History textbooks,racism and the critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation

This article is based on the theoretical framework developed within a research project on the construction of Eurocentrism and, more specifically, on the analysis of Portuguese history textbooks. We propose that the textbooks’ master narrative constitutes a power-evasive discourse on history, which naturalizes core processes such as colonialism, slavery and racism. Showing the limits of an approach that merely proposes the compensation or rectification of (mis)representations, we argue for the need to unbind the debate on Eurocentrism from a perspective that fails to make problematic the ‘very idea of Europe’. Accordingly, our analysis of Portuguese history textbooks focuses on three core narrative devices: (1) the chronopolitics of representation; (2) the paradigm of the (democratic) national state; and (3) the definitive bond between concepts and historical processes.     

Making Sense of Scientific Biographies: Scientific achievement,nature of science,and storylines in college students’ essays

In this article, the educative value of scientific biographies will be explored, especially for non-science major college students. During the ‘Scientist’s life and thought’ course, 66 college students read nine scientific biographies including five biologists, covering the canonical scientific achievements in Western scientific history. Students’ essays were initially analysed in terms of four dimensions of scientific achievement: personal traits and talent, socio-cultural environment, scientific inquiry and debate, and historical significance. Further analysis focused on noticeable aspects in the nature of science (NOS). Based on the analyses, the idea of a story grid was devised in order to identify major storylines that show students various ways of making sense of scientific biographies. The analysis shows the aspects in which biographies are instrumental for students to identify and engage critically with issues related to the NOS. The article concludes with some implications for designing history of science courses for non-science major college students.     

A large-scale phylogeny of Synodontis (Mochokidae,Siluriformes) reveals the influence of geological events on continental diversity during the Cenozoic

To explain the spatial variability of fish taxa at a large scale, two alternative proposals are usually evoked. In recent years, the debate has centred on the relative roles of present and historical processes in shaping biodiversity patterns. In Africa, attempts to understand the processes that determine the large scale distribution of fishes and exploration of historical contingencies have been under-investigated given that most of the phylogenetic studies focus on the history of the Great Lakes. Here, we explore phylogeographic events in the evolutionary history of Synodontis (Mohokidae, Siluriformes) over Africa during the Cenozoic focusing on the putative role of historical processes. We discuss how known geological events together with hydrographical changes contributed to shape Synodontis biogeographical history. Synodontis was chosen on the basis of its high diversity and distribution in Africa: it consists of approximately 120 species that are widely distributed in all hydrographic basins except the Maghreb and South Africa. We propose the most comprehensive phylogeny of this catfish genus. Our results provide support for the ‘hydrogeological’ hypothesis, which proposes that palaeohydrological changes linked with the geological context may have been the cause of diversification of freshwater fish deep in the Tertiary. More precisely, the two main geological structures that participated to shape the hydrographical network in Africa, namely the Central African Shear zone and the East African rift system, appear as strong drivers of Synodontis diversification and evolution.     

The tribunal of philosophy and its norms: history and philosophy in Georges Canguilhem’s historical epistemology

In this article I assess Georges Canguilhem’s historical epistemology with both theoretical and historical questions in mind. From a theoretical point of view, I am concerned with the relation between history and philosophy, and in particular with the philosophical assumptions and external norms that are involved in history writing. Moreover, I am concerned with the role that history can play in the understanding and evaluation of philosophical concepts. From a historical point of view, I regard historical epistemology, as developed by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as a conception and practice which came out of the project, elaborated in France from the 1920s to the 1940s, of combining history of science and philosophy. I analyse in particular Canguilhem’s epistemology in his theory and practice of history of science. What he called ‘normative history’ is the focus of my analysis. I evaluate the question of the nature and provenience of the norm employed in normative history, and I compare it with the norm as discussed by Canguilhem in Le normal et le pathologique. While I am critical of Canguilhem’s treatment of history, I conclude that his philosophical suggestion to analyse the formation of scientific concepts ‘from below’ represents a useful model for history and philosophy of science, and that it can be very profitably extended to philosophical concepts.     

Words of the ancestors: disembodied knowledge and secrecy in East Timor

By examining processes of revealing and concealing ancestral ‘words’, this article analyses the connection between East Timorese knowledge practices and status competition. The point of departure is a tension between the assertion by eminent ritual speakers in the Idaté‐speaking village of Funar of the need to discover the most truthful ‘trunk’ knowledge, and the simultaneous and continual concealment of what this ‘trunk’ may consist of. The article explores the discursive practices that sustain the notion that knowledge exists as an immutable essence outside of history, and the difficulty of maintaining this notion given dramatic historical events in East Timor in recent decades. Whereas secrecy and concealment are key strategies of dealing with unrelenting contestations over the ownership and content of ‘trunk’ words, a ritual speaker's attempt to deny the interrelational aspect of knowledge is undermined by the need for others to recognize him as its rightful guardian.     

Empirical research in clinical ethics: The ‘committed researcher’ approach

After the ‘empirical turn’ in bioethics, few specific approaches have been developed for doing clinical ethics research in close connection with clinical decision-making on a daily basis. In this paper we describe the ‘committed researcher’ approach to research in clinical ethics that we have developed over the years. After comparing it to two similar research methodological approaches, the ‘embedded researcher’ and ‘deliberative engagement’, we highlight its main features: it is patient-oriented, it is implemented by collegial and multidisciplinary teams, it uses an ethical grid to build the interview guide, and it is geared towards bringing the results to bear on the public debate surrounding the issue at stake. Finally, we position our methodological approach with respect to the ‘is vs. ought’ distinction. We argue that our ‘commitment researcher’ approach to clinical ethics research takes concerned people’s life-building values as the main data, and compares them to the larger normative framework underlying the medical practice at stake.     

Recent science and its exploration: the case of molecular biology

This paper is about the interaction and the intertwinement between history of science as a historical process and history of science as the historiography of this process, taking molecular biology as an example. In the first part, two historical shifts are briefly characterized that appear to have punctuated the emergence of molecular biology between the 1930s and the 1980s, one connected to a new generation of analytical apparatus, the other to properly molecular tools. The second part concentrates on the historiography of this development. Basically, it distinguishes three phases. The first phase was largely dominated by accounts of the actors themselves. The second coincided with the general ‘practical turn’ in history of science at large, and today’s historical appropriations of the molecularization of the life sciences appear to be marked by the changing disciplinary status of the science under review. In a closing remark, an argument is made for differentiating between long-range, middle-range and short-range perspectives in dealing with the history of the sciences.     

‘The Earth Cannot Let Go of Us’: Analysing Ontological Conflicts

This paper examines certain key concepts of the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, with a view to a clearer understanding of its proposed methodology. It situates the ontological approach within the historical and intellectual conflicts through which it arose, outlining its motivations and the challenges it poses to traditional fieldwork methods and theory. The concepts of ‘radical alterity’ and ‘incommensurability’ are examined as intellectual as well as political concepts, highlighting their historical contingency on the politics of colonisation. Following from this, the notion of ‘ontological self-determination’ is analysed with respect to my fieldwork with the Dongria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha, India; I show how an application of the ontological methodology allows a better understanding of certain conflicts within current discourses and practices of nationhood and development.     

Minority politics in the Middle East and North Africa: the prospects for transformative change

This special issue explores the prospects for what Jacob Mundy calls ‘transformative minority politics’ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – that is, a form of minority politics that strengthens democratic reform in the region, and that helps deepen a culture of human rights and democratic citizenship. The cases examined in the special issue include the Amazigh in North Africa, the Copts in Egypt, the Kurds in Iraq, the Palestinians in Israel, the ‘minoritarian’ regimes in Syria and Bahrain, and the various ethnic minorities in Iran. In this introduction, we try to situate this debate in a larger historical and international context, identifying some of the factors that might help support a new transformative minority politics in the region, while also emphasizing the factors that have inhibited it in the past, and why they remain powerful.     

Postcoloniality,National Identity,Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post-colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so-called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post-coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation-state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation-states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.     

Retrieving the Red Continent: settler colonialism and the history of American Indians in the US

While present in the contemporary academy, American Indian history remains marginalized by being associated with regional and national histories of the United States. Recently, postcolonial scholarship has provided a pathway out of that marginalization. The postcolonial critique of traditional anthropological and historical writing about indigenous peoples suggests a new way to imagine the relationship between American Indian history and other areas of scholarship. The most promising aspect of this critique is the formulation of ‘settler colonialism’. That framework first emerged among geographers and has recently been embraced by historians and anthropologists. The settler colonial framework offers a way to conceive of the Native past in a transnational context as well as to understand indigenous encounters with modernity as an ongoing struggle with colonial rule rather than as a campaign to accommodate Native people to ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ or to ‘assimilate’ them into a nation state.     

Believing in a secular age: Anthropology,sociology and religious experience1

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age generated a great deal of attention—and has stimulated important debates—among a diverse range of scholars in sociology, history, politics, religious studies and to a lesser extent, anthropologists. Much of the debate has focused on the implications of Taylor’s work for the so‐called secularisation thesis and the place (or non‐place) of religion in the so‐called public sphere. The essays in this volume arise less out of such concerns and more from Taylor’s discussion of secularism in a third, ‘experiential’ sense. Each paper addresses the question of what it is like to ‘believe’ (or not ‘believe’) in the modern world. Among other things the authors of the essays published in this Special Issue are concerned to develop better understandings of the conditions under which belief and unbelief may be experienced as open, rather than closed, to the possibility of other ontological construals, thereby building on Taylor’s insights into the phenomenology of modern secularism.     

The ethics of biobanking: Assessing the right to control problem for broad consent

The biobank consent debate is one with deeply held convictions on both the ‘broad’ and ‘specific’ side with little sign of resolution. Recently, Thomas Ploug and Soren Holm have developed an alternative to both specific and broad consent: a meta‐consent framework. The aim here is to consider whether meta‐consent provides a ‘solution’ to the biobank consent debate. We clarify what ‘meta‐consent’ actually is (arguing that the label is a misnomer and ‘consent à la carte’ is more accurate). We identify problems with Ploug and Holm's arguments, and some challenges for meta‐consent. We focus on whether there is any ethical obligation to provide consent à la carte. There may seem to be so, especially if we draw upon an unclear appeal to the ethical significance of ‘respect for autonomy’. Similarly, there might seem to be an intuitive inference from the fact that ethically legitimate research requires informed consent to the conclusion that it thereby requires consent à la carte. It is shown that this line of inference is mistaken.     

Negotiating the Ritual and Social Order through Spectacle: The (Re)Production of Macassan/Yol▒u Histories1

Broadly framed in terms of performance theories by Turner and Beeman, this paper weaves together the historical, mythical, ritual and performative aspects of a 1997 encounter in Sulawesi between Yol?u (an Aboriginal people of northern Australia) and Macassans (people from southern Sulawesi, Indonesia). The focus of the paper is an indigenous opera called Trepang, which is based on the centuries‐long history of trading relations and family connections between the two groups, and the way its performance was used by the Yol?u and Macassan cast members to renegotiate their often turbulent shared history, along with the contemporary social and ritual order. In this light, Trepang can be understood as a restorative social process, a means of pursuing a common path and a way of ameliorating the discrepancies of the past—bringing the parties finally together as one. Analysing the social context in which the performance of historical ‘truths’ was negotiated, I unpack key events in the staging of this ‘play within a play’ and demonstrate the need to transgress the dualism of ritual and spectacle.     

Spatial scale resolves the niche versus neutral theory debate

The 50‐ha long‐term forest plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama was ‘ground zero’ for the development of ecology's ‘neutral theory’ and comparisons with its ‘niche theory’ counterpart. In this issue, Garzon‐Lopez and colleagues used tree distributions at this site to recast the unresolved (and unresolvable) debate to show that observational scale drives the perception of which processes predominate.     

New media and the digitized paranormal: instrumentation,affective atmospheres,and the production of history in Chile

In the last decade in Chile, an increasing amount of paranormal investigation companies have carried out ghost tours in patrimonial and historical places, using diverse technologies to penetrate into the history of sites. We ethnographically and analytically explore two related questions. First, we ask what paranormal instrumentation does to collective memory and to history. We argue that these ‘registers’ of the paranormal create ‘affective atmospheres’, namely from the forms of indeterminacy embedded in the functioning and performance of the apparatuses. Our argument is that these machines are mechanisms for the creation of a new history, one that is apprehended affectively. Second, in the context of an explosion of adherence in Chile to forms of new media, we employ the notion of ‘dark media’ to illustrate that online material posted by paranormal researchers appears to escape any form of mediational understanding, feeding at once the public's perceptive and affective dispositions.     

Global historical biogeography of hadrosaurid dinosaurs

Hadrosaurids were the most derived ornithopods and amongst the most diverse herbivore dinosaurs during the Late Cretaceous of Europe, Asia, and the two Americas. Here, their biogeographical history is reconstructed using dispersal‐vicariance analysis (DIVA). The results showed that Hadrosauridae originated in North America and soon after dispersed to Asia no later than the Late Santonian. The most recent common ancestor of Saurolophidae (= Saurolophinae + Lambeosaurinae) is inferred to have been widespread in North America and Asia. The split between saurolophines and lambeosaurines occurred in response to vicariance no later than the Late Santonian: the former clade originated in North America, whereas the latter did so in Asia. Saurolophine biogeographical history included a minimum of five dispersal events followed by vicariance. Four of these dispersals were inferred to have occurred from North America to Asia during the Campanian and Early Maastrichtian, whereas a fifth event represented a southward dispersal from North to South America no later than the Late Campanian. The historical biogeography of lambeosaurines was characterized by an early evolution in Asia, with a Campanian dispersal to the European archipelago followed by vicariance. Reconstruction of the ancestral areas for the deepest nodes uniting the more derived lambeosaurines clades (‘hypacrosaurs’, ‘corythosaurs’, and ‘parasaurolophs’) is ambiguous. The split between North American and Asian clades of ‘hypacrosaurs’ and ‘parasaurolophs’ occurred in response to vicariance during the Campanian. The evolutionary history of North American ‘hypacrosaurs’ and ‘parasaurolophs’ was characterized by duplication events. The latter also characterized the Late Campanian ‘corythosaurs’, which remained restricted to North America. © 2010 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2010, 159 , 503–525.     

Making Heredity Matter: Samuel Butler’s Idea of Unconscious Memory

Butler’s idea of evolution was developed over the publication of four books, several articles and essays between 1863 and 1890. These publications, although never achieving the success expected by Butler, proposed a psychological elaboration of evolution (robustly enforced by Lamarck’s philosophy), called ‘unconscious memory’. This was strongly in contrast with the materialistic approach suggested by Darwin’s natural selection. Starting with a historical introduction, this paper aspires to ascertain the logic, meaning and significance of Butler’s idea of ‘unconscious memory’ in the post-Darwinian physiological and psychological Pan-European discussion. Particular attention is devoted to demonstrating that Butler was not only a populariser of science but also an active protagonist in the late Victorian psychological debate.     

Retracing and rewriting Hooke’s Micrographia book for teaching history of science

The history of science is an important component to acquire for achieving scientific literacy. In this study, a collaborative activity was applied in which the students were presented with the historical context in which Robert Hooke lived and developed the first register of the microscopic world. Furthermore, the students explored the environment using a microscope made by themselves, employing PET bottles and lenses obtained from CD or DVD readers and, finally, they drew and described selected objects, and collaboratively rewrote a ‘new version’ of Hooke’s classical book ‘Micrographia’. The study was performed in a secondary school, with 12- to 15-year-old students, and the hypothesis was that the planned intervention could enlarge students’ perception of historical aspects of the scientific discovery of the microscopic world, to a greater extent than traditional classes involving lectures and textbooks. The comparison was evaluated using a quantitative tool, called the History-Word-Association test (HWAT), which aims to evaluate the general vision of students regarding the agents, historical period and sociocultural circumstance involved in the issue addressed. The students that participated in the planned didactic activity showed a significant improvement in identification and retention of ideas associated with the history of the discovery of the microscopic world.     

The Impact of West African Trade on the Distribution of Chimpanzee and Elephant Populations (Guinea,Guinea-Bissau,Senegal, 19th–20th Century)

This article elaborates a relational historical geography of human, chimpanzee and elephant populations, working mainly from precolonial and early colonial (nineteenth and twentieth century) narratives by travellers to regions now corresponding to parts of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. It then compares a global ‘West African trade’ model of human and animal population’s spatial distribution with elements of an ‘East African settlement colony’ model drawn from other historical research. This perspective balances mainstream evolutionary approaches to animal biogeography with the human history, ecology and the geopolitics of their habitats. Taking such historical processes into account helps to unravel contrastive spatial and temporal dynamics of large mammal populations and to raise new questions about the anthropogenic causes of present-day population distributions.