Natalie Zemon Davis recalls the late Clifford Geertz in conversation and teaching and reflects on his intellectual leadership and influence on her work as a historian. Especially she considers his ...ethnography of economic life, his alternatives to standard modernization theory, and his approach to historical and anthropological knowledge.
Leon (Judah Aryeh) Modena was a major intellectual figure of the early modern Italian Jewish community--a complex and intriguing personality who was famous among contemporary European Christians as ...well as Jews. Modena (1571-1648) produced an autobiography that documents in poignant detail the turbulent life of his family in the Jewish ghetto of Venice. The text of this work is well known to Jewish scholars but has never before been translated from the original Hebrew, except in brief excerpts. This complete translation, based on Modena's autograph manuscript, makes available in English a wealth of historical material about Jewish family life of the period, religion in daily life, the plague of 1630-1631, crime and punishment, the influence of kabbalistic mysticism, and a host of other subjects. The translator, Mark R. Cohen, and four other distinguished scholars add commentary that places the work in historical and literary context. Modena describes his fascination with the astrology and alchemy that were important parts of the Jewish and general culture of the seventeenth century. He also portrays his struggle against poverty and against compulsive gambling, which, cleverly punning on a biblical verse, he called the "sin of Judah." In addition, the book contains accounts of Modena's sorrow over his three sons: the death of the eldest from the poisonous fumes of his own alchemical laboratory, the brutal murder of the youngest, and the exile of the remaining son. The introductory essay by Mark R. Cohen and Theodore K. Rabb highlights the significance of the work for early modern Jewish and general European history. Howard E. Adelman presents an up-to-date biographical sketch of the author and points the way toward a new assessment of his place in Jewish history. Natalie Z. Davis places Modena's work in the context of European autobiography, both Christian and Jewish, and especially explores the implications of the Jewish status as outsider for the privileged exploration of the self. A set of historical notes, compiled by Howard Adelman and Benjamin C. I. Ravid, elucidates the text.
Este ensayo se presentó en público por primera vez en el Simposio del Premio Ludwig Holberg 2010 que tuvo lugar en Bergen (Noruega), donde, como autora galardonada, se me pidió que describiera mi ...trabajo y su relevancia dentro del periodo de globalización en el que vivimos. En él primeramente se examinan los procesos interconectados de “descentralización” de la historia en la historiografía occidental del medio siglo posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial: el desplazamiento hacia la clase obrera y las “clases subalternas”, hacia las mujeres y las cuestiones de género, hacia comunidades marcadas por la etnia y la raza, así como hacia el estudio de las historias no occidentales y de la historia mundial o global, dentro de la cual la trayectoria europea no constituye más que uno entre varios modelos. ¿Puede el historiador tratar los temas de la historia “descentralizada” social y cultural —a menudo local y llena de detalles concretos— y aun así adoptar el punto de vista de la historia global? A modo de propuesta para responder a esta pregunta describiré mi propia trayectoria de descentralización desde el trabajo de los artesanos del siglo XVI en la década de 1950 hasta las investigaciones recientes en torno a personajes no europeos, como el musulmán “León el Africano” (Hasán al-Wazzan). Más adelante ofreceré dos casos concretos que pueden proporcionar un punto de vista global. En uno de ellos compararé las carreras literarias de Ibn Jaldún y Cristina de Pizán en las culturas amanuenses de ambos lados del Mediterráneo a finales del siglo XIV y principios del XV. En el otro mostraré la transmisión y la transformación de las prácticas adivinatorias, de sanación y de detección procedentes de África que tuvo lugar en las comunidades de esclavos de Surinam en los siglos XVII y XVIII. This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of "decentering" history in western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and "subaltern classes"; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non-western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold on to the subjects of "decentered" social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth-century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non-European figures such as the Muslim "Leo Africanus" (Hasan al-Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Feminism and postcolonialism are allies, and the impressive selection of writings brought together in this volume demonstrate how fruitful that alliance can be. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills have ...assembled a brilliant selection of thinkers, organizing them into six categories: "Gendering Colonialism and Postcolonialism/Radicalizing Feminism," "Rethinking Whiteness," "Redefining the 'Third World' Subject," "Sexuality and Sexual Rights," "Harem and the Veil," and "Gender and Post/colonial Relations." A bibliography complements the wide-ranging essays. This is the ideal volume for any reader interested in the development of postcoloniality and feminist thought.
Reina Lewis is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Sara Mills is Research Professor in the School of Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.
Este artículo describe los orígenes y usos de las lenguas criollas, así como las fuentes utilizadas para su estudio, en la colonia de Surinam, antigua Guayana holandesa, durante el siglo XVIII: las ...que se crearon y hablaron entre los esclavos de las plantaciones, entre los cimarrones libres de los poblados de la jungla y entre la población de la ciudad de Paramaribo en la que se mezclaban liberados y esclavos, cristianos y judíos, franceses y holandeses etc. Las fuentes de más valor nos las proporcionan fundamentalmente los administradores de las plantaciones y los misioneros moravos que, en el mejor de los casos, trabajan con colaboradores negros o mulatos. Las lenguas criollas, tanto el sranan, de base inglesa, como el saramaccano, de base portuguesa, les permitieron a generaciones de africanos y surinameses de origen africano y distinta extracción discutir asuntos de familia, de salud y de religión, contar relatos, intimar y pelearse unos con otros, hablar de las relaciones con los amos y los colonos, tejer una resistencia y construir, a veces, una historia del pasado. Describimos los usos que los colonos hacían de los idiomas criollos, incluso lo poco que los utilizaron para la conversión religiosa. Para terminar, citamos unos poemas en neerlandés y sranan, publicados en la década de los ochenta del siglo XVIII por un colono holandés casado con una heredera mulata, que cuestionan la validez de las jerarquías de color. This article describes the sources for, and the origins and uses of, the creole languages in the Dutch colony of eighteenth-century Suriname — those created and spoken among slaves on the plantations, among the free black Maroons in the jungle villages and among the mixed population (freed/slave, Christian/Jewish, French/Dutch, etc.) of the town of Paramaribo. The rich sources derive especially from plantation managers and Moravian missionaries, at their best working with black or coloured collaborators. These creoles, both the Englishbased Sranan and the Portuguese-based Saramaccan, allowed generations of Africans and Surinamese-Africans of diverse background to discuss matters of family, health and religion, to tell stories, to establish intimacy and mount quarrels with each other, to consider relations with masters and settlers, to plot resistance and sometimes to construct a past history. The uses of the creole languages by settlers are described, including their limited employment for religious conversion. The article concludes with the Dutch and Sranan poems published in the seventeen-eighties by a Dutch settler married to a mulatto heiress, poems casting in doubt hierarchies of colour.
Using her experience as historical consultant forLe Retour de Martin Guerre, the author weighs the advantages and disadvantages of describing the past in the language of film and the language of ...professional prose. She concludes that both forms of communication should be used: historians should amplify their role as consultants or filmmakers through discussion and written debate.
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