Modern Assumptions Research Articles

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World

‘Making Bombay Island’: land reclamation and geographical conceptions of Bombay, 1661–1728

This article examines the connection between geographical conceptions of the Bombay archipelago and the uniting of the islands through land reclamation. The modern assumption is that before reclamation, Bombay consisted of seven islands. No early modern observers understood Bombay in this way, however. Its geography was hotly contested during the Anglo-Portuguese transfer in the 1660s. While the Portuguese thought of the archipelago as four distinct islands, the English reinterpreted it as two, and this perception informed their attitudes to Bombay’s environment. Highlighting the importance of this factor offers a revised understanding of Bombay’s early land reclamation. By focusing on the build-up to the first major reclamation in 1710, this article argues that reclamation was a reaction to the region’s harsh geopolitical climate. The aggressive programme of environmental transformation was an attempt to remove Bombay’s dependence on imported provisions. It also sought to bolster English claims to the islands by physically eliminating the Portuguese argument that Bombay consisted of distinct islands. By considering the interplay between geographical conceptions and political imperatives, this article revises our understanding of what motivated early modern environmental change. Finally, the article discusses the imperial origins of the idea that Bombay was once seven islands, revealing the extent to which geographical conceptions and the meaning of environmental intervention changed over time. This challenges simple distinctions between urban and agricultural reclamation.

Research as praxis, en route theory/practice teacher-researcher collaboration: a self-study

This paper relates to project related instructional interventions, conducted via teacher-researcher collaboration in a Grade Four mathematics classroom. Drawing upon cultural historical activity theory or CHAT perspectives, such conduct exemplifies research as praxis. While CHAT perspectives argue for a theory/practice approach, enabling practitioners to act on their reflexivity and address contradictions found in ongoing practice; research as praxis views practitioner reflexivity as central to pursuing openly ideological work and practising in empirical inquiry what one preaches in theoretical formulations. Such pursuit led to our becoming stakeholders in each other’s professional practice and the conduct of interventions becoming the shared object of both teaching and research. In teacher-researcher collaboration realising expansive learning activity, it was possible to question modernist assumptions which view abstract theory as applicable to any concrete practice and take political action in dialectic with theory.

Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s ‘Planet Politics’

This article is a collective response to ‘Planet Politics’ by Anthony Burke et al., which was published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a ‘Manifesto from the End of IR’. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al. reproduce an already failed and discredited liberal cosmopolitan framework through the advocacy of managerialism rather than transformation; the top-down coercive approach of international law; and use of abstract modernist political categories. In the closing sections of the article, we discuss the possibility of different approaches, which, taking the Anthropocene as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions, could take us beyond IR’s disciplinary confines.

Nicolaus Listenius’s Musica (1537) and the Development of Music Pedagogy

Nicolaus Listenius’s Musica (1537) proved to be one of the two most successful music textbooks in the Lutheran Latin Schools of the sixteenth century, issued in at least forty-six editions and surviving in use into the next century. Yet, a casual inspection of the book today does not readily yield to modern expectations of a successful pedagogical text; indeed, there has never been any thorough analysis of the book to determine its merits and defects and so the causes of its popularity. The present analysis demonstrates that the Musica utilizes a variety of influential practices—medieval, humanist, and Lutheran—combined with an innovative new concept in music pedagogy in order to account for its success. It also reveals certain weaknesses and flaws in the book but argues that these were mostly overcome by the intended practice of guidance from the instructor in actual classroom use. The book’s method presents a difficulty for understanding today because of our modern assumptions about proper pedagogy, but an analysis of its method is beneficial for making more conscious those assumptions and advances in current practice.

The Status of the Social Fact

The Status of the Social Fact

Could Guinevere ever be a superhero? Depictions of a warrior queen in Camelot 3000 (1982–1985)

ABSTRACTCamelot 3000, one of Arthuriana’s most influential comic series, has reimagined Queen Guinevere as a heroic warrior who attempts to atone for previous transgressions by slipping on a minidress, picking up a futuristic gun and battling invading aliens. In this book, Guinevere has transcended medieval and modern assumptions of women by occupying a traditionally male sphere and being able to fight with the Knights. She has not, however, been able to transcend medieval and modern assumptions about women’s bodies and sexuality, which remain overly emphasised throughout her storylines, most of which revolve around her emotional and sexual turmoil. The need to sexualise Guinevere, position her as a damsel in distress and perpetuate literary traditions, found especially in Malory, hobbles her transformation into a hero and exemplifies the difficulties that medieval female characters often face when they enter the pages of comic books as warriors.

After Contemporary Art: Actualization and Anachrony

Departing from a critical assessment of the most widespread and initiated definitions of Contemporary Art from the last decade and a half, sustaining a world-wide discourse on contemporary art and contemporaneity, this article will deal with two aspects of an immodest proposal captured by the keywords actualization and anachrony. While current discussions on contemporary art are arguably reproducing modernist assumptions on the primacy of innovation, bolstered by a veiled avant-garde logic, the proposal to regard contemporary art as actualized art upsets not only ideas on what art after postmodernism might mean, but the whole edifice of historicist historiography. An anachronic perspective, a bi- or polychronic situatedness of the work of art, could be used to liberate art from being defined according to its unique descent, and to embrace, instead, a chronologic open to art’s continuous “life” through its successive aesthetic accessions and actualizations in time.

αὐτάρκης in Stoicism and Phil 4:11

This article contends that many nt scholars have read the Stoics and their view of αὐτάρκης through a post-Enlightenment (specifically Kantian) ethical framework, which assumes notions like individualism and detachment are fundamental to the ethical subject. When Stoicism is not distorted with these modernist assumptions about the ethical subject, a fairer comparison can be made between the Stoics and Paul. This article demonstrates this by providing an outline of Stoicism in such a manner, emphasizing how their ethical theory is grounded in a teleological and communitarian framework and maintains a psychologically holistic view of the self, which then sets up an exploration of the Stoic understanding of αὐτάρκης not clouded by individualist strands of thinking. This provides material for a more equitable comparison with Paul’s use of this term in Phil 4:11, where it can be seen that the scope, sources, and basis of Stoic and Pauline contentment are similar.

DA MODERNIDADE À PÓS-MODERNIDADE: EXPERIÊNCIAS E SIGNIFICADOS JUVENIS

O presente artigo de revisão resgata alguns conceitos centrais da modernidade e da pós-modernidade para, a partir deles, analisar a condição juvenil nestes diferentes contextos. Os estudos têm demonstrado uma fragilidade acentuada no ensino médio , tanto no que tange a aprendizagem, quanto nos elevados índices de evasão e repetência. Dentre os diversos aspectos a serem investigados, um deles refere-se ao aprofundamento dos estudos acerca da juventude. Conhecer a trajetória juvenil ao longo da história é fundamental a todos os educadores e demais envolvidos com o processo educacional, tendo em vista que a compreensão dos projetos, anseios, fragilidades e sonhos dos jovens é necessária para romper com estigmas e rótulos que interferem negativamente na vida escolar, no seu ingresso no ensino superior e na inserção no mercado de trabalho. O entendimento de alguns pressupostos epistemológicos da modernidade e da pós-modernidade podem nos auxiliar como referencial teórico, para ampliar a compreensão sobre a trajetória juvenil.
 Palavras-chave: Juventudes; Cultura Juvenil; Condição Juvenil; Modernidade; Pós-modernidade.

Ein Kaiser geht auf Distanz: die Rompolitik Constans’ I.

Constans I, emperor of Rome from 337 to 350, never visited Rome. This paper proposes to identify Constans’ absence from Rome as a conscious political strategy to maintain a functional relationship with Rome without submitting himself to the demands of the traditions of Rome and of Christian emperorship. The paper opens with a discussion of Constans’ rapport with the senators in Rome as reflected in appointment policies. I argue against modern assumptions that pagan senators from Rome served as praetorian or urban prefects or in comitiva at court throughout his reign. This leads me to reinvestigate Constans’ policies towards the religions of Rome, pagan cults (e.g. CTh XVI 10.2) but also Christian affairs. I show that his collaboration with Rome was made possible by the emperor’s avoidance to associate himself too closely with religious issues and by his support the public amenities in the city. Prohaeresius’ visit to Rome then highlights the role of Greek learning as a neutral space of communication between emperor and Rome. Following a brief discussion of the the impact of imperial absence on reforms of the urban prefecture, the final section comments on Constans’ failure to use references to Rome in his imperial representation.

A History of The Modernist Novel ed. by Gregory Castle

Reviewed by: A History of The Modernist Novel ed. by Gregory Castle Ellen Scheible (bio) A HISTORY OF THE MODERNIST NOVEL, edited by Gregory Castle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiv + 532 pp. $115.00. Like any good post-theory attempt to historicize as idiosyncratic a period as modernism or, worse, the genre of the modernist novel, Gregory Castle's shrewdly organized collection, A History of the Modernist Novel, throws any definition we comfortably use for the genre out the window. In fact, the collection aims to dismantle our dependence on reliable categories like "genre," "fiction," or, perhaps even more shockingly, the "novel." The crux of this urge to reorient common understandings of the modernist period and modernist texts lies in an undermining, time and again, of the classic binary that traps modernism in a timeless feud with its realist enemies. As one author in the collection, Leonid Livak, puts it, "[r]ealism, of course, was in the eye of the beholder" (117). No longer should we think of the fin de siècle novel as either modernist or realist, traditional or experimental, or a victim of any binary relationship. Instead, the modernist novel is the canvas for a modernism that is, in the words of Castle, "in motion, in transit across periods, canons, cultural traditions, and geographical borders and spaces" (23). In Part I, "Modernism and the Challenge to the Real," authors spend time crafting meticulous close-readings of a few under-recognized texts that are grouped into categories like the "aesthetic novel" or "impressionism" and are often positioned opposite modernism. Time and again, the verdict is the same: modernism is never truly divorced from the stylistic approaches it chooses to challenge, reject, or dismantle. Instead, these tense categories expose the kind of duplicitous modernist history Castle wants to emphasize: one where time periods, geography, and content are inconsistent but equally successful representations of experimental fiction. This especially rings true for non-British fiction, like French and Russian novels that maintain combative relationships with the modernist genre. Strikingly, the essays in this section expose the deeply passionate feelings of their authors. Jean-Michel Rabaté's piece, "Modernism and the French Novel: A Genealogy (1888-1913)," is a highly evocative argument lauding Marcel Proust's canonical superiority (second only to Joyce for Rabaté, it seems). Moreover, Livak's "Russian Modernism and the Novel" reads like a plea for our understanding of the differences [End Page 238] between western assumptions of modernism and Russian skepticism about such practices. Modernism is not always what we think it is, and sometimes the most modern of texts renders suspect the category that defines it. The next section of the edition, Part II—"Realism in Transition"—contextualizes modernism and certain modernist writers within a persuasive spectrum of crosscurrents where modernism and Edwardian fiction or modernism and domesticity emerge as overlapping categories rather than separate genres. The last two essays in this part shine as significant arguments for reorienting the modernist frame within a larger discourse of an ever-evolving realism. Especially for American modernists, particularly African-American writers like Nella Larson, the inclusion of realism as a chosen style within modernist discourse must be acknowledged as a strategy—one that forces readers to consider who is writing experimental fiction and who is not. That said, the first essay in this section, "Bootmakers and Watchmakers: Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Woolf, and Modernist Fiction" by David Bradshaw is markedly defensive of the conventional and dramatically suspicious of Virginia Woolf's critical views of realism. One might question why the author of the essay needed to castigate Woolf so disparagingly to prove the importance of Edwardian fiction. While we certainly might be persuaded more clearly to recognize the genius of a writer like H. G. Wells, we are not prepared to read Woolf's canon, especially her more experimental fiction like The Waves, as indebted to her Edwardian predecessors for its success.1 More importantly, we are not willing to see her personal struggles with mental illness as side effects of her critical engagement with realism. It is persuasive to consider modernism and realism as codependent literary categories, but we run the risk of undermining the radical influence...

Editorial

Editorial Estelle R. Jorgensen This issue marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Philosophy of Music Education Review—a journal that has appeared in an unbroken chain since its inception in 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1993). The journal is indexed in major philosophical, musical, educational, and library indices, is available online and in libraries around the world, and has a distinguished international Editorial Board consisting of professional philosophers, aestheticians, and philosophers of arts education and music education. It continues to be an important scholarly voice of members of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education and remains the only refereed international journal devoted exclusively to the philosophy of music education. Looking back over the past five volumes (volumes 20 to 24), our contributors were working in at least twelve countries representing in order of the number of contributions: USA (twenty-six), Canada (ten), the United Kingdom (six), Finland (four), Germany (four), Norway (four), Denmark (three), Greece (three), Singapore (three), the Netherlands (one), New Zealand (one), and Sweden (one). The present issue features European writers whose symposium began life as a panel presentation at the Ninth International Symposium on the Philosophy of Music Education held at Columbia University, New York, in June 2013. The issues with which this conversation deals seem especially timely and worth exploring more fully. Its premise, as Øivind Varkøy puts it, is that "proclaimed pluralism, diversity, and heterogeneity" are in tension with "expressions and experiences of uniformity, sameness, and homogeneity." I invited the panelists to expand their position papers into full-blown articles in order to tease out philosophical questions that I saw as important for readers of the Philosophy of Music Education Review. [End Page 1] At that time, today's full-blown nativist, nationalist, and populist sentiments were less obvious in Western politics. Still, looking back over the past few years, their roots are evident in the cultural and political upheavals in the Middle East and the massive population migrations to the United Kingdom and on the European continent. In North America, growing white restiveness over the increasing populations of color and the impact of cultural policies that recognized the multiplicities and pluralities of Western culture took their toll particularly on male self-identity. There was a rising tide of economic discontent by workers left behind by the tumultuous technological changes that displaced them from the factories in which they had previously worked for a living wage. If they were unable to retrain for new positions, they were unemployed, underemployed, or forced to cobble together minimal wage jobs that left them in poverty. Global capital movements exacerbated these demographic and cultural shifts as manufacturing moved to low-wage environments. And there was a growing alienation from professed governmental commitments to cultural multiplicity and pluralism on the one hand and growing expectations of rationality and uniformity on the other. It is not surprising that these complex and intertwined demographic, economic, and technological movements prompted a rising tide of political resentment against the political and economic elites in the West. The establishment was held responsible for the clashes between the public's desire for a sense of belonging, cultural and national cohesiveness, economic wellbeing, and sense of identity and the forces of multiculturalism, globalism, and economic rationalism. Economic laissez-faire proved disastrous for many people who were excluded from prosperity and alienated from their own culture. These geographic and cultural shifts resulted in political upheavals in the United States and European countries where establishment politicians were repudiated and the world political order began to fray. Upheaval was also evident in the ideologies manifest in Western education. Postmodern writers sought to upend notions of unity, stability, and order that had characterized modernism. In emphasizing matters of difference, deconstruction, and disorder and unmasking what they saw as untenable modernist assumptions, postmodernists fostered notions of pluralism, multiculturalism, and globalism. Other ideologies such as neoliberalism also arose in response to the perceived flaws of modernity. American pragmatism (embraced by North American and European writers alike) turned out to be unduly optimistic in failing to sufficiently grasp the dark side of capitalistic democracies. In the United States, for example, increasing efforts to rationalize and standardize education...

Postmodernism—Posthumanism—Evolutionary Anthropology

ABSTRACT The article explores the relationship between postmodernism, posthumanism, and evolutionary anthropology. In contrast to standard postmodernism, which provides just an updating of modernity, evolutionary anthropology (as here conceived) transcends the basic axiom of modernity, that of an unbreachable gap between man and world. It shows that humans are inherently worldly beings, deeply rooted in the process of evolution, and therefore participants in the process of life that share a great many traits with other living beings. Posthumanism, too, tries to establish a new framework for conceptualizing the human, one that equally leaves behind the modern assumption of human uniqueness and supremacy. Yet this is often done in a more declaratory than evidence-based manner. Turning to the scientific arguments of evolutionary anthropology might help posthumanism to become more solid. In an evolutionary perspective, two further main points of posthumanism—the fusion of human and artificial intelligence and human enhancement—appear quite natural. In cosmic and biotic evolution, matter and mind were never totally distinct, but coevolved, and enhancement was constitutive to human evolution from its beginning some million years ago. Evolutionary anthropology has a lot to offer to posthumanism.

Установление правопорядка в древних Афинах

How do democratic societies establish and maintain order in ways that are conducive to growth? Contemporary scholarship associates order, democracy, and growth with centralized rule of law institutions. In this article, we test the robustness of modern assumptions by turning to the case of ancient Athens. Democratic Athens was remarkably stable and prosperous, but the ancient city-state never developed extensively centralized rule of law institutions. Drawing on the “what-is-law” account of legal order elaborated by Hadfield and Weingast (2012), we show that Athens’ legal order relied on institutions that achieved common knowledge and incentive compatibility for enforcers in a largely decentralized system of coercion. Our approach provides fresh insights into how robust legal orders may be built in countries where centralized rule of law institutions have failed to take root. 1. I NTRODUCTION

A Transformative Eco-Social Model: Challenging Modernist Assumptions in Social Work

A Transformative Eco-Social Model: Challenging Modernist Assumptions in Social Work

Physics and Philosophy in Whitehead

Abstract An essay first published in 1917 presents key insights and ideas that shaped Whitehead’s physics and metaphysics. It also displays his apparently lifelong view that science cut off from philosophy (which for him meant, or at some point led to, metaphysics) will fall short in its vital mission of explaining facts and phenomena—a view dissenting sharply from reigning doctrines of the modern era. His largely implicit criticism of the modern assumption that science as such can do without philosophy merits clarification and evaluation.

Dos primeiros versos às últimas linhas: Mário de Andrade na trajetória literária de Pedro Nava

Este artigo discute a importância de Mário de Andrade na formação literária de Pedro Nava. Para isso, aborda uma carta de Mário, escrita em 1925, na qual encoraja Nava a privilegiar, em vários sentidos, a diversidade de referências linguísticas brasileiras. Inicialmente bastante preso ao modelo mariodeandradino, Nava irá adotar, cerca de 50 anos depois, uma prática ampliada dessa concepção em suas Memórias. Esse considerável intervalo temporal permite rever, ainda, o alcance de alguns pressupostos do modernismo brasileiro, retomados ou mesmo recriados pela prosa de Nava.

Copper and the evolution of space in high modernist America and Japan

Abstract This essay makes a neo-materialist analysis of the extraction and use of copper in the first half of the twentieth century, using two sites as empirical examples, one American and the other Japanese. By moving beyond the modernist dichotomies that separate mine and city, nature and technology, and the “natural” and built environment, I argue that copper has played a central role in creating modern human spatial relationships and associated cultures. I offer two specific examples. First, the extraction of copper and the resulting pollution challenged the modern capitalist idea that material things could be abstracted into idealized commodities of exchange that were spatially distinct from their places of origin and each other. In actual historical practice, though, this abstracted space of global commodity exchange was repeatedly undermined by local spaces where real commodities often interacted in unanticipated ways. Second, once this extracted copper was formed into far-flung networks of wires, it challenged earlier spatial concepts in which the burning of coal or other energy-rich materials had always occurred very near to the site where the resulting power would be used. By creating what Manuel Castells’ terms a “space of flow” in which power could be instantaneously transmitted over long distances, copper wires created the illusion of an immaterial and even placeless source of power. Ironically, though, this immaterial illusion could only be sustained by surrounding humans with large amounts of very real copper wires. In both of these examples, the extraction and use of copper shaped human space and societies in unanticipated ways, challenging the modernist assumption that humans could fully understand and control the material things they extracted from nature and embedded in their built environments.

The Economies of Love: Love marriage, kin support, and aspiration in a South Indian garment city

AbstractThe article considers narratives and experiences of love marriage in the garment city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, South India. As a booming centre of garment production, Tiruppur attracts a diverse migrant workforce of young men and women who have plenty of opportunity to fall in love and enter marriages of their own making. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the article explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape postmarital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of postmarital kin support is central to evaluations of love marriages by members of Tiruppur's labouring classes. Such marriages not only flout parental authority and often cross caste and religious boundaries, but they also jeopardize the much-needed kin support youngsters require to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship, and success in a post-liberalization environment. It is argued that critical evaluations of love marriages not only disrupt modernist assumptions of linear transformations in marital practices, but they also constitute a broader critique of the neoliberal celebration of the ‘individual’ while reaffirming the continued importance of caste endogamy, parental involvement, and kin support to success in India's post-reform economy.