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Heuristic Purposes (heuristic + purpose)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

New Historicism: Postmodern Historiography Between Narrativism and Heterology

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2000
Jürgen Pieters
In recent discussionsof the work of new historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, it has oftenbeen remarked that the theory of history underlying their reading practice closely resembles thatof postmodern historiographers like Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. Taking off from onesuch remark, the aim of the present article is twofold. First, I intend to provide a theoretical basisfrom which to substantiate the idea that new historicism can indeed be taken to be the literary-critical variant of what Frank Ankersmit has termed the "new historiography." Inthe second half of the article, this theoretical foundation will serve as the starting point of afurther analysis of both the theory and practice of new historicism in terms of its distinctlypostmodern historiographical project. I will argue that in order to fully characterize the newhistoricist reading method, we do well to distinguish between two variants of postmodernhistoricism: a narrativist one (best represented in the work of Michel Foucault) and aheterological one (of which Michel de Certeau's writings serve as a supreme example). Abrief survey of the two methodological options associated with these variants (discursive versuspsychoanalytical) is followed by an analysis of the work of the central representative of newhistoricism, Stephen Greenblatt. While the significant use of historical anecdotes in his workleaves unresolved the question to which of either approaches Greenblatt belongs, the distinctiondoes serve a clear heuristic purpose. In both cases, it points to the dangerous spot where the newhistoricism threatens to fall prey to the evils of the traditional historicism against which it defineditself. [source]

Islam, Slavery and Jihad in West Africa

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2006
James Searing
Modernist readings of Islam exist in different forms, from the Orientalist to the Islamist, but they agree in defining Islam by looking back to the founding period of the Prophet and his immediate successors. Muslim reformers undertook this step to cut out centuries of commentary and precedent that they blamed for the stagnation of the Muslim world, but their influence is now so pervasive that it distorts historical interpretations of Muslim thought by imposing modernist interpretations that erase past debates about contentious issues such as jihad and slavery. This article challenges the assumptions of this modernist consensus by exploring past debates about slavery and jihad in West Africa from 1600 to 1900, and exploring the diversity of positions defended by West African Muslims. For heuristic purposes, these are defined as those of the revolutionary, the jurist, and the mystic. [source]

Some Structural Effects of Migration on Receiving and Sending Countries

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 5 2000
Danièle Joly
Traditionally, the question of migration has been compartmentalized analytically between, on the one hand, the causes of international migration which in the main have been studied by economists and geographers and, on the other hand, the consequences of migration primarily on the receiving countries, which has mostly been an area of concern for sociologists, demographers and geographers who have looked into theories and processes of settlement/integration. The twain rarely met. As a consequence, for heuristic purposes a separation based on discipline, geographical areas and objects of study has taken place, an approach challenged recently by some scholars. This article brings together the threads of international migration in its causes and consequences affecting both sending and receiving countries as well as the migrants. The close interaction between causes and consequences is enhanced by the role of migrants themselves. Indeed, migrants are not only objects whose moves are deterministically conditioned by structural factors, they are social actors who formulate their own strategies and life projects within given settings and conflicts in their society of origin and society of reception, which they in turn contribute to modify. [source]

How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2007
EDUARDO KOHN
Under the rubric of an "anthropology of life," I call for expanding the reach of ethnography beyond the boundaries of the human. Drawing on research among the Upper Amazonian Runa and focusing, for heuristic purposes, on a particular ethnological conundrum concerning how to interpret the dreams dogs have, I examine the relationships, both intimate and fraught, that the Runa have with other lifeforms. Analytical frameworks that fashion their tools from what is unique to humans (language, culture, society, and history) or, alternatively, what humans are commonly supposed to share with animals are inadequate to this task. By contrast, I turn to an embodied and emergentist understanding of semiosis,one that treats sign processes as inherent to life and not just restricted to humans,as well as to an appreciation for Amazonian preoccupations with inhabiting the points of view of nonhuman selves, to move anthropology beyond "the human," both as analytic and as bounded object of study. [source]

Der Natur-Begriff des 17.

BERICHTE ZUR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE, Issue 4 2000
Jahrhunderts und zwei seiner Inter-pretamente:, intima rerum", res extensa" und
Abstract This article aims to show the general and broad use of the concept of nature in the philosophical discourse of the 17th century - and in this context it is obvious that this discourse includes both philosophy and theology. I will discuss two opposite views concerning its fundamental understanding of nature, yet will not go into elaborating differences concerning such particular concepts as, for example, space, void or motion. These views and the theoretical positions from which they emerged will here be called res extensa and intima rerum - this is done in order to clarify the basic opposition: there is no interior in pure extension and there is no extension at all in that what is called the interior. My aim is to show that these two views are, in fact, not quite as incompatible and contradictory as it easily may seem at first glance. Although I will for heuristic purposes introduce the two concepts res extensa and intima rerum as complete opposites and in a wholly contrary manner, ist should become clear that there exist both influences and interactions between these two notions. Theorists introduced here as advocates of the intima rerum -position, can, for example, be seen as having been influenced by the mechanistic, or res extensa -position, mainly through the formally and methodologically attractive geometric and mathematical argumentation. Likewise theorists advocating a mechanistic position can be said at some points to have been led by a substantial necessity concerning the contect of their argumentation to take recourse to the concept of intima rerum, at least partly or in a modified manner. [source]