Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1977"

On the dialogic of field work

Abstract: Dante, in The Inferno, encoutered Muham? mad, the Prophet of Islam, in the Eighth Circle, among the Sowers of Discord. Muhammad's body was split open from the chin to tho anus, and "Between his legs all of his red guts hung/ with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder/ and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung" [ 1 ]. This was cultural mediation of a sort, a communication about "self" through use of the "other", and was spoken in an historical context which witnessed a direct challenge to Christian dominance in Europe from Muslim Spain. Dante's polemic against Islam was the other face of his defense of Christianity. It was not uncommon, however, throughout the Renais? sance and the Enlightenment, for the other to serve as a weapon in the critique of self. The exemplary use of an Islamic other to this end is probably Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), in which fictional Turkish visitors to Western Europe, and to Paris in particular, correspond with their countrymen at home and abroad, exposing what are seen as irra? tional and extravagant aspects of European life. This discourse, whether prompted by a defensive impulse similar to Dante's or by a critical one like Montesquieu's, whether the other was purportedly historical or explicitly imaginary, objectified the other as part of a strategy to objectify the self. Anthropology is today a major vehicle for this discourse. It too creates otherness and objectifies it. Although such objectification is probably a necessary moment in any con? scious attempt to transcend the self, it is not, of course, a sufficient one. As we acknow? ledge this moment, we must now begin to move beyond it, to ask further questions con? cerning the kind of objectification of others, and of ourselves, that we as anthropologists create. These questions are particularly vital when we phrase them with reference to con? texts where our social action is most imme? diate and most suspect, in our interaction with people. This is not the place to embark upon an extended critique of anthropological practice, especially since excellent ones already exist. Let me simply outline what I take to be central to such a critique, in order to situate these remarks within the latter, and as an effort to extend it. The emergence of anthropology as a dis? cipline was intimately connected to "a histor? ical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other" [2]. Corre? ctively, anthropologists conceptually and practically apportioned their human contem? poraries into two corresponding classes: "informants" and "public". Furthermore, since anthropology evolved in a social system, whenever relationships between people tended to be viewed as relationships between things, the connections between anthropolo? gists and informants, and between anthro? pologists and public, were transmuted in a similar way. Kevin Dwyer was most recently Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Enlightenment and despair : a history of sociology

Abstract: A new conclusion has been written for the second edition of this widely acclaimed critical history of social theory in England, France, Germany and the United States from the 18th century to the present.

Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment: A Reassessment

Abstract: AFTER THE PUBLICATION of the Principia in 1687 Newton's scientific achievement and the natural philosophy which explained and supported his system of the world became the centerpiece of a new intellectual program. Invented in large measure by his friends and followers, Richard Bentley, Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, John Harris, William Derham, and reinforced by Jean Desaguliers and later by Benjamin Martin, among others, this church-supported program proclaimed Newton's intellectual achievements as a model and justification for social order, political harmony, and liberal, but orthodox, Christianity.' From their pulpits and in their writings the Newtonians preached to a London-based and exceedingly prosperous mercantile audience. They extolled the virtues of self-restraint and public-mindedness while at the same time assuring their congregations that prosperity came to the virtuous and that providence permitted, even fostered, material rewards. Men must acknowledge God's providence by the cultivation of virtue, by the pursuit of what Isaac Barrow had called "sober self-interest," and by their support for Anglican hegemony. Inextricably the same God whose laws of motion Newton had discerned in the natural world would insure order, prosperity, and the conquest and maintenance of empire in the political world. Adopt-

Nature and Art in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: T HE MOVEMENT we call Romantic is often said to mean a return to nature; a turn, that is, in literature and other arts, from representations of social action to ecstasies over a desolate pond, or a lugubrious nightingale, or a lonely cloud, with no human figure in sight. The return to nature, from Rousseau through Wordsworth to Thoreau, was so successful that the word Nature now evokes mountains, forests, waterfalls, and all those television programs on the diminishing wild species of Australia and Africa. The struggle of art versus nature, fascinating to students of classical Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, has been popularly granted a fictional ending in 1800, with nature completely triumphant. Yet the century that began with the glorification of nature concluded, after much Victorian travail, in art for the sake of art.

Enlightenment, evangelism, and economics: an interpretation of the drive towards emancipation in british west india

Abstract: The intention of this paper is modest. It is simply t o present a hypothesis on the British middle-class consensus of opposition to slavery, by illustrating some of its components from three groups of writers. The first is a sample of ministers within the evangelical churches in Scotland. The second are the scholarly moral philosophers of the “common-sense’’ school. The third are the contributors t o the Edinburgh Review, between its foundation in 1802 and the time of West Indian emancipation. All their writings are Scottish, and in the last resort they only provide hard evidence on the way in which a small sample of provincial intellectuals responded t o black slavery before 1833.1 Nevertheless, their opinions d o reveal concerns ;that have not yet been explored and that have some significance for the context of the whole metropolitan drive against British colonial slavery. It is not surprising that evangelicals, or academic moralists, or liberal journalists were opposed t o West Indian slavery. By the end of the eighteenth century, the theoretical war against slavery had long been won. Each of these three groups, however, contributed t o translating the abstract disapproval of slavery into a determination to get rid of it. This new activist commitment, without which emancipation would have been impossible, reflected not only a heightened distaste for slavery in its own right, but also an increasing sense that it was in every way at odds with what Americanists would now call a nationalizing ethic. In its British form, this was the fundamentally middle class “entrepreneurial ideal” described by Mr. Perkins.2 The onslaught on the planters was part of a wider campaign t o bring all divisions of British society within a single canon of ethics and social organization. This canon was applicable even where it was selfevidently at odds with tradition, local preference, and vested interest. The overthrow of slavery, like the destruction of church patronage and rotten burghs, was an early attempt t o iron out aberrations from an ethical norm to which all elements of Victorian society would eventually be expected t o conform. White West Indians, on the other hand, had selfish but pressing reasons t o resist being absorbed into the moral structure of the metropolitan culture. Their views were well represented in the Scotland where the men who are the subject of this paper were writing. Throughout the eighteenth century, the country had used the tropical colonies as a democratizing mechanism t o absorb, and in a few cases enrich, its perennial surplus of poor but educated young men. Even in the nineteenth century, hopeful Scots were still trickling out t o the new lands of Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice, although their economic development had been crippled by the abolition of the slave trade in 1806 and 1807. These settlers carried with them many of the values of the society from which they came. They characteristically maintained their faith i n the work ethic, in norms of thrift, industry, and future reward, which were distorted only by a failure t o extend them t o the slave population. None of them would have seen any irony

Rationality, Needs and Politics: Remarks On Rationality as Emancipation and Enlightenment: Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage

Abstract: Jfrgen Habermas, in common with such paradigmatic figures of the Frankfurt School as Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, takes the critique and transcending of positivism and scientism to be a central philosophical task 1. Crucial to this is a tracing out of the implications between theory and practice. Habermas argues that by restricting the domain of legitimate or genuine knowledge to empirical knowledge and to formal (analytic) knowledge (knowledge of relations of ideas), positivism leads to a purely decisionalist

Buddhism in modern China

Abstract: Could Buddhism in China remain unaffected by the transformation of the Chinese nation into a modern state? By the beginning of the 2oth century it was apparent to many Chinese that it could not. The late-Ch'ing dynasty (i644-1911) novelist, Li Po-yuan (i867-i9o6), expresses the dilemma facing Chinese Buddhists in his novel, A Brief History of Enlightenment (completed in 1905): a young, modern-minded scholar, who is determined to establish a school, seeks to persuade the abbot of a Buddhist monastery to allow him to use some of the rooms in the monastery, and when the abbot refuses his request, he says to him: