The purpose of this thesis is to use the history of music theory to study cultural change in Japan. It has been said that “music is number” (Sima Qian), that it is the “organon of philosophy” (Schelling), that the discovery of the identity of certain simple mathematical ratios with the basic aural consonances—ascribed to Ling Lun in the East and Pythagoras in the West—is the inaugural instance of the “mathematization of reality.” It is this isomorphic relationship between mathematics and music that allows us to unlock the latter and all that it represents with the precision of the former. Indeed, it is my contention that music theory provides one of the crispest articulations of particular mentalités. This thesis is comprised of six chapters Chapter one outlines the history of music theory and shows how it applies to the history of modern Japan. Chapter two describes the way that music theory changed musical sensibility: music-theoretical ideas were imported by bureaucrats, actualized in school songbooks, and through these and other means suppressed the initially unfavorable reaction to Western music through a concerted effort to "hear through" the music to the ideas beneath. Chapter three looks at the way that the twelve tone equal division of the octave functioned analogously to Panofsky's perspectival "symbolische Form": a condition of possibility that rendered intellectually invisible other ways of organizing sound. Chapter four investigates the idea of a “natural scale” and traces attempts in Japan to provide rational, scientific justifications for Japanese scalar formations. Chapter five shows how a particular form of the pentatonic scale—one that both overlapped with the "universal" scale of pre-modernity and was compatible with the diatonic system—came to represent the “Japanese essence” within the constraints of the twelve tone system. Chapter six discusses the double nature of this pentatonic scale through a description of how it symbolized Japan’s entry into the “rationality” of the modern musical system while simultaneously objectifying “Japan” within that system as a specific lack. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Recent literature in the social sciences has emphasized the socially constructed nature of knowledge. Consequently, this has had a bearing upon the understanding of science; interpretations of the natural world; and issues associated with understanding 'the Other'. The relevance of these wider social debates can be extended into a consideration of 'natural' hazards in different cultural contexts. This thesis attempts to develop a 'middle ground', drawing on theories of critical realism, that appreciates the socially constructed nature of scientific practice, but that retains the empancipatory, positive potential of science and that allows intervention in other cultural contexts. The remainder of the thesis attempts to put some of these ideas into practice and to develop the implications of these arguments for those interested in understanding and mitigating 'natural' hazards in other cultures. Two case studies are used, relating to Egypt and the U.K., which explore the scientific understandings of 'natural' hazard events in two different cultural contexts. Fundamental to the approach adopted is the need to acknowledge science as a social practice and how it functions within different societies. Examples are given, pertaining to both Egypt and the U.K., of what this might mean in 'practice'. In summary, therefore, there is an appreciation of the implications of recent social science literature for hazards research and the development of a practical approach to hazards with a social and philosophical justification

The twilight of a tempestuous nineteenth-century saw the rise of a new order and a newly defined nation in Porfirian Mexico (1876-1911). Given the martial background of General Porfirio Di­az, and the warfare that marked the times, military involvement in the modernizing country was not altogether surprising. But relative stability and technological advances now enabled a much reduced army to exert itself in unprecedented ways. Far out of proportion to their size, the armed forces absorbed half the national budget and penetrated every area of society with military officers making up, among other things, many of the most important politicians, engineers, and writers. Thousands of young men, often forcibly conscripted, entered a national army that extended the State into regions previously beyond centralized influence or surveillance. Yet the regime's ostentatious public rituals of parade and manoeuvre stood in stark contrast to the violent eradication of bandits, dissidents, and indigenous rebels. Hatred of Porfirian brutality and decadence has obscured the truly significant contributions the military made to the nascent Mexico.By devising and enacting their particular visions of the nation, and embodying it through practices that ranged from crime and duels to parades and battle, the military proved integral to the formation of nationalism and its constituent identities of gender, class, and racial organization. I contend that the role of the military offers important clues to the making of the modern nation. Both the history of its impact as an institution and the role of soldiers in civil society shed light on the historical roots of Mexican cultures and politics that persisted into the twentieth century, and offer insights into the roots of some persisting challenges-- machismo, corruption, and distrust of public institutions. The military comprises both lens and exemplar of how the process of becoming modern shapes the foundations of what is understood as the nation.

No description available.

In The Memory of Things, I begin by posing the question, what if memory were not merely a human characteristic but also a thingly one. I aproach this thought through the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom things and memories are often juxtaposed, and whose writing of modernity is concerned particularly with the intersection of material traces and memory. I access these questions by means of various theories, among which are psychoanalysis, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, and phenomenology, and, more briefly, through the history of geological science. At their cores, the questions of modernity, of things and people, of trauma and politics, of aura and its decay, of memory and forgetting, of weight are questions of ethics. I demonstrate in the dissertation to follow, objects bear the weight of human memory and ethics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Benjamin's eclectic writings, most especially his writings on aura, provide the tools we need to re-think objects and our relations to them.

No description available.

In The Memory of Things, I begin by posing the question, what if memory were not merely a human characteristic but also a thingly one. I aproach this thought through the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom things and memories are often juxtaposed, and whose writing of modernity is concerned particularly with the intersection of material traces and memory. I access these questions by means of various theories, among which are psychoanalysis, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, and phenomenology, and, more briefly, through the history of geological science. At their cores, the questions of modernity, of things and people, of trauma and politics, of aura and its decay, of memory and forgetting, of weight are questions of ethics. I demonstrate in the dissertation to follow, objects bear the weight of human memory and ethics. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Benjamin's eclectic writings, most especially his writings on aura, provide the tools we need to re-think objects and our relations to them.

Traditional histories of archaeology have left lacunae in understanding of both the discipline and elements within it. Using the Royal Archaeological Institute and its product, the Archaeological Journal, as a pattern site for research the archaeological paradigm is applied to history rather than vice-versa. After a short explanation of method the published membership of the Institute between 1845 and 1942 is analysed in terms of geographical distribution, social composition and occupational interest. In the process the dynamics of a will to discourse are revealed in conjunction with the areas of discourse which were problematic. The text of the Journal (1843-1914) is then analysed on the basis of format, citations, terminology, tropes and objects of discussion in order to identify any 'statements', in the Foucauldian sense, which constitute the objects of discourse. Three major phases emerge. These are characterised at one level by similarities and differences in social and cognitive topography. At another level the conditions of existence and emergence revealed in the study suggest that archaeology itself is a characteristic of the Modem episteme, intimately linked in its successive modes of exploration and interpretation of the past with the Enlightenment project and the nation state.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines the problem of identity and difference in Hegel and Heidegger and thereby attempts to shed light on the relationship between the critique of metaphysics and the critique of modernity. Both Hegel and Heidegger, it is argued, investigate identity and difference in relation to the problem of self-consciousness or subjectivity within the historical context of modernity. Their respective critiques of modern subject-metaphysics can for this reason also be viewed as critiques of the philosophical foundations of modernity. Two paths or lines of inquiry can be identified: Hegel’s dialectical-speculative path, which attempts to supersede modern subject-metaphysics in favour of speculative philosophy, the form of thought adequate to the experience of freedom in modernity; and Heidegger’s ontopoetic path, which attempts to detach itself from metaphysics in order to usher in a ‘non-metaphysical’ experience of technological modernity. These two paths are explored through a critical dialogue between Hegel and Heidegger as a way of showing the relationship between the critique of metaphysics and the critique of modernity. Part I of the thesis considers the philosophical background to the identity/difference problem and its relation to the principle of self-consciousness within modern philosophy. The early Hegel’s encounter with Kant and Fichte is explored as an attempt to criticise the (theoretical and practical) deficiencies of the philosophy of reflection. Part II considers Hegel’s positive project in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular the theme of intersubjective recognition and its significance for theorising self-consciousness in modernity. Hegel’s critique of substance- and subject-metaphysics is examined in the Science of Logic, which integrates the logic of identity and difference within the threefold Conceptual unity of universal, particular, and individual. Part III then turns to Heidegger’s explicit confrontation with Hegel, discussing Heidegger’s project of posing anew the question of Being, and examining in detail Heidegger’s “Cartesian-egological” reading of the Phenomenology. The later Heidegger’s “non-metaphysical” or ontopoetic evocation of identity and difference is further explored in light of Heidegger’s critical engagement with the nihilism of technological modernity. In conclusion, it is suggested that the critical dialogue between Hegel and Heidegger can open up new paths for exploring the problem of freedom in modernity.