We tend to use the word taste in two different ways. First, to refer to the ability to judge a thing correctly, usually (but not always) a work of art from an aesthetic point of view. Second, we use the word to refer to a particular set of aesthetic preferences, and given the most popular sense of this second usage, we understand that one person's set of preferences may differ from another …
Introduced in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the word technology signified the pursuit of a science to encompass all the industrial arts. Mechanical arts, a term used in medieval and early modern Europe, indicated something different because it included, for example, painting and sculpture. The introduction of the term technology corresponded somewhat contemporaneously with the intro…
In classical and medieval thought, temperance, or sōphrosynē, could signify one or more of a congeries of traits, such as moderation, self-knowledge, self-restraint, or independence. These virtues were to be cultivated by the individual. In modern history, however, the meaning of temperance has become narrowed to refer only to limits on the consumption of alcoholic beverages, whether t…
An apprehension of danger or impending violence, terror is akin to fear in an accentuated or distilled form and is often accompanied by trembling. It underpins many aspects of existence, especially the cut-and-thrust of the evolutionary drive and the predatory nature of the food chain. Lacking the "blood and sawdust" element associated with "horror," it has nevertheless…
While terrorism has arisen in a variety of cultures and historical periods, much of the world's attention on this phenomenon in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has centered on the Middle East. Middle Eastern terrorism emerged in Western consciousness during the 1970s, primarily through the rise of secular leftist and nationalist groups among Palestinian exiles, which tar…
This is not a definition. Well, of course it is—after all, it is appearing in a dictionary—and yet, in a certain and actually rather important way, it is not. Or, put differently, precisely to the extent that the text is not an idea, this is not a definition. Of course, the text can be treated as an idea, perhaps even one whose time has come, but doing so misses something important …
Working with fiber has generated many seminal ideas in the course of human history, including the first notions of rotary motion, machines, and computers. The fiber arts also have provided an important means of expression of the human condition. …
"Performance" is an influential theoretical paradigm in the arts and humanities, with adherents in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, linguistic philosophy, and theater. Since the early 1980s, thinking about performance has been fostered in "performance studies" programs, disciplinary hybrids with widely variant intellectual genealogies, united by their commitment …
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's (1646–1716) neologism théodicée (from Greek theos, God dike, justice) means divine justice, but the term has long been conflated with John Milton's (1608–1674) promise to "justify the ways of God to men." In 1791 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined theodicy as "the defense of the highest wisdom of the creat…
"The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality …
The term Third World has long served to describe countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have been seen to share relatively low per-capita incomes, high rates of illiteracy, limited development of industry, agriculture-based economies, short life expectancies, low degrees of social mobility, and unstable political structures. The 120 countries of the Third World also share a history of u…
As a term of standard usage, though still minus "literature," Third World dates from the 1950s. (The Oxford English Dictionary's first listing for it—still in its French form of Tiers Monde—is dated 1956.) Supposedly coined by the French sociologist Alfred Sauvy (1898–1990) in 1952, it initially referred to the independent and soon-to-be-independent nation…
Chinese thinkers did not devise philosophies, pedagogies, or keys of the sort developed in the West concerning time, and the context was chiefly driven by the state's need for cosmological and ritual correctness, and in some cases by cosmological and apocalyptic notions conveyed in Buddhist and Daoist scriptures. Yet China also produced its own sophisticated metaphysics of time—more …
In general, the conceptualization of time in Indian religious and philosophical thought is framed by a dichotomy between the phenomenal world and absolute transcendence—that is, the realms of time and the timeless. The former, the sphere of contingent temporality, is usually understood to be the world of suffering, of change and impermanence, of what is known in Sanskrit as samsara. The lat…
A primary distinction separates sequential (or utilitarian) time, which has to do with the relations of before and after, from traditional time, which has to do with the relation of the present to both the past and the future. For Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), traditional societies were based on solidarities in traditional time, and they relegated to the margins of social life practical …
Toleration is a policy or attitude toward something that is not approved and yet is not actively rejected. The word comes from the Latin tolerare (to bear or endure), suggesting a root meaning of putting up with something. There is no single and widely accepted definition of the term, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that every author uses it in his or her own way. Therefore it may be best …
Totalitarianism is a concept rooted in the horror of modern war, revolution, terror, genocide, and, since 1945, the threat of nuclear annihilation. It is also among the most versatile and contested terms in the political lexicon. At its simplest, the idea suggests that despite Fascist/Nazi "particularism" (the centrality of the nation or the master race) and Bolshevist "univer…
The word totem is an anglicized rendering of the Ojibwa word ninto:tem. It refers to an animal or plant species emblematic of a specific group, notably a clan. While the term was originally applied only to practices of natives of northeastern North America, it was soon extended to refer to superficially similar phenomena around the globe, whose observances came to be known as "totemism.�…
Trade is one of the basic processes that link individuals and groups. Trade binds people to one another through the expectations of reciprocal giving, through the formal calculus of wages and markets, and through the desires or needs to obtain items not locally available. In this way, trade is a fundamental element of human culture. Trade and exchange are often used synonymously, but there is a ba…
The basic sense of the term tradition remains quite close to its etymological roots. The Latin noun traditio describes the handing over of an item or an idea, while the English tradition refers to a social or cultural institution that is handed down from the past. This much seems straightforward. Sacrificing cattle, singing at graduation, celebrating the New Year with fireworks: all these appear q…
Various ideas have been associated with the term tragedy and the term comedy over the centuries, including tragedy that is not tragic, in the sense of "sad" or "disastrous," and comedy that is not comic, in the modern prevalent meaning of "amusing." The modern English meaning of comedy as a synonym for humor is largely a twentieth-century development. …
What may summarily be called translation has been practiced in many parts of the world for centuries and even millennia. The rendering of Buddhist texts into literary Chinese and the Latinization of the Bible in the first millennium are two instances of celebrated achievements in the long history of translation. There are countless cases where translations are known to have played a decisive role …
The genre of epic structures the oldest European travel narratives extant, from the voyages of Ulysses to that of Beowulf. The epic as a form connects travel to conflict and cultural threat, as well as to the landscape of fantasy and to the epic hero. Just as the epic hero is larger and more marvelous than life, so the epic landscape is both marvelous and dangerous. The epic hero and those who acc…
Although the word treaty can be etymologically traced back to the Latin tractus, meaning treatment, handling, discussion, and management, there was no Latin word with that root having the notion of an (international) agreement. If anything, tractus sometimes had the sense of a disagreement, of a violent handling of affairs, such as the dragging by the hair of the priestess of Apollo. A common Lati…
The term tribe, derived from the Latin tribus, refers to a group of persons forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor. In the Middle East and North Africa, unlike many other parts of the world, claiming tribal affiliation often positively affirms community, identity, and belonging. In the mid-to late twentieth century, nationalist leaders in some regions rejected claims to tr…
The trope concept, which is used increasingly in the social sciences to conceptualize the dynamics of definitions (and redefinitions) of social situations involved in communicative interaction, is derived from the Greek tropos (a turning), tropë (a turn), or trepein (to turn). It has long been used as a technical term in rhetoric to designate the use of a word or expression in a different sen…
The concept of truth is central to Western philosophical thought, especially to such branches of philosophy as metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. In particular, the correspondence theory of truth has long been associated with a realist metaphysics, according to which objects exist independently of cognition by the human mind. Alternatives to the correspondence theory have, …
Since the late nineteenth century, the debate around issues concerning universalism and universalizability has intensified. Against the claims to universal knowledge made on behalf of Christianity, the West, rationality, and mankind, feminist, critical race, and postcolonial scholars and activists have shown that the issues are more complicated. Notwithstanding the validity of their criticism, uni…
The university is a legal corporation empowered by civil or ecclesiastical authorities to award degrees certifying that the recipients have achieved significant levels of expertise in various disciplines. Teachers instruct students of various ages and preparation in higher learning in several subjects. Many, but not all, teachers are scholars who carry on original research in order to add to the b…
The late twentieth century saw a renewed interest in the postcolonial development of higher education systems within broader literature on globalization and education policies. Particularly, efforts by international institutions, such as the World Bank, to prevent the global and local effects of the so-called knowledge divide, led to a number of policy documents and initiatives aimed at leveling t…
Parallel to the varnas and outside scripture were jatis, meaning "by birth" and also translated as castes. A jati is an endogamous group, sharing many customs and often an occupation, usually based in one language area. There were hundreds of jatis within each varna, and while untouchables were avarna, without varna, they were members of specific jatis. …
Menstruation is a physiological process often imbued with powerful cultural and religious symbols. For men, it is a mysterious and sometimes frightening phenomenon—the shedding of blood without visible injury. For women, it has been a double-edged sword. Far too often, it has been used in misogynist ideologies as evidence of the defiling and ungodly nature of the female body, leading many s…
The notion of taboo has a peculiar history: it was originally a Polynesian term referring to a ritual prohibition against contact with a thing, an animal, or a person. The term eventually became a widely discussed anthropological concept, and finally, in its last avatar, has been adopted by most languages to refer to something that is strictly and collectively forbidden. This wide recognition ste…
Utilitarianism is the name of a group of ethical theories that judges the rightness of acts, choices, decisions, and policies by their consequences for human (and possibly animal) welfare. These theories have been widely influential among philosophers, economists, and political and social scientists, and, in the early twenty-first century, in the general area of applied or practical ethics. It wou…
The word utopia was coined by Thomas More (1478–1535) as the name of the island described in his Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip[ublicae] statu, deq[ue] noua Insula Vtopia (1516). While More wrote in Latin, he based his new word on Greek. More combined topos (place or where) with u or ou (no or not) to create nowhere, but in "Six Lines on the Isl…
Even seemingly unshakeable axioms are prone to reassessment by historians, and Victorianism is no exception. Even the very period of Victorianism itself stands challenged: historians no longer refer unquestioningly to the North-West Passage (1874) by John Everett Millais. Oil on canvas. A strong patriarchal influence and the importance of family were prominent values in the Victorian Age, possi…
Virtual reality, a term that became popularized in the late 1980s with the advent of critical research and new technologies developed by Scott Fisher at NASA-Ames Research Center, has its roots in a broad and colorful evolution of art, technology, and communications. The creation of virtual reality is essentially concerned with the quality and experience of immersion, whether real or simulated. Th…
Virtue ethics is one of the three major ethical approaches in modern moral philosophy, the other two being utilitarianism and deontology. Unlike the latter two, it focuses on the virtues. In the Western tradition of philosophy, virtue ethics begins with the ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle, but in the Eastern tradition its origins are even earlier. Confucius discussed in detail what might b…
While visual culture has certainly been around as long as culture itself, the phrase visual culture used to denote a specific component of culture in general, a set of visual practices, or an academic discipline is quite recent. James Elkins, one of this emerging field's leading scholars, dates the term from 1972, saying that it "was used—perhaps for the first time …&#x…
A generation trained to select icons on a desktop computer is able to take a fresh approach to the visual cues within early rooms of collection. Visual cues often preceded catalogs and inventories, helping users to situate themselves in the room and to locate items of the collection. In searching out the modes of conceptualizing, mapping, and classifying of collections, we shall see that the disti…
Volksgeist (folk or national spirit) is perhaps the best known of a family of terms referring to sets of mental, intellectual, moral, and cultural traits that define particular human groups represented as being "nations" or "peoples." Additional related words include Volksseele ("folk soul"), "national character," esprit de la nation (…
The meaning of volunteerism is contingent on the nature of government, particularly the extent and ways in which it enables individuals to make uncompensated donations of money and labor to some form of collective activity or shared purpose. Over the course of the five centuries since European colonists first occupied North America, the meaning and practice of volunteerism has changed as part of t…
How does one define a war? How can one distinguish between the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, jihad, anarchy, and wars between states? Definitions are relevant as they provide the rationale for considering a war legitimate and just and contribute to decisions about international interventions, aid, and protocol. This has become particularly important in contemporary international affairs, whe…
Depictions of violence have been part of human culture for millennia. What began as an effort of early humans to come to terms with the awe-inspiring power of weapons to kill their prey, and thus sustain human life, or ward off danger (for example, the cave paintings of Altamira, Spain) has evolved into a complex social code to help us try to make sense of total war, which industrialization and th…
Wealth has been viewed as a blessing and as a curse; as a prerequisite of virtue and an embodiment of vice; as an expression of merit and of fault. This nonexhaustive list illustrates that not only is the history of wealth a history of contention, it is also intimately bound up with moral evaluations. These differing evaluations themselves indicate a range of divergent cultural judgments. "…
As applied to non-Western societies, the term Westernization is almost always equated with modernization. It is important, however, to distinguish between the two, for modernization, considered as an overhauling of African societies, predates the incursion of the West on the continent. Before the Europeans, the most important agents of modernization in Africa were the Arabs, who, after their settl…
The notion of Westernization in the Middle East raises a number of interrelated issues. First, it refers to a period (nineteenth to twentieth centuries) in which Middle Eastern intellectuals engaged Western political philosophy in a self-conscious search for modernity. Albert Hourani, in his groundbreaking Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1983), dates this engagement from Napol…
Westernization in world history can refer to the transmission and reception of European ideas, technology, lifestyles, and institutions throughout the globe. Much of the scholarly attention has tended to concentrate on the intensity and nature of that transmission during the era of European colonialism and its attempts to transform the very consciousness of the peoples it encountered. Although the…
Prehistory makes clear that our ancestors continuously conceptualized their relations with the myriad forms of plants and animals with whom their existence was interwoven. These ancient musings, more mythological than scientific, were the first sustained efforts to comprehend the order of nature. The noun wildlife has been in use no more than 125 years. But the swirl of ideas around wildlife, howe…
Wisdom is irretrievably linked with age and experience in human societies. If wisdom comes mainly through age and experience, it also requires "sense" to achieve. It is associated with the capacity to deal with experience in a constructive manner. If someone acts in a way that seems sensible, we may use the phrase "he has sense." Sense is the internal quality that promo…
The word witchcraft is used in many different ways. The word witch is derived from Old English wicca (masc., "wizard") and wicce (fem., "witch"). The term wiccan ("witchcraft") referred to human acts intended to influence nature, usually through the use of power unavailable to all human beings. This use of the word witchcraft is synonymous with the more ge…
In contemporary scholarly and popular discourse, the term witchcraft refers to a wide variety of ideas, practices, and institutions. Among most social science scholars of Africa, particularly anthropologists, witchcraft is defined as an act of magic that results in harming a person or aspects of the material world on which he or she depends. In this context, witchcraft and magic are used interchan…
The term womanist first appeared in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), in which the author attributed the word's origin to Although Walker states that a womanist is a black feminist or feminist of color, she insists that a black feminist as womanist talks back to feminism, brings new demands and different perspectives to feminism, and comp…
Before the women's movement and deconstruction, the term femininity was understood as the opposite of the more obvious masculinity. Femininity represented those traits, characteristics, behaviors, or thought patterns not associated with a given society's expectations of men. Until the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s in the United States and elsewhere, the sweetly patient "…
Since 1970 the history of African women has developed into a vital and steadily expanding area of research and study, motivated, as with other areas of women's history, by the development of the international feminist movement. African women's history also paralleled the expansion of African history following World War II, as scholars inside and outside of Africa began to focus on hi…
The prominent roles occupied by women in the legends and myths of that complex and diverse part of the world called Asia suggest that "histories" of women in Asia have existed for a very long time. That these legends have been shaped, written, and sometimes performed by men operating in androcentric cultural contexts does not negate the impression of power and consequence their narra…
In its short history (from the late 1960s in the United States) women's studies has moved around the world as an idea, a concept, a practice, and finally a field or Fach (German for specialty or field). As late as 1982 in Germany Frauenstudium was not considered a Fach and therefore could not be studied in the university but only in special or summer courses. By the early twentieth century …
Work as a unitary experience, set off in time and place from the rest of life, is a concept bound in the culture of wage labor (see especially Thompson, 1967, on disciplined promptness and time regulation accompanying factory work). Only when effort—physical and mental—is turned into a commodity sold to an employer who then monitors and controls it can we discern an abstract concept …
The term world systems analysis was coined in 1974 by Immanuel Wallerstein to refer to a broad set of ideas about the global political economy, and especially the relationship between Latin America and the dominant economies of Europe and the United States, which were then gaining currency. The phrase world system is explored in detail in Wallerstein's famous book The Modern World-System: C…
In Chinese cosmology, yin and yang are two opposite but complementary principles that regulate the functioning of the cosmos. Their repeated alternation provides the energy necessary for the cosmos to sustain itself, and their continuous joining and separation is at the origin of the rise and the disappearance of the entities and phenomena that exist within the world of the "ten thousand th…
The word yoga comes from a Sanskrit verbal root meaning "to yoke, harness" and in general refers to one or another of the many psycho-physical techniques in Indian religions designed to obtain discipline and control over the body and mind. In its classical contexts, yoga could refer to any one of a whole variety of such self-disciplinary practices. In India, yoga transcended sectaria…
One of the most important scholars of Zen Buddhism, Daisetz Suzuki, cogently explained the origins of Zen Buddhism in 1959: For several centuries in China, it was thought that Buddhism was a form of Daoism returning from India along the Silk Roads. Bernard Faure relates: "At the end of his life Laozi, in the guise of the Buddha, was said to have departed to the west to convert the barbarian…
The historians of nationalism have reached a consensus that modern nationalism began as a secular movement, but almost all its varieties were affected by an undertow of older religious sentiments and loyalties. In many of the nationalisms (for example, in the battles between Greeks and Turks in the second decade of the nineteenth century or in the quarrel between Catholics and Protestants in North…
