Useful dates and contextual information Flashcards
What happened in medicine around 1900?
Discovery of the germ theory of disease; landmark increase in medical effectivity [before the 1928 discovery of penicillin]
WHen was the Franco-Prussian War?
1897
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1905]
Demystification of religion; linked religion to capitalism; showing link between materialist and moral philosophies
De Saussure - early C20th
Example of reduction of natural phenomena to laws
[CP Darwin]
What and when did Edward Burnett Taylor publish?
Primitive Culture (1871) and Anthropology (1881) – argued that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion (universal to all societies); believed that all societies moved from savagery -> barbarism -> civilisation.
- Belief that all cultures have the same potential intelligence, but education (which evolves over thousands of years) makes the difference. Likens primitive culutres to “children”; sees culture and the minds of humans as progressive
- Idea of ‘survivals’ - elements of primitive cultures whcih remain
- Argued that religion was a way that people explained their world - contemporary Christianity was just a “survival” of primitive life
- Reaction AGAINST degeneration theory – the worry in c19th that biological change was causing civilisation to decline
What and who was an example of C19th Degeneration theory?
Arthur de Gobineau (1855) Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. - suggested it was possible for the ‘intrinsic value’ of men to reduce
CP and CT Cesare Lombroso - deviants as degenerate/evolutionary throwbacks (suggests that this state of degeneration is possible but not normative)
WHat did James Frazer publish?
The Golden Bough - demystification of the evolution of magic/myth into modern religion
What was Stravinsky’s ballet?
The Rite of Spring (1913) portrayed Russian “folk traditions” (such as sacrifice) through re-using folk songs in modernist music; caused riot on its opening night; critics have noted how it demonstrated the closeness of ‘primitive’ behaviours to machinery?
What does Vincent Pecora note about the C20th mindset?
‘all-or-nothing’ divide between those who wanted revolution and those who wanted to restore tradition
What does TS Eliot say about a poet redoing what has been done before?
It is ‘wasteful’
How does Fredric Jameson characterise modernity?
Characterised by ;experiments in temporality’ (CT to experiments with place in postmodernism)
What did Goethe, in 1828, insist - formative to consciousness evolution?
“every healthy effort…is directed from the inward to the outward world”
