Evolutionary Theories and Religious Traditions
Evolutionary Theories and Religious Traditions

Author: Bernard Lightman

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2023-11-21

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0822990075

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Before the advent of radio, conceptions of the relationship between science and religion circulated through periodicals, journals, and books, influencing the worldviews of intellectuals and a wider public. In this volume, historians of science and religion examine that relationship through diverse mediums, geographic contexts, and religious traditions. Spanning within and beyond Europe and North America, chapters emphasize underexamined regions—New Zealand, Australia, India, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire—and major religions of the world, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam; interactions between those traditions; as well as atheism, monism, and agnosticism. As they focus on evolution and human origins, contributors draw attention to European scientists other than Darwin who played a significant role in the dissemination of evolutionary ideas; for some, those ideas provided the key to understanding every aspect of human culture, including religion. They also highlight central figures in national contexts, many of whom were not scientists, who appropriated scientific theories for their own purposes. Taking a local, national, transnational, and global approach to the study of science and religion, this volume begins to capture the complexity of cultural engagement with evolution and religion in the long nineteenth century.

Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina
Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina

Author: Jeane DeLaney

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2020-07-25

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0268107912

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Nationalism has played a uniquely powerful role in Argentine history, in large part due to the rise and enduring strength of two variants of anti-liberal nationalist thought: one left-wing and identifying with the “people” and the other right-wing and identifying with Argentina’s Catholic heritage. Although embracing very different political programs, the leaders of these two forms of nationalism shared the belief that the country’s nineteenth-century liberal elites had betrayed the country by seeking to impose an alien ideology at odds with the supposedly true nature of the Argentine people. The result, in their view, was an ongoing conflict between the “false Argentina” of the liberals and the “authentic”nation of true Argentines. Yet, despite their commonalities, scholarship has yet to pay significant attention to the interconnections between these two variants of Argentine nationalism. Jeane DeLaney rectifies this oversight with Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina. In this book, DeLaney explores the origins and development of Argentina’s two forms of nationalism by linking nationalist thought to ongoing debates over Argentine identity. Part I considers the period before 1930, examining the emergence and spread of new essentialist ideas of national identity during the age of mass immigration. Part II analyzes the rise of nationalist movements after 1930 by focusing on individuals who self-identified as nationalists. DeLaney connects the rise of Argentina’s anti-liberal nationalist movements to the shock of early twentieth-century immigration. She examines how pressures posed by the newcomers led to the weakening of the traditional ideal of Argentina as a civic community and the rise of new ethno-cultural understandings of national identity. Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina demonstrates that national identities are neither unitary nor immutable and that the ways in which citizens imagine their nation have crucial implications for how they perceive immigrants and whether they believe domestic minorities to be full-fledged members of the national community. Given the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, this study will be of interest to scholars of nationalism, political science, Latin American political thought, and the contemporary history of Argentina.

The Argentine Folklore Movement
The Argentine Folklore Movement

Author: Oscar Chamosa

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780816528479

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"Oscar Chamosa's book is an ambitious foray into largely uncharted intellectual waters. Chamosa writes well, knows how to drive a narrative forward, knows how to integrate his theory into the story he is telling, and never loses sight of the forest for the trees."---Daniel James, author of Dona Maria's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity Oscar Chamosa brings forth the compelling story of an important but often overlooked component of the formation of popular nationalism in Latin America: the development of the Argentine folklore movement in the first part of the twentieth century. This movement involved academicians studying the culture of small farmers and herders of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent in the distant valleys of the Argentine Northwest, as well as the artists and musicians who took on the role of reinterpreting these local cultures for urban audiences of mostly European descent. Oscar Chamosa combines intellectual history with ethnographic and sociocultural analysis to reconstruct the process by which mestizo culture---in Argentina called criollo culture---came to occupy the center of national folklore in a country that portrayed itself as the only white nation in South America. The author finds that the conservative plantation owners---the "sugar elites"---who exploited the criollo peasants sponsored the folklore movement that romanticized them as the archetypes of nationhood. Ironically, many of the composers and folk singers who participated in the landowner-sponsored movement adhered to revolutionary and reformist ideologies and denounced the exploitation to which those criollo peasants were subjected. Chamosa argues that, rather than debilitating the movement, these opposing and contradictory ideologies permitted its triumph and explain, in part, the enduring romanticizing of rural life and criollo culture, which are essential components of Argentine nationalism. The book not only reveals the political motivations of culture in Argentina and Latin America but also has implications for understanding the articulation of local culture with national politics and entertainment markets that characterizes cultural processes worldwide today.