Le culturalisme traditionaliste africaniste

Eugenics in the Americas

This paper is based on Canguilhem's text on the concept of scientific ideology, which he introduced in 1969. We describe Canguilhem's attempts at designing a methodological framework for the history of science including the status of kinds of knowledge related to science, like scientific ideologies preceding particular scientific domains (like ideologies about inheritance before Mendel, or Spencer's universal evolutionary laws preceding Darwin). This attempt at picturing the relationships between science and ideology is compared with Jürgen Habermas's book Technology and Science as 'Ideology' in 1968. The philosphical issue of human normativity provides the framework of this discussion.

Dialectical materialism demands that things be understood in their original form, and that they not be distorted or reshaped. To put this a little more simply, dialectical materialism is an honest ideology, an ideology of seeking truth from facts, a scientific ideology. With the exception of the proletarian class, the understanding of things by the other classes cannot be thoroughly honest, or is clearly not honest, because of the narrowness of their class interest. Only the proletarian class, because it is the class of the most advanced producers, is able to understand things honestly, that is, according to their original forms and without any distortion, addition, or subtraction. Moreover, it is able to oppose all dishonesty and all distortion.

The role of anthropology as an academic discipline that seeds tourism imaginaries across the globe is more extensive than generally acknowledged. In this article, I draw on ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia and Tanzania to examine critically the recycling of long-refuted ethnological ideas and scientific ideologies in contemporary tourism interpretation. A fine-grained analysis of local tour guide narratives and practices in two popular destinations, Yogyakarta and Arusha, illustrates empirically how outdated scholarly models, including anthropological ones, are strategically used to represent and reproduce places and peoples as authentically different and relatively static, seemingly untouched by extra-local influences.

The previous chapter addressed how embryologists working inlaboratories in assisted fertilization clinics used perceptual-epistemological judgment to assess what embryos to select for the embryo transfer to the womb. The capacity of the embryologists was both a personal and entrenched and trained skill and a collective competence, developed and maintained through international agreements and local routines for jointly calibrating the assessment work across clinics. Perceptual-epistemological judgment is therefore recursively constituted both as an individual and a collective competence. In this chapter, the focus changes from visual inspection and scientific professional ideologies to less immediate and robust forms of judgment, namely what was addressed as aesthetic- emotional judgment in the first part of the book. While the work of embryologists is firmly anchored in a realist epistemology wherein the most qualitative embryos can in fact be selected, and the scientific challenge is therefore to decode the information displayed in the features of the embryos, aesthetic-emotional judgment belongs to an entirely different register of thinking wherein truths and beliefs are basically socially constructed and therefore open to negotiations and politics. Biological systems, embryologists and other scientists think, may reveal their inner workings through the use of carefully designed research methods.

With the advent of scientific management in the late 19th century came attempts to increase worker efficiency by setting standards for various factors in an industrial system. While measuring financial factors of a business was prevalent even during late 19th century, the scientific management ideology heralded the start of an era of formally measuring non-financial factors. This ignited several performance measurement frameworks that were used by businesses.

National science is being transformed under the influence of global processes, which are mainly, although not entirely, dictated by the dominance of neoliberal ideas in a wide range of developed and developing countries. The term neoliberalism, (or neo-liberalism), which was coined in the 20th century, offers recommendations that include a set of political, economic, and ideological actions. The article examines the impact of the neoliberal turn in science on the process of interaction between science and society. It is substantiated that this affects the development of vector models for the spread of scientific neoliberal ideology. Academia is a research field that deals with a wide range of issues from actual dissemination of scientific research to the models of involving new constituencies, in which non-professionals are encouraged to participate in research via scientific discussions and polls. Academia is a global and debatable topic to be discussed. It should be noted that scientific communications as a process of promoting scientific knowledge outside the scientific communities have not been thoroughly studied by domestic researchers yet. In the international scientific community and the Russian scientific field, until recently, the understanding of the tasks of scientific communication varied greatly. However, the development of scientific communities is widespread in different countries and reveals the impacts of neoliberalism research on this process. The neoliberal initiative encourages the creation of conditions in which, firstly, citizens take an active part in solving scientific issues. And secondly, the prestige of the pursuit of pure science does not deter researchers from promoting commercialization and the free development of their scientific activity. The peculiarities of interaction between science and society are regarded from the point of view of the Italian sociologist Massimiano Bucchi. Distinguished in academic discourse for his classification of relationships among science, technology, and society, M. Bucchi specifies three patterns for such relationships: deficit, dialogue, and completion.

Tracy constantly professed his faith in the importance of facts, observations and rigorous scientific method, and yet his writings often have the appearance of rationalist deduction from basic principles. In exploring this paradox or tension in his work, it is necessary to consider the images of scientific method and scientific laws which were part of Tracy’s intellectual borrowings. Why did he believe that methods of observation, analysis, and the search for general causal explanations, were the key to attaining certain or reliable knowledge? What kinds of ideas were to be excluded from the realm of positive knowledge? What was the proper starting-point for reaching a scientific understanding of man and society? Could the models derived from mechanics, optics, astronomy, and the biological sciences be applied directly to the study of man? These and similar questions are the concern of this chapter.

The legend of Galileo's persecution by the Roman Catholic Church is treated here as an example of scientific folklore. By examining the various ways in which this legend diverges from scholarly readings of the Galileo affair, we can assess the part that folklore plays in building and sustaining a professional ideology for the modern scientific culture. The forty treatments of the Galileo episode that are examined here were found in sources, such as textbooks and popular histories, which are presumably intended as socializing rhetorics. An examination of these narratives suggests five distinct themes of the scientific ideology.

Reviewed by: Histoire sociale de la médecine Martha L. Hildreth Olivier Faure. Histoire sociale de la médecine (XVIIIe–XXe siècles). Historiques. Paris: Anthropos, 1994. 272 pp. F 130.00 (paperbound). Olivier Faure, a professor at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, is one of the leading historians of French medicine in the modern era. His earliest work focused on the social history of hospitals and was pioneering in that field. More [End Page 156] recently he has investigated smallpox vaccination, tuberculosis, homeopathy, and the distribution of medical practitioners. Histoire sociale de la médecine is a short survey of key topics within the history of French medicine from the eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. However, the era from the Société royale to the First World War is the principal subject matter. Readers expecting a social history focusing upon practices, remedies, customs, clients, and practitioners, will be disappointed in this work. Instead they should turn to another of Faure’s works, Les français et leur médecine au XIX e siècle, which provides a more comprehensive survey of social and cultural aspects of medical history in that century. 1 While there is some overlap between the two works, Histoire sociale de la médecine emphasizes principal diseases and connected scientific medical ideologies. It discusses the relationship between etiological concepts, epidemics, and the practical developments of therapies and prevention. To cover so much material over such a long period is a daunting task. Thus Faure organizes each era thematically around a set of antitheses. In what must be an acknowledgment of Jacques Léonard’s La médecine entre les savoirs et les pouvoirs, 2 Faure subtitles the three sections of his book: “La médecine entre Molière et Jenner,” “La médecine entre Jenner et Pasteur,” and “La médecine entre succès et échecs.” As a result he highlights major turning points in French medicine that are well known: the rise of clinical medicine, the introduction of vaccination, and the cholera and tuberculosis epidemics of the modern era. Faure states his desire to avoid being caught between great men/great ideas, on the one hand, and a social history of maladies and physicians, on the other. He wants to do a history of the changing and ambiguous relationships within society between illness and cure—an analysis that he recognizes as privileging change. He writes that he wishes to explain change, not by the internal logic of medicine, but rather by attending to medicine within culture and society. However, the strength of the work is in Faure’s analysis of the relationship between changing scientific ideologies, therapeutic innovations, and actual medical practices. Broader issues of culture, politics, and social change enter into the analysis only in the most general ways. The discussion of cholera, for example, examines efforts to analyze the disease through existing etiological concepts of theorists such as Magendie, Broussais, Roche, and Bretonneau, discussing the limitations of those approaches and of their connected therapeutic practices. Faure points out that although clinical concepts were able to isolate the disease process within specific organ systems, standard therapies were clearly not adequate. As patients searched for alternatives, homeopathy gained the ground that the savants were losing. The volume provides a valuable summary of most of the major work of French scholars in the social history of medicine of the last two decades—particularly that of Jacques Léonard and of Faure himself, and, for the period after 1880, that of Bruno Latour and Anne-Marie Moulin. Faure’s generalizations sometimes [End Page 157] obscure issues that are treated in more complex ways in the literature he invokes. He remarks, for example: “Le rôle politique des médecins au XIXe siècle n’a dans ce contexte rien d’étonnant. Faire la politique, c’est faire de la médecine par d’autre moyens” (p. 115)—whereas Jack Ellis has pointed out nearly the opposite situation: that for most physician-legislators what is remarkable is the degree to which their political lives were inspired and governed by issues having little to do with medicine. 3 Faure also remarks that “Contrairement...

The article tries to revive the traditions of neptunizm. The neptunist Cuvier believed that «the fossil is the key to the past. The past is characterized by a radical break with the present, perhaps it even proceeded according to another physical laws. This is evidenced by the fossils. With the modern action of physical forces, all the deceased remnants decompose. Fossils could have formed during catastrophically rapid burial with reliable isolation from oxygen. The present is the key to the past according to the lawyer Lyell. The past is like the present. It contains an incredible amount of time and years. All processes were going with the same energy as they do now and were not overshadowed by any gigantic disaster. Lyell's statements entered science under the name of the principle of actualism. He gave a paradigmal form not only to the earth sciences, but to all of science, and formed the basis of the evolutionary doctrine. The fundamental dogma of randomness of both natural and all historical processes is the basis of modern scientific ideology. This randomness has no purpose and cannot have. Nevertheless, paradoxically, it predetermines the evolutionary progress of all things. With the appearance of the anthropic principle the teleologism regains its completeness and direction. The anthropic principle is teleological. Since the entire Universe and the biosphere are attuned to human nature, the more such attunement can be expected from earthly nature. There are opportunities for harmonizing human with natural landscapes for health-improving purposes. Nothing was known about the subtlest adjustment of the Universe for humans, or about the incredible complexity of the biosphere even 50-70 years ago. The universe could be explained by evolution and actualism. The discovered incredible complexity of the world brings religion and science closer together. A catastrophic and probably anti-random picture of the planet's history is emerging more and more clear. In this light, the power of science is seen again not in confrontation with religion, but in harmonization with it.

It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms in turn influenced Late Victorian vampire literature and its translation into twentieth-century cinematic and televisual content. An analysis of these adaptations shows how a readily accessible assemblage of grotesque Gothic symbology and popular scientific ideology help constitute a secure space for exploring queer identity I have termed the “glass coffin.”

Main goal of any science – development of the tools allowing receiving exact and reliable knowledge. Ability to reproduce the phenomenon in all completeness and in any circumstances characterizes degree of depth of scientific knowledge. Power series as the mathematical tool are used so widely that it is difficult to overestimate them. It would seem, and they are studied rather well, nevertheless, all that it is possible to receive from them, it is the row sum in borders-1 < x < +1. Such row can turn out from function which exists and even can be continuous on all numerical axis from +∞ to -∞. It would seem, mathematics is faced by an important and noble task – to find other row which describes this function outside a piece (+1,-1). If the task is set, it seeks to solve in every way. However, if in this respect there is a theorem “About uniqueness of power series”, she, as if even forbids to speak about it. Harm from such theorem bearing incorrect scientific ideology doesn’t even give in to an assessment. This scientific article shows practically existence of the second power series – Taylor’s Number outside convergence of the first row. The additional formula for calculation of this row is given.

Special issue on “The Linguistic Socialization of Scientific Ideologies”

Given the cultural context in which it occurs, the title Elegy for Theory (2014) suggests a fairly elaborate set of discourses about the death of theory. These discourses have been circulating since the 1990s at least, and today D. N. Rodowick’s title is even very overdetermined for most academics, because what one sees is not just the death of theory, but many other deaths as well: the death of tenure; the death of traditional forms of education delivery; the death of the PhD as required terminal degree for college teaching; the death of the middle-class professorial wage (“pauperization”); the death of the liberal arts (replaced by STEM); the fabled death of the focused, attentive student (millennials are not without good reason said to be “wired for distraction”); and, last but not least, the death of the university itself as a noncorporate institution based on a participatory model of administration and governance. Of course, in this broad context of mass die-off, the death of theory is insignificant. Nevertheless, this end of theory is symptomatic of a conspicuous dumbing down of the humanities on account of a familiar scientific ideology that has become very dominant in university culture, namely that of positivism, which happens to be one of Rodowick’s chief concerns. Oddly, despite the expectations that Rodowick’s title sets up, it turns out that Elegy for Theory is really about something entirely different: a Foucauldian genealogy that reconstructs theory first in terms of the history of philosophy and then in terms of the history of film with some remarks at the end on the states of theory nearer to our own historical moment. This is hardly a lament, though I take it that by “elegy” Rodowick wanted to signpost that all this talk about theory seems moot to the many people who have moved on. Elegy for Theory is the second in a three-volume series, preceded by The Virtual Life of Film (2007) and to be followed by Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. A complex book, Elegy is divided into 23 sections, a strategy unhelpful for the overall comprehension