Showing papers in "Studies in History in 1987"

Madness and society in England: the historiography reconsidered.

Abstract: Despite the madness of key figures in English history-most notably King George III’-it is perhaps not surprising that insanity and the measures taken to deal with it (psychiatry, both personal and institutional) have never been central topics in historical research and interpretation. For one thing, insanity has always been a delicate subject, surrounded by layers of silence. Possibly this has created the impression that it would be voyeuristic to investigate this unfortunate condition; but without doubt, it has put grave practical hurdles in the way of historical researchers, because records concerning mad people and the institutions housing them have commonly either

The Worship of Pir Sakhi Sarvar: Illness, Healing and Popular Culture in the Punjab:

Abstract: In 1896, in a vernacular pamphlet, Gyani Dit Singh of the important Sikh Singh Sabha sodo-religious movement, censured the worship of the popular. saint Sakhi Sarvar. In this Punjabi tract, he argued that it was futile to go to the shrine of the saint in west Punjab in order to cure illness or in the hope of miracles to overcome the material and spiritual problems of human existence. Why a prominent Sikh intellectual in the last quarter of the nineteenth century should object to the worship of a popular saint who had been revered for hundreds of years is an intriguing question. One possible answer that has often been implicitly or explicitly suggested is that the expansion of the Empire and its ideological institutions, such as schools, printing presses and newspapers, in the Punjab, produced a more modern and rational

Pastoralists in the Prehistory of Baluchistan

Abstract: third millennium B.C. In analysing these developments, the role of pastoral nomadism should be considered. In 1978 Shaffer pointed out that mobile pastoralists could have been responsible for long-distance and short-cycle flows of goods; being dependent on exchanges with agricultural communities, they would have formed the linkages between the various culture traditions of prehistoric Baluchistan. In order to explore this idea more fully, this article surveys the available ethnographic data for information on pastoral mobility, herder-cultivator relationships, and social and political organisation among pastoral societies. If Shaffer’s interpretation of the development of social complexity stresses the variables of uncertain rainfall and agriculture, pressures on resources which led to the occupation of marginal lands, intensified intercultural exchanges and differentiated access to prime agricultural land (with an accompanying intensification of common ’crisis rituals’),’ the following discussion, drawing from the ethnography of pastoral societies, develops a somewhat different set of emphases. Today, in some parts of Baluchistan, such as the most arid Iranian west, pastoralists may outnumber agriculturalists two to once. This is closely related to the geography of the region. The rainfall is meagre, varying in average from 70 to 250 mm per annum, and is markedly seasonal and erratic. True to its borderlands character,’ Baluchistan receives both winter rainfall from westerly winds as well as summer precipitation from the flanks of the southwest monsoon, the comparative incidence varying from region to region. The present day vegetation is correspondingly sparse, with a larger area covered by grass and shrub rather than by stands of juniper, pistachio or shisham.

Attitudes Towards Religion and Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal: Tattvabodhini Sabha, 1839-59:

Abstract: were disseminated, others were sensitive to the possible adverse effects of the intrusion of the West on indigenous culture and institutions. Even if the early nineteenth century was not ’an auspicious era,’ as Alexander Duff termed it,2 it was a period of considerable turmoil, both cultural and intellectual. The intellectual and cultural concern during this period was expressed through the ideas and activities of these organisations. The more important and influential were the Academic Association (1828), the Gaudiya Samaj (1830), the Sarbatattvadipika Sabha (1832), the Bangabhasa Prakasika Sabha (1836), the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge (1838), and the Tattvabodhini Sabha. In the existing historiography’ they find only a passing reference, as forums formed by important socio-religious activists. What is thus overlooked is their contribution to the making of the sociocultural attitudes, which is what this essay seeks to examine.

Literature as Ideology: Rudyard Kipling's Creative World:

Abstract: Kipling was not only a successful versifier and novelist, but also a journalist and social commentator of some stature. With his well-defined positions on important social and political issues, coupled with his unshaken belief in ’Pax Britannica’, he became England’s Chief Imperial Spokesman.’ By the turn of the century, he achieved the status of a celebrity-a national institution of sorts. The staggering impact of his powerful and pervasive presence on the minds of his contemporaries is reflected in the cartoons of Max Beerbohm

Commissars and Bagmen: Russia During the Civil War, 1918-21

Abstract: The significance of War Communism (June 1918 to March 1921) lies in its being the Revolution answer to the first challenge to its very existence, namely, the Civil War and foreign intervention. War Communism brought into the sharpest possible focus the central apparent paradox of the first socialist revolution, that is, its occurrence in conditions of a backward, rather than a mature, capitalism. It, therefore, had to attempt to lay the foundations of the future socialist society in conditions of the acutest scarcity, rather than of the abundance to which it was presumably theoretically entitled. This resulted in the two defining features of War Communism: first, the focus on distribution rather than on production and, second, the concentration of power and authority in the Party rather than in their dispersal through a series of lower instances. Economic planning, therefore, consisted essentially of forced requisitions, central allocations and the virtual abolition of the market system, along with its prime lubricant, money. This, inter alia, necessitated the centralisation of power in the Central Committee and provincial tiers of a militarised party rather than its spread within its local committees, trade unions and soviets. There was, nonetheless, a widespread opinion in the Party that all this was leading to socialism rather than merely to ensuring military victory and economic survival. In one of the earliest theoretical expositions of the nature of War Communism, Bukharin celebrated the supersession of capitalist economic categories (such as the commodity, money and wages) by the ’naturalisation’ of economic relations, the direct distribution of products and the ’social-labour ration’.’ Preobrazhenskii argued that, in a Communist