History Commons^™

Review: Alix Cooper, Inventing The Indigenous: Local Knowledge And Natural History In Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), Andre Wakefield

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Reviewed work: Alix Cooper. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. xi + 218 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. $75 (cloth).

The Fiscal Logic Of Enlightened German Science, Andre Wakefield

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

This work is Chapter 14 in Knowledge and its Making in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400 –1800, edited by Benjamin Schmidt and Pamela Smith.

The fruits of knowledge—such as books, data, and ideas—tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit.

Composed …

Mothers And Non-Mothers: Gendering The Discourse Of Education In South Asia, Nita Kumar

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men's reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The essay argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively.

The Scholar And Her Servants: Further Thoughts On Postcolonialism And Education, Nita Kumar

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

The hypothesis of the paper is twofold. By juxtaposing the two subject-positions of mistress and servant, moving between one and the other to highlight how each is largely constructed by the interaction, we illuminate the questions of margin and centre, silence and voice, and can ponder on how to do anthropology better. But secondly, to the work of several scholars who propose various approaches to these questions, I add the particular insight offered by the perspective of education. Because one of the subject-positions is that of ‘the scholar’, someone professionally engaged in knowledge production, the new question I want to …

Confesiones De Un Bicho Raro, Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

The "lección magistral" that Wolf delivered to the graduate students in History and Geography at the University of Salamanca, May 31-June 1, 2007.

Convivencia And The “Ornament Of The World”, Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

The “Southeast Medieval Association” keynote address that Wolf gave at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina in October 2007. Convivencia is a historical term used to describe the “coexistence” of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain and by extension the interaction, exchange, and acculturation fostered by such proximity. It first emerged as the by-product of a famous debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz that dominated Spanish historical scholarship during the Franco years. Since then convivencia has taken on a life of its own, fueled in part by increased interest in multi-culturalism on the one hand and rising …