Occidental Civilization Research Articles

Justicia, amor y disyunción en <em>Palais de Justice</em> (2014), de José Ángel Valente

En 2014 se publicaba Palais de Justice, el volumen en prosa donde José Ángel Valente recreaba el juicio desencadenado por el divorcio de su primera mujer en los años ochenta, y en el que se inscribe una paradoja entre el amor y el derecho, en la medida en que el primero es sometido al control biopolítico del segundo mediante la institución matrimonial. Partiendo del contraste entre justicia y ley propuesto por Jacques Derrida y otros pensadores contemporáneos, este artículo examina cómo, en el texto de Valente, el sentimiento amoroso opera una disyunción respecto a lo legal para desplegar un ámbito suspendido en el que habita un orden otro. Inquietudes permanentes de Valente como la atención a la mística o al lenguaje se actualizan en una postulación de la existencia como la «nuda vida» teorizada por Giorgio Agamben. Con ella se cuestiona el fundamento legalista de la civilización occidental.

The politics and poetics of Museology

It has become rather common to speak of the museum as a place of power. Whether one refers to it as media (Davallon, 1992), as medium (McLuhan, Parker & Barzun, 1969), or as device (Bennett, 1995), we must understand that this institution, emblematic of occidental civilization, has always aroused the interests of local political regimes, whatever they may be. The creation of the British Museum and the birth of the Louvre (Deotte, 1994; Pommier, 1995) illustrate the many different ways the pub...

The Chinese Pattern of the Past, in Comparative Perspective

This paper highlights and praises the main contributions of Professor Zhao’s remarkable book, The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History, especially its contribution to understanding warfare in Chinese history. But comments made about the weakness of states in Islamic and Occidental civilization are designed to better understand the pattern of the Chinese past. These comments allow endorsement of Professor Zhao’s views about the “rise of the West.”

How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved in Modern China

Abstract The entrance of “nature” from English to Chinese and the transformation of the word ziran in Chinese had been intertwined together. In the formal process, “nature” was not translated as ziran at first while in the latter process, the western concept and Chinese ideas of nature combined together with multiple, comprehensive meanings in the history of modern China. This means the second process consists some major transformations of ziran as a key concept in modern China. Firstly, it has been a process of materialization for the traditional concept of ziran from ancient China. Secondly, traditional ideas of nature like tian, tianran, ziran, got revived during their association and collaborations with western understandings of nature as a concept of naturalist philosophy. Thirdly, it was also in this process where a humanistic and existential definition of ziran began to emerge, not only as a response to the materialized understanding of ziran, but also created the confrontation between a material occidental civilization and a spiritual oriental civilization. This dualist view not only ignored other thought like Romantism, Humanism and ideas which go against materialism or scientism, but also overlooked materialism and scientism itself in the history of Modern China.

The EPA guidance on suicide treatment and prevention needs to be adjusted to fight the epidemics of suicide at the North Pole area and other autochthonous communities

More and more, youth suicide in the Inuit community is gaining importance, with a frequency in Greenland rising from 14.4 (1960–64) to 110.4 per 100,000 person-years (2010–11). The huge cultural/educational changes during the last 20 years and the role of globalization, especially of the occidental influence on this community may be at the origin of such an “epidemics” of suicide in this cultural region. Recently, a political organization representing the Inuit community in Canada (ITK for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami) launched a National Inuit Suicide Prevention Strategy (NISP) based on the specificities of this community in comparison to the occidental civilization. In fact, not only the Canadian Inuit community is concerned by this epidemics of suicide, but also many other autochthonous groups. In this context, the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) guidance on suicide treatment and prevention needs to be adjusted to autochthonous individuals’ needs.

Resistencia a la insulina y acción insulínica

Es importante reconocer el síndrome de resistencia a la insulina, lo que a menudo se está denominando enfermedad de la civilización occidental. El predominio de estas enfermedades se encuentra incrementado con la asociación de la epidemia de obesidad en países desarrollados. Se hace una revisión sobre obesidad, resistencia a la insulina, hipertensión arterial y síndrome de ovario poliquístico.

Denial of the Reality of State Terrorism in Argentina as Narrative of the Recent Past: A New Case of “Negationism”?1

This article applies the concept of negationism—from a French basis—to an analysis of the activities and discourse of groups and individuals who define the state terrorism applied in Argentina between 1975 and 1983 as a “war” against “Marxist subversion,” in defense of “Christian and Occidental Civilization.” By distorting history and systematically denying the reality of state terrorism, Argentine negationists try to disguise the vindication of state terrorism as a fight for the truth and memory. The article is organized in three parts. A brief review of the origins of this concept and of the negationist current in France is followed by a discussion of the differences between the concepts of revisionism and negationism. The gestation and historical evolution of this current are then analyzed and described; for this purpose, the article deals with some of the principal argumentations and tactics used by the negationists in their media appearances and street ceremonies: books, magazines, courses, conferences, literary gatherings, so-called study groups, Web sites, demonstrations, and public commemorations, claiming a “complete social memory,” are employed to instill a revision of Argentina's recent past. Finally, the article deals with the current stage of the evolution of negationist groups.

Denial of the Reality of State Terrorism in Argentina as Narrative of the Recent Past: A New Case of "Negationism"?

This article applies the concept of negationism—from a French basis—to an analysis of the activities and discourse of groups and individuals who define the state terrorism applied in Argentina between 1975 and 1983 as a war against Marxist subversion, in defense of Christian and Occidental Civilization. By distorting history and systematically denying the reality of state terrorism, Argentine negationists try to disguise the vindication of state terrorism as a fight for the truth and memory. The article is organized in three parts. A brief review of the origins of this concept and of the negationist current in France is followed by a discussion of the differences between the concepts of revisionism and negationism. The gestation and historical evolution of this current are then analyzed and described; for this purpose, the article deals with some of the principal argumentations and tactics used by the negationists in their media appearances and street ceremonies: books, magazines, courses, conferences, literary gatherings, so-called study groups, Web sites, demonstrations, and public commemorations, claiming a complete social memory, are employed to instill a revision of Argentina's recent past. Finally, the article deals with the current stage of the evolution of negationist groups.

Reflexive Exceptionalism

In this paper I argue that a reflexive type of exceptionalism was articulated by the reformist elites in late imperial China as a cultural strategy to confront and appropriate the hegemonic representation of modern democratic power and Occidental civilization that was articulated on the basis of Tocqueville's exceptionalist image of America and imposed by Western imperialism. By delineating the temporal and normative structure of this reflexive exceptionalism and reconstructing the quasi-religious meanings of its myths and rituals, I propose that the motif of `Confucian religion' in the reformist study society movement should be understood in terms of its intent to produce and discipline a social power that could be mobilized for China's ideological and political competition with the West. While the movement ended in failure with the rise of a fundamentalist reaction, the fate of Chinese exceptionalism under the changing power structure of contemporary world society can be properly understood with reference to its historical origin and transformation.

Liberal Globalization and Peripheral Justice

The increasing salience of cultural conflicts in the post-Cold War era brings the problem of peripheral justice, defined as the equal attainment of social justice, to the center of current debates on globalization. Specifically, they force us to directly confront the toughest challenge posed by the Weberian tradition: If the principles of justice and equality are beyond the peculiarity of the Occidental civilization, how then may we give a full explanation as to why in the West-and only in the West-the ideal of public reasoning by private people has been materialized? The present study seeks to address this fundamental challenge by drawing on the Marxist tradition of public hegemony developed by Confucian Marxists and Gramsci. I argue that at the core of the problem of peripheral justice is an intrinsic linkage between Eurocentricism and the liberal paradigm of "civil society." The prospect of equal justice, therefore, hinges on the development of a new conception of the "social" that reverses the liberal interpretation of the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and the "social" and derives from the primacy of the ethical life for social formation.

The Homeric Question: An Issue for the Ancients?

What is oral tradition in ancient Greece? In ancient Greece, the question of oral tradition is closely related to the famous Homeric Question. Even if many problems remain without answer, it is today a well recognized fact that the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, derive from an oral tradition. However, it remains very remarkable how long it took to discover and prove that derivation. How can we explain this difficulty in recognizing an oral dimension in the Homeric poems? We could still argue that Occidental civilization is what Derrida calls a “civilization of the Book” and that for centuries a great poet has had to be a writer. This explanation is, however, insufficient. Greece itself bears major responsibility for the longstanding misapprehension. Until the fourth century BCE, Greek civilization was une civilisation de la parole. In every activity and in every field, people were trained to repeat or reproduce speeches by others. Writers such as Herodotus or Plato exemplified these procedures of transmission, in which one remembered the words of another who himself quoted a speech originally made by someone else. Indeed, the symposium furnished a cultural occasion to perpetuate this activity of transmission and reproduction of speech. Furthermore, Greeks were perfectly conscious of the advantage of versification to aid memory. Aristotle even undertook to show how metrical poetry adapted itself progressively to the different genres of poetry. But in spite of all of this, Greece seemed to pay no attention to the enigma of Homeric poetry. Amazingly enough, they never recognized the Iliad or the Odyssey as the result of an oral tradition going back to a distant past and transforming previous mythological stories. Homer was for them a composer of fixed poems who lived after the Trojan war (Herodotus proposed to situate him four centuries before himself), and it was clear to everyone that rhapsodes perpetuated his poems with total fidelity. In effect, there was no Homeric Question in ancient Greece. This may not directly help us to answer the question posed above, but it does suggest that our inquiry must also consider how the Greeks themselves conceptualized orality and speech transmission

Health care in the Bible and the Talmud.

"The thought patterns of occidental civilization have been basically influenced by the mentalities of two peoples: the ancient Greeks, with their lucid reasoning and logical approach to scientific problems, and the People of the Book, with their intuitive ethical teachings, their timeless moral laws, and, last but by no means least, their ethically based health rules.” (Rosner, p.3).

The notion of rationality in the work of Max Weber

The'PrefatoryNote' written in 1920 shortly before his death with which Weber introduced his Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion has rightly become famous, both for its sweeping universal-histor ical breadth and as his ultimate legacy which focuses on rationality as the key to occidental civilization and to the work of Weber (cf. Lowith 1960, Nelson 1975a, Tenbruck 1975a). Yet what holds for his ultimate legacy does not necessarily hold for his entire life-work and its different stages (cf. Bendix i960, Baumgarten 1964, Francis 1966, Rex 1971, Mommsen 1974b, Tenbruck 1975a) during which his concepts and methods underwent considerable changes. For example, however strong his emphasis on means and ends (Zwecke) and on values, his famous notion of Zweckrationalitaet (i.e., purposive rationality) does not show up until 1913, while the no less renowned notion of Wertrationalitaet (value rationality) is even as late as his ' fundamental categories of sociology ' of 1920. It is then only in 1919/1920 that Weber's sociology took on its final form.

The Potlatch System of the Southern Kwakiutl: A New Perspective

HIS PAPER is, first, an attempt to reconstruct the potlatch system of Southern Kwakiutl society around the last decade of the eighteenth century, i.e. at the beginning of direct contact with Occidental civilization; and, second, an argument that in aboriginal times the potlatch had a very real pro-survival or subsistence function, serving to counter the effects of varying resource productivity by promoting exchanges of food from those groups enjoying a temporary surplus to those groups suffering a temporary deficit.2 In making this reconstruction, I find myself forced by the data to depart from the orthodox portrait of the Kwakiutl potlatch and to develop another based on data rather neglected in the literature. At the same time, there is no need to reject the orthodox picture as at least an approximately accurate description of later Kwakiutl potlatching, because the later form can be deduced from the proposed model of the aboriginal potlatch when certain actual historical processes, i.e. the events of the contact period, are fed in as conditions disturbing the original state of equilibrium specified in the model. Therefore, although this paper is not intended as a reconstruction of Kwakiutl history, it does provide an explanation for some of the responses that actually occurred in the historic period. In particular, I wish to present evidence for the following propositions: (a) The Kwakiutl have been commonly described as having a fantastic surplus economy distinguished by a great abundance of food and other natural resources further maximized by efficient methods of exploiting and storing the various products; this great abundance, preserved in summer, fed the people throughout the winter,

Church Sects and Parties

ded in the spiritual, moral, political, and legal system of society. It must be, together with this, disciplined, animated, and unified by fundamental conceptions of our civilization. Its smooth and vigorous operation largely depends upon social and political conditions at large being compatible with the economic constitution of the competitive system relying on private interest and initiative. Such are: First, political conditions maintaining nationally and internationally a clear and relatively stable demarcation between the field of public activity and the field of business and a clear cut between public law and commercial and civil law; second, protection of business from overtaxation and monetary instability through wellordered public finance in all the main capitalistic states; third, interconnection of international markets and price systems and a consistent operation of international credit and monetary standards. The capitalistic system could only meet with so mairaculously favorable and compatible social conditions all over the world because it is itself one of the expressions of the spirit which gives unity and vigor to that Occidental civilization which conquered the world during the last few centuries. With this unity in spirit making for compatibility and consistency between the different spheres of life, European society was able to develop its predomninant role in the world as well in the political as in the cultural and the economic fields. Moreover, the system could be maintained only when in all countries leading groups equally interested in the development of capitalistic life defended it. These groups, however, were able to maintain themselves and their positions onlv as long as they possessed the aristocratic quality of a consciousness for the consistency and logic of the set-up of Occidental civilization, not only in its economy, but in all its aspects, and the sense for its final values.

Early Arabic Printing at the Cape of Good Hope

A thorough and scientific treatment of the historiography of the African Muslim peoples and institutions south of the Zambesi is a long-felt and eminent want. As yet, this particular field of research has hardly been explored, and its results, if collected and evaluated, would add tangibly to our contemporary knowledge of Oriental penetration in lands where Europeans have founded new homes and fostered a vitalist conception of Occidental civilization.

Nomadic Herding Regions

N XOMADIC herding is the dominant and almost exclusive mode of agricultural land occupance in a vast stretch of territory in Asia and Africa that makes up perhaps one-tenth of the earth's total land surface. That the very large area thus occupied is no true measure of the real importance of nomadic herding, however, is readily demonstrated by comparing a map showing the location and extent of this type of agriculture (Fig. 1) with maps of density of population. Such a comparison reveals the fact that except for small and scattered spots of concentration, the population density of this immense area is very low. The insignificance to the at large of the regions of nomadic herding is further emphasized by a tabulation of the names of the countries that lie within these regions; without exception the list comprises land-s that have but little contact with the interdependent commercial world of today. Periodically in the past, however, the populations of these now unimportant lands have powerfully affected, by persistent and damaging raids, their immediate neighbors in China, India, Mesopotamia, Eastern and Central Europe, North Africa and Spain, and the Sudan. At. present the tables are turned, and railroads, airplane routes, and military force are driving wedges of occidental civilization into the lands of the nomads. Even so, the conquest is not complete; the British government, for example, keeps a strong army on the Northwest Frontier of India to ward off depredations of nearby hill tribes of nomadic herders.

Heart disease in the American negro of the South

In view of the facts that heart disease in the negro as compared with the white race is of greater incidence, occurs at a younger age, pursues a more rapid course, and has a higher mortality rate, the opinion is offered that the cardiovascular system of the American negro of the South is inferior to that of the white race, and is more vulnerable to insult whether this be applied as an infection, a degeneration, a toxemia, or in the form of the stress and strain incident to the complexities and modes of modern occidental civilization.

Japan's Position in the Far East

The subject assigned to me is Japan's Position in the Far East. The Himalaya Mountains may be called the fountain head of the two great waves of human energy and endeavor of which all our enlightened modern civilization is the result. From the western slopes there began, in remote time, that Aryan march which established its dominion over the whole of Europe and flowered into occidental civilization. From the mountain's eastern sides