Modern Origins Research Articles

“The Horror of It Made Me Mad”: Hysterical Narration in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)

This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially Othered groups of this period—racialized foreigners, New Women, and the urban poor—as well as (pseudo)scientific studies from the 1870s–80s, this reading notes the ways that Victorian cultural biases surrounding race, gender, and class could be projected onto Gothicized, Orientalized figures in literary texts. Pairing a postcolonial examination of the novel’s spatial and temporal elements with a psychoanalytic reading of this text, I argue that the slowing pace in Robert Holt’s narrative and the compulsive repetition of Marjorie Lindon’s both reflect the novel’s disruption of space and time and structurally parallel the symptoms of a “hallucinatory hysterical attack,” as conceived by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Together, these hysterical narratives reveal the failure of particular cultural and scientific discourses to completely bury Victorian anxieties about modernity into different, explicitly Othered spaces and times by collapsing both space and time in the narration of psychic trauma.

Development as Labour and Labour as Development: Korczak’s Philosophy of Labour Against the Background of Interwar Childhoods

In this article, I consider two Korczakian conceptions complementary to each other of children’s labour as a means of building their agency and autonomy. The first is the concept of labour as development. While the second is development as labour. I analyse testimonies from Korczak’s institutions, including notes gleaned from children’s accounts Wspomnienia z maleńkości dzieci Naszego Domu w Pruszkowie [Recollections from the Children of Our Home in Pruszków], children’s texts (Mały Przegląd [Little Review]) and programme and literary texts by Janusz Korczak/Henryk Goldszmit and Maria (Maryna) Falska, who collaborated with him. In the anthropological perspective of new childhood studies I ponder the radicalism of Korczak’s projects involving child labour in light of the time, their perspective on child labour, and childhood itself. In what sense did they have modern origins? And in what sense did they transcend modernity – along with its concepts of childhood and child development?

Demographic Challenges for the Caucasian Race: What Can the Assimilation of Cultures on the European Continent Lead to?

Nowadays, the problem of the disappearance of primitive culture, the primary foundations of people’s self-consciousness, which are lost in conditions that promote the imposition of values, through politicisation, crisis phenomena, economic consequences, during forced migration and the search for more comfortable living conditions, is acute. The process of social modification occurs due to unconventional changes in culture, which acts as the “face” of the identification of nation, changes in the collective consciousness, identity and moral cohesion. The purpose of the study is to define the concept of cultural assimilation, its types and consequences, and identify demographic factors that cause changes in the existence of culture on the European continent. For a comprehensive investigation of this problem, the following methods were used: analysis and synthesis, comparative method, hermeneutical method, and interpretive method. The study results theoretically revealed current demographic problems that make changes in the cultural environment, disclosed possible consequences of assimilation of cultures on the European continent, investigated the differences between assimilation of cultures and cultural diffusion, and determined the nature of culture shock. The features and strength of cultural integration and its relationship with national and cultural autonomy are theoretically analysed, and the historical and modern origins of the mechanism of cultural assimilation on the European continent are revealed. The study aims to identify demographic changes and factors that encourage the assimilation of cultures, reveal the consequences of implementation, and influence the identification of ethnic groups and their position in the world. Theoretically, the presented material serves as a practical information base, which encourages a deeper investigation of the cultural mechanism and the creation of certain measures, the purpose of which is to preserve cultural integrity, as the main source that strengthens the state power and ethnicity of the people

The Modern Origins & Sources of China's Techtransfer

The research identified the key element on P. R. China’s incentives in modern history on techtransfer practices. With reviewing on the state funding surrogacy in the natural sciences, the author identified the key militant coercive contracting clauses in the document of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. With its combined workings with the statutory & martial laws, the analysis takes a comparative culture approach that partially counteracts the work of the “United Front Working Group of the CPC”, which constitutes as the major cyber espionage organization that manifests upon the communication & information technologies. The “United Front”’s work has substabtially undermined the premices of market economy and eroded the markets’ self-organizing & self-regulating functionalities. With heterogenous semantic networks taken into consideration, the psychosociological elements were taken into consideration even with the psychological data codings in the semantic networks of P. R. China.

Posthuman rights struggles and environmentalisms from below in the political ontologies of Ecuador and Colombia

In a decolonial determination to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, political ontologies and posthuman legalities in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces as inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse. After years of Indigenous struggles, new social movement mobilizations and citizen activism, twenty-first-century constitutional changes in the region have affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region’s polities. Drawing upon extensive interdisciplinary ethnographic research in Ecuador and Colombia, the article illustrates how Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities express multispecies relations of care and conviviality in opposition to modern extractivist development through the concept of buen vivir. These grassroots collective life projects and life plans articulate rights ‘from below’ to support new practices of territorialization that further materialize natures’ rights and community ideals. Although human rights have modern origins, the implementation of third generation collective biocultural rights to fulfill natures’ rights may help to materially realize community norms, autonomies and responsibilities that exceed modern ontologies. The ecocentric territorial rights struggles and posthuman legalities we explore are examples of a larger emergent project of decolonizing human rights in a politics appropriate to the Anthropocene.

The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. Peter Boxall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+411.

<i>The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life</i>. Peter Boxall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+411.

The Politics of Petitioning: Parliament, Government, and Subscriptional Cultures in the United Kingdom, 1780–1918

AbstractOver the course of the long nineteenth century, people in the United Kingdom signed a wide variety of petitions, addresses, testimonials, and related documents. Though many forms of subscriptional culture had medieval and early modern origins, their transformations across this period reveal the shifting perceptions of the crown, parliament, the administrative state, and local government. The article draws on a dataset of more than 1 million petitions to the House of Commons and surviving data from the House of Lords, alongside qualitative evidence of signed addresses to other authorities. This reveals a pattern whereby applications and requests increasingly took new, bureaucratic forms, and petitions became more closely associated with the representation of public opinion. The study suggests the value of examining the practices and processes, alongside the languages and ideas, that shaped political culture. This emphasises the participatory and representative politics of name‐signing as a means to materialise popular opinion in a responsive ‐ but not democratic ‐ state.

Camilo Barcia Trelles on Francisco de Vitoria: At the Crossroads of Carl Schmitt’s Grossraum and James Brown Scott’s ‘Modern International Law’

Abstract Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) undertook a re-interpretation of the modern origins of the discipline of international law, placing Vitoria at its pivot, as the Spanish international law professor Camilo Barcia Trelles (1888–1977) had done before. Barcia’s work had a strong influence on some of the seminal pieces on international law and geopolitics that Schmitt wrote in the period from 1941 to 1950. This was the case for Schmitt’s historical mythology of the opposition between sea and earth and its juridical consequence, his doctrine of the Grossraum, which had as its basis Barcia’s account of the Monroe Doctrine, and also of Schmitt’s critique of the ‘discrimination of war’ formalized in the Kellogg–Briand Pact. According to Barcia, the exclusion of European powers from the American continent by the United States as a rising hegemon was transformed – thanks to its domination of the sea – into the global reach of a world police power. Barcia did not agree with Brown Scott’s transformation of international law through American liberal internationalism into ‘modern international law’. While Brown Scott and Schmitt were competing for two opposing vernaculars of the discipline in search for a new definition and to shape it, Barcia was instrumental in the opposed efforts of these two apparently very dissimilar representatives of international law by ushering Vitoria into their service.

The Early Modern Origins of Pragmatism

Abstract This paper considers the alleged pragmatism of Berkeley’s philosophy using the two Sellarsian categories of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of the world and human beings. The ‘manifest’ image is regarded as a refinement of the ordinary way of conceiving things, and the scientific image is seen as a theoretical picture of the world provided by science. The paper argues that the so-called Berkeleian pragmatism was an effect of Berkeley’s work towards a synthesis of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images through the creation of one unified synoptic vision of the world and was a part of a new conceptual framework within which these two images could be combined.

French mainstream online press covering a Hollywood pacifist war drama: The case ofTu ne tueras point

This article outlines and discusses two aspects of the French mediatization of Tu ne tueras point ( Hacksaw Ridge) film: the relationship between media, normative secularism and religion in the context of the hegemony of mediatization as ‘media and communication-centered’ phenomenon. Based on the content analysis and discursive strategies of the biographical war drama chronicles, the contribution points out less developed empirical aspects in France regarding the relation between religion and media: (a) the media discourse is dependent on a normative narrative of secularism, (b) the media discourse represents and expresses a confusion between the sacred, religion and faith, deliberately created and maintained by the journalists, and (c) the media discourse is based on a conception of violence with modern origins.

A EMERGÊNCIA DA ÉTICA SOCIOAMBIENTAL E A QUESTÃO DOS TRANSGÊNICOS

This article aims to analyze socio-environmental ethics in the technological age from its modern roots. Based on the theoretical framework centered on modern and contemporary thinkers, reflections on the concepts alluding to socio-environmental ethics were used, based on an interdisciplinary approach. In this context, the origins of a technological thought and its implications in relation to nature and man himself were discussed. Finally, some ethical questions related to the production of transgenic plants will be analyzed, in favor of an ecologically balanced environment for present and future generations.Among the main authors used to deepen the issues pertaining to Socio-Environmental Ethics and its modern origins are: Rousseau (1754), Condorcet (1993); Larrère and Larrère (1997); Jonas (2006); Singer (2006); Vázquez (2010); Parizeau (2007); Leopold (1949). Regarding the ethical reflections related to the release of transgenic plants into the environment, works by authors such as: Lacey (2006a, 2008, 2010) and Ferment (2015) were analyzed.

Married Monastics and Military Life: Contradictions and Conflicted Identities within South Korea’s Buddhist Chaplaincy System

Since its modern origins in the Buddhist Purification Movement of the 1950s, South Korea’s Jogye Order has established monastic celibacy as central to its identity and claim to legitimacy as a Buddhist sect. However, in the order’s urgency to introduce Buddhist chaplains to the South Korean military in the 1960s, after almost two decades of Protestant monopoly over the chaplaincy program, the Jogye Order permitted its chaplains to marry; a practice which soon became the norm. This contradiction grew increasingly problematic for the order over subsequent decades and, in 2009, it attempted to resolve the issue by reversing the marriage exception for chaplains, reinforcing their identity as monastics within the order. While controversial, the resolution has proved effective in practice. However, this reversal has also provoked unprecedented lawsuits against South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense in 2017 and a ruling by Korea’s Human Rights Commission in 2018, challenging the Jogye Order’s exclusive control of the military’s Buddhist chaplaincies. Given the challenges these issues currently present to the Jogye Order’s chaplaincy program, this article interrogates the origins, history, significance, and impact of the issues surrounding the order’s marriage exemption for its military chaplains.

“Voodoo Doll”: Implications and Offense of a Taxonomic Category

This paper focuses on the persistent use of a particular term, “Voodoo Doll,” to classify certain artifacts and argues that it is both fundamentally misleading in its history of applications and especially egregious in the current debate over the openness of classics to people of color. Voodoo Doll not only exploits caricatures of Afro-Caribbean religion, it maintains a fundamental error in the interpretation of ancient ritual figurines: that is, the assumption of a primitive “law of sympathy.” This paper reviews current scholarship on ancient ritual figurines and then discusses the category Voodoo Doll and its modern origins, with an argument for its abandonment.

The Late Modern Origins of Early Modern Governance

The Late Modern Origins of Early Modern Governance Antonis Hadjikyriacou (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Governance, Historiography, Ottoman Empire The conceptual tools associated with the historiography of early modernity have received scant attention.1 The lexicon for the study of this period currently includes concepts such as fluidity, ambiguity, adaptability, permeability, malleability, flexibility, accommodation, elasticity, pragmatism, exchange, or encounter. I will here discuss the context within which this trend emerged, and then shift attention to a recently popular term used to describe imperial rule: governance. The idea of early modernity as an explanatory, analytical or heuristic tool—different those purposes as they may be—gained traction in Ottomanist historiography sometime in the 1990s. The timing was not by chance. Firstly, as more than one contributor to this volume has pointed out, this was the result of the historiographical quest to offer a valid alternative to the orientalist decline paradigm. Early modernity implied that the Ottoman Empire was not inherently different from its European counterparts and experienced similar or identical historical processes. One of the pioneers of early modernity in the Ottoman context, Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj, insisted on a social history agenda— interestingly, something that was gradually abandoned by later proponents of the approach. The early modern perspective opened new vistas for comparative studies, something that radically changed the field. However, the development of this perspective proved unable to account for historical questions at the explanatory level—unless one assumes that the Ottoman Empire failed to transition from early modernity to modernity proper, thereby adopting a developmentalist stage-theory approach of national state building. [End Page 37] This brings us to the second reason why the concept of early modernity appeared in the 1990s: That modernization theory had by then reached its explanatory capacity. The quest for a teleological path to the modern nation-state had restricted historians for too long. Scholars no longer accept long-standing binaries such as institutionalized/informal practices, centralization/decentralization, consolidated/fluid identities, or market/moral economy. Rather, the current consensus understands these processes as coexisting in non-mutually exclusive ways. This lack of consistency with modernization theory and its foundational assumptions did not preclude the development of modern structures. On a different level, the waning of area studies was another associated development, giving room for global, connected or entangled history.2 Equally important is the political/ideological context of this conjuncture. The end of the Cold War heralded the victory of liberal democracy and its values. The notion of multiculturalism rose in prominence both as ideology and policy in order to provide answers to questions of cultural and religious diversity or integration in the face of waves of migrants and refugees in the western world. Influenced by this intellectual climate, which concurrently included a temporary (if superficial) receding of nationalist ideology and historiography, historians turned to multiethnic and multireligious empires for answers and inspiration. The Ottoman Empire was a particularly fertile ground to elaborate on and document what an early modern multicultural polity looked like and how it administered and managed its populations. Despite the value and usefulness (if not necessity) of abandoning the rigid categories of modernization theory, there are various problems with the way early modernity has been conceptualized. I will limit my comments here to the lexicon of early modernity that I have referred to in my introductory paragraph. To name one implication that has escaped attention, the ease with which such concepts are employed renders early modernity a reflection of the current condition of late modernity. In other words, the language of the present globalized condition is projected back to a romanticized primordial pre-modern past. Such a linear periodization means that the flexibility and fluidity of early and late modernity were interrupted by a modern “digression,” which temporarily consolidated the human condition. Thus, it reifies modernity itself as the central and defining element of the preceding and subsequent era. The sense conveyed by most studies celebrating the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of Ottoman rule is that of a paradise lost, a cosmopolitan milieu that [End Page 38] twentieth-century nationalist modernity may have obliterated, but is coming back with a vengeance. Click for larger view View...

C.I. Lewis, E.J. Nelson, and the Modern Origins of Connexive Logic

C.I. Lewis, E.J. Nelson, and the Modern Origins of Connexive Logic

Born in Translation

Around the turn of the twentieth century, late Qing (1644–1911) thinkers settled on an ancient term, Zhongguo, as an appropriate name for the nation-form to supplant the empire that had run its course. The renaming was directly inspired by the “Western” idea of “China,” which had no equivalent in native geopolitical conceptions of the area so designated and “mis-recognized” its historical political configurations. The renaming called for radical re-signification of the idea of Zhongguo, the political and cultural space it presupposed, and the identification it demanded of its constituencies. Crucial to its realization was the reimagination of the past and the present’s relationship to it. This essay explores the reasons late Qing intellectuals felt it necessary to rename the country, the inspiration they drew upon, and the spatial and temporal presuppositions of the new idea of China/Zhongguo. Their reasoning reveals the modern origins of historical claims that nationalist and Orientalist historiography has endowed with timeless longevity.

The Devil Wears White: Teutonic Knights and the Problem of Evil in Polish Historiography

This paper addresses the intersection of moral condemnation, national antagonism, and civilizational critique in the images of the Teutonic Order as presented in Polish historical discourse since the early nineteenth century, with references to their medieval and early modern origins. For more than 150 years, the Order played the role of the archenemy in the historical imagination of Poles. This image is typically considered an element of the anti-German sentiment, fueled by modern nationalism. In this paper I argue that the scale and nature of the demonization of the Teutonic Knights in Polish historiography is more complex, and should be interpreted in the contexts of pre-modern religious rhetoric on the one hand, and the critique of Western civilization from a peripheral or semi-colonial point of view on the other. The durability and flexibility of the black legend of the Order, born in the late Middle Ages, and adapted by Romantic, modern nationalist, and communist historians, makes it a unique phenomenon, surpassing the framework of modern nationalism. It is the modern anti-German stereotype that owes much to this legend, rather than the other way around.

Improvement of mineral nutrient content of tomato through selection of cultivars and soil fertility

Depleted soil fertility and high-yielding cultivars have been associated with low nutrient contents in vegetables. This study explored if elemental nutrient concentrations in tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) can be increased through selection of cultivars and nutritional regimes. Cultivars with different phenotypes of heirloom and modern origins were studied in field experiments in two years. Chemical fertilizer (10-10-10), compost, and an organic fertility regime of soybean meal, bone meal, and potassium sulfate were assessed for their effects on growth and composition of fruits of the cultivars. Differences in nutrient concentrations between modern or heirloom cultivars or among fertility treatments were small or non-significant. Differences among individual cultivars for each element were large with some cultivars having nearly twice the concentrations of nutrients of others and with considerable uniformity in cultivar rankings among the elements. This work suggests that cultivars can be selected for production of nutrient-dense tomatoes.

Policing labour in empire: the modern origins of the Kafala sponsorship system in the Gulf Arab States

ABSTRACT This study traces the modern origins of the Kafala migrant labour sponsorship system in the Gulf Arab States. The sponsorship system was a product of the British colonial era, particularly the period from the 1920s until independence in the 1970s. Colonial administrators introduced sponsorship requirements in order to control labour migration in the pearl industry shortly before the discovery of oil in the region, and its use was further regularized and widely applied with the increasing migrant labour working in the oil companies. British officials viewed migrant labour as both a necessity and a problem that needed to be regulated and controlled, both from the viewpoint of economic growth and security. As jurisdiction over foreigners was retroceded back to the newly created states in the independence era, sponsorship of foreign labour was ultimately restricted and delegated to citizens or companies owned by citizens. As a particular example, the case of the ‘bachelor’ worker is detailed as a legal-bureaucratic complex of sponsorship practices. Such practices are placed within a wider ensemble of British colonial policies for controlling labour and policing empire across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Learning from Rome:

To walk through a city, stroll down a street, and pause in a public square is to be enveloped in history.1 But people typically pass through built environments without considering them as totalities of topography, architecture, and human history—like hiking a landscape without understanding its geology and ecology. Scholars, however, seek to grasp how and why humans have formed and re-formed built environments, preserving, altering, or destroying fabric over time. With the advent of digital, data-driven approaches and increasingly powerful mapping tools, can we better make sense of complex, historically rich built environments? The case of Rome offers an ideal opportunity to address this question. Often compared to a palimpsest, the Eternal City has historical layers that span millennia. Consider, for example, the modern-day Piazza Navona, the proportions and curved northern end of which recall the ancient Stadium of Domitian still partially present underground. The city is a vast archive and thus a huge challenge to comprehend in spatial and temporal terms. Freud famously used it as a metaphor for a memory that one could submerge in one's psyche but never fully expunge.2 Our question here concerns both urban history and architectural history. Whether one is more interested in the former or the latter, the first step is to know what was where, and when. This basic spatiotemporal knowledge is the foundation for any evidence-based historical exploration of the physical and social fabrics of the past. Here we present principles and examples of existing and potential digital approaches that enable scholars to tackle the challenges of studying complex built environments. We begin with a discussion of the early modern origins and the modern-day value of the spatiotemporal approach. We then turn to consider how data-driven approaches and digital maps benefit our discipline. Finally, we present case studies about …