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Historical Transformation (historical + transformation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2000
Anne Kane
The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/"culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879,1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse. [source]

Growing Sovereignty: Modeling the Shift from Indirect to Direct Rule

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2010
Lars-Erik Cederman
Drawing on theories of historical sociology, we model the emergence of the territorial state in early modern Europe. Our modeling effort focuses on systems change with respect to the shift from indirect to direct rule. We first introduce a one-dimensional model that captures the tradeoff between organizational and geographic distances. In a second step, we present an agent-based model that features states with a varying number of organizational levels. This model explicitly represents causal mechanisms of conquest and internal state-building through organizational bypass processes. The computational findings confirm our hypothesis that technological change is sufficient to trigger the emergence of modern, direct-state hierarchies. Our theoretical findings indicate that the historical transformation from indirect to direct rule presupposes a logistical, rather than the commonly assumed exponential, form of the loss-of-strength gradient. [source]

The Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo: A Peace Movement

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2002
Viviana M. Abreu Hernandez
On April 30, 1977, at 3:30 in the afternoon a historical transformation began in Argentina. This transformation was carried out by Argentinean women acting in the social and political spheres against a military regime that directly affected them and their futures. The Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo have reshaped the concepts of motherhood, feminism, activism, resistance, and social action in Argentina and the rest of the world. This study looks at the Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo as a peace movement instead of a human rights movement, resistance movement, or feminist movement, as it has been previously analyzed. Looking at the literature analyzing peace movements and nonviolent direct action, I propose that the Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo should be seen as a peace movement. [source]

From Warrior to Wife: Cultural Transformation in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2002
Dena Freeman
This article focuses on cultural transformation in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia and seeks to explain the way in which certain initiation rituals have transformed over time. The article begins by considering two structural variants of the initiation ritual that exist in two neighbouring communities, Doko Gembela and Doko Masho, and argues that one is an historical transformation of the other. After comparing the contemporary form of these two variants, the article then moves to consider the macro-level forces of change that have impinged on the two communities over the past two hundred years or so. It then seeks to bring ethnography and history together by considering how the macro-level changes might have been experienced in the interpersonal relations of individuals. It explores the new types of situations that would have arisen and discusses how these new situations would have put strains on particular interpersonal relations, leading in many cases to conflict and dispute. After describing the local methods of conflict resolution, it is shown that on some occasions solutions are found which involve communal decisions to make a small change in cultural practice. In some cases these small changes have a knock-on effect leading to overall structural change. The article ends with a hypothetical reconstruction of the way in which the Doko Masho initiation rituals might have transformed. [source]

UNESCO's doctrine of human diversity: A secular soteriology?

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2009
Wiktor Stoczkowski
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was created in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its principal mission, as initially defined, was to establish the conditions of peaceful coexistence between nations. This mission was equivalent to an experiment in social engineering on a global scale, which consisted in working out and disseminating a new worldview based on a revised vision of humankind. In this worldview an important place was granted to a particular vision of human diversity, both cultural and genetic. The paper reconstructs the main presuppositions of UNESCO's doctrine of human diversity and examines theirs historical transformations. [source]