Download or read book Cultures of Natural History written by Nicholas Jardine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-26 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This copiously illustrated volume is the first systematic general work to do justice to the fruits of recent scholarship in the history of natural history. Public interest in this lively field has been stimulated by environmental concerns and through links with the histories of art, collecting and gardening. The centrality of the development of natural history for other branches of history - medical, colonial, gender, economic, ecological - is increasingly recognized. Twenty-four specially commissioned essays cover the period from the sixteenth century, when the first institutions of natural history were created, to its late nineteenth-century transformation by practitioners of the new biological sciences. An introduction discusses novel approaches that have made this a major focus for research in cultural history. The essays, which include suggestions for further reading, offer a coherent and accessible overview of a fascinating subject. An epilogue highlights the relevance of this wide-ranging survey for current debates on museum practice, the display of ecological diversity and concerns about the environment.
Download or read book CULTURES AND INSTITUTIONS OF NATURAL HISTORY written by MICHAEL T. GHISELIN and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Worlds of Natural History written by Helen Anne Curry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.
Download or read book Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland written by Diarmid A Finnegan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between science and civil society is essential to our understanding of cultural change during the Victorian era. Finnegan's study looks at the shifting nature of this process during the nineteenth century, using Scotland as the focus for his argument.
Download or read book American Curiosity written by Susan Scott Parrish and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth. Parrish shows how scientific knowledge about America, rather than flowing strictly from metropole to colony, emerged from a horizontal exchange of information across the Atlantic. Delving into an understudied archive of letters, Parrish uncovers early descriptions of American natural phenomena as well as clues to how people in the colonies construed their own identities through the natural world. Although hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race persisted within the natural history community, the contributions of any participant were considered valuable as long as they supplied novel data or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic. Thus Anglo-American nonelites, women, Indians, and enslaved Africans all played crucial roles in gathering and relaying new information to Europe. Recognizing a significant tradition of nature writing and representation in North America well before the Transcendentalists, American Curiosity also enlarges our notions of the scientific Enlightenment by looking beyond European centers to find a socially inclusive American base to a true transatlantic expansion of knowledge.
Download or read book Nature s Evil written by Alexander Etkind and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and wide-ranging book views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises go to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works.
Download or read book Institution in Cultures Theory and Practice written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book represents a selection of papers presented at an international symposium in Singapore on the role of theory and practice in the mutually interactive and mutating relations between institutions and cultures. In effect, the papers turn about a single theme: the ways in which power is expressed through those institutions by means of which cultures mediate their requirements. The symposium brought together scholars and academics from a variety of disciplines, including literature, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, comparative literature and comparative religions. In terms of the geography of cultures and the history of institutions, the range of reference to this book of the symposium is global: from Hong Kong awaiting 1997, through the travails of political democracy in Singapore, and Cultural Studies à la Greenblatt or under the aegis of Shakespeare as cultural idol, through German Romantic theory and its relevance to current theorizing about theory in America, to Zen Buddhism and Nagarjuna and how these two sources refract the concerns of Jung, Lacan and Derrida; through Colonialism and postcoloniality and how they have shaped identity and mediated power to the current crises in education created by these mediations, specifically, in literary studies. The aim of the symposium was twofold: to theorize about the impulse to theorize in relation to the plurality of cultures and institutions which comprises our contemporary world; and to ground this impulse in those specificities and contingencies which provide resistance to such theorizing.
Download or read book Cultural History in Europe written by Jörg Rogge and published by Transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2011 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural History in Europe addresses the following questions: What is the current state of discussion in cultural history? Which European institutions engage exclusively in cultural history and which topics do they address? How will cultural history develop in the future? In addition, it provides a wide-ranging overview of contemporary developments in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Great Britain, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Download or read book Cataloguing Culture written by Hannah Turner and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism has operated through the technologies of museum bureaucracy: the ledger book, the card catalogue, and eventually the database. As Indigenous communities reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on the importance of documentation for access to and return of cultural heritage.
Download or read book Stuffed Animals Pickled Heads written by Stephen T. Asma and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In countless exhibits, for instance, the idea of the traditional human and nuclear family is evident in displays of everything from extinct animals to grizzly bears (in nature, alas, the male bear is more likely to devour its young than to nurture them)." "Where else but at a natural history museum could you find a T. rex, a high-tech planetarium, a Native American totem pole, and flesh-eating beetles - all under one roof. And in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, Stephen Asma reveals that what we don't see - the scientific research that is going on backstage - is just as fascinating as the exhibits on display."--Jacket.
Download or read book Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society written by Anne Goldgar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers new insights into the self-perceptions, strategies, and rituals through which early modern institutions functioned. Its wide range and its comparative vision of the nature of institutions prompts a new interpretation of the role of institutions in society. With contributions by Florence Hsia, Ian Anders Gadd, Gayle K. Brunelle, Christopher Carlsmith, Susan E. Brown, Victor Morgan, Steve Hindle, Janelle Day Jenstad, Eve Rosenhaft, Reed Benhamou, James Shaw, Kristine Haugen.
Download or read book Possessing Nature written by Paula Findlen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-09-16 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.
Download or read book World History written by Eugene Berger and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India's Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding their educational experience beyond the textbook. It provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making World History an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.
Download or read book Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens written by Pascal Boyer and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’. Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences.
Download or read book Culture Works written by Arlene M. Dávila and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on research in Puerto Rico, New York, and Buenos Aires.
Download or read book Germany s Nature written by Thomas Lekan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-23 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany boasts one of the strongest environmental records in the world. The Rhine River is cleaner than it has been in decades, recycling is considered a civic duty, and German manufacturers of pollution-control technology export their products around the globe. Yet, little has been written about the country's remarkable environmental history, and even less of that research is available in English. Now for the first time, a survey of the country's natural and cultural landscapes is available in one volume. Essays by leading scholars of history, geography, and the social sciences move beyond the Green movement to uncover the enduring yet ever-changing cultural patterns, social institutions, and geographic factors that have sustained Germany's relationship to its land. Unlike the American environmental movement, which is still dominated by debates about wilderness conservation and the retention of untouched spaces, discussions of the German landscape have long recognized human impact as part of the "natural order." Drawing on a variety of sites as examples, including forests, waterways, the Autobahn, and natural history museums, the essays demonstrate how environmental debates in Germany have generally centered on the best ways to harmonize human priorities and organic order, rather than on attempts to reify wilderness as a place to escape from industrial society. Germany's Nature is essential reading for students and professionals working in the fields of environmental studies, European history, and the history of science and technology.
Download or read book Museums and Communities written by Ivan Karp and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this volume examine and illustrate struggles and collaborations among museums, festivals, tourism, and historic preservation projects and the communities they represent and serve. Essays include the role of museums in civil society, the history of African-American collections, and experiments with museum-community dialogue about the design of a multicultural society.
