Mid-twentieth Century Research Articles

A Role of Pressure Group in Vision india@2047

The presence of numerous pressure groups stands out as a significant driver of democracy in the contemporary political landscape. The term "pressure group" has gained widespread recognition, denoting any organized or unorganized collective employing various pressure tactics. Exploring the role of these groups in influencing governmental decisions is a relatively modern endeavor, with its roots traced back to Arthur F. Bentley's 1908 work "The Process of Government" and later expounded upon by David B. Truman in "The Governmental Process" of 1951. The mid-twentieth century witnessed a surge in scholarly interest regarding the impactful role pressure groups play in shaping government policies, spawning a plethora of studies in this domain. In the context of Indian democracy, pressure groups serve as conduits for translating group interests into governmental policies. Lobbying, mobilizing public opinion, campaigning, providing legislative counsel, endorsing candidates, and publishing viewpoints constitute the familiar arsenal of techniques employed by these groups to wield influence. Despite concerns over their potential to undermine national unity, pressure groups have become indispensable components in democratic governance. In India, pressure groups predominantly fall into two categories: those grounded in ethnic identities and those driven by economic or professional interests. Notably, contemporary trends indicate a constructive role played by pressure groups in formulating sound policies, contributing to India's envisioned trajectory towards becoming a developed nation by 2047.

Roger Scruton’s theory of the imagination and aesthetics as a formulation of Aristotelian virtue ethics

ABSTRACT Scholars who mention the turn to Aristotelian virtue ethics in the Mid-Twentieth Century tend to cite G. E. M. Anscombe’s famous ‘complaint’, and sometimes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is less usual to write of Roger Scruton. Placed in the context of Bernard Williams and John Casey’s works – at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of the emotions – Scruton’s theory of the imagination is shown to concern the rationality of moral attitudes. In short, it concerns virtue ethics. Of broader interest, following Scruton’s arguments, his aesthetics may be conceived as concerning stores of moral knowledge; this is by virtue of the sensuous conditioning of the thought-content of moral judgement. The centrality of imitation to Aristotelian ethics, in other words, finds its concomitant in the object of imitation as the artwork. It is my view that Scruton’s work, Art and Imagination (his PhD thesis of 1973), is an attempt to provide a framework for the judgement involved in virtue ethics, concerning both intentionality and object.

Vaccine Science Diplomacy and "The Phenomenon of Man".

The central tenets of international scientific collaborations leading to the development, testing, and the equitable distribution vaccines to combat poliomyelitis, smallpox, COVID-19, and other devasting infections, first accelerated in the mid-twentieth century. The genesis of vaccine science diplomacy also coincides with the publication of Le Phénomène Humain (The Phenomenon of Man) shortly after the death of its author, the French Jesuit priest and scientist, Dr. Teilhard de Jardin. Several tenets of Teilhard's posthumous essay, including our collective consciousness, and the "conjugated faces" of science and religion, are relevant to a modern vaccine diplomacy framework, even if Teilhard may not have specifically addressed vaccines in his writings. This could also include the potential for arriving at an "omega point" through international scientific collaboration and joint vaccine development, while simultaneously avoiding the destructive forces of anti-vaccine or anti-science activism. Collaborations between the Vatican, Catholic research universities and institutions; and leaders of the Catholic-majority nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in an integrated framework might accelerate these activities as they apply to both pandemic threats and neglected diseases of poverty.

In the Vanguard of the 1930s Reformed Resurgence

Abstract The first two decades of the twenty-first century have manifested a large-scale revival of interest in John Calvin, Reformed Theology and popular forms of Calvinism. Journalists have scrambled to grasp the parentage of a movement which had so long been out of the public view. Sympathetic Christian writers have developed a range of hypotheses about the roots of this resurgence, with most concentrating on developments unfolding since the mid-twentieth century. This essay maintains that the actual roots of the contemporary Calvinist resurgence lie in the period following the Great War (1914–1918), when three distinguishable streams of Protestant thought found common ground and for a period of at least a quarter-century collaborated to draw attention to the resources offered in the broadly Reformed theological tradition.

A nostalgic trip? Klaus Rifbjerg’s “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” and the Copenhagen tramway

For much of the twentieth century, the tramway was the most important public transport system in Copenhagen, Denmark. It played a crucial role in the life of the city and features strongly in Danish art and literature produced during the network's lifespan as well as after it was finally closed in 1972. Despite this, the tramway has only received scarce scholarly attention. This article looks to address the situation. It does so by drawing attention to the fact that although the tramway was shut down, it lived on in art and literature. One example of this is “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” (1985) written by Klaus Rifbjerg. This short story has often been described as nostalgic. While this is not a misreading, it is an assessment that requires clarification. A close reading that draws on studies of nostalgia reveals that the short story does not boil down to a sentimental longing for a lost past. Rather, it thematises nostalgia for the Copenhagen tramway, questioning such remembrances’ status and relevance in contemporary society. This means that, ultimately, the short story can be seen as part of a broader tendency in writing about closures of electric public transport networks in Western Europe and North America: it works as a counternarrative to notions of progress, an antidote to predominant ideas of urban development in the mid-twentieth century.

Multiplicities and Contingency: Rethinking ‘Popular Buddhism’, Religious Practices and Ontologies in Thailand

AbstractThis paper reconsiders explanations of ‘popular’ Buddhism in Thailand initiated in mid-twentieth century anthropological definitions of vernacular articulations of religiosity in village settings. Buddhist localism, in its various manifestations, is seen to contrast with a doctrinal or literate ‘great’ monastic tradition. In this persisting ethnographic argument, an actor may draw randomly on various syncretic elements of their religiosity according to circumstances (an historical complexity which is sourced in a mix of Sinhalese-sourced Buddhism, animism including magic, and folk Brahmanism). It is therefore not wholly or consistently one, but substantively divided into several strands. This long-standing position is problematic as the paper shows. There are multiple coextensive Buddhism/s (plural) within the Greater Theravada tradition, which emerge from an identification of the actors themselves with the one, not the many, as one-unitary-Buddhists. I theorise using a general framework of Meillassoux’s discussion on contingency and, by way of contrast, taking Deleuzian ideas on multiplicity. It is grounded on an understanding of popular or organic lived religion sourced in the early counter-enlightenment or radical enlightenment thinking of Giambattista Vico. Here, it is argued that in Thailand villagers would identify cosmologically as the one, not as the many (in a sense as in the assemblages or varieties of religious practices detached from the totality of the cosmological unitary one). Understanding the creative processes behind cosmological multiplicities is a starting point, with the notion that within specific cultural forms we are faced with a multiplicity of definitions and things to observe, as in an understanding of the varieties of lived Buddhism. The essay is based on an ethnographic assessment from over three decades of field research among ethnic Thai Buddhists at various modalities and settings, and in framing these vernacular religious practices and their ontologies. My gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The essay does not deal directly with specific ethnographic case studies; instead, it is intended as retheorising representations of ‘Popular Buddhism’ in Thailand as based on early scholarship since the 1960s (where Buddhism is constituted as three or more distinctive but intertwined religious strands).

When one thing leads to another: Pole Station Antarctica: December 15th 8am 1956

ABSTRACT This short paper illuminates a research-creation project titled Pole Station Antarctica: December 15th 8am 1956 (2012 – Ongoing). This artwork is an evolving collection of envelopes sharing the same postmark – mailed from the South Pole at the same time, on the same day. As the collection grows its shifting contents illustrate with increasing clarity global flows to and from the South Pole during the mid-twentieth century. When observed en mass, the cumulative minutia of place names, postage stamp designs, and decorative embellishments expose the complicated cultural and historical circumstances of this particular mailing – pointing towards America’s geopolitical motivations at the height of the cold war, the spread of Second World War military logistics and transportation technologies in the post war era, and the effects of navigation technologies on remote areas of Antarctica.

On Anti-colonial Time: Encountering Archival Traces in a Haunted Present

This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality, and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt's project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting and fragmented, the other institutionalized and material, and asks how these different forms of memory constitute different types of anticolonial archives. Both forms of memory and practices of archiving appear in the present, albeit in vastly differing ways. The first form is a series of vignettes around Gamal Abdel Nasser and Patrice Lumumba, and the connections between them, their families, and anticolonial Egypt and anticolonial Congo during the 1950s and 1960s. The second form is the practice of economic nationalization that was a central pillar of Nasser's project in Egypt throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through these two forms, the article demonstrates both the urgency of the past and the present in Egypt, as well as the ways in which the crisis of the anticolonial past has structured the crisis of the postcolonial present.

The Conflict between Regulatory Agencies over the 20,000-Fold Lowering of the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) for Bisphenol A (BPA) by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recommended lowering their estimated tolerable daily intake (TDI) for bisphenol A (BPA) 20,000-fold to . BPA is an extensively studied high production volume endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) associated with a vast array of diseases. Prior risk assessments of BPA by EFSA as well as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have relied on industry-funded studies conducted under good laboratory practice protocols (GLP) requiring guideline end points and detailed record keeping, while also claiming to examine (but rejecting) thousands of published findings by academic scientists. Guideline protocols initially formalized in the mid-twentieth century are still used by many regulatory agencies. EFSA used a 21st century approach in its reassessment of BPA and conducted a transparent, but time-limited, systematic review that included both guideline and academic research. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) opposed EFSA's revision of the TDI for BPA. We identify the flaws in the assumptions that the German BfR, as well as the FDA, have used to justify maintaining the TDI for BPA at levels above what a vast amount of academic research shows to cause harm. We argue that regulatory agencies need to incorporate 21st century science into chemical hazard identifications using the CLARITY-BPA (Consortium Linking Academic and Regulatory Insights on BPA Toxicity) nonguideline academic studies in a collaborative government-academic program model. We strongly endorse EFSA's revised TDI for BPA and support the European Commission's (EC) apparent acceptance of this updated BPA risk assessment. We discuss challenges to current chemical risk assessment assumptions about EDCs that need to be addressed by regulatory agencies to, in our opinion, become truly protective of public health. Addressing these challenges will hopefully result in BPA, and eventually other structurally similar bisphenols (called regrettable substitutions) for which there are known adverse effects, being eliminated from all food-related and many other uses in the EU and elsewhere. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP13812.

Extractivism in the Anthropocene

This month's Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster illuminates the idea of extractivism, a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth's resources since the mid-twentieth century, Foster notes, threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet.

Broken promises and transoceanic fragments: Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, 1935–46

This article examines the personal experiences and memories of Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria in the years leading up to and immediately after the Second World War, revealing the tensions between migration and movement, on the one hand, and memory and loss, on the other. By engaging with the ideas surrounding tairiku (‘continents’) in early to mid-twentieth century Japan, this article moves away from triangulating the transoceanic movements of Japanese tango musicians and musical commodities across Japan, China and Latin America at this time. Instead, it considers such movements as the sonic manifestation of the island/continent dichotomy that framed Japanese maritime thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, in offering a Japan-reflexive scholarship for the study and writing of global music histories, this article argues for the need to move beyond a geo-oceanic approach in examining transoceanic circulations.

‘Resonating across Oceanic Currents’: Special edition editorial

Preoccupied with the historical contradictions of seawater as manifested in the early to mid-twentieth century popular music history surrounding Japan, the Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents: Maritime Histories of Popular Music in and from Japan, 1920s-60s’ addresses a potentiality of the maritime frame as a method for moving away from historical periodization in popular music studies, and for reconsidering the approaches to ‘the global music history’. Above all, by contributing to the growing scholarship that engages with the oceanic frames as methods ripe for deconstructing music histories, it argues for the potencies of the maritime frame that, in many respects, brings to centre personal narratives, shifting geopolitical positionalities and subjectivities of musicians, listeners and creators in the study of popular music history.

The Evolution of the Russian Diaspora in Northeast China (Late 19th – Mid‑20th Centuries)

Based on the fundamental statement that the Russian immigrant community in Northeast China in the late nineteenth – mid-twentieth centuries was a diaspora, this article examines the process of transformation of the nature of the Russian diaspora and the peculiarities of its functioning at certain stages of its existence. The research is based on the conceptual ideas of Imperial and Diaspora Studies. There are four stages of the existence of the Russian diaspora in Manchuria, which differ in the nature of the interaction of Russian immigrants with a foreign cultural environment, due to the sociolegal, economic, and political situation of the diaspora, as well as sociopolitical and sociocultural conditions of the living environment. The Russian immigrant community was formed as an imperial diaspora during the period of Russian domination in Manchuria. Despite the decline of the political and legal status and the marginalization in the early 1920s and later the split into politically antagonistic Soviet and Emigrant colonies, the diaspora retained elements of imperial consciousness and the desire for national and cultural autonomy. In the case of the Soviet colony, this was accompanied by attempts at a new “imperial” expansion in the form of Sovietization of the former alienated zone of the CER. In its turn, focused on the Sinification of the former alienated zone, the policy of the Chinese authorities led to a conflict of interests and hindered the process of integration of Russian immigrants, which was already complicated by the cultural and religious alienation of the living environment. The capture of Manchuria by the Japanese and the creation of the state of Manchukuo, which led to the disappearance of the Soviet colony, actualised the problem of the Russian diaspora’s integration into the multinational community of Manchukuo. Implemented within the framework of the Japanese pan-Asian national policy, the integration led to the strengthening of national defence tendencies and a significant numerical decline of the Russian diaspora. After 1945, the Russian diaspora, which was subjected to political repression, experienced intensive Sovietization and turned into an instrument of Soviet policy in Northeast China. The history of the diaspora ended with mass repatriation and remigration of 1954–1961.

Театр как «наблюдение второго порядка»: опыт Никласа Лумана

The article describes a viewpoint on theatre arts from the perspective of the Systems theory developed by the social philosopher Niklas Luhmann. The target of the study is theatre as a part of the social system. The theatre, being extremely dialogical and “demonstrative” kind of art, is described in terms of communication: self-reference, hetero-reference, autopoiesis, operational closure, first-and second-order observation. The paper aims to consider the theatre as a subsystem of the social system “art”, focusing on the notion of “second-order observation” which presumably can be a key to understanding the contemporary theatre form. Despite its social significance theatre has rarely been an object of social and philosophical studies. One of the aims of this article is to attempt to fill this gap. Luhmann avoided the political bias which was not always possible for social philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, so his view on the space and structure of theatre may also be of interest to contemporary researchers.

Changing land and labour relations on cocoa farms in Sefwi, Ghana: Continuity and change

Ever since the late 1880s when cocoa began to be grown commercially in Ghana, land and labour has been mobilized to expand the area under cocoa trees and cultivate the crop. The first cocoa farmers ingeniously used and adapted existing social norms for land acquisition and recruitment of labour from both the extended family and from migrants. The resulting development of cocoa was a remarkable story of African innovation and enterprise that made the then Gold Coast one of the most prosperous parts of Africa by the mid-twentieth century. We look at how land and labour has been mobilized for cocoa in Sefwi, western Ghana, from the start of cocoa growing in the region in the 1940s through to 2019. We ask what current norms are, how they have evolved, and why changes to them have been made. Changes in land and labour relations in the area have not followed the linear evolutionary theory of land tenure change neither have they remained as unique immutable customary structures. We note a flexible, reversible and highly pragmatic logic in tandem with the ruling exigencies that account for patterns of change over time.

Food structure revisited

BackgroundWe eat tasty and nutritious foods produced by nature and transformed through processing including cooking. Their unique microstructures started to be unveiled by food scientists in the mid-twentieth century and their relationship with sensory properties, nutritional and health benefits is of recent occurrence. Scope and approachThis article describes how the study of food structure evolved from plain curiosity (microscopy) to become a major field of research in food science, nutrition and health. Up-to-date articles and books on food microstructure are reviewed. Key findings and conclusionsFood structure research has evolved into the concept of the food matrix that studies the functional behavior of chemical components confined in discrete domains. Today, knowledge of food structures and food matrices is key to understanding the effects of foods on nutrition and health, the efficacy of digestion and bioavailability of nutrients, the impact of a healthy microbiome, the design of novel foods for personalized needs, and the development of sustainable plant-based products. Future developments in food structuring and design will require moving from a multidisciplinary effort (food science and nutrition) to a transdisciplinary approach that effectively integrates advances in related disciplines spanning environmental sciences to health sciences.

Oppressive Even As It Inspires

Abstract In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.

Population structure and migration in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, a region impacted by the kuru epidemic

Populations of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (EHPNG, area 11,157km2) lived in relative isolation from the rest of the world until the mid-20th century, and the region contains a wealth of linguistic and cultural diversity. Notably, several populations of EHPNG were devastated by an epidemic prion disease, kuru, which at its peak in the mid-twentieth century led to some villages being almost depleted of adult women. Until now, population genetic analyses to learn about genetic diversity, migration, admixture, and the impact of the kuru epidemic have been restricted to a small number of variants or samples. Here, we present a population genetic analysis of the region based on genome-wide genotype data of 943 individuals from 21 linguistic groups and 68 villages in EHPNG, including 34 villages in the South Fore linguistic group, the group most affected by kuru. We find a striking degree of genetic population structure in the relatively small region (average FST between linguistic groups 0.024). The genetic population structure correlates well with linguistic grouping, with some noticeable exceptions that reflect the clan system of community organization that has historically existed in EHPNG. We also detect the presence of migrant individuals within the EHPNG region and observe a significant excess of females among migrants compared to among non-migrants in areas of high kuru exposure (p= 0.0145, chi-squared test). This likely reflects the continued practice of patrilocality despite documented fears and strains placed on communities as a result of kuru and its associated skew in female incidence.

The dress and commercial image of the American ‘Fat Lady’, 1850–1920

In this article, I analyse the genre of ‘Fat Lady’ photographs popular between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. I assert that there is an archetypal appearance that developed in the 1860s and was standardized by the 1880s, consisting of certain dress, grooming and posing practices that emphasized their subjects’ sizes and presumed social status. Fatness was a performance that these women were employed to embody – one that straddled the lines between corporeal deviance and normality. Freak shows reveal cultural anxieties about bodies. The way Fat Lady performers were costumed reflected concerns about fatness taking up too much space and visibility as well as fatness rendering people immature and androgynous, thereby challenging established sex-role differences; it also revealed the potential erotic allure of extreme body size. Over a century of popularity, Fat Lady performers came to rely on costumes inspired by evening dress, childrenswear and then lingerie, all of which grew scantier as time progressed. Existing cartes de visite, cabinet cards, posters, advertisements, reports from journalists and side show insiders, and rare interviews with the performers themselves provide material for close analysis.

Quantifying Subsurface Tar Volumes at Three Former Manufactured Gas Plants

Manufactured gas plants (MGPs) were a staple of the Industrial Revolution, operating in the US primarily on the East Coast, starting in the early 19th before phase-out in the mid-twentieth century. Their legacy includes the release of copious quantities of subsurface tar, and when located adjacent to waterways, tar in sediment due to direct discharge and leaking bulkheads. Computing the depth and extent of tar impacts is a three-dimensional problem required to facilitate appropriate remediation efforts. At three former MGPs, 306, 223, and 254 boreholes with 1452, 544, and 276 intervals were coded and %saturation attributed to saturated (Sn = 70%) and residual (S Nr = 20%) tar. These data were incorporated into the 3-D krieging software EnviroInsite to estimate the spatial extent of tar and oil impacts and their affiliated volumes. At the former Citizens, Fulton, and Metropolitan MGPs, the model estimated a most probable volume (MPV) of 7.21, 4.36, and 0.8 million gallons of tar. As a sensitivity analysis, Sn was decreased to 60%, reducing the MPV to 6.3, 3.4, and 0.6 million gallons, respectively, Regardless, it is irrefutable that a large amount of tar remains in the subsurface ∼70 years after the facilities ceased operating.