bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Animal Magnetism and Psychic Sciences, 1784-1935: The Rediscovery of a Lost Continent
Authors: Mancini Silvia
Published: March 2007

In the spring of 1784 the Marquis of Puységur, a great landowner and colonel in an artillery regiment, was called to the bedside of Victor, the son of his steward, who was suffering from pneumonia. Puységur was a follower of the new holistic medicine taught in an atmosphere of intense enthusiasm and scandal by Franz-Anton Mesmer, an Austrian doctor who had been living in Paris for several years. As a disciple of Mesmer, he intended to direct his ‘vital fluid’ onto the young patient, by means of ‘magnetic passes’, to provoke ‘spasms’ which would lead to a calm state and an improvement in health. But things did not go as anticipated. Instead of displaying the anticipated spasms, the young Victor sank into a strange state of unconsciousness which, at first sight, resembled a deep sleep. Then he revived once more and came to life with a new personality. Freed from his inhibitions, he no longer spoke his habitual dialect, but the French of aristocrats, and he had no hesitation in berating his school teacher, whose secret thoughts he appeared to be able to read. Finally, he forecast the stages by which he would be cured and the remedies which would be suitable for him. Puységur wrote down all these strange facts and the following year he published a report which caused a sensation. Soon, throughout France, somnambulists appeared and observations about their subjects gathered. From that time onwards, the incomprehensible facts apparently evident in ‘provoked’ or ‘artificial somnambulism’ and also in ‘magnetic sleep’ - such expressions were used by Puységur and his followers for the state that he had just discovered - were to give rise to huge controversy. The Marquis of Puységur triggered the development nineteenth century of a movement of reflections and practices which have generally been referred to by the expression ‘animal magnetism’, invented by Mesmer. On the eve of the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century this movement held a real fascination for philosophers, writers, and scholars. But there has been a tendency to overlook this episode in European culture, which has ultimately become a “lost continent” in our own period.
The Modern Intellectual and His Heretical Ancestor: Gershom Scholem and Nathan of Gaza
Authors: Löwy Michael
Published: March 2007

Gershom Scholem was without question a brilliant example of the modern Jewish intellectual: neither Talmudic, rabbinical, nor kabbalistic and still less a prophet. More modestly - but with remarkable spiritual energy - he was a historian, a man of learning, a university graduate, a (critical) son of the Haskalah or Hebrew Enlightenment, and a thinker who - without ever ceasing to believe after his own fashion - abandoned the traditional orthodox faith, with its rituals and prohibitions. He was also a modern Jewish intellectual because he was assimilated, shaped by German culture - despite his revolt against assimilation, his fight on behalf of ‘dissimilation’ (to use the term invented by Franz Rosenzweig), and his adherence to Sionism, which caused him to leave for Jerusalem in 1923. In reality he belonged to the first generation of Jewish university intellectuals in Central Europe who burst massively into the institutions of higher education at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries - in contrast to the isolated individuals, generally cut off from the Jewish community, who had had access to academic study in the earlier period.
Making One out of Many: The Brazilian Experience
Authors: Villela-Petit Maria
Published: March 2007

Brazil, land of miscegenation (métisse). An indisputable fact and an unending process. But how should we understand its genesis and how should we, while respecting the requirements of a historiography worth the name, interpret it in terms of our hopes for the future? This is the horizon binding these reflections, which is to be put in perspective in the studies published in this issue of Diogenes.

Foregrounding miscegenation, and understanding its origins, has been one of the constant themes among the most distinguished practitioners of Brazilian thought since the 1930s, and has been accepted, indeed demanded, since the 1920s by the artistic and literary movement known as ‘modernism’, of which one of the major figures was the São Paulo writer, Mário de Andrade. Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), who would now have been a hundred years old, comes particularly to mind, as does Sergio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982). Freyre made history with the publication of his two first works, Casa Grande & senzala [Masters and Slaves] of 1933 and Sobrados e mucambos of 1936. The same year Buarque de Holanda published his Raízes de Brasil [Roots of Brasil]. Motivated by the desire to understand their country, its shaping and – with some kind of concern as to identity – their own origins, both had been led to pave the way for what might be called an ‘open’ sociology, which immediately acquired a strongly anthropological character with Freyre and quickly incorporated increasingly historical aspects with Buarque de Holanda.
Literature and Racial Integration
Authors: Mauricio Gomes de Almeida José
Published: March 2007

The historical formation of Brazil is distinguished from the majority of ex-colonial nations by one factor that is especially characteristic: an intense process of ethnic and cultural mixing. The Portuguese colonisers, who, unlike the English Puritans in North America, left their families and arrived in Brazil in small groups mainly composed of men, naturally tended to pair off with the women they found available - first of all indigenous women and later African women. There was nothing in Brazil to prevent this spontaneous behaviour similar to the role played in the English colonies of North America by the strength of the family group or the strict religious observance of the community. Thus from the outset Brazil tended to accept racial mixing as a de facto reality. As Gilberto Freyre correctly noted in his book Casa Grande e Senzala:

They mixed happily with women of colour from the very first contacts and many mixed-race children resulted, so much so that only a few thousand men were enough to colonize vast areas and compete with the greatest and most numerous peoples as regards the extent of the colonial territory and the effectiveness of colonizing activity.
The Greek View as Political Experience
Authors: Kausch Frank
Published: March 2007

Whether it is a question of apprehension, grasp, or simple contact, the vocabulary of perception clearly points towards the materiality of touch through what we usually think of as just a metaphorical variation. This is what ancient Greek thought recognized, or dimly felt, as a sometimes hidden constant in its history and its project: sensation, which describes the primary access to being, is first of all and above all a way of touching. Far from indicating a simple perceptual realism, this acknowledgement implies a specific idea about the presence of things in the world: touch assumes a surface, and every being, in order to appear and be seen, must therefore be entirely surface, be articulated within a boundary that describes it perfectly.
Photography from West to East: Clichéd Image Exchange and Problems of Identity
Authors: Vauday Patrick
Published: March 2007

What are the preferred subjects of mass photography? We will not go far wrong if we hazard this reply: the Self and the Other. The popular practice of photography does not much go in for nuance: it has taken as its watchword the distinction between gens de Soi and gens de l'Autre which Robert Jaulin once used as the title of one of his books on ethnology. The self, that is, one's own, those close to one, familial space and the familiar space of identity and recognition. The other, in other words, strangers, the space of distant parts, and the space of displacement where tourism increasingly frequently leads the inhabitants of richer countries. Here, in the first space, one is among one's own kind, “among ourselves”, part of the same family through kinship or part of the same community through lifestyle and nationality; here, connivance rules, the unspoken word and the wink with the photographer who is “one of us”, and so one does not generally hesitate to expose oneself, that is, open up to their lens. There, in the second space, one is in a foreign country, amongst others, whose costumes and customs are photographed; there, the more polite rule of the smile and the presentation of the self for others holds sway, one is more engaged in the process of representation and adopts a pose for the photographer rather than exposing oneself to their lens. The most widely disseminated version of this dual polarity of popular photography is the souvenir photos of the family album, on the one hand, and the holiday photos brought back by tourists from their various excursions abroad, on the other; a version which illustrates one of the most spontaneously practised photographic montages, consisting of having oneself photographed in a distant country against a typical scenic background or emblematic monument of the country visited.
The Art of the Spectator: Seeing Sounds and Hearing Visions
Authors: Giacchè Piergiorgio
Published: March 2007

Even before Erving Goffman, in his studies of interaction, develops and makes the most of the metaphor of a daily life entirely composed of representation, or even stage acting, sociology had already stolen from theatre a number of terms and modes particular to it: the concept of “role”, to take the most classic example, but also the term “actor”, which sociology in fact translates as social actor.
A ‘Green' Referendum in Russia? Contribution to the Study of the Birth of a Civil Society
Authors: Jeannier-Groppo Armelle
Published: March 2007

On 12 June 2000, the tenth anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's election as head of the reconstituted Russian state, 180 people who had formed an ‘initiative group for a pan-Russian referendum’ launched a campaign to collect the two million signatures required by Russian law to organize a popular initiative referendum which included these three questions:

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Are you opposed to the importing of radioactive material from other states to be stored, buried or reprocessed on Russian territory?

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Are you in favour of the existence of a federal environmental protection agency which would be independent of those bodies concerned with exploiting and managing natural resources?

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Are you in favour of the existence of a legally independent state service for forests in Russia?
The Advent of the Genetic Quotient
Authors: Bénichou Grégory
Published: March 2007

This article is intended to be both an analysis, and also an account: that of a generation of young citizens, to which I belong, which is both enthusiastic about and worried by recent advances in genetics. In the modern world mind set evolves very rapidly. In the late 1960s women demanded ‘a baby when I want!’ The right to contraception followed. Then, in the early 1970s, another slogan was heard: ‘a baby if I want.’ Shortly afterwards, a woman's right to abortion was recognized. Now, new demands are increasingly being synthesized as: ‘a baby of the kind I want.’ The spectre of eugenics is slowly and insidiously being reborn at the heart of democracy.
Dehumanization or the Disappearance of Pluralism?
Authors: Duclos Denis
Published: March 2007

The ‘dehuman’ and the inhuman are not, even partially, exterior to the human, as are the material and the living, the animal and the bestial; they represent rather the extremes, the very limits of the human. The inhuman forms the interior facet of the boundary which makes us human and concerns us as such. In that sense, it is never exterior to us.
The Paradigm of the Human and Modernity
Authors: Trigano Shmuel
Published: March 2007

The most burning question we are faced with, in our anxiety about the possible dehumanization of the world, concerns the nature of modernity. Today's erasure of and uncertainty about norms relating to the definition of the human only go to confirm this. Indeed this is a typically modern question because it is in this civilization, which is unique in human history and which is replacing heaven with earth in the order of values, that human beings have been able to observe themselves from the outside and think that humanity could be outside itself to the extent that the idea of the ‘death of man’, the ‘end of humanity’ and now even a ‘posthumanity’ can be entertained.
The Gift as Sufficient Source of Normativity
Authors: Caillé Alain
Published: March 2007

Daniele Hervieu-Léger and Marcel Gauchet explain that today the hold that the religious dimension has always exerted over human societies is, of very recent date but definitely, slackening; that it is becoming ‘hollow’ and ceases to inspire collective action, leaving henceforth wide open the question of knowing in which name we should attempt to take our destiny in our hands and base the norms of collective being. This question at once summons up another, implicitly contained in the latter: is every ethical norm (or moral norm, for we are not making a distinction between the two concepts here) ultimately religious in origin, as is most often supposed, or can one in fact conceive of sketching the outlines of a moral code that is immanent within the social relationship, a moral code that is sufficiently coherent and self-consistent to do without, at least in theory, a religious-type transcendence? Here, I should like to make a case for the second response by emphasizing that religion - whatever meaning one bestows on this notion, still undefined today - does not constitute the primary, irreducible social and historical fact that is most often supposed, but that it should itself be interpreted as the formulation of a more original and more universal formulation: the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, and repaying distinguished by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essay on the Gift. Of course, I shall not claim here to do more than sketch a few possible lines of argument. But even before formulating them, I must call to mind two prejudicial objections that my argument has encountered.
Gathering Memory: Thoughts on the History of Libraries
Authors: Jacob Christian
Published: March 2007

Maps and libraries are ways of externalising memory and knowledge, making them not only concrete, visible and accessible, but also durable, reproducible, communicable and socially active. Both are linked to processes of totalisation. Maps add together and incorporate individual, particular and partial experiences of a space: they provide a summary and synthesis of points of view concerning a given territory, obscuring their empirical content in order to construct a coherent degree of visibility and intelligibility. Libraries represent the sum of the reading and knowledge of the individual readers who frequent them. A library is one of the places that embody the intellectual, literary and spiritual heritage of a community; it is here that written memory, with its importance as a foundation for identity, can be seen in complete and tangible form.
The Prose of the World
Authors: Foucault Michel
Published: March 2007

It has been over two centuries since resemblance ceased to play in our culture a stable, adequate and autonomous role at the wellspring of knowledge. The classical age broke away from it. First Bacon, then Descartes established within our time a system of knowledge in which similitude no longer occupied more than a precarious and temporary place, on the border of illusion: “when we discover some resemblances between two things we ordinarily attribute what we have recognized as true of one only to the other as well, even aspects in which in reality they differ.” Since the 17th century the similar has offered no more to knowledge than an unstable countenance, ready to give way to knowledge, and it is the province of knowledge to determine immediately the identical and the different so that they appear one beside the other and are scrupulously distinguished.
The Confrontation Between Reason and Imagination: the Example of Darwin
Authors: Eng Erling
Published: March 2007

The theme of Darwin's struggle between reason and imagination is perhaps most clearly shown in his efforts in the Origin to conceive of how the eye of the body might have developed through natural selection. Thus he wrote:

To arrive, however, at a just conclusion regarding the formation of the eye, with all its marvellous yet not absolutely perfect characters, it is indispensable that the reason * should conquer the imagination; but I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.
The Box of Digital Images: The World as Computer Theater
Authors: Bartels Klaus
Published: March 2007

Frames

In 1934 the Belgian artist René Magritte painted a room with a view. On an easel in front of the window stands a painting depicting the very piece of landscape blocked from sight. Magritte named his painting La Condition Humaine (“The Human Condition”), which is quite apt, for the life of everyone is determined by windows, doors, mirrors and many other frames. Indeed, to avert anxiety, one actually cultivates social behavior born of the fear of being “outside the frame.” Because of this apprehension, we organize all reality into a series of preestablished frames.
Montaigne: European Reader of America
Authors: Rigolot François
Published: March 2007

Our world has just discovered another world [ … ] I am much afraid

[ ... ] that we will have sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, III, 1588

The year 1992 saw many important cultural commemorations take place, of which the most important, the fifth centenary of the “discovery” of America, seemed to eclipse, at least on the American continent, the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Montaigne (1533-1592). It therefore does not seem inappropriate to question the view of the author of the Essays concerning the theme, “much fussed over” by ideologues on all sides, of the “encounter,” as memorable as it is debatable, between the “New” world and the “Old”.
The Birth of Indianism
Authors: D'Souza Florence
Published: March 2007

When Anquetil-Duperron landed at Pondicherry in 1755, in search of the sacred books of the “Indous et des Parses” (“Hindus and Parsees”), he surely had no idea that he was inaugurating a new discipline, Indianism. He returned to France in 1761, laden with a whole library of Indian texts which he was to spend the rest of his life deciphering. That year was a turning point in Indian history: the Marathes, on the verge of becoming the dominant power of the entire Indian continent, were crushed in Panipat, north of Delhi, by the armies of an Afhgan invasion, and this catastrophe halted their advance for a while. During the same year, in the south of India, Lally-Tollendal was beaten and taken prisoner by the English, thereby destroying the French dream, shared by Dupleix and Bussy, of creating an Indian empire for themselves.
Sun at Midnight. Despair and Trust in the Islamic Mystical Tradition
Authors: Schimmel Annemarie
Published: March 2007

In the Name of the One who has no Name,He who appears before you, how ever you call Him!

How does Islamic theology and Koran exegesis, some of whose representatives set out to find the most modern developments, such as the atomic bomb, in the Koran, deal with the latest interpretations of quantum physics, of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, and with the question of whether the sub-atomic world is made up of waves or particles? How does a theologian react to the notion that parts of the atom influence each other and that the observer himself plays a role in the shaping of future events? Are these discoveries compatible with the traditional idea of a God who knows all; are they compatible with the various terms for fate: qadar, qada, or qismat?
Chaos and Eros. On the Order of Human Existence
Authors: Schabert Tilo
Published: March 2007

Thinking is a festival and thus human beings experience, through cogitation, the sociable structure of their thinking. As they think, speak and listen they listen and speak and they are in the company of others. It was Plato, the sociable one, who thus spoke and was listened to: “And thinking, is it the same thing to you as to me?” This is the question that Plato puts in Socrates's mouth, when faced with Theaetetus in a dialogue named after him. Theaetetus in turn asks a question: “How do you describe it?” And Socrates replies: “As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. …, but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.”
China Open - China Closed
Authors: Zwi Werblowsky R.J.
Published: March 2007

Forbidden areas, i.e. areas (sites, cities, countries) that are inaccessible for topographical reasons or especially because of decisions based on political, religious, or other motivations are usually surrounded by an aura of mystery and almost necessarily arouse curiosity. The dream of generations of explorers was to reach Lhasa. An area can be closed not only to outsiders but also to “insiders:” nobody is allowed to leave for the “outside.” The isolation imposed on Japan by the Tokugawa regime was such a two-way seclusion aided, of course, by geographical conditions and hence easily enforceable. It has been suggested, perhaps not quite seriously, that the famous Chinese wall was meant not only to keep out barbarian invaders, but also to prevent Chinese from leaving. That there was some kind of border control is also suggested by the leger, according to which Lao-tse, before disappearing into the west, committed his teaching, the Tao-te-kinq, to writing at the request of the “gatekeeper.” One may well wonder whether there exists another equally influential text written at the behest of a border policeman!
From the Mirror to Post-History
Authors: Berger René
Published: March 2007

All societies are made up of members who have a certain number of things in common, by virtue of which they understand, identify and communicate with each other, on the one hand, and establish differences with members of other societies on the other. Among the most important of these things is language.

In this regard, let us recall two examples raised by Ferdinand de Saussure. The first: “Language is both a social product of the faculty of speech and an ensemble of necessary conventions adopted by the social body to allow for the exercise of this faculty in each individual.” The second: “Speech, distinct from language, is on the contrary an individual act of intelligence and will … by which the speaking subject uses the code of language to express his personal thought.”
The Double Responsibility of the Historian
Authors: Gurevich Aaron I.
Published: March 2007

I am an historian in a country in which it is not only impossible to say what the future will be, but in which the past itself—as someone put it—is susceptible to change. This country is currently going through an unprecedented crisis that has turned both its material and political as well as spiritual life upside-down. The crisis, the roots of which stretch back over decades, has made life virtually unbearable for many of its citizens. Yet for the historian, and for the philosopher and sociologist, this crisis affords an unusual opportunity. As a result of the earthquakes that have shaken the former Soviet Union, formerly hidden layers of history—and the forces that underpin them—have been revealed. Such cases do not often arise. To a scholar endeavoring to discover the secret springs of unfolding events, Russia represents a gigantic and unique “laboratory.” Although it is easier to judge the extent of a cataclysm, to comprehend its deeper import, after the event, this does not relieve the contemporary—who participates in historical events—of the duty of trying to understand, to the extent possible, the nature of the changes taking place.
Do We Know How to Read Messages in the Sand?
Authors: Stengers Isabelle
Published: March 2007

Let us begin by making a rather obvious remark: the meaning of the question of ‘what we do not know’ varies according to whether or not the word “yet” is explicitly or implicitly included. It comes as no surprise that it should be in physics, the science in which, ever since Galileo and Newton, the quest for knowledge has been so amply and unexpectedly rewarded, that we find the most dramatic examples of both possibilities: one in which theory points to knowledge not yet acquired, knowledge which is still to be conquered, but which, once attained, should constitute its final triumph; and one in which “we do not know” may be taken as the conclusion of established knowledge. We do not (yet) know how to unify the four fundamental forces of interaction in a single theory, and yet that eventuality is already being called the theory of everything (TOE). Since interaction is the principle on which physics now bases all its explanations, and since physical explanations are in principle valid for everything that exists, the unification of the forces of interaction must therefore be the science of the principles of everything that exists. On the other hand, we do not know at what moment a particular radioactive nucleus will disintegrate. In this case, our knowledge of physics makes it impossible to use the word “yet”: radioactive disintegration is described in terms of a “lifetime,” which means that each nucleus within a given population has, at any one moment, the same probability of disintegrating, and that this probability is not a function of any variable which we can identify and manipulate. In this case, our knowledge asserts that we cannot know now and will not be able to know for as long as our present knowledge remains valid.
Bioethics
Authors: Héritier Françoise
Published: March 2007

This issue of Diogenes is devoted to questions of bioethics. This subject was chosen not because bioethics is fashionable but rather because the purpose of this journal is to explore the timely and timeless questions of our era in order to understand what is at stake and to share this knowledge with our readers.

I have chosen to call my piece “Bioethics: Between the Plausible and the Thinkable” to highlight at least three themes that are taken up either directly or indirectly in the articles that follow.
New Foundations for an Evolutionary Ethics
Authors: Tort Patrick
Published: March 2007

Contemporary bio-ethics shares with the ancient tradition of natural theology the characteristic of assuming, in the face of the advances of a fundamentally materialist science, an opportunistic function, which is that of the adaptive rescue of spiritual values. Bioethical humanism exists only in the process of this perpetual movement of repossession, and its effort, established to this effect, leads back incoherently to the interminable dualistic confrontation between science and conscience, having failed to take upon itself the task of constructing a rationally-informed thinking on the relationships between the order of development of positive knowledge and the order of development of moral feelings, both in human evolution and in the history of societies. These matters hardly concern today's fashionable philosophers, whose dominant preoccupation seems to be to find a still-unfilled job - something between an esoteric magus and a preacher in vogue - on the great stage of the inessential upon which inconsequential thought is exhibited.
Epico-Lyrical Legends of the Punjab and Sikh Reformism in the 1920s
Authors: Matringe Denis , Fletcher John
Published: March 2007

Like the other great cultural areas of the Indian subcontinent, the Punjab is endowed with a living heritage of oral tradition: all kinds of songs and tales are hawked by itinerant bards, and after the day's work is done, people particularly like listening to them reciting legends of love, the most moving passages of which they sing to their own accompaniment on various traditional instruments. The stories most popular with village audiences are local epico-lyrical legends; these function like myths for Punjabis, forming a symbolic system according to which they can organize and think through their experience.
Following the Traces of the Sons of Hilal
Authors: Galley Micheline
Published: March 2007

While the epic is absent from classical Arabic literature, the genre - although long ignored - plays an outstanding part in popular culture throughout the Arabo-Islamic sphere.
Ethics and Politics
Authors: Bobbio Norberto
Published: March 2007

Increasingly frequent discussions in our country over the last few years on the question of morals have roused the old theme of the relation between morals and politics. Although it is an old theme, it is nevertheless a theme that remains new, which explains why no moral question, regardless of the field in which it has been raised, has ever found a definitive answer. While the issue of the relation between politics and morals is the best known, due to the length of the debate, the authority of the authors who took part, the variety of the arguments put forth and the importance of the subject, it is not that different from the issue of the relation between morals and all other human activity; thus the fact that we can readily speak of the ethics of economic relations or, as often the case over the last few years, of market ethics, or sexual ethics, medical ethics, the ethics of sports and still others. In all these diverse spheres of human activity, the same problem always arises: the distinction between what is morally licit and what is morally illicit.
Copying in Imperial China
Authors: Elisseeff Danielle
Published: March 2007

“Copying”: this practice, in China as elsewhere, was and still is the first exercise of every apprenticeship at the same time as an irreplaceable technique for spreading know-how, talent, and innovation; but the place and interest accorded to it throw light on the rather special positions being taken up. Thus, when a Chinese author speaks of copy, he is thinking primarily of the “copy-image,” in two dimensions. Sculpture in China plays a religious and propitiatory role; it only indirectly gives rise to reflections about art. The copies of objects thus found themselves relegated to the sphere of the utilitarian, even of the frankly deceptive (the “fakes”); they held little interest for esthetes, with a single exception: that of archaic bronzes, which I shall be dealing with later since they fall within the scope of an overall reflection on history, ritual, and the foundations of the state. Now the latter, like the bases of painting, flow from an original cultural context, the elements of which that are most resistant to comparison are language and writing.
Greek Statuary, Roman Portraits
Authors: Balty Jean Charles , Bertelsen Mara
Published: March 2007

The originals of great classical Greek statuary—cult idols (agalmata) raised in the cella of a temple, or ex-voto (anathemata, offerings) dedicated in a sanctuary, or even, more rarely, political dedications erected in public places, were not destined to be copied and only the pure chance of history, from the fall of Greece to Rome and the emergence of a taste for these works of art, gave rise to a process of copying that would snowball. The Urbild of a Roman imperial effigy was never to remain unique. Quite the contrary, it was, by its very nature, destined to be multiplied from the moment of its completion, for the sake of propaganda and thorough distribution of the emperor's image. At first, we cannot imagine a situation more different. However, today, the historical value of these copies is the same, the original having disappeared in one case as in the other. This is not the only paradox.
Model and Copy in Byzantium
Authors: Cutler Anthony
Published: March 2007

Few aspects of social behavior tell us more about a culture than those practices that involve the roles it assigns to models and copies. Under interpretation, such conduct reveals its attitudes toward authority and antiquity, its sense of identity and regard for security, and the relative importance that it attached to imitation and invention. To varying degrees, all societies display these concerns, but in none were they so firmly grounded in a considered theory of the relation between prototype and derivative as they were in Byzantium. An example from the domain of law will illustrate, though not explain, this cultural difference. As against the Roman tradition in which the use of copies as evidence in court was prohibited, at least from the tenth century on Byzantine tribunals accepted the legitimacy of certified copies of documents. The very word used for an official copy—ison, meaning equal— suggests the conceptual distinction between it and the terms copie, Kopie, kopiya, and so on, in modern languages, all derived from the Latin word for abundance.
The Fetish of Art in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Belting Hans
Published: March 2007

The old idea of the masterpiece, the bane of artists throughout the century that is now drawing to a close, is barely recognizable any more. For the general public, this idea remains a facile cliché that is always ready when needed to put an end to a serious discourse on art. Only the label, not the idea itself, was left when artists came to the point of holding masterpieces responsible for the tenacious survival of outdated artistic ideals. The idea of perfected art has become so far removed from the object of its incarnation that we have long been forced to seek the masterpiece by other names. On the other hand, the term masterpiece lends itself to cut-rate uses in which the Utopian content is but a dim gleam. The avantgarde, in search of a scapegoat, decries favored artistic objects as false idols or as fetishes of art. The Mona Lisa, which did not achieve the status of a universal idol until the nineteenth century, thus became the prime target of ill humor: was it not the very epitome of society's trivialization (and mystification) of art?
Preface
Authors: Fall Yoro K.
Published: March 2007

Like any other part of the world, Africa is not immune to the intermingling of cultures and civilizations, heritages and horizons, the endogenous and the exogenous, knowledge and imagery. The effects of new communication and information technologies, which still remain the privilege of a minority of political and intellectual elites, cannot conceal the far more profound transformations and reconfigurations that characterize its societies and cultures.
The Art of Beginnings
Authors: Anati Emmanuel
Published: March 2007

When we speak of prehistoric art, we think almost instantly of visual art, although we know that even the least technologically developed peoples on earth also expressed themselves by means of music, dance, gesticulation, and poetry; they practised the arts of eloquence, of moving and decorating their bodies, and of awakening social or sexual interest; prehistoric peoples developed any number of other aspects of artistic creativity and of externalization of the self, of which we can for the time being only recover (since archaeology does not reconstruct temporal arts) that which leaves decipherable physical traces.
The Healing of the Nations: Humanism Beyond Racism, Relativism, and Corporation
Authors: Sutlive Vinson
Published: March 2007

The discipline of anthropology was established in the 19th century to answer one major question, viz., Why are we different? The first answer was provided by anthropologists educated in the biological sciences, principally doctors and anatomists. With the establishment of the anthropological society of Paris in 1839, the first President, Paul Broca, declared in his inaugural address that the task of anthropology was to trace the long evolutionary sweep of humankind from its first appearing to the present. A second answer was provided by pioneers in the social sciences, including Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Emile Durkheim, each of whom asserted that we learn to be different. Most anthropologists would agree that our differences are results of both our biological inheritance and our personal and social experiences.
The Judaeo-Muslim Cultural World in Morocco: Written and Spoken
Authors: Zafrani Haïm
Published: March 2007

If, at the outset, we postulate the totality of Jewish thought and lay down the principle of its organic unity and its call to universalism, thus asserting the active solidarity which dominates its relations with Jewish religious and intellectual life in the Maghreb, if we state that both have a privileged interrelationship and use the same modes of expression, then we must add that Maghrebian Judaism is an integral part of the intellectual space, the cultural landscape and the civilization of the Muslim West where it was born, blossomed and bore fruit.
Anthropologia Incognita: Teaching and Learning Anthropology in Europe Today
Authors: Schippers Thomas K.
Published: March 2007

During the last thirty years both the social sciences and humanities in many countries have experienced a huge increase in student numbers, often directly related to national policies aimed at enlarging access to higher education for the majority of a generation. Although this evolution seems globally positive, it has also caused some specific problems within those disciplines, such as anthropology, which until recently led only to academic careers. In most European countries anthropological teaching has been predominantly research-oriented, that is rather than ‘knowledge-oriented’ like disciplines taught in secondary education. In this paper, after having recalled some aspects of the teaching of anthropology since the 1950s, I would like to propose certain arguments for a discussion about the aims and means of teaching social sciences in general and anthropology in particular in the coming decades. Given the actual ‘dis-ease’ about this topic, this debate seems to becoming more and more inevitable.
Higher Education and Socialist Transformation in the Peoples' Republic of China since 1970: A Critical Analysis
Authors: Pincus Fred L.
Published: March 2007

Between 1970 and 1976, Chinese higher education was organized to promote the simultaneous development of both the forces and relations of production. Meritocratic principles were de-emphasized and political conscious ness emphasized in order to gradually reduce the differences between mental and manual labor and to prevent the development of a new ruling class composed of intellectuals and bureaucrats. However, certain problems emerged which re duced the schools' ability to provide students with the technical expertise needed for rapid economic growth. Since the death of Mao Tse-tung and the fall of the "Gang of Four" in 1976, colleges have been reorganized on a more meritocratic basis in order to train technical experts. The new Chinese leadership feels that the forces of production must be developed before the relations of production can be transformed. This new policy may retard the socialist transformation of produc tive relations. Ultra-right errors may result from the attempt to correct some of the ultra-"left" errors of the early 1970s.
On The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures
Authors: Gintis Herbert , Gintis Herbert
Published: March 2007

Among the most important advances in Marxian theory in recent years have been the methodological and philosphical contributions of Louis Althusser and his colleagues. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff's "The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe," as one of the first serious contributions of this school to emanate from the United States, deserves serious consideration. In this paper I point out some of the more vulnerable points in their methodological framework, which can be identified as a form of the traditional "coherence theory of truth," shorn of the latter's commitment to the unity of knowledge. The shortcomings of this approach are seen as resulting from an insufficiently developed conception of the Marxian dialectic, especially in the area of subject-subject relations. I suggest that further development of this school will depend on a strict attention to the separation of the theoretical concepts of sites and practices, which have hereto fore been theoretically fused. I then draw the implications for the analysis of feudalism which the authors have offered.
Underconsumption in Latin American Economic Thought: Some Considerations
Authors: Lustig Nora
Published: March 2007

The object of this paper is twofold: to introduce a new theoretical distinction of underconsumption theories and to criticize Latin American under consumptionism in terms of its general theoretical propositions and its empirical validity. It is seen that the causal ordering that the Latin American writers use does not coincide with some basic propositions of the Marxist "laws of accumu lation;" rather than starting with the relations of production or "value rela tions," they choose the (personal) distribution of income and the structure of de mand as the analytical point of departure. At the empirical level as well it is very difficult to show, as the Latin American writers argue, that consumer durables are underconsumed, or even if this occurred, that this underconsumption could threaten the performance of the economy as a whole. Moreover, it is not neces sarily true that concentration at the top or in favor of the middle sectors would be the best alternative to expand demand for all classes of consumer durables, and so remove the presumed constraint on their growth.
Patriarchy in Colonial New England
Authors: Folbre Nancy
Published: March 2007

This article explores the social relations of production within the rural household of colonial New England. It draws upon a review of the litera ture as well as primary research in Western Massachusetts to describe important aspects of patriarchal domination of sons and the extent and significance of the sexual division of labor. Two significant theoretical issues are emphasized: 1) There are important interconnections between control over children and control over women which have important implications for understanding the impact of the growth of capitalism on the family and 2) The fact that women in colonial New England played an important role in production did not ensure them any objective power within the household.
Abortion Clinics and the Organization of Work: A Case Study of Charles Circle
Authors: Aries Nancy
Published: March 2007

This paper is a case study of the changing labor process at Charles Circle, an abortion clinic in Boston. The material is based on interviews with two women who were active in the abortion movement and worked at the clinic dur ing its first four years of operation.
Nonproduced Means of Production: Neo-Ricardians vs. Fundamentalists
Authors: Gibson Bill , Esfahani Hadi
Published: March 2007

Neo-Ricardian and Fundamentalist theories of rent and landed property are compared within the analytical framework of the Sraffian model with respect to both the question of the static distribution of surplus value and the dynamics of capital accumulation. The general problem of nonproduced means of production is first posed in a way that admits a Fundamentalist as well as Neo- Ricardian solution. It is seen that Sraffians refer to land's scarcity in relation to the level of effective demand as the cornerstone of their theory of rent, while Fundamentalists rely on the political and economic power of the landlord class to close the system of price-and rent-determining equations. A key Fundamentalist proposition concerning the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production-that rent deters capitalist development in agriculture-is demonstrated in the context of the sylized Fundamentalist model. This result is contrasted with Okishio's theorem which holds that individually profitable technical change will cause the general rate of profit to rise.
Production-for-Use or Production-for-Profit?: The Contradictions of Consumer Goods Production in 1930s Work Relief
Authors: Rose Nancy E.
Published: March 2007

A variety of work relief projects were implemented in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the first U.S. federal relief agency begun in May 1933 and lasting until December 1935. They included construction, projects for professionals (e.g., writers, artists, actors and musicians), and production of consumer goods. The construction and professional projects elicited criticisms of "make-work," i.e. that little of value was produced. In contrast, the output of the consumer goods production projects was clearly useful, as canned food, garments, mattresses, bedding, and other goods were produced and then distributed to relief recipients. But these projects, termed production-for-use by FERA administrators, came under fire from capitalists for competing with the private sector. As a result, production-for-use projects that capitalists found offensive were terminated by the time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) began in late 1935, and no such government production of consumer goods has been repeated since. In this paper, I examine the FERA production-for-use projects, discuss the contradictions of "make-work," and describe the effects on government work programs since the 1930s.
Capital Flows and Rates of Profit
Authors: Webber Michael
Published: March 2007

Using a simple two department model this paper concludes that even if capital does flow from less to more profitable firms or industries, profit rates may not be equalized. Thus theories that assume that profit rates are equal in equilibrium are called into question as well as those which argue that profit rates are unequal solely because of immobilities.
Women, Modernization and Revolution in Iran
Authors: Moghissi Haideh
Published: March 2007

This paper examines the contradictory nature of women's support for the Iranian revolution, which severely restricted women's legal and social rights. An analysis of the possibilities and limitations of the pre-revolutionary reforms points to the lack of necessary conditions for the development of an autonomous feminist movement. In the absence of such a movement, the issues of women's oppression were subsumed and muted in the anti-imperialist struggle.
Capital Accumulation and Over-Accumulation Crisis: The Case of Greece (1960-1989)
Authors: Ioakimoglou Elias , Milios John
Published: March 2007

In this paper, the concept of capital over-accumulation, formulated by Marx in Volume 3 of Capital, is discussed and adopted as the theoretical framework for the study of capital accumulation and economic crisis in Greece in the period 1960-89. The empirical part of the analysis is based on the investigation of a series of indices which reveal the historical trend of the social and economic relations determining capital accumulation. It is thus shown that the main factor determining the economic crisis of Greek capitalism since the late seventies is the decreasing ability of the capitalist class to economize on constant capital, which is the outcome of the social relation of forces established in the class-struggle.
Neither Prophets of Doom nor Facile Optimism
Authors: Levinson Ariana
Published: March 2007

This paper views the Swedish wage earner fund debate in the context of various theories about the transition to socialism. It reviews the ideas of the participants in the debate and of various theorists. The conclusion is that a transition to socialism may come about at some time in the future through either a revolutionary or gradual transition.
Direct Foreign Investment, Globalization, and Northern Growth: Implications of a North-South Model
Authors: Dutt Amitava Krishna
Published: March 2007

A model of North-South trade is developed in which TNCs invest in the South to produce a good competing directly with the Northern good. It implies that the liberalization of direct foreign investment to the South increases the long-run equilibrium rate of both Northern and Southern growth. However, since the long-run equilibriums is likely to be a saddlepoint, the North can be hurt by this globalization.