Trans of Color inclusion is not simply a gesture of affectionate commitment to María Lugones's theory of impure communities. Rather, it is required for the enactment of her liberatory theory within and across communities of color. While María Lugones's historico-theoretical analysis of the colonial/modern gender system relies upon anthropological citations of Native gender and sexual diversity, she argues that we must bracket gender for the benefit of [cis]women of color feminisms. However, if this bracketing does not first carefully uncover (...) cisgender histories of violence, then this decolonial feminist praxis reinscribes the invisibility of transphobia, racism, and colonialism's violent intersections, performing another mode of erasure and silence on Trans, Two-Spirit, and Nonbinary Native, Black, and Latinx peoples. In placing Lugones's texts into conversation with the voices of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color theorists, I argue that the mutilation of trans flesh makes possible the integration of [cis]People of Color into the gender–sex binary even if as failures. More important, this essay offers the beginnings of a phenomenological account of Trans World-Traveling, where the unruliness of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color bodies cocoons decolonial worlds from within the spiraling folds of abject flesh—always already in infra-communication with ancestral pasts, presents, and futures. (shrink)

: The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms "the coloniality of power" and "modernity." The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through (...) domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the "civilized" West. (shrink)

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

This essay uses Maria Lugones’s account of the colonial/modern gender system to analyze the retro-use of “biological sex” in recent anti-trans legislation. The retro-use of sex refers to the role of sex in legislation that has been widely described by critics as moving the U.S. backward in time, or as a rollback of trans rights. The essay argues that Lugones’s theorization of the sex/gender distinction in the context of colonialism offers a better way of understanding the retro-use of sex (...) in this legislation than white Anglo-American feminist theories. While Lugones does not explicitly engage with this legislation, the essay shows that her racialized material history of the concept of biological sex not only allows for an expanded sense of the pasts that are at work in the present use of sex but also sharpens the need for feminist and trans responses to the retro-use of sex that are explicitly anti-racist and decolonial. -/- . (shrink)

In this article, I use ethnographic and historical evidence to consider marriage as a particular locus of what Maria Lugones has called “the colonial/modern gender system.” By bringing specific research on marriage among the matrilineal Asante of Kumasi, Ghana, together with a consideration of global ideals of marriage and gender, I argue that marriage and the family are key sites through which the subjugation of women in Africa can be understood, but that this requires local and historical contextualization. To (...) do this, I trace the emergence and current local expression of “companionate marriage,” an ideal of marriage that is associated with romantic love and personal choice, and that is often seen as a gender-progressive marriage ideal. In Kumasi, “companionate” ideals began to emerge during the colonial period, not as an empowering force, but in complicated interactions with other gendered changes that limited wives' claims to husbands' reciprocal support and isolated women from their matrilineal kin. Today, customary marriage is often considered harmful to women and distinct from other forms of marriage; however, I show that such assumptions impose categorial differences where none may exist, and occlude the complexities of women's lives and struggles. (shrink)

This article describes and analyses the development of modern irrigation in Java within the context of the establishment and transformation of the colonial state in the Dutch East Indies / Indonesia. In order to make this relationship comprehensible the concept “large technical system” has been adopted. The colonial socio-technical irrigation system was built between 1830 and 1942. Engineers, civil servants and agricultural experts were the main system builders and they formed specific coalitions practising specific irrigation approaches. After Indonesia (...) gained its independence, the colonial irrigation system remained in existence and, consequently, irrigation engineering remained top-down, large-scale and focused on agricultural-technical management. (shrink)

There is a growing body of feminist scholarship and literature exploring the ways in which Western patriarchal technologies of gender differentiation and sexual violence structure the racial categorisation and dehumanisation that define South Africa’s history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. In this article, I consider the gendered history of white Afrikaner nationalism in the context of these insights. Using the decolonial feminist lens of María Lugones, I interpret the historical and contemporary patriarchal subjugation of the white Afrikaner woman as a (...) site of the production and maintenance of colonial racial categories and hierarchies. Gaining a better understanding of how gender operated as a colonial mode of organisation in the process of forging the ethno-racialised white identity of the Afrikaner in the early nineteenth century in opposition to the black indigenous majority population helps to explain how the continued patriarchal subjugation of white Afrikaner women by Afrikaner men in postcolonial/postapartheid South Africa works to reassert and maintain colonial racial categories and inequalities that continue to plague the country. (shrink)

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, (...) precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems. (shrink)

Os processos de integração regional em curso hoje na América Latina têm sido marcados por uma lógica territorial que tem concebido grandes áreas do espaço geográfico latino-americano como “vazios demográficos” ou “terras disponíveis”. Essa forma de conceber o espaço geográfico latino-americano remonta ao legado colonial que atravessa a formação sócio-espacial da região e a própria posição que o continente americano ocupou no processo de formação do sistema-mundo moderno-colonial, a partir de 1492. Este artigo tem por objetivo problematizar os (...) processos de integração física em curso atualmente no continente, especificamente a Iniciativa para Integração da Infra-estrutura Regional Sul-Americana (IIRSA), buscando evidenciar a reprodução da lógica da colonialidade do poder e do saber constituintes de seu modelo de desenvolvimento regional. (shrink)

The connection between quantum mechanics and classical statistical mechanics has motivated in the past the representation of the Schrödinger quantum-wave equation in terms of “projections” onto the quantum configuration space of suitable phase-space asymptotic kinetic models. This feature has suggested the search of a possible exact super-dimensional classical dynamical system, denoted as Schrödinger CDS, which uniquely determines the time-evolution of the underlying quantum state describing a set of N like and mutually interacting quantum particles. In this paper the realization of (...) the same CDS in terms of a coupled set of Hamiltonian systems is established. These are respectively associated with a quantum-hydrodynamic CDS advancing in time the quantum fluid velocity and a further one the RD-CDS, describing the relative dynamics with respect to the quantum fluid. (shrink)

The problem is posed of the prescription of the so-called Boltzmann–Grad limit operator ) for the N-body system of smooth hard-spheres which undergo unary, binary as well as multiple elastic instantaneous collisions. It is proved, that, despite the non-commutative property of the operator \, the Boltzmann equation can nevertheless be uniquely determined. In particular, consistent with the claim of Uffink and Valente that there is “no time-asymmetric ingredient” in its derivation, the Boltzmann equation is shown to be time-reversal symmetric. The (...) proof is couched on the “ab initio” axiomatic approach to the classical statistical mechanics recently developed. Implications relevant for the physical interpretation of the Boltzmann H-theorem and the phenomenon of decay to kinetic equilibrium are pointed out. (shrink)

In Modern Isonomy distinguished political theorist Gerald Stourzh develops the idea of "isonomy" or a system of equal rights for all, as an alternative to the concept of "democracy." The ideal for Stourzh is a state, and indeed a world, in which individual rights, including the right to participate in politics equally, are clearly defined, and possessed by all, as the core of a real democratic system. Stourzh begins with ancient Greek thought contrasting isonomy--which is associated with the rule of (...) the many--with oligarchies and monarchies, pursuing the implications of these different forms for the rights accorded to individuals. He moves on through history to discuss the American experiment with the development of representative democracy as well as the French revolution, after which the idea that rights should not be influenced by the status of the individual became the bedrock of a democratic system. But progress on the creation and protection of individual rights for all has been uneven. Democratic systems themselves often limit the scope of rights, particularly rights to participate in the political system. Stourzh brings this learned exploration forward to the discussions of human rights and democracy in the postwar period, with the end of the colonial empires and the fall of fascist dictatorships. He demonstrates how deeply intertwined equal rights for all, under law, as a concept and practice are with the development of democracy. He then explores the challenges to the idea of equal rights posed by economic inequality and the demands of the "security state" and concludes with a discussion of universal human rights which, under his idea of isonomy, will require bodies superior to nation-states to enforce. (shrink)

A central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical contradictions of liberal ideologies predispose states to institute unjust gender systems. I argue that postcolonial Caribbean states have inherited a complexity of social relations and structures from the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism, yet they seem unaware that the discourses which created colonialism and Western expansion were themselves part of the Enlightenment project of modernity. In this paper I apply this theoretical framework to a historical analysis of gender systems in the (...) twentieth-century Caribbean. The paper examines three distinct periods: 1900–37, 1937–50s and 1950s-90s, the transition from colonial to postcolonial modernizing societies, and attempts to generate a gendered analytical model which can be widely applied both within and outside of the region. (shrink)

The concept of religion as an anthropological category and the idea of race as an organizing principle of human identification and social organization played a major role in the formation of modern/colonial systems of symbolic representation that acquired global significance with the expansion of Western modernity. The modern concepts of religion and race were mutually constituted and together became two of the most central categories in drawing maps of subjectivity, alterity, and sub-alterity in the modern world. This makes the (...) critical theory of religion highly relevant for the theory of race, and both of them crucial for ethics. It follows from this, not only that religion and race have been profoundly intertwined in modernity, but also that any ethics that seeks to take seriously the challenges created by modernity/coloniality has to be, at least to some extent, decolonial. (shrink)

_Global Religious and Secular Dynamics_ integrates European theories of modern secularization and theories of global religious revival as interrelated dynamics. Casanova contrasts the internal European road of secularization with the external colonial road of global interreligious encounters and the globalization of the secular immanent frame with the expansion of global religious denominationalism.

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also (...) to engage in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. (...) From the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

Drawing on the analytic of the “colonial matrix of power” developed by Aníbal Quijano within the Latin American modernity/coloniality research program, this article theorises how a system of coloniality underpins the structuring logic of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We develop a framework for critiquing the regimes of global labour exploitation and knowledge extraction that are rendered invisible through discourses of the purported universality and objectivity of AI. ​​Through bringing the political economy literature on AI production into conversation with scholarly (...) work on decolonial AI and the modernity/coloniality research program, we advance three main arguments. First, the global economic and political power imbalances in AI production are inextricably linked to the continuities of historical colonialism, constituting the colonial supply chain of AI. Second, this is produced through an international division of digital labour that extracts value from majority world labour for the benefit of Western technology companies. Third, this perpetuates hegemonic knowledge production through Western values and knowledge that marginalises non-Western alternatives within AI’s production and limits the possibilities for decolonising AI. By locating the production of AI systems within the colonial matrix of power, we contribute to critical and decolonial literature on the legacies of colonialism in AI and the hierarchies of power and extraction that shape the development of AI today. (shrink)

A lire comme on lit un roman policier : comme une analyse complexe mais systématique qui vous entraîne là où vous ne voudriez pas aller. L'argumentaire met aux prises philosophes, historiens du moderne et du global, Schmitt, Bourdieu et Foucault. Il fait apparaître qu'émerge, derrière notre dos, un État-monde de classe articulé au Système-monde impérialiste. Une anti-utopie, donc. Une thèse réaliste, qui n'est pas celle d'un État mondial. Ou bien comme on lit un recueil de nouvelles (...) liées les unes aux autres : comme autant de mises en perspective du même sujet. On peut ainsi scruter chaque chapitre pour lui-même. Les uns s'adressent aux économistes, d'autres aux sociologues et aux politologues, d'autres encore aux féministes, altermondialistes, théoriciens du discours ou chercheurs du postcolonial, d'autres enfin aux historiens, juristes ou géographes. Ils prennent chaque destinataire sur son terrain "scientifique" particulier. En y impliquant chaque fois le philosophe, c'est-à-dire aussi le citoyen. Il n'y a qu'une seule idée, un seul paradigme : une théorie. Il s'agit bien sûr de transformer le monde, mais en commençant par le comprendre, là où Marx a en partie échoué. C'est donc aussi une refondation du marxisme qui est proposée. Ce livre est le quatrième d'un ensemble publié aux PUF - Que faire du Capital?, 1985, Théorie Générale du droit, de l'économie et de la politique, 1999, Explication et reconstruction du Capital, 2004 - qui a fait l'objet de traductions en une dizaine de langues étrangères. (shrink)

The emergence of religious fundamentalism in a globalized, post-colonial world poses a significant challenge to the "End of History" narratives common in academic and non-academic literature alike. Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalismproposes that we must seek new explanations for this phenomenon that recasts the relationship between globalization, modernity and religion. One model through which this possible is that of a dialectical kaleidoscopic methodology - one that applies a variety of theoretical tools and takes a truly multi-dimensional (...) perspective. Through the overlapping and complementary approaches of Systems Theory, Field Theory, and Network Theory, this book redefined the concepts of globalization, modernity and religion itself by challenging the inherent misconceptions of ethnocentric biases. It also provides a thorough historical analysis of religious systems from antiquity to the present to show the integration of modern and archaic elements within the structure of religious fundamentalism. Interdisciplinary in nature, Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Geopolitics, History of Race and Ethnicity, Postcolonialism, Globalisation and Sociology of Religion. (shrink)

Resumo: O artigo objetiva refletir sobre as concepções de gênero, poder, multiplicidade e multiculturalismo, em María Lugones, analisando o modo como sua teoria se associa ao pensamento pós-colonial. Para tanto, aborda a perspectiva do pensamento pós-colonial e a noção de colonialidade do poder, considerando o sistema moderno/colonial de gênero. As teorias pós-coloniais criticam o paradigma epistemológico do Ocidente e a hierarquização baseada na distinção entre humanos e não humanos, colonizador e colonizado. Em sua análise do sistema moderno/ (...) class='Hi'>colonial, María Lugones introduz a ideia de gênero na reflexão acerca das relações de poder. A teoria de Oyèronké Oyӗwùmí é uma referência para María Lugones, que desenvolve uma concepção de intersecção de raça, classe, gênero e sexualidade, propondo um feminismo decolonial baseado na identificação de formas de resistência e coalizão para emancipação.: The article reflects on María Lugones’s concepts of gender, power, multiplicity, and multiculturalism, analyzing the way her theory is associated with postcolonial thought. In order to do so, it aproaches the perspective of postcolonial thought, and the notion of coloniality of power, considering the colonial/modern gender system. The postcolonial theories criticize the Western epistemological paradigm, and hierarchy based on the distinction between human and non-human, colonizer and colonized. When analyzing the colonial/modern system, María Lugones’s perspective introduces the concept of gender in the analyses of the power relationships. Oyèronké Oyӗwùmí’s theory of gender is a reference to María Lugones. In the analysis of the coloniality of power, Lugones develops the idea of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, proposing decolonial feminism based on the identification of forms of resistance, and coalition in social movements for emancipation. (shrink)

In contrast to the European historical experience, Africa’s urban infrastructural systems are characterised by stagnation long before demand has been saturated. Water infrastructures have been stabilised as systems predominantly providing services for elites, with millions of poor people lacking basic services in the cities. What is puzzling is that so little emphasis has been placed on innovation and the adaptation of the colonial technological paradigm to better suit the local and current socio-economic contexts. Based on historical case studies of (...) Kampala and Nairobi, this paper argues that the lack of innovation in African urban water infrastructure can be understood using Pinch and Bijker’s concept of technological closure, and by looking at water technology from its embedded values and ideology. Large-scale water technology became part of African leaders’ strategies to build prosperous nations and cities after decolonisation and the ideological purpose of infrastructure may have been much more important than previously understood. Water technology had reached a state of closure in Europe and then came to represent modernisation and progress in the colonial context. It has continued to serve such a similar symbolic purpose after independence, with old norms essentially being preserved. Recent sector reforms have defined problems predominantly as of economic and institutional nature while state actors have become ‘unseeing’ vis-á-vis controversies within the technological systems themselves. In order to induce socio-technical innovation towards equality in urban infrastructure services, it will be necessary to understand the broader incentive structure that governs the relevant social groups, such as governments, donors, water suppliers and the consumers, as well as power-structures and political accountability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse by Jean-Paul EngélibertCyril CamusJean-Paul Engélibert. Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse [Fabulating the end of the world: The critical power of apocalypse fiction]. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2019. 239 pp. Print. 20€. ISBN 978-2-348-03719-1.Jean-Paul Engélibert is a well-established expert on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. His exploration of the genre thus (...) far includes the monograph Apocalypses sans royaume: Politique des fictions de la fin du monde, XX–XXIe siècles (2013), numerous articles, as well as the essay collection L’Apocalypse: Une imagination politique, XIXe–XXIe siècles (2018), which he co-edited. In his latest book, Fabuler la fin du monde, he returns to several texts and aspects of the genre previously covered, delving deeper into what he calls “fictions of the end of the world.” In the ten chapters, gathered in five parts, he approaches his subject as a seasoned scholar in the field of comparative literature, and his analysis draws from comparisons between modern fiction’s representation of apocalypse and biblical literature’s visions of apocalypse and messianism. The book also offers ecocritical insights into the specter of Anthropocenic manifestations in fiction, with reflections on the interrelated genres of utopia and dystopia, theories of cinema, and philosophical writings on the catastrophic history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.The range of fictional works discussed is wide, including Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Émile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846); Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883); Robert Merle’s Malevil (1972); José Saramago’s Blindness (1995); Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (1999); Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003); Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Céline Minard’s Le dernier monde (2007); Davide [End Page 163] Longo’s The Last Man Standing (2010); and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003], The Year of the Flood [2009], and MaddAddam [2013]). Engélibert also touches on feature-length movies such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2012), and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), as well as on other literary and audiovisual fictions, such as E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), Edward Bond’s dramatic trilogy The War Plays (1985), and the first season (2014) of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s TV series The Leftovers (2014–17).Engélibert’s exegeses of the genre build around two aspects of the evolving relationship of apocalyptic narratives to the context of their production. Apocalypse (in the sense of “the end of the world” rather than the etymological sense of “revelation”) is no longer primarily a religious myth: the creation and use of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the theorization of the Anthropocene, and the mainstreaming of concerns over climate change have made the term “apocalypse” a very real, tangible prospect for the future. Engélibert relies on Günther Anders’s Die atomare Drohung (1981) to highlight the importance of the A-bomb in bringing home the reality of potential annihilation to people’s collective consciousness. Yet his second contextual/historical point is that the Anthropocene (albeit unnamed at the time) actually started with the Industrial Revolution, and that thinkers and polemicists such as Charles Fourier or Eugène Huzar, as well as contemporary fiction writers, were already acknowledging the environmental impact of humans and their economic/industrial/technological activity as threats to human and nonhuman life, and to the health of the planetary system itself.1Citing the work of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil on the history of climate science, Engélibert analyzes in detail several nineteenth-century novels (namely Le Dernier homme, Frankenstein, Le monde tel qu’il sera, and Ignis) and one early-twentieth-century story (Forster’s “The Machine Stops”) that denounce the harm that the idol of the time, Progress, was already wreaking on nature and human life... (shrink)

Le monde moderne est en proie à une crise majeure de civilisation. La doxa parlera de " perte des repères ", et les pouvoirs publics croient contenir les périls en multipliant les " comités d'éthique ", dans de nombreux secteurs d'activité à commencer par ceux des pratiques médicales et des recherches en biotechnologies. Mais encore cette crise porte sur les valeurs, les moeurs, la politique, l'économie, la violence, la criminalité, les médias, l'éducation, le sport, etc. À ne pas (...) interroger plus en profondeur cette crise, ces divers comités d'éthique seront autant de " rustines " destinées à colmater en vain ce qui fait eau de toute part. Les questions sous-jacentes de l'éthique contemporaine portent sur les " limites ": "peut-on tout faire?", "peut-on tout dire?", "peut-on tout montrer?", "peut-on rire de tout?". Elles interrogent la formation et la condition du lien social, dans un contexte où la démocratie est une valeur inconditionnée. Thomas Jefferson en avait identifié le point de tension : " Le prix de la Liberté, c'est une vigilance éternelle ". Ce champ de réflexion appelle donc un croisement de disciplines : le droit, la sociologie, l'anthropologie, la philosophie, l'histoire, la psychanalyse, les sciences du comportement et des systèmes intelligents et robotiques, les sciences politiques, les sciences du vivant, les sciences de l'environnement. Sous la direction de Michel Gad Wolkowicz l'ouvrage réunit des intervenants de référence de toutes ces disciplines. (shrink)

This paper is one in a series of attempts on my part to think through one of the central challenges left to us by Merleau-Ponty’s sudden death in 1961: if we understand the turn, in his later writings, toward an ontology of the flesh as “a radical rethinking of the experience of belonging from within, [as] a phenomenology of being-of-the-world”, how are we to bear witness to such an experience? What modalities are called forth to do justice to this belonging? (...) The task accrues existential and ethical weight when, at stake in our analyses, are historical and social structures like coloniality that normalize experience, perception, and sense-making while marginalizing others. It is my contention, in this article, that when the phenomenological inquiry becomes critical the question of modality becomes ethically central; how we bear witness to experiences of marginalization and the operations of power that produce them matters in that it risks reifying the same normative structures that predicate the oppression of many. With these questions and considerations in mind, in this article, I return to silence and propose that the mobilization of what I call “deep silences” can be a powerful tool for a critical phenomenology that bears witness without capitulating to the imperative of transparency norming the modern/colonial world system. Deep silence, in fact, designates signifying practices that do not primarily operate within the bounds of logocentrism and speech as the foundational principles of meaning, or that rely upon conceptual, analytical, and instrumental thinking, mobilizing instead the somatic, affective, and sensual dimensions of existence. In this article, I am primary concerned with the sense-making effected by the aesthetic as an instance of deep silence. Specifically, I focus on the image- and ritual-centered photographic documentaries of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, which, I suggest, challenge the hegemonic normativity of modern/colonial aesthetics, introducing the reader to other sensibilities wherein the distinction between theory and practice has no purchase and the multiplicity of creative expressions is recognized. (shrink)

Heidegger est le penseur de la "détresse", parce qu'il est à la fois le philosophe de la technique et de la science modernes, et l'interprète de l'architecture onto-théologique de la métaphysique. Penser la jointure actuelle de la détresse, de la technique et de la métaphysique comme infrastructure de notre monde est ce que tâche d'engager cet essai, via le concept de système, tel qu'il fut construit à partir de Kant et de l'idéalisme allemand...

This paper theorizes and historicizes the ideas of modern language and translation and challenges the imperialist and nationalistic mode of worlding with the notion of ‘untranslatability’ that is embedded in the linguistic and cultural practices of colonial Taiwan and Korea. I redefine the notion of translation as a bordering system – the knowledge-production of boundaries, discrimination, and classification – that simultaneously creates the translatable and the untranslatable in asymmetrical power relations. With this, I discuss how this ambivalence is embodied (...) in the experiences of colonial writers Wu Yung-fu and Pak T’aewŏn and their novellas ‘Head and Body’ and ‘A Day in the life of Kubo the Novelist’. I illustrate two characteristics of the ambivalent untranslatability embedded in their novellas: the linguistic untranslatability and the experience of ‘unhomeness’. The linguistic untranslatability and unhomeness, I argue, result in the colonized’s dislocation in homogeneous time-space relationships, resulting to the incompletion of the modernization project through colonialism. At the same time untranslatability offers a site to explore the transnational space that crosses linguistic boundaries, and to caution against the legacy of colonialism. (shrink)

In the second half of the 19th century, anthropology rode the coat-tails of modernity, adopting new printing technologies, following new travel networks, and gaining increasing access to Indigenous people as colonialism spread and new policies were developed to contain and control people in settler-colonial states. The early innovator in kinship studies Lewis Henry Morgan and his two greatest proteges, Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, working respectively in the United States, Fiji, and Australia, epitomised this conflation of governance, technologies (...) of representation, and anthropology. They corresponded on the alterity of kinship systems across increasingly regularised postal routes, and developed new forms of collecting and new diagrammatic representations of kinship using developments at the press. Nineteenth-century kinship studies were focused exclusively on relationships formed through biology and descent, and there was little recognition of kinship making beyond these forms. This was especially significant for Howitt, whose closest Aboriginal interlocutor, Tulaba, claimed him as a brogan (brother), according to Gunaikurnai kinship paradigms. This article tracks the links between the collection and publication of kinship material in the questionnaires and the books of the latter part of the 19th century across the English-speaking world and the outcomes for Indigenous peoples, as arguments for distinctive kinship systems helped define their ‘primitiveness’ and dismissed Aboriginal attempts to forge kinship links across the settler/Indigenous divide. (shrink)

Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as (...) the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states.The book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. This book offers a methodological and historiographic intervention meant to challenge conventional studies of the modern era"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Scholars are increasingly concerned about social biases in facial analysis systems, particularly with regard to the tangible consequences of misidentification of marginalized groups. However, few have examined how automated facial analysis technologies intersect with the historical genealogy of racialized gender—the gender binary and its classification as a highly racialized tool of colonial power and control. In this paper, we introduce the concept of auto-essentialization: the use of automated technologies to re-inscribe the essential notions of difference that were established under (...) colonial rule. We consider how the face has emerged as a legitimate site of gender classification, despite being historically tied to projects of racial domination. We examine the history of gendering the face and body, from colonial projects aimed at disciplining bodies which do not fit within the European gender binary, to sexology's role in normalizing that binary, to physiognomic practices that ascribed notions of inferiority to non-European groups and women. We argue that the contemporary auto-essentialization of gender via the face is both racialized and trans-exclusive: it asserts a fixed gender binary and it elevates the white face as the ultimate model of gender difference. We demonstrate that imperialist ideologies are reflected in modern automated facial analysis tools in computer vision through two case studies: commercial gender classification and the security of both small-scale and large-scale spaces. Thus, we posit a rethinking of ethical attention to these systems: not as immature and novel, but as mature instantiations of much older technologies. (shrink)

* one of the great philosophical works of the eighteenth century * the rare and valuable first edition, reprinted in its entirety 'Of the countless reprints of Scottish Enlightenment works that Thoemmes has given us, none is more welcome than this. The posthumous System was not only Hutcheson's own last word on the full range of topics that he included under the rubric "moral philosophy", but also a monumental event in the book history of the Scottish Enlightenment itself.' - Newsletter (...) of the 18th-Century Scottish Studies Society Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the eighteenth century's most influential philosophers. He taught Adam Smith and he greatly influenced Hume and Bentham. His theory that the only proper actions are those which will generally benefit society prepared the way for the English utilitarians. His views were extensively discussed throughout Britain and ranged as far as the American colonies, where his political theory was adopted by revolutionaries. He is best known for his contribution to moral theory, being the chief exponent of the 'moral sense' doctrine which, following Shaftesbury, emphasized feeling rather than reasoning as the source of judgements of virtue and vice.A System of Moral Philosophy was written as early as 1738, but added to and altered by Hutcheson throughout his life. Published posthumously in 1755 by Hutcheson's son, Francis the younger, the System is Hutcheson's longest work and the fullest explanation of his method. Giving a comprehensive account of morality, it includes discussions of human nature; our duties to God, to each other and ourselves; the supreme good; civil liberty; rights; contracts; marriage; the rights and duties of parents; and the laws of peace and war. The work also contains an argument against slavery that was reprinted in colonial Philadelphia and helped give academic weight to the anti-slavery movement. William Leechman, a friend of Hutcheson and Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, contributes a highly valuable biography. This edition also includes a new introduction by Daniel Carey. (shrink)

While much current research on political Islam revolves around militant Islamism, the genesis of this ideology remains little understood. A System of Life is a pioneering examination of the earliest attempt at a systematic outline of Islamist ideology, namely that proposed in the 1930s and early 1940s by the renowned Indo-Muslim intellectual Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi. Hartung reconstructs his thought in the light of the competing ideologies at play at the time, especially his claim to recast Islam as an all-comprehensive, self-contained (...) and inner-worldly system of life. His analysis is embedded in an understanding of the history of ideas that assumed increasingly global dimensions through colonial encounters. By showing how Mawdudi -- depicted as a major protagonist of this development - attempted to align elements of Western philosophical thought with selected traditional Islamic ideas and concepts, 'Islamism' is established as an Islamic contribution to a universalistic notion of modernity. Along with offering a detailed portrayal of Mawdudi's system of thought, Hartung also discusses the reception and modification of his ideas in the Middle East, predominantly among intellectuals of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and among their imitators in postcolonial South Asia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 558-559 [Access article in PDF] Stephen Gaukroger. Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 258. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $22.00. Stephen Gaukroger, author of a definitive biography of Descartes, has now written an excellent account of Descartes's natural philosophy as presented in his Principia philosophiae. Gaukroger claims that the roots of modernity lay in the (...) philosophies of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, both of whom regarded natural philosophy, rather than either moral philosophy or metaphysics, as the core of the philosophical enterprise. Whereas Bacon developed his ideas from a background steeped in the writings of the Renaissance humanists who emphasized moral philosophy, Descartes developed his ideas in the context of Scholastic philosophy, particularly the textbooks of the Jesuits that he had encountered at La Flèche and that located the foundations of philosophy in metaphysics.Regarding the unpublished early works, Le monde and L'homme, as suppressed parts of Descartes's mature project and taking seriously Descartes's stated intention of dealing with living things and humans along with the physical world in his natural philosophy, Gaukroger presents a detailed account of this "complete" version of the Principia philosophiae. In a series of six chapters, he explicates Descartes's views on the principles of knowledge, the principles of material objects, the visible universe, the Earth, living things, and man. In addition to Le monde and L'homme, Gaukroger draws on Les Passions de l'âme as an important source for Descartes's views on human nature.Gaukroger situates Descartes's natural philosophy in the context of the Scholastic textbook tradition in a chapter preceding his account of the Principa philosophiae. He delves into the history of medieval universities, the place of natural philosophy in the medieval curriculum, and the changing relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy, particularly after the Condemnations of 1277. Difficulties in reconciling Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology, which had been formulated in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, continued into the sixteenth century and provided the immediate background to the Jesuit commentaries and textbooks to which Descartes was exposed as a student. In these works, Jesuit philosophers attempted to derive a coherently unified Christian Aristotelianism from first principles. Gaukroger reminds us that Descartes's Principia philosophiae was a deliberate attempt to replace these Jesuit textbooks with one based on mechanistic principles.Despite the strength of Gaukroger's book as a contextualized study of a major philosophical figure who is frequently treated in an entirely ahistorical way, the book is not without its problems. The main problem is one that plagues many studies of Descartes (and other canonical figures in the history of philosophy), to wit, the presumption that he is somehow unique. For example, Gaukroger writes at length about Descartes's views about the differences between animals and humans with regard to cognition, arguing that Descartes did not consider animals to be automata because they lack rational souls but rather that they actually experience some but not all of the more abstract or reflexive forms of cognition usually ascribed to humans. Gaukroger does not mention the fact that many other early modern philosophers held a view like this. For example, Descartes's contemporary and fellow mechanical philosopher Pierre Gassendi claimed that animals could know universals, as when a dog recognizes that it is a human that is approaching, but differ from humans in not being capable of contemplating the nature of universality per se. Descartes was part of a community of thinkers concerned with similar problems, and his natural philosophy can be illuminated by viewing him in that context as well as against the backdrop of Scholasticism.Gaukroger underplays the significance of theology for Descartes's philosophy. Although he discusses how God's attributes, especially immutability, provide the basis for Descartes's laws of motion, he does not explore the specific aspects of Descartes's theological presuppositions and the way they influenced his entire natural philosophical project. Gaukroger repeats the received view that "One of the principal tasks of a mechanistic natural philosophy... (shrink)

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between (...) modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression. (shrink)

Loin de se limiter à l’économie, le néolibéralisme est une pensée globale, une vision du monde, une idéologie qui élabore des perspectives sur les dimensions les plus diverses de la vie sociale et, last but not least, sur la politique. La réflexion de nombreux néolibéraux, certains de premier plan, souligne la permanence, des années 1930 au début du xxi e siècle, d’une interrogation critique sur la démocratie, accusée d’entraver la liberté et de conduire au socialisme. Le regard soupçonneux jeté (...) sur la démocratie se double parfois d’une réflexion sur les alternatives envisageables et explique l’intérêt manifesté pour certains régimes autoritaires de droite, notamment la dictature du général Pinochet au Chili. La réflexion néolibérale sur la démocratie révèle une réticence profonde face aux systèmes représentatifs modernes et la quête d’une forme de légitimité fondée non sur le gouvernement de la majorité, mais sur celui d’une élite triée sur le volet. (shrink)

This article considers María Lugones's work in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, especially her association of the fragmented self with modernity, in order to understand the existential grounds of what she calls an impure, perceptually aware, mestizaje. It suggests that the impure Latina self validated thereby may be seen retrospectively as the forerunner of the decolonial feminist self who unveils the coloniality of gender analysis. Noting some discrepancies between them, the article questions whether Lugones's use of Quijano's world systems theory leads to an overdetermining (...) historical approach that disables the spirit of inquiry for diversely situated Latinas, even as the theory itself invokes the heterogeneity of their experiences. The dilemma is illustrated by two types of peregrinas: a community-bound peregrina who easily undertakes the decolonial turn, and a diasporic peregrina who may or may not pass its guarded gate. The question remains: what difference does the divergence between these two peregrinas's paths make? (shrink)

In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to (...) early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence--from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment--this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of 'the canon' in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Complex Mimetic SystemsHans Weigand (bio)The goal of science is to make the wonderful and complex understandable and simple—but not less wonderful.—Herb Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial11. IntroductionComplex systems theory stands for an approach in the social as well as natural and computational sciences that studies how interactions between parts give rise to collective behaviors of a system, and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment. (...) A typical example is the market economy, in which the order is emergent: it is the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.2 Complex systems theory is currently a popular vehicle for understanding the complexities of the Internet; other examples of its application are as diverse as the stock market, ant colonies, epidemics, and the spread of business innovations. The focus in this article is on modeling social systems rather than physical or biological phenomena. [End Page 63]The mimetic theory developed by René Girard fits well with a systems perspective, as it has specific ideas about the drivers of human action (at the micro level) and cultural processes (at the macro level). The relationship has been explored earlier in several books and articles;3 in particular, in the work of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA) in Paris. The systems perspective received a new stimulus in the 1990s in the form of complex adaptive systems (CAS),4 not least because of the agent-based computer simulations adopted at that time. The objective of this article is to introduce a special version of CAS, called complex mimetic systems (CMS), which builds on mimetic theory. The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, the phrasing of mimetic theory in terms of CMS poses an interesting challenge to the theory to formalize its concepts and explicate possible limitations. On the other hand, CMS might be a useful contribution to the CAS field, as it incorporates concepts such as “social influence” that are very basic to but typically not spelled out in current CAS work.The structure of this article is as follows. In section 2, I briefly review the CAS literature and introduce the idea of complex mimetic systems. Section 3 describes a straw-man agent architecture for CMS, whereas in section 4, I move to the macro level and formalize the culture reproduction cycle. To illustrate the applicability of the CMS framework, I discuss in section 5 Ingo Piepers’s recent CAS analysis of the European international system in the period 1490–1945, and comment on it from a CMS perspective.2. Complex Mimetic SystemsThe characteristic features of complex systems are as follows:• Nonlinear effects: a small perturbation may have a large effect.• Feedback loops: the effects of an element’s behavior are fed back to it in some way. The feedback can be positive (amplification, runaway) or negative (damping).• Openness: a typical complex system interacts with its environment.• Memory: the history of a complex system may be important. Prior states may have an influence on present states.• Nesting, hierarchy: a complex system may itself be an element of a larger complex system. For example, clans in a tribal society, nation-states in an international system, or divisions in a company. [End Page 64]• Topology: the interactions of the elements are enabled and constrained by the network, or grid, of relationships between them.Complex Adaptive SystemsComplex adaptive systems (CAS) are a modern variant of complex systems theory. The elements of a complex adaptive system are called agents, as CAS builds on computational research in the field of multiagent systems.5 Although there is not much difference in the overall objectives, the use of agent simulation opens up interesting research opportunities. Let me clarify this by means of an introductory example given by Miller and Page, the standing ovation problem.6Standing ovations, in which waves of audience members stand up to express their particular appreciation of a performance, usually arise and evolve spontaneously. Suppose that we want to model this phenomenon. A starting point could be a simple mathematical model in which we distinguish N people, each receiving a signal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 549-550 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, editors. The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 3 of Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European (...) Culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Pp. xxv + 190. Cloth, $85.00. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a significant body of scholars called attention to the idea of the millennium in English thought during the seventeenth century. These scholars argued that, especially during the epoch of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, 1640 to 1660, religious speculation that history was moving toward its imminent consummation in a thousand-year reign of Christ exercised powerful influence on English politics and society, both in England itself and in colonial New England. To a lesser extent, scholars also noted the persistence of millennial anticipation after the Restoration, including speculation by mathematicians and scientists such as Isaac Newton.Richard H. Popkin, in addition to his well-known work on the history of skepticism, has played an important role in fostering and contributing to continued scholarship on millenarian and messianic ideas in the early modern era. In The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Popkin collaborates with James E. Force to publish eleven papers from a 1998 conference at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. The book interprets the work of biblical exegetes, theologians, and scientists in the two centuries from 1600 to 1800 and places millenarian ideas in such varied contexts as Whig politics, the production of almanacs, Jewish-Christian relations, and early modern theories of geological history.The essays that comprise The Millenarian Turn are most successful when they reconstruct the millennial ideas of particular thinkers, relate these ideas to other aspects of a given individual's thought, and trace the revision of millennial ideas through successive generations. For example, Sarah Hutton of the University of Hertfordshire carefully describes the influential commentary on the Book of Revelation by the Cambridge biblical scholar Joseph Mede (1586-1638), in order to demonstrate the paradoxical point that Mede's theories were appropriated for dramatically different political and ecclesiastical purposes by Puritan radicals and by Church of England apologists. Margaret J. Osler of the University of Calgary shows that the physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was not only preoccupied with questions about the extent and limitations of human knowledge, but also consistently extended these questions into his views on the afterlife, in which he identified heaven with enlarged capacities for knowing the beauty and harmony of the cosmos. And Reiner Smolinski of Georgia State University expertly traces the series of exegetical and theological shifts from early seventeenth-century millenarians to the New England minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who became "the first American to develop a fully coherent premillennialist system in the modern sense" organized around the idea that Christ's return at the beginning of the millennium would purify the world from "wickedness, death, and destruction" (166).As these three examples suggest, The Millenarian Turn makes an important contribution through the chronological span of its essays. Chapters usefully describe the principal millenarian exegetes of the early seventeenth century (Thomas Brightman, Joseph Mede, J. H. Alsted), but nine of the book's eleven chapters focus on the continued vitality of millenarian ideas after 1660. In this regard, the book stakes out an important agenda for future scholarship on the cultural history of millenarian and messianic beliefs and movements.At the same time, it must be said that Force, Popkin, and their colleagues could have done more to explore the cultural work done by millenarianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Having provided extensive evidence of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste SystemChristopher S. QueenDr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System. By Christophe Jaffrelot. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xiii + 205 pp.Outside of India, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar remains virtually unknown. Everyone knows that Mahatma Gandhi led the fight for Indian independence and that his nonviolent marches inspired Dr. King and the American civil rights movement. Most educated men (...) and women have heard of Nehru and some of the political and literary figures that India has produced in modern times. But few know of the first Untouchable to attend college, who went on to earn advanced degrees in the social sciences and law at Columbia University, the London School of Economics, and Grays Inn, who returned to India in the 1920s to launch a civil rights movement for Untouchables, [End Page 168] who drafted the constitution for the Republic of India as its first law minister, and who led a mass conversion to Buddhism weeks before this death.Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) is venerated by millions of Buddhist and low-caste followers in India today, and at the same time feared by politicians determined to preserve the Hindu caste system he vowed to destroy. Admirers call him Babasaheb Ambedkar or simply Baba, using a traditional term of respect for a guiding elder, and many use the greeting Jai Bhim (“Victory to Bhimrao”) within the Untouchable communities. Ambedkar is portrayed on ubiquitous wall calendars, public statues, and home altars alongside that of the Buddha, wearing a Western suit and tie, with the horn-rimmed glasses and pocket pens of a scholar and diplomat. Although widely regarded as a bodhisattva or Buddhist saint, he is never pictured in the robes of a holy man or entreated in prayer by his devotees. And while most of his campaigns for Untouchable human rights were driven back by the Hindu nationalists, many of the provisions of his path-breaking legislation were eventually adopted after his death. In the intervening decades, amid deepening polarization over his legacy, the state government of Maharashtra has published eighteen volumes of Ambedkar’s collected works and the government of India has bestowed on him its highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna.Given the dearth of Western scholarship on Ambedkar’s place in the history of modern India and the emergence of socially engaged Buddhism, I welcome Chris-tophe Jaffrelot’s Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System. As a social scientist and director of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internatio-nales (CERI) who has published more than a dozen books on South Asian politics, Jaffrelot is well qualified to assess Ambedkar’s life and thought. Drawing on a wide range of materials on the social reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Ambedkar’s contributions to sociology and politics, the author aims to redress Ambedkar’s neglect by Indian scholars before the 1990s, when the low-caste movement began finally to gain traction. However, he does not address the anomaly of Ambedkar’s neglect by all but a small circle of Western authors.1The strength of Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability is its concise analysis of the geographical, political, and social context of Ambedkar’s career. Jaffrelot shows how British recruitment of the Mahars, members of Ambedkar’s lowly but numerous caste, for service in the colonial army resulted in disproportionate levels of literacy. Ambedkar was the fourteenth child in such a military family, whose father held the rank of major and served as a school master for the barracks. Both parents and all of Bhimrao’s uncles could read and write, compared to less than one percent of Mahars in village life. Moreover, in spite of his brilliance and determination, Ambedkar could not have continued his education without the financial support of Maratha maharajahs who opposed the Brahmins’ monopoly in education. “Ambedkar was the heir to a regional tradition; his struggle harked back to the anti-Brahmin movements which emerged in western Maharashtra from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a precocity that only the Dravidian South—the other key area of anti-Brahmin mobilization—could match.”Jaffrelot presents... (shrink)

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714) was the most renowned engraver of Louis XIV's France. For the history of scientific publishing, however, Le Clerc represents a telling paradox. Even though he followed a traditional route based on classic artisanal training, he also published extensively on scientific topics such as cosmology and mathematics. While contemporary scholarship usually stresses the importance of artisanal writing as a direct expression of artisanal experience and know-how, Le Clerc's publications, and specifically the work on cosmology in hisSystème du (...) monde(1706–1708), go far beyond this. By reconstructing the debate between Le Clerc and the professor Mallemant de Messange on the authorship of this ‘system of the world’, this article argues that Le Clerc's involvement in publishing ventures shaped his identity both as an artisan and as a scientific author. Whereas the Scientific Revolution supposedly heralded a change from the world of ‘more or less’ to the ‘world of precision’, this article shows how an artisan could be more ‘precise’ than the learned scholar whose claims he disputed, and points to the importance of the literary field as a useful lens for observing the careers of early modern scientific practitioners. (shrink)

The case of highland Yemen up to around the middle of the twentieth century involves a history different from most Muslim societies in that, from 1919, the Yemeni state was independent. The problem I address concerns the utility of thinking about the highland property regime in this era in relation to the categories of "private" and "public." What sort of antecedents existed, at the level of property relations, for later commercial transformations that would culminate in such things as Pizza Hut (...) franchises? In Yemen, the polity of the period was a type of Islamic state, one based on the shari`a in ideology and in application and headed by a classical form of jurist-leader, a figure known as an imam. Prior to the twentieth century, this Yemeni form of a shari`a-based Islamic polity had a thousand year history in the highlands. Shari`a courts had exclusive competence as state tribunals, and judges, trained on old-style law books, heard the full gamut of litigation. By contrast, colonial changes in other Muslim societies typically entailed a sharp alteration and restriction of the sphere of the shari`a, often limiting application to the domain of "family law" alone. At the same time, the highlands had yet to commence the other great and, elsewhere, ongoing modern transformation of the shari`a, codification and legislation, which would not begin in Yemen until after the Revolution of 1962.Highland society at mid-century was agrarian, based primarily on settled plow cultivation, and the associated property regime was almost exclusively "private." In Yemen, the "private" property regime centered conceptually on milk, a category of individual ownership of immoveable property, and on the concept of mal, a commercial commodity. As a form of private, landed property, milk involved rights that could be acquired, alienated and inherited, and the associated agricultural production was based on lease contracts between landlords and sharecroppers. Pious endowments were the basis for one of the great Muslim "public" institutions, which supported mosques, schools, water systems, etc. Another fundamental "public" institution was an extension of the "private" commercial notion of mal into the state institution of the 'House of Mal,' or Treasury. Other key "public" institutions were the imamate itself, a form of Islamic state, and the shari`a court. This shari`a system can be thought of in terms of three levels of legal texts. At the highest level, shari`a doctrine, the jurisprudence of the period, constituted an ideology of the property regime. The doctrine provided models for both the range of substantive undertakings and for court processes, but the relationship of these models to the property relations and to litigation on the ground is a key question. At the lowest level, the routine documents of ongoing, uncontested practice proliferated. These included ordinary sale documents, leases, marriage contracts, endowment instruments, wills and estate inheritance instruments. Between high doctrine and low instruments were the records of shari`a court judgments, records in which the conflicts and contradictions of the property system were expressed, argued and ruled upon. In certain problem areas of the law, the ruling imams's personal doctrinal "choices" were designed to guide court judges in their rulings. (shrink)

Résumé Dans l’étude traduite ici, le philosophe allemand Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), après avoir critiqué quelques travaux d’histoire de la philosophie moderne faisant alors autorité, propose une classification des systèmes philosophiques de l’Europe du XIX e siècle selon trois formes fondamentales, qu’il nomme matérialisme ou positivisme, idéalisme objectif et idéalisme de la liberté, fondées sur des « visions du monde ».

La démocratie est aujourd'hui une valeur sacrée, une véritable religion. Dans un ouvrage " passionné, passionnant où toute l'histoire de la pensée politique moderne et contemporaine est citée à comparaître ", Maxence Hecquard revisite les fondements et la genèse de cette religion séculière. L'antique ordre du monde s'est écroulé. La mort de Dieu définitive depuis Darwin, fait place à un Etat de droit fondé sur une " vérité scientifique " : le progrès. Qui contesterait un tel régime? La (...) cohérence remarquable du système apparaît ainsi à l'énoncé de la métaphysique sous-jacente : celle d'un univers en évolution peint par Condorcet et Teilhard de Chardin, mais véritablement pansé par Kant, Hegel et Darwin. La démocratie est le moment politique de ce progrès. Hasard et Liberté, droit et morale, intérêt et bien commun forment désormais autant de couples indissolubles. Le lien social devient essentiellement économique... (shrink)