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Photography and Jewish History
It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our underst...
The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science
The transformation of the human sciences into the social sciences in the third part of the 19th century was closely related to attempts to develop and implement methods for dealing with social tensions and the rationalization of society. This book studies the connections between academic disciplines and notions of Jewish assimilation and integration and demonstrates that the quest for Jewish assimilation is linked to and built into the conceptual foundations of modern social science disciplines. Focusing on two influential "assimilated" Jewish authors—anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Georg Simmel—this study shows that epistemological considerations underlie the authors’ respective evaluations of the Jews’ assimilation in German and American societies as a form of "group extinction" or as a form of "social identity." This conceptual model gives a new "key" to understanding pivotal issues in recent Jewish history and in the history of the social sciences.
Race and Photography
Race and Photography studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the “science of race,” what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enabled not just new forms of documentation but new forms of perception. Foregoing the political lens through which we usually look back at race science, he holds it up instead within the light of the history of science, using it to explore how science is defined; how evidence is produced, used, and interpreted; and how science shapes the imagination and vice versa. Exploring the development of racial photography wherever it took place, including cou...
Photography and Imagination
As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography's capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.
Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities
This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust – years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement – the concept of ‘race’ slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.
Touching Photographs
Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.
National Races
National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interaction produced powerful, racialized national identity discourses whose influence continues to resonate in today's culture and politics. Ethnologists, anthropologists, and raciologists compared modern physical types with ancient skeletal finds to unearth the deep prehistoric past and true nature of nations. These scientists understood certain physical types to be what Richard McMahon calls "national races," or the ageless biological essences of nations. Contributors to this volume address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, c...
Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda
This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the util...
Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture
Arthur Ruppin’s immense contribution to the Zionist movement gave him the title “The Father of Jewish/Zionist settlement in Palestine.” Nevertheless, the common narrative sets Ruppin’s historical persona in an ambivalent position and suppresses his formative role and heritage. Part of the reason for this is that, in many ways, his history causes a crack to appear in the Zionist national “cover stories.” This study utilizes innovative archival research and contains provocative theses which make us view the foundation of Israeli culture differently. It addresses the cultural interaction between the German Sonderweg, with all its proto-Nazi and völkische ideas, and Palestinian Zionism. The study therefore exposes the sources and presence of internal Jewish racism while also analysing the anti-Semitic aspect of Pre-Israeli culture. A particularly important section details Ruppin's crucial influence on the Labor Movement and the colonization of the Land of Israel/Palestine.
Materials of the Mind
Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters stretching around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world--and how the world changed phrenology. This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is the first substantial account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history could help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.
