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Práticas da História No. 6
Sep 13, 2018 | 2018, Editions, Práticas da História
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Práticas da História – Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past
- 2018
- Issue 6
- ISSN: 2183-590X
- Special issue: The History of Hayden White
Excerpt from the editorial:
The homage the present issue embodies is far from an original gesture, or even one that would have to wait for Hayden White’s death. Since the 1990s, White and his academic trajectory have been the object of a number of tributes.10 On this occasion, we challenged a group of co-leagues from different countries to engage with one of the many essays penned by White throughout his career. We asked them to comment that specific essay as they saw fit, namely by exploring the way White questions their own field or line of research (as Paul-Arthur Tortosa does, within the frame of the History of Medicine) or exploring the relations between White and other authors – in some cases, classical authors (such as Vico, by Maria-Benedita Basto, and Freud, by Nancy Partner), in others, contemporary with White (such as Paul Ricoeur, brought to this issue by João Luís Lisboa, and Frederic Jameson, by Luís Trindade, or Dominick LaCapra, by Rui Bebiano).
To make White’s essays the topic or motto for the issue’s contributions was not an innocent choice. As previously mentioned, he was the author of one of the most influential History books ever published, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, whose 40th anniversary was recently acknowledged in different parts of the world (see, for instance, the book Metahistoria: 40 años después. Ensayos en homenaje a Hayden White, edited by Aitor Bolanõs de Miguel, who also happens to participate in this same issue). But White’s interventions in the field of theory of History were not limited to monographs. In fact, most of his work was first published in journals or as chapters in collective works.12 As a counterpoint to this dispersion, from time to time he published works such as Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999) and The Practical Past (2015). The Fiction of Narrative – Essays on History, Literature, and Theory (2010), mentioned earlier, is a collection of White’s essays selected by Robert Doran with a biographically-structured anthological purpose.14 The same anthological principle presides over White’s essay collections published in languages other than his native English. Such is the case with Forme di storia: dalla realtà alla narrazione, published in Italian in 2006, Proza historyczna, published in Polish in 2009, or, more recently, L’Histoire s’écrit, published in French. The texts that the organisers of those works sign in the issue of our journal – respectively, Eduardo Tortarolo, Ewa Domanska and Philippe Carrard – bring to light some of these editorial processes and their relation with the historiographical cultures of the countries where these anthologies were published.
There is a well-established genealogy of the essay as a genre – or, we could also say, as an anti-genre – that can be traced back from Lukács to Montaigne, for example.16 The point here is not to re-trace or extend this particular topic. And the place of the essay as a form in White’s work also has been acknowledged, among others, by LaCapra, Richard Vann and Robert Doran. I would just like to add that the choice of White’s essays as the starting point for the various contributions we gather in this budding academic journal also springs from our will to insist on the need to problematize what is implied in the modes of production historians nowadays are subjected, or subject themselves, to. Some of the conceptions of the discipline of History and of historical time itself that we have attributed to White in the previous paragraphs seem to fit uneasily with the conventions of writing and academic publishing that currently prevail within social sciences and humanities. Those conceptions rather bring to our mind a text of T. W. Adorno originally published in German in 1958, in which he exalts the untimely nature of the essay. It is with Adorno’s words in «The essay as form» that we conclude: «The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the giveness of totality and thereby the identity of subject and object, and it suggests that man is in control of totality. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. Its weakness testifies to the non-identity that it has to express, as well as to that excess of intention over its object, and thereby it points to that utopia which is blocked out by the classification of the world into the eternal and the transitory. In the emphatic essay, thought gets rid of the traditional idea of truth.»
José Neves (IHC — NOVA FCSH)
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![Illustrative banner for the lecture “Rice: ersatz, cultural artifact, object of knowledge, unruly crop”. With Lavinia Maddaluno, from Università Ca’ Foscari , IHC Visting Scholar 2024. The poster includes a photo of Lavinia Maddaluno.](https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-07-16_Lavinia-Maddaluno_1200x500.jpg)
Detalhes do Evento
Lecture with IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar Lavinia Maddaluno, on the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy.
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Detalhes do Evento
Lecture with IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar Lavinia Maddaluno, on the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy.
Rice: ersatz, cultural artifact, object of knowledge, unruly crop
A dietary mainstay in non-European societies and a cornerstone of dishes like Northern Italian risotto, rice has diverse culinary significance. However, the timing of its introduction to Northern Italy remains unclear. Examining this event offers insights into the process of integrating new crops into both diet and cultural imagination. This talk is about the socio-economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and medical responses to the expansion of rice cultivation in northern Italy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. Bringing together the history of knowledge and environmental history, in this talk I will reflect on how rice was appropriated by several actors, and on how these appropriations were intertwined with perceptions and constructions of the landscape and material environment. By interlacing narratives of rice cultivation and of the landscapes rice forms, alongside discussions of infrastructural development and knowledge systems, I will also delineate the progression of interactions between humans and their environments, as well as the evolution of water management practices, scientific advancements, medical understandings, and political-economic ideologies across different historical periods. Additionally, the talk will highlight how resources were conceptualized in the early modern period, reconnecting to contemporary debates on the Anthropocene and on the agency of non-humans.
About IHC’s 2024 Visiting Scholar:
Lavinia Maddaluno is Assistant Professor in early modern history at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari, Venice, working on David Gentilcore’s ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500-1900. She is a historian of science interested in exploring the nexus between humans, nature and economy in early modern Europe. Lavinia has just completed her first monograph Science and political Economy in Enlightenment Milan (1760-1805), forthcoming with the Voltaire Foundation in autumn 2024. She is currently editing a book on rice in the Mediterranean with Rachele Scuro and a special issue on Water Knowledge with Giacomo Savani and Davide Martino. Lavinia has held multiple fellowships since the end of her PhD (Cambridge UK, 2018), from a Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome, to a Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI and a joint Warburg/I Tatti Fellowship in the History of Science. More recently, she has been Fellow at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Fondazione Einaudi, working on a new project on rice-related knowledge networks between France and Italy in the Enlightenment.
Attendance is free.
Tempo
(Terça-feira) 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
Organizador
Institute of Contemporary History — NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanitiescomunicacao.ihc@fcsh.unl.pt Avenida de Berna, 26C - 1069-061 Lisbon
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The historian of science will be the fourth IHC Visiting Scholar
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Quintino Lopes visited the building that housed the former Phonetics Laboratory of the Federal University of Bahia
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