Unified History Research Articles

Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development from the Stoics to Origen

This book traces, for the first time, a revolution in philosophy which took place during the early centuries of our era. It reconstructs the philosophical basis of the Stoics' theory that fragments of an ancient and divine wisdom could be reconstructed from mythological traditions, and shows that Platonism was founded on an argument that Plato had himself achieved a full reconstruction of this wisdom, and that subsequent philosophies had only regressed once again in their attempts to 'improve' on his achievement. The significance of this development is highlighted through parallel studies of the Hellenistic debate over the status of Jewish culture; and of the philosophical beginnings of Christianity, where the notions of 'orthodoxy' and 'heresy' in particular are shown to be tools in the construction of a unified history of Christian philosophy stretching back to primitive antiquity.

Reconstructing Ethnicity: Recorded and Remembered Identity in Taiwan

Ethnic identity can have a different basis locally than it does at the level of the larger society or ethnic group. This point is illustrated with a reconstruction of the early twentieth-century ethnic classification used in three villages in southwestern Taiwan. Discrepancies between estimates of ethnic intermarriage based on government records and on interview reports result from cross-ethnic adoptions. Interview reports more accurately portray the social experience of ethnic identity for adopted daughters and thus yield better estimates of intermarriage. Analysis of the discrepancy shows the local basis of Han identity to be culture, not, as for most Han, ancestry. (Ethnic identity, historical records, memory, intermarriage, adoption, Taiwan) Ethnic identities are changeable in their content and (e.g., Harrell 1996), yet they are commonly portrayed as fixed, with clear-cut borders, the product of a person's culture and/or ancestry, in which there is no choice about belonging or departing. In order to mobilize people behind their political agendas ... [governments and ethnic leaders] actively hide the fluidity and changeability of identity and group membership (Harrell 1996:5); they discuss identity in terms of purported common descent and/or purported common culture (including language), even though ultimately it is common sociopolitical experience that binds group identity (Brown n.d.). The concealment of fluidity is accomplished by constructing of (Bhabha 1990:1; Harrell 1996:4), origin myths (Keyes 1981:8; Williams 1989:429), or a reified History (Duara 1995:4) that portrays the group as having a long and unified history distinguished from other groups.(2) These narratives draw heavily on selected historic sociopolitical events to galvanize support for the claim that the group constitutes a socially and/or culturally distinct people. Although these narratives attempt to mask them, relatively recent changes in ethnic identity can nevertheless be deciphered and the basis for such changes can be reconstructed. At the end of the twentieth century, political leaders frequently used ethnic identity as constructed by narratives of unfolding to motivate and justify warfare. Indeed, ethnic identity in relation to national identity fuels tensions between Taiwan and China that could potentially lead to warfare. Why have these ideologies succeeded in their hegemonic goal of naturalizing ethnic relations and tensions? To answer this question requires analysis of the experience of ethnic identity for ordinary people in addition to other analyses of social power hierarchies (e.g., Gates 1996). Reconstructing ethnic identity and its changes is no less an interpretation of the past than are narratives of unfolding, but it offers a different vantage point: ordinary people's experience rather than the ideology of the elite. This article contributes to our understanding of ordinary people's experience of ethnic identity in two ways. First, by analyzing ethnic identities in terms of the social experience of individuals, it shows that local ethnic identity can have a different basis than that underlying identity claims in the larger ethnic group or society.(3) With contemporaneous variation, there is the potential for future change. Second, it offers a methodology for reconstructing past ethnic identity by comparing documentary and oral history reports. Analyzing the early twentieth-century ethnic classification used in the southwestern Taiwan villages of Jiashe, Yishe, and Bingshe brings out discrepancies between information drawn from the Japanese-period government household registers and information drawn from interview reports. Jiashe, Yishe, and Bingshe were considered plains Aborigine villages in the early twentieth century, in spite of their cultural similarity to neighboring Han villages and in spite of some patrilineal Han ancestry.(4) About 1930, however, Jiashe, Yishe, and Bingshe changed their ethnic identity from plains Aborigine to Han (Brown 1996, n. …

The Cultural Enframing of Nature: Environmental Histories during the Early German Romantic Period

Abstract The introduction of histories of nature in the late eighteenth century posed the epistemological problem of how to bring the diversity of empirical laws into theoretical unity. Whilst Goethe and Humboldt argued for the possibility of objective histories of nature through modes of disciplined perception, Schelling emphasised the inevitable subjectivity of such histories and the impossibility of displaying visually or instrumentally the internal processes generating manifest forms. Each of these three figures used different technologies of representation to produce their environmental histories. But all three gave a central role to aesthetic judgment in representing their view of a unified history of nature.

Into the West: the story of its people

When he was a teenager, growing up in New York, Walter Nugents only knowledge of the West came through Dragnet and B-movies, watching cops and villains speed along streets lined with palm trees. For many in the East, the Midwest, and the South, the Great West has remained terra incognita, a diverse, dynamic region with mythic origins and enormous influence over our culture and economics. With the benefit of an outsiders eyes, Nugent has constructed a new, unified history of the people of the West from earliest times to the present, answering why people came west and why, for the most part, they stayed. Because Nugent has conceived a social-demographic history ... a history of the people, not of their politics or other doings, he warns readers not to look for chapter breaks at 1776, 1865, or 1945--economic booms and depressions played a bigger role in the West than politicians and generals, it seems. Likewise, geography is contested, receiving knowing treatment as Nugent digs into whether the West is the Plains to the Pacific, or just Dodge City to the Sierras. Nugent successfully pursues broad themes, such as the regions rapid urbanization and its central role in the baby boom and the death of homesteading. But Into the West shows equal affection for the more personal stories, such as the extended conflict between Anglos and braceros in the Great Plains and the nascent rise of turn-of-the-century tourism (the Rock Island Railroad promised in 1903 that a month in California will do you more good than all the medicine in Christendom). -Paul Hughes

Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography

Reviewed by: Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography* Patricia Johnston (bio) Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. By Geoffrey Batchen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. xii+273; illustrations, notes/references, index. $35. In 1828, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre wrote to his partner Nicéphore Niépce: “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.” Though textbooks today generally credit Daguerre and Niépce with the invention of photography, announced to the public in 1839, they were part of much larger social, cultural, and technological movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that advanced the development of photography. Burning with Desire is Geoffrey Batchen’s historiographic [End Page 702] analysis of the telling of photography’s origin stories. The author announces one of his ambitious goals in the preface: “to rewrite the traditional history of photography’s origins” (p. xiii). Batchen does not attempt this rewrite through new discoveries in the archives, but rather through a reinterpretation of known information. Early on Batchen outlines the stakes. How these origin stories are told is crucial to supporting particular methodological approaches to photography: “recent approaches to photography all hinge on photography’s historical and ontological identity” (p. 17). The first chapter sketches the two dominant approaches to photography in the theoretical literature on photography of the last three decades: a “formalist” approach exemplified by John Szarkowski and Clement Greenberg and a “postmodern” approach Batchen identifies with John Tagg, Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Batchen asserts that the key difference between the older formalist and newer postmodern positions centers around the location of photography’s identity. The argument “reduces down to a single, deceptively simple question: Is photography to be identified with (its own) nature or with the culture that surrounds it” (p. 17). In other words, the formalists tend to see inherent and essential qualities in the photographic medium, while postmodernists tend to believe photography has no singular identity or unified history and that context shapes the meaning of a given photograph. Thus the stage is set for a critical reexamination in which Batchen will “look for the identity of photography in the history of its origins,” which the author implies will result in a new, post-postmodern view of the medium (p. 21). The three central chapters tackle the meaning of invention itself. Is the invention of photography a technological struggle that should be traced to the chemists and physicists who studied light prior to the nineteenth century? Or is the invention a concept, an idea, a desire for photography? Rather than engage in futile questions of who got there first, Batchen prefers to explore the writings of the numerous proto-photographers, the people who experimented or recorded a desire to photograph prior to 1839. Using Foucault’s archaeological method, he locates the origins of photography in concept and metaphor as much as technology, “to uncover,” as Foucault said, “the regularity of a discursive practice” (p. 36). Batchen reviews the ideas of about twenty protophotographers, including both the well known, such as Thomas Wedgwood, Humphry Davy, Samuel F. B. Morse, Hippolyte Bayard, and William Henry Fox Talbot, and the lesser known, such as the Brazilian Hercules Florence, the German Philipp Hoffmeister, and the Spaniard Jose Ramos Zapetti. Batchen argues that this cluster of activity, which intensified in the early decades after the turn of the nineteenth century, reveals a deep cultural need for what was to become photography. But its meaning was not immediately clear, emerging as it did along with the new philosophical and aesthetic views of the modern [End Page 703] era. The shifting definitions of nature and culture, original and copy, are reflected in the difficulties protophotographers had in deciding whether their inventions recorded nature or whether nature recorded herself. Niépce used two terms: physante (nature herself) and autophuse (copy by nature). And Daguerre, Batchen notes, “claimed, quite paradoxically, that the daguerreotype drew nature while allowing her to draw herself” (p. 177). Talbot hedged on the name he chose for his process: “Photogenic Drawing, or, The Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves.” Thus, Batchen argues, the earliest photographers avoided the binary thinking...

Theoriegeschichte oder Theoriegeschichten?. Über den Status der ökonomischen Dogmengeschichte / History or Histories of Economic Thought?. On the State of the History of Economic Thought

Zusammenfassung In der ökonomischen Theoriegeschichte bestehen parallel zwei Tendenzen: zum einen eine unifizierende, mehr oder minder lineare Geschichte der allmählichen Herausbildung des modernen Kerns der Ökonomie zu schreiben, zum anderen sich auf Heteronomie einzulassen, d. h. auf ein Kaleidoskop unterschiedlicher Erzählungen, die sich nicht auf einen corpus inertus zusammenbringen lassen. Die erste Linie dominiert die Theoriegeschichte; die zweite Linie wird aktuell stärker als früher erörtert. Es läßt sich, aus systematischen Gründen, zeigen, daß die erste Tendenz selber nur eine Geschichte unter vielen möglichen ist, d. h. keinen exklusiven Status anmelden kann. Es geht aber nicht um reinen Pluralismus, sondern um die Reflektion epistemologischer Differenzen, d. h. um die Anerkennung des Umstandes, daß differente Theorien differente Weltverständnisse haben. Wir haben es mit Interpretationen zu tun, die, wenn sie Theoriegeschichte betreiben wollen, nicht umhin können, die Weltverständnisse ihrer Zeit mitzudenken. Sonst versteht man kaum, welche Fragen sie formulierten (und welche nicht).

Nature as myth, symbol and action: notes towards a historical understanding of development and conservation in Kenyan Maasailand

Opening ParagraphHistory is often presented as a unilineal process whereby events follow on from each other in a causal sequence: A gives rise to B which in turn leads to C. While this structural form is extremely compelling as explanation, it has limitations when applied to the colonial encounter. The differences between the beliefs and practices of the people involved in this encounter, and the consequent variety in perceived significances of individual events, make it almost impossible to construct a unified history. The diversity of perceptions in historical events has been recognised and is most clearly seen in those historical accounts of the colonial encounter written from the perspective of the ‘other’ (Sahlins, 1981; 1985). However, these analyses, by focusing on events, still maintain the structural framework of conventional history.

Language as a Key to Latin American Historiography

Latin americanists have in recent years become increasingly concerned with constructing the basis for a unified history of Latin America. Frequently this enterprise leads them to contemplate the even larger design of a history of the Americas. While the New World may still be, in Hegel’s words, “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” it is now recognized as having an independent heritage; its history is no longer experienced as “only an echo of the Old World.”