Download or read book A Mission to Civilize written by Alice L. Conklin and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: How did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a “civilizing” ideology with distinct racist overtones? By focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific setting—the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to 1930—the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the evolution of modern French republicanism generally. French ideas of civilization—simultaneously republican, racist, and modern—encouraged the governors general in the 1890’s to attack such “feudal” African institutions as aristocratic rule and slavery in ways that referred back to France’s own experience of revolutionary change. Ironically, local administrators in the 1920’s also invoked these same ideas to justify such reactionary policies as the reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that coercion, which inculcated a work ethic in the “lazy” African, legitimized his loss of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas of “civilization,” colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris managed to obscure the fundamental contradictions between “the rights of man” guaranteed in a republican democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire that violates those rights. In probing the “republican” dimension of French colonization in West Africa, this book also sheds new light on the evolution of the Third Republic between 1895 and 1930. One of the author’s principal arguments is that the idea of a civilized mission underwent dramatic changes, due to ideological, political, and economic transformations occurring simultaneously in France and its colonies. For example, revolts in West Africa as well as a more conservative climate in the metropole after World War I produced in the governors general a new respect for “feudal” chiefs, whom the French once despised but now reinstated as a means of control. This discovery of an African “tradition” in turn reinforced a reassertion of traditional values in France as the Third Republic struggled to recapture the world it had “lost” at Verdun.
Download or read book Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century discuss how top-down interventions to “improve” societies were justified in terms such as nation building, social engineering, humanitarianism, modernization or the spread of democracy.
Download or read book Our Civilizing Mission written by Nicholas Harrison and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Civilizing Mission is both an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the foundations of the 'humanities'. Focusing on the example of Algeria, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education.
Download or read book The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole written by Amelia H. Lyons and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France, which has the largest Muslim minority community in Europe, has been in the news in recent years because of perceptions that Muslims have not integrated into French society. The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole explores the roots of these debates through an examination of the history of social welfare programs for Algerian migrants from the end of World War II until Algeria gained independence in 1962. After its colonization in 1830, Algeria fought a bloody war of decolonization against France, as France desperately fought to maintain control over its most prized imperial possession. In the midst of this violence, some 350,000 Algerians settled in France. This study examines the complex and often-contradictory goals of a welfare network that sought to provide services and monitor Algerian migrants' activities. Lyons particularly highlights family settlement and the central place Algerian women held in French efforts to transform the settled community. Lyons questions myths about Algerian immigration history and exposes numerous paradoxes surrounding the fraught relationship between France and Algeria—many of which echo in French debates about Muslims today.
Download or read book Dominance by Design written by Michael Adas and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to civilize non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America's national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral--at times military--interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of smart bombs and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America's global mission. Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East. Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.'s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America's past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.
Download or read book Colonialism as Civilizing Mission written by Harald Fischer-Tiné and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inherent in colonialism was the idea of self-legitimation, the most powerful tool of which was the colonizer's claim to bring the fruits of progress and modernity to the subject people. In colonial logic, people who were different because they were inferior had to be made similar - and hence equal - by civilizing them. However, once this equality had been attained, the very basis for colonial rule would vanish. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission explores British colonial ideology at work in South Asia. Ranging from studies on sport and national education, to pulp fiction to infanticide, to psychiatric therapy and religion, these essays on the various forms, expressions and consequences of the British 'civilizing mission' in South Asia shed light on a topic that even today continues to be an important factor in South Asian politics.
Download or read book Civilizing Missions written by M. Hirono and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-11-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By comparing the role and influence of early Christian missionaries with those of Christian NGOs today, this book critically assesses the idea of a Christian 'civilizing mission' within the context of China. It provides a local, non-Han perspective based on a rich array of historical, ethnographical, and empirical sources.
Download or read book Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia written by Carey Anthony Watt and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.
Download or read book Mission to Civilize written by Mort Rosenblum and published by San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book was released on 1986 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A uniquely interesting look at both the country France and the way its peoplesee the world.
Download or read book A Paradise Inhabited by Devils written by Jennifer D. Selwyn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years much scholarly attention has been focused on the encounter of cultures during the early modern period, and the global implications that such encounters held. As a result of this work, scholars have now begun to re-evaluate many aspects of early culture contact, not least with respect to Christian missionary activities. Prominent amongst the missionaries were members of the Society of Jesus. Emerging as a dynamic new religious order in the wake of the Reformation, the Jesuits were deeply committed to promoting religious and cultural reforms both within Europe and in non-Christian lands. Yet whilst scholars have revealed much about the Jesuits' innovative educational endeavours, and their numerous missions to the Americas, Asia and the Sub-Continent, less attention has been paid to the nature of the Jesuits' global civilizing mission as a key feature of their institutional character. Nor has sufficient work been done to fully explain the relationship between the Jesuits' efforts to evangelize and civilize those areas within the Catholic fold and those without. Taking as its focus the city of Naples, this study illuminates how the Jesuits' work in a Catholic European setting reflected their broader global civilizing mission. Despite its Catholic heritage, Naples was popularly perceived as a place of spiritual and social disorder, thus providing an irresistible challenge to religious reformers, such as the Jesuits, who sought to 'civilize' the city. Drawing in considerable numbers of the order, Naples proved to be a training ground for the Jesuits that shaped the order's missionary praxis and influenced the thinking of many who would later travel further afield. By gaining a fuller understanding of this process, it is possible to better understand what drove the Jesuits to craft and perpetuate a cultural map that continues to resonate down to our own times. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu'.
Download or read book Apostles of Modernity written by Osama Abi-Mershed and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1830 and 1870, French army officers serving in the colonial Offices of Arab Affairs profoundly altered the course of political decision-making in Algeria. Guided by the modernizing ideologies of the Saint-Simonian school in their development and implementation of colonial policy, the officers articulated a new doctrine and framework for governing the Muslim and European populations of Algeria. Apostles of Modernity shows the evolution of this civilizing mission in Algeria, and illustrates how these 40 years were decisive in shaping the principal ideological tenets in French colonization of the region. This book offers a rethinking of 19th-century French colonial history. It reveals not only what the rise of Europe implied for the cultural identities of non-elite Middle Easterners and North Africans, but also what dynamics were involved in the imposition or local adoptions of European cultural norms and how the colonial encounter impacted the cultural identities of the colonizers themselves.
Download or read book Researching Peacebuilding in Africa written by Ismail Rashid and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the multifaceted nature of conflict and the importance of the socio-economic and political contexts of conflict and violence and shows how to support ongoing initiatives and programs to build sustainable peace on the African continent. Drawing on a range of conceptual framings in the study of peace and conflict, from gender perspectives to institutionalist to decolonial perspectives, the contributors show how peacebuilding research covers a whole range of questions that go beyond concerns for post-conflict reconstruction strategies. Chapters focus on the methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of peacebuilding and provide a toolbox of perspectives for conceptualizing and doing peacebuilding research in Africa. Anchored in African-centered perspectives, the book encourages and promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that is conflict-sensitive, historically informed, theoretically grounded and analytically sound. This book will be of benefit to scholars, policy makers and research institutions engaged in peacebuilding in Africa.
Download or read book Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission written by Michael Falser and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the role of cultural heritage as a constitutive dimension of different civilizing missions from the colonial era to the present. It includes case studies of the Habsburg Empire and German colonialism in Africa, Asian case studies of (post)colonial India and the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, China and French Indochina, and a special discussion on 20th-century Cambodia and the temples of Angkor. The themes examined range from architectural and intellectual history to historic preservation and restoration. Taken together, they offer an overview of historical processes spanning two centuries of institutional practices, wherein the concept of cultural heritage was appropriated both by political regimes and for UNESCO World Heritage agendas.
Download or read book Civilizing Disability Society written by Stephen J. Meyers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the tensions caused by the CRDP as grassroots disability associations attempt to address their local members' needs.
Download or read book Civilized to Death written by Christopher Ryan and published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live—how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die—in this “engaging, extensively documented, well-organized, and thought-provoking” (Booklist) book. Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending—balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political system in disarray. We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Count your blessings. You’re lucky to be alive here and now. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the “progress” defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease. Prehistoric life, of course, was not without serious dangers and disadvantages. Many babies died in infancy. A broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening. But ultimately, Christopher Ryan questions, were these pre-civilized dangers more murderous than modern scourges, such as car accidents, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and a technologically prolonged dying process? Civilized to Death “will make you see our so-called progress in a whole new light” (Book Riot) and adds to the timely conversation that “the way we have been living is no longer sustainable, at least as long as we want to the earth to outlive us” (Psychology Today). Ryan makes the claim that we should start looking backwards to find our way into a better future.
Download or read book The Law of God written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s society, a positive relation between ‘God’ and ‘civilization’ is by no means self-evident. Religious believers who want to live their lives in accordance with ‘the law of God’ are often considered a threat to civilization. To many, monotheistic religion is inherently repressive and violent. The central aim of this volume is to think of both God and civilization in a more open, space-giving way. God is seen as the One who prevents man from making an absolute claim for a relative reality, including one's religion and culture. The multifaceted relations between God and civilization are explored from systematic-theological, missiological, philosophical and ethical perspectives.
Download or read book Civilizing the Child written by Katharine S. Bullard and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America, Katherine S. Bullard analyzes the discourse of child welfare advocates who argued for the notion of a racialized ideal child. This ideal child, limited to white, often native-born children, was at the center of arguments for material support to children and education for their parents. This book illuminates important limitations in the Progressive approach to social welfare and helps to explain the current dearth of support for poor children. Civilizing the Child tracks the growing social concern with children in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The author uses seminal figures and institutions to look at the origins of the welfare state. Chapters focus on Charles Loring Brace, Jacob Riis, residents of the Hull House Settlement, and the staff of U.S. Children’s Bureau, analyzing their work to unpack the assumptions about American identity that made certain children belong and others remain outsiders. Bullard traces the ways in which child welfare advocates used racialized language and emphasized the “civilizing mission” to argue for support of white native-born children. This language focused on the future citizenship of some children as an argument for their support and protection.
