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This biography of Johann Ernst Gerhard (1621-1668) offers a study of a forgotten yet unusually well documented early modern orientalist. Gerhard is not a towering figure but a fascinating representative of the academic culture of his day. His extant Nachlass allows a close study of the life and work of a seventeenth-century scholar, in many respects typical of the academic and intellectual culture of his day. This book aims to shed light on the broad and understudied field of oriental studies in seventeenth-century Germany.

Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia uses case studies to explore how knowledge circulated in the different public arenas that shaped politics, economics and cultural life in and across postwar Scandinavia, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.This book focuses on a period when the term "knowledge society" was coined and rapidly found traction. In Scandinavia, society’s relationship to rational forms of knowledge became vital to the self-understanding and political ambitions of the era. Taking advantage of contemporary discussions about the circulation, arenas, forms, applications and actors of knowledge, contributors examine various forms of knowledge – economic, environmental, humanistic, religious, political, and sexual – that provide insight into the making and functioning of postwar Scandinavian societies and offer innovative studies that contribute to the development of the history of knowledge at large. The concentration on knowledge rather than the welfare state, the Cold War or the new social and political movements, which to date have attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention, ensures the book makes a historiographical intervention in postwar Scandinavian historiography.Offering a stimulating point of departure for those interested in the history of knowledge and the circulation of knowledge, this is a vital resource for students and scholars of postwar Scandinavia that provides fresh perspectives and new methodologies for exploration.

This PhD thesis explores how demands for recognition are influencing debates about curation and decolonisation in contemporary South Africa, where a wish to be recognised on the international art scene is constantly present in museum settings, art fairs and exhibitions. The demands are voiced by curators, artists, students and sex-workers, who demand to be heard in a world which they feel for many years has neglected Africa and African artists and not given them the attention they deserved. The demands for recognition they raise are sometimes demanding for the curators expected to deal with them: despite or because of their often privileged backgrounds, they too experience their lives in an ambivalent and “betwixt and between” (Turner 1967: 97) environment as challenging. The demands for recognition targeted at them and audiences in the Global North can be seen as a wish to be ascribed a positive status in a society in which black South Africans continuously are marginalised. Demands for recognition are often the driving force behind political movements and social struggle (Honneth 1995: 137; Taylor 1994: 25), but this thesis shows that they can also be one of the driving forces behind the establishment of a new museum: at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, attempts to direct international attention toward the South African art market is not just a corporate adventure, but also an example of an institution that demands global recognition for Africa as a continent that for long has been overlooked in the global art world.

This thesis investigates how musicologists can use digital audio content analysis (ACA) methods for analyzing large amounts of music. Abundances of music have been digitized in recent years, and the field of Music Information Retrieval has created ACA methods to automatically calculate the so-called features from audio files, such as tempo or tonality. However, the vast majority of musicologists do not yet use ACA tools for analyses, although they can be a means to deal with these abundances of audio files. I illuminate my research question by seeking inspiration in the broader field of the Digital Humanities for discussing how to apply quantitative techniques within a qualitative field. I examine ACA methods’ practical and epistemological value for musicologists in three case studies: In case 1, I examine machine-learned metrics that allows the creation of features that estimate intuitive qualities of the music. In Case 2, I discuss the epistemological value of an existing big data music analysis. And in Case 3, I apply ACA methods for assisting an analysis of 89 DJ sets played at a recent festival. Data can be a means to “enhance the perception”. I.e. to observe things that otherwise would have been hard to find. Musicologists can apply data techniques for posing new questions, for example about many pieces of music, or about musical aspects adhering to a subset of a corpus. They can apply them for a “second” empirical opinion on the corpus. With modern software, digital methods allow swift exploration of musical aspects in large corpora for example through visualization, such as to create crude maps of the music. Statistics enable us to generalize, find larger patterns, but also to nuance and find individual differences. Music analytically, ACA features can both represent new and traditional ways of measuring music. However, there seems to be a current ceiling of about 70-85% correctness for ACA tasks, and this affects the conclusions for large-scale analysis. There is also a current tendency that timbral aspects play a more prominent role than previously. However, the features are created by opaque and complicated algorithms. This impedes the translation from feature to music analysis, and the analysis becomes imprecise or uncertain on a qualitative level, despite exact methods. If musicologists want to exploit the potentials of ACA methods, they will have to get used to not understanding the connection between features and music entirely.

A collection of twenty-four essays, Beyond Tranquebartakes us to seventeenth-century Denmark which strives tofind a place in the thriving colonial enterprise. It moves toMaratha-ruled Tanjore where gifts can shift the balance ofpower. It takes us to a place where ideas, textiles andfurniture arrive and depart, from as far away as Seramporein Bengal and Copenhagen in Denmark; spreading literacyin India and altering tastes in Europe. Born of theTranquebar Initiative, an international andinterdisciplinary research network of the NationalMuseum of Denmark, this collection is unique in that itcentres on activities which radiated from Tranquebarrather than seeing this place as an appendix to the Danishnational history or to the German Christian missionactivities. Book review - Economic & Political Weekly, november 1, 2014, vol xlix nos 43 & 44In the second book Esther Fihl and A R Venkatachalapathy give us a very valuable compilation of essays which promote the idea of a total social fact, as Marcel Mauss advocated a century ago.The invitees to this volume are able to work with the idea of a large span of time, which concerns itself with the overlordship of Denmark, over a sea port which came to be known as Tranquebar. How delightful, therefore, to receive this major contribution to our understanding of the Danes in India, thought to have been passive colonisers in contrast to the British and the Portuguese, and the Danish contribution to education and politics. The most obscure facts are highlighted, the most intricate histories are unravelled.I do find it odd that the writers, except a few, have not referred to Gross, Kumaradas and Liebau’s monumental work of 2006 Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India but what may be a classic to some may seem out of the boundary for others. It is unlikely this work was not available readily to the writers most of whom are of Danish origin, or live in Denmark.Leaving that minor point aside, I would say that the mission history essays are interesting because the pattern of struggle of individual missionaries, the very early history of printing, the dilemmas of language learning, the portfolio of knowledge including native scholars and translators and native catechists, seems now a well-worn trajectory in comparative history and ethnography. Yet, biographies are interesting, and the volatile relationship of differing cultures and the variability of these histories because it is real people we are reading about, makes each essay extremely valuable. There is not a dull moment, since conventional historiography is dispatched with by juxtaposing a wide variety of cultural frames of reference. The linearity of historical readings which could give one a sense of déjà vu is made astonishing by the extravagant use of material culture as an index of one’s grasp. This could be about kingship and the use of scientific knowledge, as much as it is about proximity and friendship and the love of books. It could be about the metal stylus and the palm leaf as vectors of new meanings and new scripts, or about the way in which previous texts enter new ones, when printing makes its presence felt in the first decade of the 18th century.Dexterity and PassionEach author has an obsession, and he or she takes the reader into the smallest whorl of his/her imagination. Behind this lies a great deal of dexterity and passion, which will make this book a good read for lay people as much as academics. The technical insights into what was thought to be a passive colonialism lasting about two centuries, and overlapping with French, Portuguese and British interests are quite unusual. Who would have thought that peasant communities in Denmark imported indigo in the 18th century because they found the ink to be more dramatic than the woad dye they got from their own gardens. Museums exhibiting these textures are still rapt with the vibrancy of those hues, which were thought to be a consequence of the success of trade.The contemporary readings of caste, class and occupation in Taragambadi, (a place name known to locals, but not to be found in the book’s index!) are also useful, since they highlight the issues relating to nature and culture, by looking at how people demand to be identified and resuscitated when there is a danger of cultural or demographic extinction. Fihl’s essay is remarkable in discussing the fisher people and the 2004 tsunami in consummate detail, with regard to aid strategies on both sides of the coin. Similarly, the essays which look at the politics of gift giving in medievalism when the ambassadors try to establish a rapport with the local king Serfoji are really engaging. Nothing could be more amusing than the lack of understanding, or perhaps the subtle way in which the exchanges represent the ambiguity of relationships, the desires and the baulking of them. What seems desirable to one may very well be an insult to the other in a hierarchy which is read on different planks.Similarly the essays which establish that concepts can be transformed if we attempt to rework them in modern terms, while analysing the contexts in which they were first generated are extremely interesting. This could be with regard to material culture, or to political relations. It could define how people view one another in various roles and relations. What is gift, what is tribute, what is a tax, what is booty, what is a threat? The author of these versatile texts on how kingship defines relationships in an instant is confident that if we are to understand imperial histories, it must not be from the point of view of the coloniser only, but essentially from those who do not see themselves to be colonised and emancipate themselves into a dialogic role by default. The history of many relationships may be thus confounded, where the enemy becomes the protector, by his charm, his guile, his willingness to adapt to the new circumstances. Indians are very familiar with this tactic, where overlordship cannot be understood in a single facet; it draws in a whole array of actors and contestants. Max Weber’s multicausality is thus reorganised in terms of the historical moment which is really that of accident or of probability. Do we have control over the facts?Persuasive QualityThe authors in this volume use experientiality as their test case of what it means to be human. There is a certain pliancy, a persuasive quality to the construction of narratives, and each writer draws you into the postmodern trapeze of working with the familiar, but setting up a trope which establishes the uniqueness of the project. Since it is a collaboration between writers who know each other collegially, they feel confident about intermeshing their interests, almost colloquially and without jargon. This is probably because their familiarity with the archives in Copenhagen and in Tamil Nadu are predisposed by a homogeneous project: making what is familiar to them, familiar to us. For these reasons, the book reads like an integrated volume, a task which is usually very hard to accomplish, rather than a mere compilation of essays.Its shadow or penumbra lies in the lack of focus on how the transition between the Dutch and the British happened. Any schoolbook would say that the tumultuous years of war ranging from the Battle of Plassey onwards make the domination of the British in India paramount. What the Danish scholars seem to be inscribing is the multi vocality of the real history, and the crossing over of borders, either through conquest or famine. This history is still to be written for Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The contours of it are suggested by the authors, but the real post-mortem of Collingwoodian type history is something desirable, when the boundaries are understood to be cultural boundaries, and not physical ones. Of course, the Dutch in Sri Lanka have appeared to us in fiction and anthropology, and that kind of intricate detail is not yet available to Indians for this long forgotten past.Since the collection has been edited very consummately, each essay flows well into the next, so that the repetitions of data are almost non-existent. I found Venkatachalapathy’s comment “Further exploration, based on the fashioning of prose in the Tamil Language, the creation of a new vocabulary to express Christian theology, the changing nature of translation, etc, is also possible” a little obscure (p 492). Was he conjuring the ghost of that amazing historian of religions, D Dennis Hudson of Smith College, Massachusetts, who wrote some of the most amazing works on this subject in the 1970s?Similarly, Rajesh Kocchar gives us the biographies of missionaries and institutionalisation of western education, but does not point to the real debate around how secularisation takes place, as an aspect of mission history and colonialism, since the relation between Macaulay and Bentinck is too complex! If the volume with its largeness of scope, and its myriad interests is to be highlighted, these blurred paragraphs, so far and few, must be ignored, and the new texts, made possible through multi-linguistic endeavours, and perhaps European unification, made immediately available to classroom teaching in the humanities and social science. Congratulations to the editors for no printers’ devils.Susan Visvanathan (susanvisvanathan@gmail. com) teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This dissertation examines the various artistic carvings produced by the hunter-gatherer Dorset people who occupied the eastern Arctic and temperate regions of Canada and Greenland between circa BC 800 – AD 1300. It includes considerations on how the carved objects affected and played a role in Dorset social life. To consider the role of people, things and other beings that may be said to play as actors in interdependent entanglements of actions, the agency/actornetwork theory is employed. From this theoretical review an interpretation of social life as created by the ways people interact with the material world is presented. This framework is employed as a lens into the social role and meaning the carvings played in the Dorset society. The examined assemblages were recovered from a series of Dorset settlement sites,mainly in house, midden, and burial contexts, providing a substantive case study through which variations and themes of carvings are studied. Over 1000 Dorset carvings are systematically interpreted and presented to identify various details and patterning including types, forms, subject matter, and raw material selection, as well as temporal and spatial distribution. These carvings are represented in miniaturized portable portrayals depicting animal, human, and tool implements, along with utilitarian object pieces elaborated with incised ornamentation, including petroglyphs with various depictions of human-like face engravings. The images portrayed exhibit representations of different individual beings/agents that shared the same environment and formed the daily basis of economic and social frameworks including material products that were integral to the human condition. The carvings are depicted in realistic forms of expression both in attitude and movement. They exhibit different behavioral situations and subject matter suggesting carvings operated as material symbols that played a role in communicating aspects of Dorset ideology. This research suggests that a clear change occurred in the subject matter chosen to depict in the carvings throughout the Dorset culture temporally divided into Early, Middle, and Late Dorset periods. The general progress of subject choice shows that during the Early Dorset period, miniaturized tool carvings had a more important role in depictions, whereas during the Middle Dorset period general emphasis on the animal subject are dominantly exhibited and during the Late Dorset period the human subject becomes highly important to display. The changes in the focus of the subject matter seem to suggest that ideological and social engagements and practices important to Dorset people shifted through time. The systematically collected data of the carvings are integrated with analogies based on observations of other cultures from across the circumpolar region to assist with parallel perspectives. The different forms of artistic carvings reflect dynamic daily activities among agents. The analyses of which suggest that socially constructed practices are culturally transmitted among the Dorset people over the course of time. The various portrayals of animal and human depictions along with ornamented utilitarian tools and miniature implements reflect an ontology that focused on relational manner where human, object, and animal worlds existed as reciprocal entities exerting influence in Dorset social life and ideology.