Maryanne Cline Horowitz – New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (6 Volumes)

Автор: Maryanne Cline Horowitz
Название книги: New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (6 Volumes)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Прочая историческая литература
Страницы: 3133
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Seeking to present a comprehensive work that discusses pivotal topics of human concern, the
editors at Charles Scribner’s Sons and a multidisciplinary editorial board of nineteen professors
and two librarians designed the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (NDHI ) with an emphasis
on the diverse perspectives of thinkers around the globe. This six-volume set, which contains all
new and original entries, addresses topics in the fields of history, anthropology, and women’s studies;
philosophy and religion; politics, law and economics; area studies and ethnic studies; literature,
performance, music, and the visual arts; communication studies and cultural studies; and
science, engineering and medicine. The first Dictionary of the History of Ideas was published by
Scribner’s in 1973–1974 and swiftly became a landmark of scholarship on European thought primarily.
The NDHI extends this legacy into the twenty-first century with entirely new content on
Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East. With many more articles
than the original edition, hundreds of illustrations, as well as profusely illustrated visual entries,
the NDHI provides an expansive cross-cultural and global outlook on the history of ideas.
The first Dictionary of the History of Ideas is known especially for the history of influential texts.
Most significantly, while all articles of NDHI discuss influential texts and provide an up-to-date
bibliography, there are very few articles in the NDHI that are primarily the history of texts. Articles
may give evidence of oral communication, such as in a public debate of politicians or in a religious
person sharing beliefs and sacred practices with another individual; furthermore, articles
on contemporary culture analyze the impact of high technology communication such as the cinema
and the Internet. Some authors evocatively describe a thinker’s vision of an idea, while others
reenact conversational philosophical exchanges. Articles may also depict the experiential
expression of ideas in such practices as a social science survey of voter attitudes, patriotic ritual of
flag-waving, or political protest.
The field of the history of ideas, in the mid-twentieth century, served as a trendsetter in establishing
“interdisciplinarity” in academia, encouraging the pursuit of ideas across the borders of
academic disciplines. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the NDHI is its focus on the most
influential multidisciplinary practices, such as “Mysticism,” “Mathematics,” and “Reading,” which
have ancient origins, and “Representation: Mental Representation” and “Bioethics,” which are creations
of our own times. The NDHI aims to assist the reader to participate in a wide range of
methods and practices of scholarly and popular inquiry.
The Organization of the NDHI
From “Abolitionism” and “Absolute Music” to “Zen” and “Zionism,” the NDHI is arranged alphabetically.
Following this introduction is an entry on global historiography that introduces the
traditions of history-writing in specific geographical areas. The start of each volume also contains
the multifaceted “Reader’s Guide,” a guide to help high school students, general readers, college
and university students, and scholars organize their reading systematically according to their preferences:
media of communication of ideas (whether visual images, oral traditions or high technology
media, practices or rituals, or mainly texts), geographical area, chronological period,
disciplinary or interdisciplinary field. For further reference there is an index at the close of the
sixth volume.
Chronological Length and Area-Studies Breadth
The NDHI is designed to introduce a general audience to the main ideas and movements of global
cultural history from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The chronological scope of the NDHI
permits examination of a topic over centuries and millennia of development. For example, article
range chronologically from ideas created by humanity several millennia ago, such as “Animism”
and “Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas,” to such contemporary concepts as “Computer
Science,” “Critical Race Theory,” and “Media, History of.” Articles also analyze newly conceived
ideas, such as “Sexual Harassment,” a recent label for an age-old phenomenon, as well ideas labeled
long ago such as “Untouchability,” “Yin and Yang,” and “Cycles.”
The NDHI focuses not only on the ideas themselves (as tends to be the case in companions,
dictionaries, and encyclopedias of philosophy), but also on the cultural environments within which
those ideas arose, on the transformations and intermingling of the ideas, and on their influence
far in time or place from site of origin. The editorial board, which included specialists on Africa,
Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America, invited hundreds of distinguished
scholars from around the globe to explore the impact of ideas from their particular areas
of expertise. The editorial board also utilized a variety of rubrics to ensure that the alphabetically
arranged volumes contain a balance of approaches to the exchange of ideas between individuals
and between peoples.
Transformations in Communication
The NDHI aims to explore the oral, visual, participatory, and textual processes by which communities
communicated, instilled, and ritualized their ideas. A cluster of articles by area specialists
on “Communication of Ideas”—which appears in the Reader’s Guide under the headings
Geographical Areas and Communication of Ideas—introduces the changing means of communication
across the centuries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast
Asia, respectively. The authors of these entries discuss the continuation of oral techniques after
the emergence of literate elites, as well as the growing importance of the mass media today. The
authors consider the impact of the printing press and of journalism on the distribution of ideas,
and discuss the trade routes and electronic media that spread ideas from one continent to another.
The cluster on “Communication of Ideas” describes the practices of religious leaders, educators,
and governing officials who instill religious, disciplinary, and civic rituals and approaches into
daily life. The Reader’s Guide suggests “Cinema” and “Third Cinema” as well as the visual essay
“Protest, Political” as articles for further reading on communication. The NDHI vividly narrates
and illustrates the multiple ways in which cultures communicate ideas.
Eight authors contributed to a cluster on education, focusing on the role of diverse forms of
education in the transmission and transformation of ideas in Asia, China, Japan, India, Europe,
Islam, and North America, respectively; there is also an article on the contemporary movement
to which the NDHI aims to contribute, “Global Education.” One will find all these articles listed
under Education in the Reader’s Guide section on Liberal Arts Disciplines. For developments in
higher education, “University: Overview” concentrates on Europe and “University: Postcolonial”
on Africa. “Childhood and Child Rearing” discusses the history of childhood, the education of
children, and the changing views of what it means to be a child. Two related articles on “Dialogue
and Dialectics” focus on the methods for student learning taught by Greek “Socratic” education
and by Jewish “Talmudic” education. The practices of evaluation are the focus of
“Experiment” and “Examinations Systems, China.” In “Pan-Africanism,” “Pan-Arabism,” “Pan-
Asianism,” “Pan-Islamism,” and “Pan-Turkism,” five experts explain the recent rapid development,
across wide geographical areas, of unifying cultural and educational movements of identity
politics.
Focus on a Geographical Area or Global Chronological Period
Readers may choose to focus on the cultural and intellectual history of a specific area of the globe.
For this reason, articles are categorized by geographical focus in the Reader’s Guide under the
heading Geographical Areas.
Example of Area Studies. For the study of sub-Saharan Africa, the Reader’s Guide recommends
the entries “Communication of Ideas: Africa and its Influence” and “Communication of
Ideas: Orality and the Advent of Writing.” For anthropological approaches on sub-Saharan Africa,
the reader is advised to turn to “Ethnography.” The visual arts of Africa are discussed in “Arts:
Africa” and “Architecture: Africa.” For sacred texts and the practices that accompanied them, see
“Islam: Africa” and “Religion and the State: Africa.” Among contemporary movements, consider
“Feminism: Africa and African Diaspora” and “Postcolonial Studies.” For political philosophies
and governmental practices, see “Socialisms, African” and “Democracy, Africa.” “Philosophies: African” is a text-based history of African philosophical ideas. For African responses to external
influences, see “Westernization: Africa.” For further influences of African thought on other continents,
see “Black Atlantic,” “Diasporas: African Diaspora,” “Religion: African Diaspora,” and
“African-American Ideas.” As one will find in looking into the index under “Africa,” as well as in
the Reader’s Guide under “Africa,” many of the global entries discuss African intellectual history.
Example of Period Studies. Readers choosing to focus on a chronological period are encouraged
to consider the period globally. The category Chronological Periods in the Reader’s Guide
is divided into the broad periods Ancient, Dynastic, Early Modern, Modern, and Contemporary;
the chronology at the back of Volume 6 shows events in the global history of ideas. For example,
if one seeks out modern and contemporary intellectual discourse on politics, there are several clusters
of articles by area studies specialists in the Modern and Contemporary categories. The series
of articles on “Nationalism,” “Empire and Imperialism,” “Colonialism,” and “Anticolonialism”
provide a multifaceted introduction to the political and cultural turmoil of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. To consider discourse on economics, see “Economics,” “Scarcity and Abundance,
Latin America,” “Capitalism,” “Consumerism,” “Work,” and the composite article “Globalization.”
For an introduction to postcolonial ideas from twentieth- and twenty-first-century
authors around the globe, see “Postcolonial Theory and Literature.”
Disciplines and Interdisciplinary Studies
The comprehensive entries on specific disciplines (e.g., “Historiography” and “Education”) and
interdisciplinary studies (e.g., “Ecology” and “Cultural Studies”) provide cross-references to relevant
articles on ideas, ideologies, movements, and methods in the A–Z volumes (the disciplines
are listed in the Reader’s Guide under Liberal Arts Disciplines). Let us consider the field of religious
studies.
Organization of religious studies. The world religions receive an introductory composite entry
in “Religion,” which is organized globally and concerned with the transmission of religion by
both text and oral tradition. Readers might consider also “Sacred Texts” and “Prophecy.” One
will find composite entries on “Christianity,” “Judaism,” and “Islam,” as well as individual entries
on “Buddhism,” “Hinduism,” “Jainism,” and “Pre-Columbian Civilization.” Relevant to philosophy,
as well as to religion, are the articles on “Agnosticism,” “Atheism,” “Deism,” and “Confucianism.”
For Asian religions, it is important to also look at “Chinese Thought,” “Japanese
Philosophy, Japanese Thought,” and “Meditation, Eastern.” The practices of religion are the focus
of “Ritual: Religion,” “Monasticism,” and “Fundamentalism” and are also a concern of the
six-part composite on “Mysticism.” “Orthopraxy” explicitly focuses on strict rules for religious
practices, in contrast to the focus on strict rules for religious belief in “Orthodoxy.” The physical
locations that provide a geographical center to religious rites are the focus of the visual essay “Sacred
Places.”
The reader thus might learn how religion in its multitude of variations has been spread orally,
by text, by disciplined practices, and by sacred objects and sacred locations. The impact of cultural
history, cultural studies, and anthropology on current practices in the history of ideas is very
evident in many articles in this encyclopedia.
Oral, Visual, Experiential, and Textual Transmission of Ideas
The section titled “Communication of Ideas” in the Reader’s Guide indicates articles about oral
communication, articles showing visual expression, articles discussing the spread of ideas through
practices and rituals, and articles based mainly on history of important texts. The aim of this categorization
is to feature the main types of historical evidence the author used in the writing of the
entry.
Oral ideas. For further exploration of oral communication, one might consider “Everyday Life,”
“Oral Traditions,” and “Myth.” The entry “Language, Linguistics, and Literacy” further enhances
understanding of the oral traditions underlying language development. The entry “Wisdom, Human”
focuses on global examples of popular wisdom traditions, in contrast to the entry “Knowledge,”
which highlights the learning of books. “Theater and Performance” and “Musicology” focus
on those liberal arts that rely on communication by sound waves.
Visual ideas. People often express their thoughts and their ideas visually. There are more than
400 illustrations throughout the NDHI to make that point, to visibly show the correspondence between ideas expressed in images and ideas spoken or written. Readers are encouraged to thumb
through the volumes and allow the images to pique their curiosity. In addition, there are fifteen
special visual essays in which the images are the focus of the entry. The illustrations are offered
with meaningful commentary to explain their context and analyze their content. For example, the
visual essay “Gesture” shows human communication by hand and face, while the entry “Maps and
the Ideas They Express” analyzes the conceptual mapping processes of diverse historical cultures.
“Gender in Art” is one of several “gender” articles that together help the reader to see and understand
the concerns of academic programs in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies.
Experiential ideas. Practices are explored in articles on controversial and easily misunderstood
topics, such as “Ancestor Worship” and “Jihad.” Military and civic practices are discussed in
“Bushido,” “Cannibalism,” “Terror,” “Nihilism,” “Civil Disobedience,” and “Nonviolence.” The
political practices of “Apartheid” and “Segregation” contrast with those of “Diversity” and “Multiculturalism,
Africa.” Practices related to human exploration of nature and the power of humans
to influence nature are considered in “Witchcraft,” “Astrology,” and “Alchemy,” as well as in “Scientific
Revolution” and “Physics.” The experiential aspects of performance arts are discussed in
“Masks,” “Dance,” “Theater and Performance,” and “Tragedy and Comedy.” Authors consider
music from around the globe, with attention to both performer and audience, in “Music, Anthropology
of” and in the visual essay “Musical Performance and Audiences.” The experiential dimension
of ideas ranges from the pain inferred in “Punishment” to the joy and reciprocity in
“Gift.”
The Reader’s Guide category Communication of Ideas: Practices lists entries focused on practices
and experiences, as well as on schools of thought, religions, and political movements. The
combined listing encourages readers to consider how the practices overlap among those seeking
to spread viewpoints and lifestyles. Schools of thought, such as “Stoicism,” “Confucianism,” and
“Existentialism,” are movements of ideas, generally in the humanities; many of these have premodern
origins and educated disciples into particular schools of thought that adapted to new
times. Schools of thought are in fact schools of thought and practices, which contend with religions.
Focusing on the human relationship with the divine, religions tend to create popular movements
as well as new schools of thought; scholars who emphasize the pantheism of the Stoics
consider Stoicism to be a religion. Political movements such as “Temperance,” “Anti-Semitism,”
and “Chicano Movement” are movements of ideas in the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences
expressed in socioeconomic and political movements. These movements usually have modern developments
associated with ideologies.
Textual ideas. Anyone looking at this six-volume encyclopedia in which every article has a bibliography
would notice that the written word is one of the major sources for the authors’ evidence
and in some cases the exclusive source. Some authors selected primary source passages to quote
in sidebars, which are set along side their articles. The bibliographies exhibit the primary sources—
the historical texts, images, and transcriptions of oral communication—by which we become familiar
with thought from ancient or faraway societies, or with the latest contemporary thought.
The bibliographies also exhibit the secondary sources, recent authorities’ accounts of the topic at
hand. Many NDHI authors are among the authorities cited in the bibliographies of other authors.
Example of political philosophy. Political philosophy is a good example of a field that traditionally
has relied on interpreting major texts of history, law, and philosophy. One may learn
about political philosophy from the introductory articles “Political Science“ and “Power.” Or one
might look at specific concepts that have been elaborated in texts for use by governments and citizens
such as “Citizenship,” “Democracy,” “Sovereignty,” “Utopia,” “Liberty,” and “Justice.” Political
movements that have involved personal experiential participation are well represented in
“Fascism,” “Capitalism,” “Machiavellism,” and “Volunteerism, U.S.” Visual display and practices
are important for “Ritual: Public Ritual,” “Public Sphere,” and “Resistance.” Oratory abounds in
“Liberation Theology.”
Ideas and their accompanying practices that provoked controversies are enhanced by the crossreferences
in each article, guiding the reader to antonyms and to alternative scholars’ viewpoints;
for example, see “Terror” as well as “Human Rights,” “Atheism” as well as “Religion,” or “Evil”
as well as “Good.” Likewise, to treat independent developments, diffusion and differentiation of
ideas, movements, and practices around the globe, we have provided composite articles for topics
such as “Medicine” and “Marxism.”
Reader’s Guide to the Liberal Arts
The entries on specific disciplines and on interdisciplinary studies are intended to introduce the
reader to a field of study. These introductions to the disciplines are listed for convenience under
the university liberal arts classifications of divisions or schools of Fine Arts, Humanities, Social
Sciences, and Sciences. In addition, there are listings under three professions: Medicine, Law, and
Engineering. The divisions or schools of a university are historically based on the exploration of
related topics, as well as an apprenticeship in distinctive crafts and methodologies. We live in an
age of crossing “Borders, Borderlands, and Frontiers,” yet it is helpful to recognize the whereabouts
of the border one is crossing. Generally, fine arts is concerned with creative artistic production;
it relies on both the philosophical field of aesthetics and apprenticeship in distinctive
crafts. Humanities, increasingly influenced by studies of communication and language, evaluates
the traditions and texts at the foundation of distinctive cultures and fosters the expression of philosophical,
religious, and literary ideas. Social sciences (or, in recognition of its humanities traits in
secondary education, “Social Studies”) investigates human societies from the points of view of
both observer and observed to find general societal patterns and variations, and contributes to
such professions as law. The sciences, seeking to understand nature, have acquired many humanities
topics considered in philosophical and religious texts. Scientists analyze aspects of nature (including
human perception) through the tools of theory, experiment, and mathematics, and
applications of science abound in engineering and in medicine.
Aside from the major differences of academic divisions, the NDHI attests to contemporary
trends internalized within each discipline. These trends pervade inquiry at the beginning of the
twenty-first century: respect for individual creativity, heart-and-mind concern for ethical issues of
human and societal relations, and honest consideration of the specific societal position of the inquirer
and the inquirer’s impact on the investigation.
Combining Approaches of Fine Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences
The multiple sections of the Reader’s Guide aim to prevent the reader from treating any listing
location as rigid. Each article in the NDHI cross-references many other articles. The growth of
interdisciplinary programs reflects the increasing overlap among topics listed under the labels of
Fine Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences. Specific disciplinary practices include the
very multifaceted approaches of biology and history and interdisciplinary programs that are even
more difficult to classify in one of the four classifications, such as the earth sciences of ecology
and geology or the performance studies exhibited in oratory, drama, ceremony, and dance.
The Liberal Arts Disciplines category has been designed with awareness that the relationship
of disciplines to one another has changed over time, and that there is a benefit to studying a topic
from several angles. To help encourage cross-fertilization in the fields of knowledge, articles are
often listed under the several disciplines or interdisciplinary studies to which they contribute. An
important development in the NDHI is the listing of entries that overlap the four divisions and
of entries that overlap three or two divisions; these listings are designed to help the reader understand
how scholars from diverse fields have problemetized subjects in new ways, contributed
the results of their approaches, and thus added to the comprehension of a multifaceted topic of
human concern. The reader will observe that all four divisions of Fine Arts, Humanities, Social
Sciences, and Sciences are confronted with issues of “Objectivity” and “Subjectivism,” topics within
the rubric Multidisciplinary Practices in the Reader’s Guide under Liberal Arts Disciplines and
Professions.
Example of Interdisciplinary Discipline: History
We might consider the field of history, which utilizes methods of both social science and humanities
and considers topics historically from all four classifications of the arts and sciences. For
convenience, history is listed here as a discipline under the social sciences. As most of the articles
in the NDHI are historical, the list of articles under the discipline history concerns historiography
and interpretative methods. One will find terms such as “Hermeneutics” and “Volksgeist”
and debates on historical periodization, as in “Periodization of the Arts,” “Renaissance,” and “Reformation,”
as well as “Modernity” and “Postmodernism.” There are specific types of history, such
as “Social History, U.S.,” “Cultural History,” “History, Idea of,” “Iconography,” and “Science,
History of” (“Iconography” is also in “Visual Studies”). The discipline of the history of science
appears in the Sciences, where it has numerous articles. The listing separates those articles in the
History of Science focused on the origins of modern or contemporary ideas in the physical, chemical,
biological, mathematical, or earth sciences from articles focused on early ideas about nature
and the human relationship with nature.
Listing of Each Article under Its Multiple Disciplines
The Liberal Arts Disciplines section of the Reader’s Guide allows for duplication of entries in an
attempt to provide the student with a full list of relevant articles for the discipline to which the
student inquires. One would find “Narrative” and “Trope” under Literature as well as under History.
The topic of “Family” is under Anthropology and Sociology and under Women’s Studies
and Gender Studies. The topic of “Virtual Reality” occurs under Visual Studies and Computer
Science. The student and the public are encouraged to perform interdisciplinary inquiries and to
freely examine ideas wherever they lead.
An Encyclopedia of, by, and for Humanity
The focus of the NDHI is the main ideas that humans have created, expressed, described, visualized,
experienced, and proclaimed. What idea might be more important than the idea of “Humanity,”
yet only recently has a scholarship been accumulating on the history of the idea of
“humanity” (rather than the idea of “man”). A cluster of articles treats the abstract idea and the
visual imaging of “Humanity” and another cluster addresses the movements around the globe associated
with the term “Humanism.”
Nevertheless, there are numerous articles on movements that hierarchically categorized humans
and deemphasized the commonality, as in the series of articles on “Ethnicity and Race” and on
“Race and Racism,” as well as in articles on “Ethnocentrism” and “Eurocentrism.” Articles on
“Sexuality,” “Women’s Studies,” “Universalism,” and “Essentialism” add further sophistication
to inquiries into the idea of humanity (humans of diverse races, color, and ethnicities; sexes, sexualities,
and gender; religions, cultures, and nationalities).
Entries on “Individualism,” “Person, Idea of the,” and “Personhood in African Thought” focus
attention on self-definition. The bridge between studies of particularity and studies of humanity
is represented in the series of articles on “Identity,” particularly “Multiple Identity,” brought
about by trends of “Migration” and of “Globalization.” The NDHI, available in print and electronic
versions to readers of English around the globe, challenges readers within the multiplicity
of their individual identities to personally identify with humanity and with humanity’s more humanitarian
ideals.
Charles Scribner’s Sons: Continuity and Commitment
Charles Scribner’s Sons published the Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal
Ideas (edited by Philip P. Wiener) in five volumes in 1973-1974 and in 2003 approved its free
release online through a subsidy by the Journal of the History of Ideas to the University of Virginia
Library Electronic Text Center (http://www.historyofideas.org). Readers are encouraged to utilize
that resource for its outstanding entries by prominent historians of an earlier decade. In this brandnew
sequel by leading contemporary scholars of cultural history, the title Dictionary of the History
of Ideas has been retained. As in a dictionary, entries do typically begin with a definition or clarification
of a concept, yet the heart of each article lies in the detailed contextual narrative of the
changes of meaning over time. Each entry’s bibliography further clarifies the discourse and debate
concerning the concept. The treatment is therefore encyclopedic in the truest sense.
The NDHI is an entirely new publication with many more articles. Area specialists on Africa,
the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America, and specialists on women’s
studies and ethnic studies advised on the ideas most important to include. Seeking to present
cross-cultural perspectives on the history of ideas, the new edition encourages scholarship that is
gender-inclusive and global. It focuses on topics of interest today and features developments in
scholarship since 1970; it appraises new thinking on some topics in the NDHI (communism, linguistics,
physics), but mostly addresses entirely new topics (structuralism and poststructuralism,
genetics, paradigm, queer theory, text/textuality). While the DHI entries were to a great extent
the history of texts, the NDHI entries are generally the cultural history of ideas, utilizing the records
of oral communication, visual communication, communication through practices, as well as the
history of texts, in order to emphasize the impact of the idea on a wide variety of people. There
are articles on disciplines and interdisciplinary studies, on multidisciplinary scholarly practices, on genres in the fine arts, on movements, on ideas and the controversies they provoked, and on ethnic
traditions. The content is appropriate for assignment in class and for educating a general public.
With its generous illustrations and lively entries, the NDHI visibly reaches out to communicate
ideas.