Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
Free Play ◽  
Anthropology Of Religion ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The introductory chapter sketches the emergence of the anthropology of religion over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reading this history through the lens of recent scholarship on secularization, it explores how different anthropological constructions of religion came to underpin competing understandings of modernity itself. It then traces how specifically liberal views of religion in Britain diverged during the 1860s around what one might call the split between political and aesthetic liberalisms: the liberalism of abstract individualism and the liberalism of intellectual free play and diverse experiences. The Victorian period saw these two liberalisms first part ways over the normative nature of religion and what kind of subjectivity it defined.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Jennie Germann Molz
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Study Methods ◽  
Virtual Ethnography ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Community Belonging

The introductory chapter begins by defining the practice of worldschooling, describing the term’s provenance and illustrating this lifestyle with an ethnographic vignette of one of the traveling families in the study. It then outlines the questions that animate the book, namely what does it look like to educate and parent children on the move, how do new patterns of work enable families to afford this lifestyle, and how are notions of friendship, community, belonging, and citizenship reshaped in the context of a mobile life? This chapter establishes the book’s theoretical groundwork, starting with an overview of the literature on uncertainty, late modernity, the risk society, and neoliberalism. It then summarizes the recent scholarship on parenting in times of uncertainty and the relevant literature in mobilities studies on movement, privilege, and social inequality. Next, the chapter provides an account of the study methods, which are based on an approach called “mobile virtual ethnography,” and a preview of the book’s layout and the chapters that follow.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Self ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eastern Question ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The Introductory chapter discusses the overarching question of the book: how did it all begin? Since when did the self-defined Great Powers of the nineteenth century––Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia––come to assume responsibility for providing security in the Levant. Why? The Introduction traces the answer of these questions to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and maintains that Great Power interventions in the nineteenth-century Levant need to be considered not only in reference to their immediate causes, theatres, and implications. It is essential to take into account the continuity that European and Levantine actors saw in regional affairs from the late eighteenth century through until at least the mid-nineteenth. There is a need to foreground the persistent patterns or cultures of security within which violence was generated and sustained, and how the quest for security acted as an organizing principle of international relations. It also discusses the importance of considering these interventions in the fabric of the Eastern Question. It invites the readers to view the latter not only as a European question, as the existing literature has us believe, but also as an Ottoman question, whereby the agency of the Ottoman ministers and other local actors was more central than has been documented.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Doody
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Urban Center ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The New Deal

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the beginnings of post-World War II popular conservatism, particularly the glue that held this disparate movement together: anti-Communism. Building upon recent scholarship on conservatism, the book brings their insights to bear on the debate on the nature of early Cold War domestic politics. It argues that the key elements of twentieth-century conservatism—antipathy toward big government, embrace of religious traditionalism, celebration of laissez-faire capitalism, and militant anti-Communism—arose during the 1940s and 1950s out of opposition to the legacy of the New Deal and its modernizing, centralizing, and secularizing ethos. The book examines a specific urban center, Detroit, and grounds its conception of politics in the daily decisions of a wide variety of individuals rather than on the actions of political elites.

Introduction: Slavery, Social Revolutions and Enduring Memories

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Lane ◽  
Kevin C. Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Approach ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Slavery played an important role in the economies of most historically documented African states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This introductory chapter considers the regionality and relative antiquity of various forms of enslavement on the African continent, as well as a range of emergent archaeological studies on the subject. Further, the lingering impacts of slave economies and the memories of enslavement are critically assessed, including consideration of recent efforts to document and ‘memorialise’ both the tangible and intangible heritage of slavery on the continent. The contributions to the present volume are situated within these issues with the aim of drawing out commonalities between chapters and emphasising the value of an inter-regional comparative approach.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Daunton
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Geographical Society ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Power And Authority

This book places the establishment of the British Academy in the context of the Victorian organisation of knowledge. In this introductory chapter, the nature of academic, official, and legitimate knowledge in the Victorian period is discussed. It also considers the epistemological sites of Victorian Britain and how they were ordered. These sites included social networks, clubs, or societies such as provincial literary and philosophical societies and archaeological societies, national bodies such as the Royal Geographical Society, and the most exclusive, closed bodies of the elect, such as the Royal Society and the British Academy. These bodies have their own distinctive structures of power and authority. The Royal Society and British Academy for example, were designed to stabilise knowledge and the status of those claiming knowledge.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salim Tamari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Southern Region ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Administrative Unit ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This introductory chapter discusses the significance of the remaking of Palestine as an autonomous geographic entity within greater Syria and the Ottoman Arab provinces. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Filistin was not a separate administrative unit within the Ottoman sultanate, but the term Filistin was designated for a region embedded in the provinces of Bilad al-Sham (Syria). It was frequently used to indicate the southern region of Syria, corresponding to the combined sanjaqs (districts) of Akka, Nablus, and Jerusalem. In this regard, the chapter states that the importance of Rafiq al-Tamimi's work is that it provided unique ethnographic distinctions to each of those districts, with detailed and sharp field observations about the customs, mores, and cultural practices of southern Syria as a whole.

Introduction

Chronometres ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Krista Lysack
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Clock Time ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Empty Time

The introduction lays out the argument that what distinguished Victorian devotional literature was not a set of generic conventions but the experience of time, that is to say the form and feel of devotion’s reading durations. After identifying Victorian chronometrical print as a unique variety of devotional literature, the introduction goes on to explore the multi-scalar nature of the Victorian period with particular attention to industrial clock time and “empty time.” After discussing reading as a peculiarly temporal everyday practice, it goes on to note the affective nature of durational reading. By focusing on the operations of measured and felt time, the introduction makes a case for Victorian devotion as the uniquely material and affective observance of incremental time. After a brief discussion of the book’s relevance to recent critiques of the secularization thesis and to recent scholarship on the religious turn, the introduction closes with a brief summary of each of the book’s six chapters and with some speculations about the temporal affinities between conceptions of eternity and the quotidian.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
Second World ◽  
Grand Duchy

This introductory chapter briefly explores Jewish life and Polish nationhood within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth up until the Second World War. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dual state, created in 1569 by the union of the kingdom of Poland with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was extremely heterogeneous in character. The history of Poland–Lithuania throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries raised the questions of who was a Pole and what should be the boundaries of the future Polish state. For the Polish political élite, there was no question that the goal was the reconstitution of the country within its 1772 frontiers. This created a new interest in documenting the ‘Polishness’ of the borderlands (kresy) of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Islam

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Martin Pugh
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Common ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Over Time

This introductory chapter discusses how, despite the common origins of Islam and Christianity, Islam has long been misunderstood and misrepresented in Western societies, particularly over such matters as women, polygamy, sex, sexuality, slavery and jihad. Westerners today are largely unaware that Islam is a relatively egalitarian religion which does not endorse differences of birth, caste, wealth or race. In fact, it denounces privilege as un-Islamic, though this has not prevented the emergence of elites and aristocracies over time. Converts often find the egalitarianism a refreshing change. In this spirit, a number of Muslim states have, in modern times, adopted policies of socialist Islamism. For the British, it has always proved difficult to get the institution of slavery into its true perspective. They have tended to close their minds to the fact that for a long time the British profited enormously from the slave trade, preferring to emphasise the later campaigns against the trade and the efforts made to eradicate it in the Muslim parts of Africa during the Victorian period.

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