Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918
Abstract
Book synopsis: This book investigates the specific conception and descent of a language of 'degeneration' from 1848–1918, with particular reference to France, Italy and England. Daniel Pick shows how in the refraction and wake of evolution and naturalism, new images and theories of atavism, 'degenerescence' and socio-biological decline emerged in European culture and politics. He indicates the wide cultural and political importance of the idea of degeneration, whilst showing that the notion could mean different things at different times in different places.
... A mediados de los años setenta, Foucault afirmó que el nazismo solo tuvo que conectar la "guerra contra el anormal" que habían instado el degeneracionismo en psiquiatría (Pick, 1993) y su hijuela el lombrosianismo (Huertas, 1993;Peset, 2016), con el "racismo étnico" que ya estaba presente en Europa, para llevar a sus últimas consecuencias "la mecánica inscripta en el funcionamiento del Estado moderno" con la institución de "un Estado absolutamente racista, absolutamente asesino y absolutamente suicida" (Foucault, 2001, p. 235;2007, p. 295). ...
... Inicialmente respondía a un discurso reformista, pero desde mediados del siglo XIX la utopía reeducadora fundacional entró en crisis. El fracaso terapéutico (Goldstein, 1997) derivó en la búsqueda de una localización corporal de la "enfermedad mental" capaz de legitimar al alienismo como disciplina médica y dio lugar a la presunción de la incurabilidad y de la heredabilidad (Caponi, 2009a;Castel, 1980;Pick, 1993). En consecuencia, los alienistas aceptaron que los manicomios eran un teatro de observación (Pi y Molist, 1860, p. 15-19) en el cual la monitorización sistemática de las personas internas, como sucedió también en el hospital coetáneo y en el proyecto reeducador del panopticismo (Foucault, 1978(Foucault, , 1985, permitiría identificar especies morbosas psíquicas y somáticas, caracterizar delincuentes o crear categorías clínicas morales como la "cronicidad" o las "perversiones" (Lanteri-Laura, 1972, 1979 que condujeron inevitablemente al custodialismo puro y duro. ...
... La caza de "degenerados" y "degeneradas" situó en la conducta sexual de los ascendentes el mecanismo de reproducción responsable "de las aberraciones comprobadas en sus descendientes" (Foucault, 2007, p. 291). Supuso un rastreo sistemático de los árboles genealógicos familiares para identificar los tipos de degeneración convergentes (Pick, 1993), expresados en patrones de estigmas físicos, intelectuales y morales, que ratificaron -entre otras-las "perversiones" (Lanteri-Laura, 1979), y la "cronicidad", como categoría genérica que legitimaba la incurabilidad (Lanteri-Laura, 1972). Si el tratamiento moral invocaba las lacras sociales de los procesos de urbanización propios del nuevo capitalismo industrial, el degeneracionismo, como forma de naturalización de la locura, exculpaba a la sociedad y centraba el énfasis en las estrategias de defensa social. ...
RESUMEN: Este artículo analiza, a partir el vínculo entre psiquiatría y antropología, cómo se consolidó un discurso organicista capaz de legitimar el exterminio nazi y las políticas eugenésicas en los países democráticos. Partimos del degeneracionismo del siglo XIX y contrastamos la vertiente étnica y racial de Arthur de Gobineau con la vertiente alienista de Benedict Morel, hasta llegar a la síntesis de Cesare Lombroso. Visibilizamos el vínculo que Emil Kraepelin estableció entre la "degeneración" de los individuos y la de las razas, señalando al pueblo judío, como determinante en la consolidación científica de la Rassenhygiene en la que Adolf Hitler fundamentó su Mein Kampf. Destacamos como la justificación para "destruir la vida indigna de ser vivida", que emergió desde el ensamblaje entre la psiquiatría y la justicia, fue determinante en la transición del III Reich entre la esterilización forzosa y el exterminio. Abordamos el Programa de Eutanasia forzosa a través del importante papel político de Ernst Rüdin, sucesor de Kraepelin y fundador de la psiquiatría genética. Concluimos que el nacionalsocialismo llevó a su máxima expresión la lógica de muerte inscrita en el degeneracionismo. Finalmente, tras una reflexión sobre las reacciones y alternativas de posguerra, destacamos la persistencia contemporánea tanto del determinismo biológico como de la desigualdad legal que marcaron el destino de las primeras víctimas del exterminio nazi.
Palabras clave: Historia de la psiquiatría; Historia de la antropología; Teoría de la degeneración; Nazismo; Exterminio.
ABSTRACT: This article analyses, from the link between psychiatry and anthropology, how an organicist discourse capable of legitimiz-ing both, nazi extermination and eugenic policies in democratic countries, was consolidated. We depart from 19th century theory of degeneration and contrast the ethnic and racial facet of Arthur de Gobineau with the alienist facet of Benedict Morel, until reaching the synthesis of Cesare Lombroso. We highlight the link that Emil Kraepelin established between the "degeneration" of individuals and that of races, pointing out to the Jews, as determinative in the scientific consolidation of Rassenhygiene in which Adolf Hitler based its Mein Kampf. We stress the justification for "destroying life unworthy of live", that emerged from the assemblage between psychiatry and justice, as determinant in the Third Reich transition between forced sterilization and extermination. We approach the forced Euthanasia Program through the important political role of Ernst Rüdin, Kraepelin's successor and founder of genetic psychiatry. We conclude that National Socialism took to its maximum expression the logic of death inscribed in the theory of degeneration. Finally, after a reflection on postwar reactions and alternatives, we highlight the contemporary persistence of both biological determinism and legal inequality that marked the fate of the first victims of nazi extermination.
Keywords: History of Psychiatry; History of Anthropology; Degeneration Theory; Nazism; Extermination.
... La ciudad moderna se había convertido en escaparate de ese proceso, al fomentar el agotamiento y el desequilibrio físico y psíquico de sus habitantes. La crisis de entreguerras y el auge de la sociedad de masas acentuó el miedo hacia las llamadas clases peligrosas, hacinadas en las ciudades, así como la conceptualización de la neurastenia como enfermedad urbana, origen de comportamientos anómicos24 .En ningún momento se negó el proceso modernizador, solo hacía falta encauzarlo y recuperar la bondad romántica del hombre primitivo "El hombre primitivo vivía a pleno aire y pleno sol, entregándose diariamente al ejercicio físico a que le obligaba la necesidad de procurarse medios de vida. Un hombre físicamente sano es apto para formarse, en la vida social, mentalmente sano"25 . ...
Este artículo aborda el trabajo de los arquitectos y discípulos de Le Corbusier Josep Lluís Sert y Antoni Bonet Castellana. Miembros activos del GATEPAC desarrollaron los principios de la arquitectura internacional en la Barcelona de los años 1930. En su trabajo mostraron su utopismo, pues realizaron una profunda crítica de la ciudad existente y del sistema socioeconómico que la representaba; confiaron en las posibilidades ofrecidas por los nuevos materiales y avances técnicos, así como por la aplicación de criterios racionales; soñaron con contribuir a la formación de un nuevo hombre sano, equilibrado y creativo; consideraron que el arte desempeñaba un papel esencial en el logro de aquellos objetivos y que debía estar unido a la arquitectura. El exilio tras la Guerra civil los llevó a Estados Unidos y Argentina, respectivamente. Allí transformaron parcialmente sus presupuestos, los adaptaron a las realidades locales y los llevaron a los CIAM posteriores a la Segunda Guerra Mundial en un ejemplo de circulación transatlántica de ideas.
... Comme Lombroso, Henri Maudsley (1835-1918 fait ses études de médecine au milieu des années 1850 et se spécialise dans la neurophysiologie, l'aliénisme et la médecine légale qu'il enseignera à l'University College of London. Il publie The physiology and pathology of mind (1867), puis Body and mind (1870), et se fait rapidement connaître en Europe 3 . ...
... Estos militares se adscribían a las ideas higienistas en boga desde finales del siglo XIX en toda Europa, es decir, la idea de la necesidad de impulsar el ejercicio físico y la salud corporal como medio imprescindible para lograr la necesaria regeneración moral de la nación (Pick, 1989 siglo XIX por médicos y pedagogos, y acogidos de forma natural entre los instructores militares de la escuela (Vázquez García, 2009). Entre las teorías más influyentes estaba el Método Natural del francés George Hébert, que propugnaba el fomento de la gimnasia y recelaba del deporte inglés (Torrebadella i Flix, 2012). ...
El presente artículo propone una reconstrucción historiográfica del atletismo español en las primeras décadas de la dictadura franquista. Esta tarea ofrece la oportunidad de observar las dinámicas internas dentro de la Delegación Nacional de Deportes (DND) y las federaciones, constatando la precariedad y la falta de recursos del deporte español, especialmente de aquellos deportes minoritarios que no gozaban del interés de los espectadores. La permanente crisis del atletismo, junto con la importancia que a éste daban los dirigentes deportivos, provocó una constante sucesión de crisis federativas, con dimisiones, ceses y relevos, que constataban la impotencia de la DND para desarrollar una política deportiva coherente. Por ello, el artículo repasa, a través del uso de documentación oficial, prensa y materiales biográficos, el recorrido del atletismo en esos años a través de sus diferentes presidentes federativos para constatar que el deporte español vivía atrapado entre la exigencia de un desempeño glorioso a la altura del discurso oficial del régimen y la realidad de una radical ausencia de medios y conocimientos.
... BK, p.768. 23 Payne (1961), p.295. 24 "At that moment [preceding an epileptic seizure], the extraordinary saying that 'there shall be time no longer' becomes, somehow, comprehensible to me." ...
I am here interested in presenting a comparative analysis between the strand of thought known as ‘Degeneration Theory’ and Dostoevsky’s last major novel, The Brothers Karamazov. I will provide a brief contextualization about the influence of Degeneration Theory on Russian thought, postulating that the principal Russian preoccupation concerning degenerate attitudes – above all in Dostoevsky - consists in the disease of moral nihilism. I proceed by outlining the criminal type in The Brothers Karamazov by focalizing my inquiry around the figure of the illegitimate epileptic brother Smerdjakov. My main arguments around the question of social and physiological degeneration will be developed in the subsection devoted to the relationship between poverty and children, whose humility, it is argued, represents Dostoevsky’s answer to the death of God and the moral bankruptcy enacted by nihilistic tendencies. In the third segment I will analyse the maddening outcomes of this disease in my discussion of Ivan Karamazov. Lastly, I will venture into a more unreserved discussion about the purported sequel to The Brothers Karamazov. This study seeks to emphasize the importance in the relationship between characters and the God question, ultimately claiming that for Dostoevsky physical degeneration is deployed as a physiological counterpart for the chief concern of many degenerationist narratives: the spiritual degradation of the individual soul and of the integrity of civilization.
... The excessive consumption of distilled alcoholic beverages, unrestricted by cultural traditions and notably problematic among poor working-class families during industrialization, fueled "temperance movements" in several European countries and the United States (15,16). The prevalent "Degeneration Theory" promoted the idea that biological factors, toxic environmental influences, or moral vices could lead to a series of social, moral, and medical problems that would worsen with each generation, and eventually result in the family's extinction (17,18). In the first three decades of the 20 th century, proponents of degenerationism and the temperance movement undertook extensive political actions concerning alcohol addiction (19). ...
... In that way, criminology produced an individual profile, categorizing it in terms of risk to society, and trying to predict its behaviour (Foucault & Ferrer, 1993;Gould, 1996;Pick, 1993). In this perspective, the measures of the body represented a course to justify the categorizations connecting the physical features with specific criminal behaviour in which the racialized visions of the society were predominant (Gould, 1996). ...
In 2015, the World Bank Group presented the Identification for Development (ID4D) partnership that connects different parts of the organization to promote digital identification systems. The ID4D initiative has developed multiple publications establishing technical standards, principles, datasets and financing the development of digital ID systems in the Global South. Likewise, the ID4D has a close relationship with the United Nations organizations, academics, the private sector, and philanthropic groups.
The ID4D initiative presents the digital identification systems as a humanitarian effort to protect the human rights of vulnerable communities in the South and a solid foundation for a modern state. First, the construction of a digital ID system based on biometric technologies is a tool to “guarantee” access to social services in vulnerable communities. This platform produces a “trustful” citizen that is identifiable to receive benefits and allows them to determine their eligibility through multiple public and private databases.
Second, the digital ID system creates the conditions for the digital economy. The vulnerable communities have the most to gain from being subject to data and financial markets. Furthermore, the digital ID system is the first step toward “connecting the poor with the modern world”, not only as a technological platform but also as a direction to create benefits for the major players in the digital economy at the expense of vulnerable communities in the South.
The paper analyzes the discourses and expectations of ID systems promoted by the World Bank in ID4D.
... Such discussions had profound echoes with the generational-long obsession with "degeneration", "criminality", and "atavism. " On this see (Pick, 1993;Pick, 2007). As important to post-war defenses of eugenics was an obsession with both "quantity" and "quality", mirroring older interwar frameworks (see Schneider, 1990). ...
Using a combination of archival and secondary sources, this article argues that scientists and bioethicists after the Second World War advocated a wide variety of eugenic practices and strongly supported the development of eugenics, strengthened by advances in medicine, human genetics, and population genetics. I detail extensive research in both the Curt Stern and the American Eugenics Society Papers (American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia), uncovering novel defenses of eugenics and its integration in sciences after the Second World War by key figures such as Curt Stern and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Moreover, I relate to Richard Lewontin’s participation in a Princeton conference sponsored by the American Eugenics Society in 1965. This article is also the first to not only describe geneticists’ defense and development of eugenic ideas but also details bioethicists’ defense of this inhumane and unscientific ideology until the dawn of the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s.
KEYWORDS:
Eugenics; Genetics; Human Genome Project; Second World War; Curt Stern; Theodosius Dobzhansky
... As teses lombrosianas em relação aos anarquistas já foram examinadas por diversos autores estrangeiros (Pick, 1989;Galera, 1988;Geli, 1992;Jensen, 2001Jensen, , 2004Ansolabehere, 2005;Sierra, 2002Sierra, , 2009Knepper, 2018;Salvatore, 2017). Entretanto, o tema só foi explorado com a devida acuidade e especificidade em capítulo de livro redigido por Trevor Calafato, intitulado "Gli anarchici" and Lombroso's theory of political crime (2013). ...
O artigo analisa a maneira como os anarquistas foram compreendidos na obra do médico italiano Cesare Lombroso, Gli Anarchici (1894). Meses antes da circulação do livro, alguns atentados contra autoridades políticas de diferentes países europeus foram praticados por indivíduos autodeclarados anarquistas. Em razão desses atos, Lombroso realizou um estudo sobre o movimento anárquico. Os resultados dessas análises foram publicados na referida obra. Sustenta-se que as suas observações sobre os libertários vinham sendo desenvolvidas desde o primeiro Congresso de Antropologia Criminal (1885) e do lançamento do livro Il delitto politico (1890), escrito em coautoria com o advogado Rodolpho Laschi.
... Harry Wood's apt evaluation of Angel as "an eclectic mixture of anti-state rhetoric, Russian despotism, anarchist-nihilist revolution, and racial exceptionalism", applies equally to Olga Romanoff's overblown plot and identifies Russian autocracy as a key concern (2015: 10). However, the striking use of the gothicised past, and particularly of perceived Russian atavism, 20 Seminal scholarly works include Brantlinger (1988), Hurley (1996) and Pick (1989). 21 Paul identifies similar societal-level concerns in Darwin's Descent of Man, citing one of his more famous pessimistic conclusions: "Darwin warns, thinking of Bagehot and Henry Maine, 'the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. ...
While neo-barbarian dystopian futures are typically associated with contemporary popular culture, they were not, in fact, uncommon in late-Victorian popular fiction, especially in the politically charged, future-oriented popular fiction subgenres of invasion fiction and catastrophe fiction. Focusing on a representative tale from each subgenre – George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) – this article shows how they made innovative use of the gothic to show the future following a large-scale war or natural disaster as a decline back into an exaggerated version of the barbaric past. Reworking the familiar gothic trope of doomed inheritance, the tales showed nemesis occurring not on an individual or familial level, but on an extensive societal scale in keeping with their sweeping narratives of mass death and its aftermath. In presenting a post-catastrophe relapse to barbarism, the tales were extrapolating from the social evolution theories of Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot which, though delineating the forward tendency of western social progress, allowed the fearful corollary that in periods of crisis advanced societies might also regress. While popular fiction’s engagement with theories of biological degeneration has been well researched, engagements with these theories of societal reversion have received less attention. Applying them to invasion and catastrophe fiction elucidates how the tales used their regressive futures to warn hubristic nineteenth-century modernity about its potential comeuppance if it continued to either aggressively militarise or unthinkingly exploit the non-human world, two major negative social tendencies which were the source of considerable contemporary anxiety.
Вступ. У цій статті автор розглядає структуру та форми функціювання фотографії як візуальної практики. Феномен фотографії як технологічно, так і історично пов'язаний з розвитком військової оптики, однак метафора вбивчого погляду увійшла в культурний лексикон набагато раніше. Мета статті – розкрити співвідношення поетики та етики фотографії як візуальної практики, а також проблему відповідальності погляду фотографа. Методи. Здійснено порівняльний аналіз зі специфікою організації та трансформації практики погляду в логіці вогнепальної зброї. У цьому контексті розглянуто синтагматичні зв'язки лексичних одиниць, що породжують наступні практики та спільні метафоричні зв'язки. Особливе місце відведено диференціації лексичних одиниць метафори смерті в контексті функціювання практики та дискурсу фотографії. У методологійній площині виокремлено одиниці текстового та лінгвістичного аналізу в контексті семіотики та тропології візуальної культури. Результати. Обґрунтовано засади антропологічної моделі "розщепленого суб'єкта", що формується візуальною практикою фотографії не лише в контексті протиставлення фотографа та того, кого фотографують, як іноформи суб'єкт-об'єктної опозиції, але й міри насильства фотографії як культурного продукту, споживання якого формує динаміку погляду споживача та підстави комунікації спільноти як споживацької аудиторії з цього приводу. Висновки. У підсумку автор доходить висновку про взаємозв'язок удосконалення техніки фотографічної апаратури, що розширює соціальне коло її споживачів та відповідно форми їх комунікації. Геометричне зростання практик фотографування трансформує форми соціального контролю, зокрема технологізує практику паноптизму. Соціальний тиск погляду чужого породжує "неминучість модальності побаченого" (Д. Джойс) та перманентність присутності Іншого.
This article explores the politics of fabulation as applicable to early life adversity, and does so through a comparative analysis of Nidesh Lawtoo's Homo Mimeticus project, Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, and The Biology of Adversity and Resilience, which is how the story of early life adversity is narrated within the field of NEAR science (Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse childhood experiences, Resilience). NEAR science fabulates the facts with a view to shaping public perception, and what it shares with its historical antecedents is an orthopaedic response to deviations from the norm(al) that risks sustaining rather than transforming the deepening inequalities that characterise the present. The article cautions against Lawtoo's willingness to enter into alliance with NEAR science, looking instead to Hartman's method of critical fabulism, which affords a unique perspective on both the biopolitics of childhood and the temporality of Homo Mimeticus. By teasing out this temporality and aligning Lawtoo's method of speculative philosophy to Hartman's critical fabulism, the article aims to trouble (the contemporary history of) attempts to act through and upon 'plasticity' as embodied in childhood.
Cesare Lombroso and his "positive school" of criminal anthropology were highly influential in the formation of the social sciences and ethnographic sensibility in Brazil. Rather than carefully read or analysed, Lombroso and his school were cited, interpreted and somewhat creolized according to modalities specific to the socio-racial context of Brazil, revealing significant historical entanglements between social scientists in Italy and Latin America (as shown by the sojourns of the Italian scholars Guglielmo Ferrero, Gina Lombroso and Enrico Ferri in 1907-1910). The complex and never passive process of reception and reinterpretation of Lombrosian ideas was characterized by a dynamic of attraction and rejection. This article examines the reception and influence of "Lombrosianism" in Brazil, showing how and why such influence gradually vanished in the 1930s, to disappear after the Second World War.
The war in Ukraine has had enormous media coverage in the West, generating a wide-ranging debate concerning its origins, responsibilities, and consequences. The debate in the media raises an interesting question seldom explored in the study of nations and nationalism, specifically, the scarce incidence or penetration by expert knowledge into the theories of common sense and profane knowledge. In fact, despite the current consolidation in the scientific literature of the constructionist and modernist paradigm – of a sociological nature – other visions and interpretations of the past continue to be widely accepted and popularized beyond academia. This article analyzes the weight and influence of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in the social representation of nationalism. The persistence of psychopathological language in the profane interpretation of the conflict is explored using the discourse of the press and, in particular, the opinion columns published in various Western countries during the first weeks of the war. The article shows that the criticism and denunciation of nationalism are still being formulated nowadays with the voices of psychology and psychiatry, the psychodynamic vision of the authoritarian, and the vulgarized portrayal of Adolf Hitler.
Istanbul's intellectual life saw an evolutionist paradigm shift during the Hamidian period (1876–1908). Two generations of intellectuals used their privileged education and the burgeoning printing press to popularize evolutionism to advance global and local claims. On the one hand, selective readings of evolutionism allowed them to claim Ottoman adherence to a superior Caucasian race and to claim belonging to the circle of “civilized nations.” On the other hand, by hailing themselves champions of a new positivist age, oppositional evolutionists sought to challenge the Hamidian establishment and the kind of Islam it represented. Because examinations of Ottoman evolutionism in the Hamidian period reveal the interconnections between new globalized ways of ordering the world, the rise of new Ottoman elites, and conflicting strategies to guarantee imperial survival in the asymmetrical age of empire, they allow transcending narratives centered on the (ir)reconcilability of Islam and evolutionary theories.
Hughlings Jackson’s work formed a significant link in the transfer-network of Spencerian Lamarckism and neo-Lamarckism models and mechanisms that proved to be so generative for the emerging social sciences of the late nineteenth century, particularly psychology. I discuss Jackson’s endeavor within the contemporary medical context, showing how he constructed meticulous modes of following his patients, while drawing on Spencer’s notions of evolutionary hierarchies, applying them to the nervous system. Yet, he uncoupled the Spencerian direct relation between degree of plasticity, complexity, and organization and inversed the relations among them. This inversion impacted his choice of ‘methodological parallelism,’ and he later on deleted ‘unconscious states’ from his theorizing. Thus I deal with a cluster of philosophical issues of concern to a clinical evolutionary scientist: the relations of brain, mind, body, consciousness, the unconscious, and evolutionary ‘self/person’.
My argument is two-pronged:
When medical specialization in Britain was just beginning, Jackson created a new role, a new scientific persona, that of a clinical scientist. As I show, his clinical activity was in constant interaction with his scientific-neurological endeavor (and vice versa). I discuss the particular role that the description and analysis of medical cases played in this project.
Jackson’s search for an epistemological foundation for neurology resulted in opening up a new investigative space—neurology—discarding both anatomy and soul psychology as explanatory tools and constituting an innovative “medical-biological fact and classification of epilepsy” and a “medical-biological fact and classification of aphasia.”
This Element explores the theme of 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels. A liminal site of both possibility and irreconcilability, Gothic sympathy at once challenges the anthropocentric bias of traditional notions of sympathetic concern, premising compassionate relations with other beings – animal, vegetal, etc. – beyond the standard measure of the liberal-humanist subject, and at the same time acknowledges the horror that is the ineluctable and untranslatable otherness accompanying, interrupting, and shaping such a sympathetic connection. Many examples of 'Last Man' fiction explore the dialectical impasse of Gothic sympathy by dramatizing complicated relationships between a lone liberal-humanist subject and other-than-human or posthuman subjects that will persist beyond humanity's extinction. Such confrontations as they appear in Mary Shelley's The Last Man, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend will be explored.
The thesis that humanity progresses in a lawlike manner from inferior states (of wellbeing, cognitive skills, culture, etc.) to superior ones dominated eighteenth- and nineteenth- century thought, including authors otherwise as diverse as Kant and Ernst Haeckel. Positioning himself against this philosophically and scientifically popular view, Nietzsche suggests that humanity is in a prolonged state of decline. I argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of the thesis that progress is inevitable is a product of his acceptance of Lamarck’s use-and-disuse theory of evolution and his belief that society selects for traits beneficial to society and negatively selects for traits that promote individual flourishing. This explains Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-development as cultivating traits that Nietzsche views as valuable and that would, by Lamarck’s theory of evolution, become heritable and so help steer our evolutionary trajectory, correcting our decline.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Western European governments embarked on anti-terrorist agendas, labelling certain ethnicities as undesirable for spreading revolutionary ideas and criminal degeneracy. Several educational experiments emerged intending to eliminate the so-called degenerate element. Academics rarely consider this influence within famous examples by Maria Montessori (1870–1952) in Italy and Janusz Korczak (1878–1942) in Poland. Indeed, the conflation of the two educators obscures that each held opposing views in this critical debate. Years of war and revolution in Polish territories had produced multitudes of orphans, traumatised children and child soldiers. Following Polish independence in 1918, tensions remained high between ethnic minorities and ethno-nationalists. Social pedagogues aimed to rebuild society by drawing on Polish communitarian theories on rights and conflict. Engaging with this history of ideas related to cosmopolitanism and communitarianism disrupts dominant ideas within debates on human rights and citizenship. This article challenges the usual depiction of Korczak’s philosophical position aligned with cosmopolitan ideas on children’s rights. Associated historical research reveals that Polish social pedagogy emerged with the understanding of human rights as situated, embedded and embodied within time and place. Social activists rejected utopian visions to embrace the local conditions at the time, including the violent realities of Polish society, where teachers were often revolutionaries and terrorists. The orphanages established by Korczak functioned as sociological research centres emphasising human rights and democratic ideals while aiming to influence surrounding neighbourhoods. This article summarises Korczak’s worldview by reversing a famous epigram – it takes a child to raise a village . Such children’s rights pioneers envisaged that following years of imperialism and war, their model institutions would grow into a nationwide network fostering democracy and multiculturalism on a broader scale. In the current global context of conflict and anti-terrorist agendas, these institutions serve as critical case studies of possibilities.
In neo-Victorian young adult narratives, authors return to the figure of the “mad scientist” to reinterrogate the assumption of male dominion over science, women as objects of experimentation, and ethical concerns over transgressive scientific practices. In Megan Shepherd’s trilogy—The Madman’s Daughter (2013), Her Dark Curiosity (2014), and A Cold Legacy (2016)—and Theodora Goss’ Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club—The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018), and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerising Girl (2019)—the texts focus on the narratives of young women who are either the biological or scientifically created children of their scientist fathers, men whose motives are by turns questionable and corrupt. These stories, of females who are othered in various ways, show how they seek to reframe science and systems of knowledge-seeking as no longer the property of their male fathers.
This Special Collection focuses on the ‘pathological body’ in literature, from the socio-cultural anxieties around the human body to the sick body’s relationship with language(s) and translation. The six articles—from Italian, German, Spanish, French literatures—explore posthuman female body-subjectivity; catalepsy as a framework to reorient traditional gender narratives; the violence of maintaining a socially acceptable subjecthood; the body as language in creating identity; the emotional-psychological coupled with the environment; and translation as an epistemic category. The concept of the ‘pathological body’ arose from the professionalisation of European medicine from the mid-1800s, and literary texts and medical theories travelled across national boundaries in a mutually reinforcing interconnection that globally positioned bourgeois masculinity at the top of a medical-humanistic hierarchy. This Introduction calls for the collaboration of European Modern Languages scholars to begin undoing the consequent harmful models. Understanding that medical paradigms are formed through credible stories, the first section highlights literature as an activist (Thornber, 2013) and ethical site of knowledge that can deconstruct an apparently immutable medical narrative. Section II gives an historical overview of the rise of clinical medicine and its creation of the idealised man and woman, and examines the repercussions of not fulfilling these normative categories. Section III discusses the overlap of nineteenth-century scientific and literary texts, and the danger of translating ‘sickly’ texts. Section IV notes the signal importance of language and considers how non-normative and racialised identities can ‘write back’ against medical paradigms. Banner image: Max Simon Nordau, Entartung, Vol. 2, p. 401. 1893 edition. Berlin: C. Duncker. Image taken from Google Books.
Throughout the nineteenth century, women suspected of practising prostitution in India were registered under a local lock hospital and given a registration ticket. Paying careful attention to these documents discloses unprecedented details of the lock hospital system in Madras. At first glance, the ticket’s purpose seems to be record-keeping and surveillance. Yet, this article will argue, firstly, that registration tickets in lock hospitals functioned not just as tools of surveillance but also as a medium to study Indian women’s bodies. Thus, they evidence the anthropometric undertones of lock hospital registration systems. Secondly, the article will emphasise how the use of the speculum vaginae within these lock hospitals contributed to defining the ideas around ‘deviant bodies’. I argue that by pointing out the physical difference between Indian and European bodies, the colonial government tried to mark Indian women’s bodies as deviant and, hence, justified surveillance over them. However, this physical categorisation to define someone’s character was not introduced by colonialism but was already prevalent within Indian society as a way of categorising caste hierarchies. This physiognomic categorisation intensified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under colonialism, where the physiognomic categorisation of lower-caste women or men by upper-caste elite men had a ‘scientific’ validation in the form of anthropometry.
This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire to the evolution of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization.
Mandatory Madness offers a fresh new perspective on a pivotal period in the history of modern Palestine, by putting mental illness and the psychiatric encounters it engendered at the heart of the story. Through a careful and creative reading of a wide range of archival and published material in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, Chris Sandal-Wilson reveals how a range of actors responded to mental illness in the decades before 1948. Rather than a concern of European Jewish psychiatric experts alone, questions around the causes, nature, and treatment of mental illness were negotiated across diverse and sometimes surprising sites in mandate Palestine. Bringing together histories of medicine, colonialism, and the modern Middle East, Mandatory Madness highlights how the seemingly personal and private matter of mental illness generated distinctive forms of entanglement: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region.
Darwin’s concept of struggle for existence met with a number of different reactions, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to man’s evolution. Reactions ranged from its acceptance as a commonplace to rejecting it as a gloomy denial of the goodness of nature. As a term describing the ecological context of evolution, it suffered from a number of objections levelled against natural selection. As a metaphor, it was difficult to understand in the full range of its meanings. While some authors, popularisers, and scientists took it in a narrowly literal sense, others tried to disentangle it, or to translate it in terms of their own image of nature. Misunderstandings and distortions were not limited to Darwin’s critics, but were also widespread among some of his supporters. Interestingly, and contrary to what might have been expected, misunderstandings, distortions, and more or less creative reinterpretations did not invariably lead to a rejection of Darwin’s theory. On the contrary, in many cases they favoured its acceptance, by adapting it to morally reassuring images of nature. Moral issues, although often implicit, played an important a role in the reception of Darwin’s theory.
The term “imperial Gothic” is first explored by Patrick Brantlinger in his Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 , published in 1988. He suggests that the span of the genre might be from Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) to at least John Buchan's Greenmantle (1916), and that it is marked by a combination of Darwinism, imperialism, and an interest in the occult. In unpacking the idea, he indicates the functions of both imperialism and occultism as partial substitutes for declining religious faith, and asserts that it is also possible to distinguish clear concerns about questions of civilization and progress that make imperial Gothic specific to the culture of late‐Victorian and early‐Edwardian Britain. Brantlinger identifies the three principal themes of imperial Gothic as an individual regression, or what was called “going native;” an invasion of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world. Subsequent critical works on the Gothic and the fin de siècle have largely confirmed Brantlinger's assertion that there is an identifiable knot of issues in late‐nineteenth century and prewar fiction, the representations of which can be read in relation to the production of an imperialist national identity (see fin‐de‐siècle gothic ).
In Dracula (1897), Mina Harker declares that “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him” (Stoker 1996: 342) (see stoker, bram ). Her conclusion is based upon a description that Jonathan Harker had earlier made in his journal of the Count's physiognomical attributes. Harker's description, as Leonard Wolf has noted, is a paraphrase of Cesare Lombroso's description of the archetypal criminal in his Criminal Man (1876) (Wolf 1975: 300). The link signifies the Count's inherent degeneration as it marks out his innate criminality. Mina's reference to Max Nordau, whose Degeneration was first published in 1892 (carrying a dedication to Lombroso), compounds the Count's degeneracy by aligning him with an amoral foppishness (the Count as dissolute aristocrat) that Nordau regarded as a troubling characteristic of the fin de siècle (see fin‐de‐siècle gothic ). Theories of degeneracy thus shape Stoker's novel in particular, but they also provide a more general context that underpins the fin‐de‐siècle Gothic's engagement with disease, the body, race, and decadence. In order to appreciate this it is important to consider how theories of degeneration elaborated a language of “otherness” that the Gothic could conceptually import within the form's ideological construction of the abnormal.
The term “degeneration” denotes reversion to a state of lesser complexity on the part of an individual, species, society, or nation. In late Victorian Britain, degeneration theory was used to describe and diagnose real or perceived economic, social, and cultural crises, and to warn against the possibility of widespread, catastrophic decline on the part of the nation, its people, and its empire. Models of degenerate pathology articulated in such human sciences as evolutionary biology, psychology, criminology, and sexology were borrowed and reworked by political analysts and cultural critics, all serving to inform representations of degeneration and degenerate types in late Victorian literature.
Este artigo compreende e explica as dinâmicas do conceito de tradição da forma como elaborado por Manoel Bomfim em seu livro tardio O Brasil na História: deturpação das tradições, degradação política, de 1930. Bomfim não buscou, nesta obra, uma imagem essencializada do passado brasileiro, sendo que o seu objetivo foi o de “restaurar” elementos tradicionais de natureza autonômica. Nesse processo, o autor destacou o fenômeno da deturpação do passado, próprio das escritas da história que trabalhavam com o eixo universal/civilizacional, responsáveis por diminuir o valor das tradições nacionais. Por fim, o autor rastreou um tipo de história considerada oficial, que servia ideologicamente ao “trono bragantino”, que se performava contrária aos verdadeiros interesses do povo brasileiro. Suspender os efeitos comunicativos dessas narrativas seria, então, uma forma não apenas de “restaurar” a história, mas de reintroduzir o âmbito da tradição junto ao mundo da vida na sua contemporaneidade, energizando, por meio dos seus estímulos, os planos de historicidade que enredavam brasileiras e brasileiros.
Kampong Insulinde was opened as part of the Nationale Tentoonstelling van Vrouwenarbeid, hosted during the summer of 1898 in The Hague. The 'Kampong' was a village built after Indisch example and was inhabited during its entire opening by thirty-seven Javanese people for the amusement of its visitors. Exhibiting people was a large-scale practice in the West that has come to be known as the phenomenon of the Human Zoo. How can Kampong Insulinde be understood as the incarnated product of Dutch imperialism, feminism and human zoos? This study offers a historical, sociological and anthropological analyis that draws its methods on postcolonial feminist studies as well as intersectional strategies. It evaluates how the rise of the ‘Kampong’ can be understood as the outcome of Dutch colonialism in the Indies, by shedding light on the trade history and genesis of the Dutch East Indies along with the birth of The Netherlands as a nation-state. Furthermore is discussed how human zoos arrive at the crucial moment when humanity is looking for evidence. From merchandise and circus-act it naturally passes on to lab-sample, and intersects the interests of states who need to legitimise their conquests. Kampong Insulinde as the result of a feminist undertaking houses many intersectional conceptions on race, religion, gender and sexuality. The complexities that arrive are extensively discussed through the collection of cross-sectional themed essays. Thus far, academic research in the Netherlands in regard to human zoos lags behind. The imperial history, the colonial subjugation of the Indies and the atrocities of the slavery-past are just recently finding a place in Dutch public debate. Stories from the past need to be told in order to acquire a consensual understanding about the manner in which the image of the Other has continued to largely structure the collective mind. Human zoos and Kampong Insulinde as a casestudy therefore pose an opportunity for the academy to decolonise.
La novela de Günter Grass El tambor de hojalata (1959) representa de forma paradigmática el horizonte letal de la biopolítica nacionalsocialista. Frente a un biopoder que lo excluye y amenaza con aniquilarlo, el protagonista Óscar Matzerath ejerce un tipo de violencia que se podría caracterizar de “fática”, con la que no solo defiende su vida, sino también reivindica su subjetividad.
Parts One and Two are thus concerned with the history of the concept
(or construct) of “pre-Islamic survivals” while Part Three is
focused upon the resulting historiography, where the concept is not
always explicitly employed but is always nonetheless implicitly present.
Appendix One ties in closely with Part Three inasmuch as it covers
a historiographical debate between two late nineteenth-, early
twentieth-century Tsarist figures over the question of Kazakh religious
identity in relation to the impact of the late eighteenth-century liberal
Enlightenment policies of Catherine II on their Islamization. //
Part Four (Chapters 9 and 10) of the volume addresses the central
issues raised in the volume by revisiting the problem of “pre-Islamic survivals”
in post-Soviet international scholarship. It raises critical points
about some of the more influential Western scholarship in particular, in
direct relation to Central Asian national sources. Picking up from especially
Chapters 7 and 8, Chapter 9 pays special attention to the problem
of “Shamanism and Islam.” Chapter 10 then expands the discussion by
highlighting the complexity of the overall problem of “pre-Islamic survivals”
within broader world historiographical trends, both those emerging
and taking shape within the Western world in the post-World War
Two era as well as Turkish and Iranian traditions grappling with some of
the same points of debate over the question of “pre-Islamic survivals.”
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-981-19-5697-3/1
This chapter explores how Gramsci operationalizes the category of subaltern groups. It reviews how Gramsci’s work is discussed in contemporary theoretical approaches to racism in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and Stuart Hall. It stresses important similarities regarding the relationship between structural and social forces, political ideologies and consciousness. It notes how both ‘intersectionality’ and ‘articulation’ (one variant of this concept discussed by Hall) show how racism can be amplified through the overlapping or overdetermination of identities, representations, and societal effects. It explores the overdetermination of race in the Italian national context in the early twentieth century and how that relates it to contemporary theoretical frameworks that organize our understandings of race, racialization, and racism. Race, central to the concept of subalternity, has been theorized away from the context in which Gramsci employed the term and interpreted, instead, as a form of social ontology. The chapter concludes by reading subalternity alongside of race and class linking the concept of incipient practice to culture, political strategy, and organization.
The Ilford Carnival was a procession of costumed individuals and decorated vehicles held annually in this then outerlying London suburb between 1905 and 1914 to raise funds for establishing a local hospital. This thesis utilises the carnival to provide an insight into how different suburban organisations and social groups came together in a particular performance of community. It argues that the carnival’s administrative body, a nd other organisations involved, provided opportunities for inclusion and social capital attainment.
It also demonstrates how a local culture of voluntary action provided the basis of a largescale charitable initiative with an ethos of communal self-help. The suburban setting demonstrates the continued relevance of carnival, originating in the premodern ritual year, within a modern urban environment. In the wake of Ilford’s drastic expansion, the carnival’s annual recurrence provided reassuring familiarity , and an opportunity for inversionary performances, with the carnival’s philanthropic rationale providing a justification for what might have otherwise been seen as transgressive.
The thesis illustrates that the procession functioned as a suburban public sphere. Performances throughout operated between poles of artifice and sincerity, with dominant ideals about national and imperial identity, or class and gender roles, being projected through acts of dressing up, while such ideals were both transgressed and upheld through practices like crossdressing and blackface.
The suburb too was reimagined, as both rural idyll and metropolitan tourist attraction. It also highlights how the carnival’s timing, structure and content were impinged upon and influenced by exp anding cultural industries, with the carnival commodified by participating businesses and media, but also appropriating fundraising models and imagery from commercialised formats like sport and theatre, connoting the topicality and recognisability that ena bled it to compete within the metropolitan market for people’s spare time and money.
Big History is a seemingly novel approach that seeks to situate human history within a grand cosmic story of life. It claims to do so by uniting the historical sciences in order to construct a linear and accurate timeline of 'threshold moments' beginning with the Big Bang and ending with the present and future development of humanity itself. As well as examining the theory and practice of Big History, this Element considers Big History alongside previous largescale attempts to unite human and natural history, and includes comparative discussions of the practices of chronology, universal history, and the evolutionary epic.
Determining who was an insomniac at the fin de siècle was more complex than detailing how many hours of sleep were lost. The label was a conduit through which gender, racial, and class-based biases were ratified and produced. This article proposes there are three primary discursive elements to insomnia: the medical, the mass-cultural, and the emblematic. The first two worked together to define the label of “insomniac,” an archetype informed by and reinforcing socio-cultural biases and anxieties. The final discourse functioned as an allegorical index of civilization, contributing to the construction of a popular and “exceptionalist” American national identity.
I argue that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) decided to constitute sociology, a novel field, as ‘scientific’ early in his career. He adopted evolutionized biology as then practiced as his principal model of science, but at first wavered between alternative repertoires of concepts, models, metaphors and analogies, in particular Spencerian Lamarckism and French neo-Lamarckism. I show how Durkheim came to fashion a particular deployment of the French neo-Lamarckian repertoire. The paper describes and analyzes this repertoire and explicates how it might have been available to a non-biologist. I analyze Durkheim’s very early writings between 1882 and 1892 in this context to substantiate my argument.
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