the green side of the grass: Demsetz, Epstein, Posner, Landes, Williamson, and Calabrese among others.So in this brief essay I shall set myself the task of reciting the simple core insight that each has supplied to the intellectual world, the insight that on reflection seems obvious — and it is, once a genius points it out.