Download or read book The Ten Thousand Things written by Maria Dermout and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set between Holland and a remote Indonesian island, this intimate magical realism novel offers “an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of a legend” (Time). “Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

Download or read book Colonial Collections Revisited written by Pieter ter Keurs and published by Phoenix Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of colonial collecting is complex and full of contradictions. Collectors often appreciated the 'other' cultures where they obtained collections, but at the same time they had a close relationship with the colonial authorities who were willing to subjugate societies with military violence. This book addresses colonial collecting with examples from the Dutch East Indies and, by means of comparison, with a discussion about collecting in British India. Since the 1990s the phenomenon of collecting has become an important part of anthropological discourse. This development touches upon the foundations of the discipline, since it throws light on how the white colonizers dealt with local cultures, and thus on how the formation of the anthropological discourse took place. The study of collecting can help us to develop an anthropology of intentionality, instrumentality and desire, as Anthony Shelton argues in one of the contributions to this book. Objects do not stop 'to live' when collected. Margaret Wiener discusses the magic of the kris, which is influential even in Europe, far from the context in which the magic is created. Other chapters treat in detail the military entanglement with collecting in the Dutch East Indies. There is also attention for ethnographic collecting in the context of scholarly activities, particularly in the chapter by Ruth Barnes. The broad picture of colonial collecting ,as presented in this book, includes an analysis of the appropriation of the Indonesian Hindu-Buddhist culture by means of collecting Javanese antiquities, detailed descriptions of colonial wars (North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, Bali and Lombok) and a discussion of the cultural heritage of the Ethische Politiek. With contributions by Ruth Barnes, Francine Brinkgreve, Hari Budiarti, Brian Durrans, Wahyu Ernawati, Pieter ter Keurs, Susan Legêne, Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, Anthony Shelton, Harm Stevens, David Stuart-Fox and Margaret Wiener.

Download or read book Indonesia written by Pieter ter Keurs and published by Kit Pub. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During their colonial rule over Indonesia, the Dutch collected art objects. For each object they exported to The Netherlands they had to leave a similar object in Indonesian care. In most cases the best quality objects remained in Indonesia. Thus a collection was built that consists of two complementary parts. This book describes the history of this collection and provides a unique insight into the way colonial powers collected art and at the same time tried to be just. In December 2005, the two halves of the collection were displayed together for the first time ever in De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. This book marks that historic occasion. The Dutch and Indonesian collections are the top two Indonesian Art collections in the world. This book shows the highlights of both these collections in relation to each other. All objects were photographed especially for this book; many of the objects are unique and have never been photographed before.

Download or read book Materials in Eighteenth century Science written by Ursula Klein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this history of materials, the authors link chemical science with chemical technology, challenging our current understandings of objects in the history of science and the distinction between scientific and technological objects. They further show that chemits' experimental production and understanding of materials changed over time, first in the decades around 1700 and then around 1830, when mundane materials became clearly distinguished from true chemical substances.

Download or read book Science and Empire in the Atlantic World written by James Delbourgo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Download or read book Empire of Reason written by Lewis Pyenson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1989-06-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preliminary Material -- 1 Imperious Metropolitan Knowledge -- 2 Stars of the Southern Heavens -- 3 Islands of Earthly Wonders -- 4 Knowledge Radiant and Resplendent -- 5 Tenebrous Colonial Visions -- Index.

Download or read book The History of Science in the Netherlands written by Klaas Van Berkel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1999 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The handbook A History of Science in The Netherlands aims to correct this situation by providing a chronological and thematic survey of the field from the 16th century to the present, essays on selected aspects of science in the Netherlands, and reference biographies of about 65 important Dutch scientists.

Download or read book Science Cultivating Practice written by H. Maat and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Cultivating Practice is an institutional history of agricultural science in the Netherlands and its overseas territories. The focus of this study is the variety of views about a proper relationship between science and (agricultural) practice. Such views and plans materialised in the overall organisation of research and education. Moreover, the book provides case studies of genetics and plant breeding in the Netherlands, colonial rice breeding, and agricultural statistics. Ideas affected the organisation as much as the other way round. The net result was an institutional development in which the values of academic science were rated higher than the values of practice. This book is a distinctive piece of work as it treats the dynamics of science in a European as well as in a colonial context. These different ecological and social environments lead to other forms of knowledge and experimentation as well as other ways of organising science.

Download or read book Royal Cabinets and Auxiliary Branches written by Rudolf Antonius Hermanus Dominique Effert and published by CNWS Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the origins of the present-day National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and covers the period from 1816 to 1883. With the foundation of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in The Hague in 1816, a transformation took place from mainly private collections to national state-owned collections. The founding of the Royal Cabinet was one of the first attempts to create something like a National Museum. This book traces the purposes and motives of private collecting and the emergence of cabinets of curiosities, the composition of the collections, and the move towards a National Museum. At the time of its establishment, the Royal Cabinet of Rarities consisted of a bequest of mainly Chinese objects, objects from the Royal House, and objects concerning the national history of the Netherlands. However, the first director of this Royal Cabinet, R.P. van de Kasteele, actively stimulated civil servants and travellers to collect for the cabinet and before long, the focus moved to Japan. Through the VOC settlement at Deshima, VOC officials had a unique access to things Japanese. The three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century were Jan Cock Blomhoff, Johannes van Overmeer Fisscher, and Philip Franz Von Siebold.

Download or read book Into The American Woods written by James H Merrell and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000-01-18 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bloodshed and hatred of frontier conflict at once made go-betweens obsolete and taught the harsh lesson of the woods: the final incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared. Long erased from history, the go-betweens of early America are recovered here in vivid detail.

Download or read book Technology and Ethical Idealism written by Suzanne Moon and published by CNWS Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology and Ethical Idealism investigates a pivotal intellectual and political moment in twentieth-century Indonesian history, the establishment of "development" as both an ideal and a practice. The focus of this study is on technological development as a central concern of colonial political life from 1900 to 1942 in the Netherlands East Indies. The foundations of developmentalist thinking and practice in the turn-of-the-century colonial reforms were called the Ethical policies. Tracing the interplay of Ethical politics at the highest levels of the Netherlands Indies colonial government with the technical practices of development taking place in the fields of ordinary Javanese farmers, it shows how and why technological development became such an enduring part of political and material life in the archipelago. This study offers a new history of the Ethical policies that focuses on their often-neglected technopolitical character, and the formative influence they exercised on development thinking in Indonesia among both Dutch experts and members of the community of Indonesian activists known as the pergerakan. In startling contrast with many histories of development, it shows how the interaction of colonial idealism and scientific practice led the Dutch to commit to small-scale change in their "development of the native peoples." As experts tailored technical solutions to ecological, social, and economic conditions of local areas, they eschewed high modernism in their search for colonial moderni-zation, unexpectedly prefiguring the appropriate technology movements that arose decades later. Based on extensive research in the colonial archives in The Hague, the National Library in Jakarta, and the Bogor Library of Biology and Agriculture, this study draws on official documents and scientific research of the era, as well as public discussions in both Dutch and Indonesian language newspapers and journals in order to capture not just the official plans, but also a wide range of public critiques and responses to development, and the day-to-day practices that shaped the productive lives of ordinary farmers. Offering a new exploration of politics and technology in colonial Indonesia, this book will interest historians of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, historians of technology, and those seeking to understand the complex colonial roots of international development.

Download or read book Flora Indica written by N. L. Burmanni and published by . This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Utopia s Garden written by E. C. Spary and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue. Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.

Download or read book The Floracrats written by Andrew Goss and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated along the line that divides the rich ecologies of Asia and Australia, the Indonesian archipelago is a hotbed for scientific exploration, and scientists from around the world have made key discoveries there. But why do the names of Indonesia’s own scientists rarely appear in the annals of scientific history? In The Floracrats Andrew Goss examines the professional lives of Indonesian naturalists and biologists, to show what happens to science when a powerful state becomes its greatest, and indeed only, patron. With only one purse to pay for research, Indonesia’s scientists followed a state agenda focused mainly on exploiting the country’s most valuable natural resources—above all its major export crops: quinine, sugar, coffee, tea, rubber, and indigo. The result was a class of botanic bureaucrats that Goss dubs the “floracrats.” Drawing on archives and oral histories, he shows how these scientists strove for the Enlightenment ideal of objective, universal, and useful knowledge, even as they betrayed that ideal by failing to share scientific knowledge with the general public. With each chapter, Goss details the phases of power and the personalities in Indonesia that have struggled with this dilemma, from the early colonial era, through independence, to the modern Indonesian state. Goss shows just how limiting dependence on an all-powerful state can be for a scientific community, no matter how idealistic its individual scientists may be.

Download or read book Alexander Von Humboldt and the Botanical Exploration of the Americas written by H. Walter Lack and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Created during Alexander von Humboldt's historic expedition to the Americas and Cuba, these intricate and delicately tinted prints record his revolutionary findings as he traveled through jungles, across rivers, and over mountainous terrain.

Download or read book British Naturalists in Qing China written by Fa-ti FAN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western scientific interest in China focused primarily on natural history. Prominent scholars in Europe as well as Westerners in China, including missionaries, merchants, consular officers, and visiting plant hunters, eagerly investigated the flora and fauna of China. Yet despite the importance and extent of this scientific activity, it has been entirely neglected by historians of science. This book is the first comprehensive study on this topic. In a series of vivid chapters, Fa-ti Fan examines the research of British naturalists in China in relation to the history of natural history, of empire, and of Sino-Western relations. The author gives a panoramic view of how the British naturalists and the Chinese explored, studied, and represented China's natural world in the social and cultural environment of Qing China. Using the example of British naturalists in China, the author argues for reinterpreting the history of natural history, by including neglected historical actors, intellectual traditions, and cultural practices. His approach moves beyond viewing the history of science and empire within European history and considers the exchange of ideas, aesthetic tastes, material culture, and plants and animals in local and global contexts. This compelling book provides an innovative framework for understanding the formation of scientific practice and knowledge in cultural encounters. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction I. The Port 1. Natural History in a Chinese Entrepà ́t 2. Art, Commerce, and Natural History II. The Land 3. Science and Informal Empire 4. Sinology and Natural History 5. Travel and Fieldwork in the Interior Epilogue Appendix: Selected Biographical Notes Abbreviations Notes Index Fa-ti Fan's study of the encounter between the British culture of the naturalist and the Chinese culture of the Qing is both a delight and a revelation. The topic has scarcely been addressed by historians of science, and this work fills important gaps in our knowledge of British scientific practice in a noncolonial context and of Chinese reactions to Western science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to the culture of Victorian naturalists and Sinology, Fan shows an admirable grasp of visual representation in science, Chinese taxonomic schemes, Chinese export art, British imperial scholarship, and journeys of exploration. His treatment of the China trade and descriptions of Chinese markets and nurseries are especially welcome. I learned a great deal, and I strongly recommend this book. --Philip Rehbock, author of Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology By focusing on the experiences of British naturalists in China during a time when it was gradually being opened up to foreign influences, Fan makes at least two important contributions to history of science: He gives us an authoritative study of British naturalists in China (as far as I know the only one of its kind), and he forces us to rethink some of our categories for doing history of science, including how we conceive of the relationship between science and imperialism, and between Western naturalist and native. Fan's scholarship is meticulous, with careful attention to detail, and his prose is clear, controlled, and succinct. --Bernard Lightman, editor of Victorian Science in Context

Download or read book The Floracrats written by Andrew Goss (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: