History, Philosophy and Religious Studies
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The Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies is part of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Our faculty and students explore ideas, beliefs, and the development of human societies. The department offers majors and minors at the undergraduate level and it makes a significant contribution to the MA in Eurasian Studies.Our trans-disciplinary department is committed to pursuing excellence in research and teaching in all of its many areas of expertise. We believe that teaching and research must go hand-in-hand. All courses are therefore led by dedicated experts at the forefront of their fields.
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Browsing History, Philosophy and Religious Studies by Author "Forêt, Philippe"
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Item Open Access "An Interesting Geographical Change" : Hedin, Stein and Huntington's surveys of climate change(2012-11-09) Forêt, PhilippeStudying the contribution of the lakes of Central Asia to the discovery of global warming must touch on science policy in the early 20th century, the uneasy relationship that learned Europe used to have with the environmental history of colonial Asia, and the production and mobility of new and potentially troubling knowledge. I intend to provide an account of how three independent scholars engaged the Royal Geographical Society of London and the international geography community. I will intertwine their maps, private letters, travelogues and scientific reports from the field with the history of theorizing on climate change. My analysis of Sven Hedin, Ellsworth Huntington and Aurel Stein's interactions with their colleagues promises to challenge the current narrative on the discovery of global warming.Item Open Access Au delà de la frontière scientifique, la frontière du réel en Asie centrale chinoise(2010-02-04) Forêt, PhilippeTo comprehend the role of frontier and frontier-making in the scientific controversy on the "geographical pivot history," I will propose a short account of the remarkable topographical expeditions that explored the Gobi, Taklamakan, Qinghai and Kevir deserts.Item Open Access Challenges to fieldwork before 1914 and today: Adaptation, Omission, Rediscovery(Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, 2014) Forêt, PhilippeJohn Chappell and, before him, Lord Curzon have reminded us that much can be gained from reviewing earlier writings and from listening to interruptions and silence.1 In January 2010, I discovered with amazement a wealth of unpublished observations while scrutinizing the drafts of maps made by the productive and flamboyant Dr. Sven Hedin (1865–1952). Secluded for decades in the National Archives of Sweden, Hedin’s precise information on the vegetation types, soil and water qualities, animal tracks, former shorelines, and abandoned settlements of Tibet and Xinjiang would have been valuable for the elaboration of a theory on climate change in extreme environments...Item Open Access De la vertu au vice: l'espace des loisirs à Macao (1910-1930)(2003-05-16) Forêt, PhilippeLe nom Macao (Aomen en chinois, Ou-mun en cantonais) proviendrait d’une corruption du nom du temple A-ma (Make miao en chinois, Ma-kok miu en cantonais) qui se situe à l’entrée (men, mun) du Port Intérieur. Le temple est fondé au moins deux siècles avant l’arrivée des Portugais. Il est dédié à l’impératrice divine A-ma ou Mazu tianhou, qui est la patronne des pêcheurs et des marins...Item Open Access «De la vertu au vice: l’espace des loisirs à Macao (1910–1930)»(Chronos Verlag, 2005) Forêt, Philippe;Je propose un jeu sur l'espace des loisirs, sur la célébration et le dénigrement d'une baie et d'une rue, sur le mariage et le divorce d'une ville et de son littoral, et sur les pratiques iconographiques de répétition et de répression. Puisque nous parlons de jeu, il nous faut des cartes et un tapis vert qui nous sont précisément fournis par les établissements de Macao. Bien plus que tout autre participant, l'industrie du jeu a en effet dirigé les changements dramatiques qu'a connus Macao au cours du XXe siècle. Dramatique n'est pas un terme trop faible pour qualifier l'évolution toute en contradictions de l'image de soi, de l'identité collective, de la conception de la modernité, et de la stratégie suivie par Macao pour éviter la marginalité.Item Open Access Globalizing Macau. The Emotional Costs of Modernity (1910-1930)(Routledge, 2006) Forêt, PhilippeThis chapter deals with the ambiguity that political authorities feel toward culture and history when they are pressed to enlarge and modernize urban infrastructures. I will discuss the strategy followed by the Harbour Works Department of Macau as the city sought to reposition itself as an international trade centre. I examine Macau's spatial transformation between 1910, when a progressive regime came to power in Lisbon, and 1930, when the first extension phase of the Porto Exterior facilities was completed.Item Open Access Is China ––––––––––––––– flat? A minor contribution to counterfactual geography(2008-12-11) Forêt, PhilippeThe French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) and Félix Guattari (1930-92) gathered two seminal texts in On The Line. In "Rhizome," Deleuze and Guattari introduced a new kind of thinking, which is both nondialectical and non-hierarchical, substituted pragmatic and free-floating logic to our usual binary, oppositional, and exclusive logic model, and offered an early template to understand the internet. In "Politics," Deleuze and Guattari envisaged society as a series of lines, reinvented politics as a process of flux whose outcome is always unpredictable, and suggested that the creativity and multiplicity of its flows can redirect and question capitalism. According to On The Line, China always rebounds after most of the country is destroyed. China starts up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines, when it is shattered at a given spot. A rupture occurs in China whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight. After each rupture, there is a danger that China will stratify again everything, from Taoist resurgences to communist concretions. China experts can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and bad. China has valued the making of flat spaces, traditionally for food production and today for profit-making in the well-connected global economy. China's vision of state-building has always been at odds with the physical reality of a country rich in hills and mountains. We have had so far thirty centuries of unsustainable development.Item Open Access Kartographie der Kontinuität: Vom vormodernen Ostasien zum postmodernen Hong Kong(Rombach, 2007) Forêt, Philippe; Glauser, Jürg; Kiening, ChristianMit meinen folgenden Ausführungen möchte ich zu einem neuen Verständnis der Vormoderne beitragen, einer Epoche, die viel offener für die kulturelle Vielfalt und toleranter gegenüber inkohärenten Entwicklungen ist als auf den ersten Blick erkennbar. Ich befasse mich mit den Gründen für das Fortleben der vormodernen Kartographie und mit der Rolle, die sie an den überraschenden Orten in Ostasien spielt.Item Open Access Le paysage de la décolonisation de la métropole Hong Kong-Macao(L'Harmattan, 1997) Forêt, PhilippeLes facteurs apolitiques qui dirigent la mondialisation de l'économie sont en train de brutalement détruire l'architecture vernaculaire chinoise ainsi que le riche symbolisme lié à l'aménagement traditionnel du paysage. Le but de cet article est plus précisément de proposer une description des effets sur l'environnement du retour à la Chine des dernières colonies européennes en Asie orientale.Item Open Access Les blancs du Tibet : histoire des solutions adoptées pour résoudre le plus magnifique problème de la géographie(Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004) Forêt, PhilippeCet article traite d'un demi-échec dans l'histoire des blancs de cartes. Une tentative de revivification lexicale, sans pour autant aboutir, suffit à modifier les mécanismes d'évaluation de la découverte géographique. Un géographe prestigieux a désigné d'un nom désuet l'espace qu'il a exploré, avant de voir ses travaux rejetés par ses collègues. L'objet de la dispute, qui oppose en 1909 la Royal Geographical Society de Londres (RGS) et le docteur Sven Hedin, le champion des écoles de géographie de l'Europe continentale, est le Transhimalaya. Cette querelle redéfinit la mise en oeuvre des politiques scientifiques, un sujet dont l'importance justifie l'examen des codes de conduite auxquels les géographes adhèrent. Plus fondamentalement, je cherche à analyser les procédures de remplissage des blancs de carte qu'emploie la géographie savante de la Belle Epoque au moment même où l'acceptation implicite de ces pratiques n'apparaît plus comme allant de soi. Ce que j'étudie est donc moins la viabilité d'un nom que la viabilité des pratiques des géographes et des cartographes européens en Asie centrale.Item Open Access Railroad literature on suitable places : How the Japanese government railways forged an "old China" travel culture(Chronos Verlag, 2003) Forêt, PhilippeThis empirical study on advertising campaigns and the art of running trains in distant places finds its theoretical significance in a view of history where real and imagined geographies interact. The railroad companies of the Japanese Empire did much more than transport passengers and carry freight: their express trains embodied a particular view of a world centered on racial, nationalist and dynastic myths. Modernity as ideology and the everyday experience of colonialism combined in Manchuria to generate a particular perception of China as a decadent and romantic culture.Item Open Access Staking a Claim in Paradise : The Appropriation of Central Asia by the Capitals of China (1625-1945)(2010-11-01) Forêt, PhilippeLecture given at the China in Asia colloquia series, 2010-2011 OBJECTIVE Understand the non-Chinese notions at work in landscape-making and in thegarden architecture of the imperial capitals of China. METHODOLOGY Examine imperial villas, gardens and temples. Hypothesis: These sites represent physically and explicitly theories andtechniques on landscape appropriation. Case study: The residences of the Qing dynasty (1625-1912) in Shenyang, Beijing (Yuanming yuan and Yihe yuan) and in Chengde (Bishu shanzhuang),and those of Manchoukouo (1932-1945). EXPECTED RESULTS Conceptualize the Qing landscape through changes in scale rather thanthrough ruptures in time.Item Open Access Temperature and precipitation effects on agrarian economy in late imperial China(IOP Publishing Ltd Environmental Research Letters, 2016-06-09) Pei, Qing; Zhang, David D; Li, Guodong; Forêt, Philippe; Lee, Harry FClimate change has been statistically proven to substantially influence the economy of early modern Europe, particularly in the long term. However, a detailed analysis of climate change and the economy of historical China remains lacking, particularly from a large-scale and quantitative perspective. This study quantitatively analyzes the relationship between climate change and the economy in late imperial China (AD1600–1840) at the national level. This study also compares the findings on the relationship between climate change and the economy in late imperial China with those in early modern Europe. Results of multivariate regression and Granger causality analyses indicate that (1) climate change induces economic fluctuations in late imperial China, particularly in the long term; (2) given that the economic center is located in South China during the study period, temperature has a greater influence on the economy than precipitation; (3) the population of China is statistically proven to primarily act as consumers in the long term; and (4) given the long-term role of the Chinese population, the economic vulnerability in late imperial China under climate change is further increased and is higher than that in early modern Europe, whose population mainly acts as producers in the long term. In conclusion, the late imperial Chinese society has a high economic vulnerability to climate change. These findings revisit Malthusian theory and ‘Great Divergence’ theory by including the perspective of economic vulnerability under climate change during the study period. The role of the population must be investigated further to address the socioeconomic vulnerabilities under climate change.Item Open Access The Disentangled Pictorial History of Mémoire sur la Chine (1776)(2013-05-11) Forêt, PhilippeThis paper would add a contribution to the "entangled histories" of the circulation of Sino-European representations of landscape during the long 18th century. I will discuss a prime example of interaction, interpretation and hybridization that occurred in French essays, atlases, encyclopedias, reports, and private letters on the Qing land-scape. I am especially interested in the grey literature and colorful maps that have sur-rounded two publications by d'Anville and Father Du Halde, SJ: Mémoire sur la Chine (1776); and Description géographique, historique, etc. de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735). I will disentangle only two in the many layers of the French interpretation of the Qing landscape: Layer 1: Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782)'s quarrel with Father Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669-1748) SJ, about de Mailla's disentanglement of d'Anville's disentanglement made when he reviewed… Layer 2: … several disentanglements made by the Manchu, Russian, Dutch, and French cartographers who mapped and depicted independently several parts of the Qing Em-pire I will examine why and how d'Anville defined concepts, methods, and best practices in the disentanglement of landscape representation. I plan to revisit the Sino-European history of transfers of theories and techniques on visual information, from technical surveys of the physical landscape in Beijing to the emergence of a new intellectual landscape in Paris. Case study: The carto-controversy of the Mémoire de M. d'Anville, etc. sur la Chine (1776), and of the Description géographique, historique, etc. de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735) Since Julius von Klaproth (1826), Henri Cordier (1904-1908), and Marcel Destombes (1976), we believe that we know everything that deserves to be known on the infor-mation on China that became available to 18th-century Paris. We have been maybe too self-confident. Since 2010, Lucile Haguet has unearthed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France new materials that are telling us an un-redacted story on the Sino-European exchanges of landscape depiction.Item Open Access The intended perception of the Imperial Gardens of Chengde in 1780(Routledge, 2012-05-31) Forêt, PhilippeThe 'Record Written by the Emperor on the Mountain Manor to Escape the Heat' is a preface to an album of poems by the Qian Long Emperor (Qing Gaozong, r. 1735-96) illustrated by a series of engravings of vistas...Item Open Access The role of Central Asia in the discovery of global warming(2009-11-11) Forêt, PhilippeThe review of precise field maps and photographs should help me reconstruct not only the environmental and cultural history of Central Asia, but also the scholarly debate on climate that occurred during the first three decades of last century. I will very specifically investigate expedition reports because these publications exemplify the methodological guidelines enforced by the scholarly community. I will indeed argue that Stein's Explorations in Turkestan or Hedin's Sino-Swedish "Scientific Expedition to the North-western Provinces of China" provide a useful framework to analyze the first debate on global warming.Item Open Access The Swiss contributions to the international development of cartography: The Eduard Imhof Era(2009-07-12) Forêt, PhilippeMy paper is about a project that will examine Switzerland's participation, during five decades, in the institutional and intellectual emancipation of the map-based sciences. I intend to provide a thematic and dispassionate account of the achievements of Swiss cartography and cartographers, and document the crucial initiatives a Swiss academic took to develop cartography worldwide. In the course of my analysis of Professor Eduard Imhof's interactions with his foreign colleagues, I will add cultural as well as technical perspectives to the interpretation of contemporary progress in the mapping sciences. For the Swiss school of cartography, the Imhof era (1920-1970) was more formative than the bet-ter-studied Dufour and Siegfried Maps period (1845-1926). Despite the contentious political environment of his time, E. Imhof (1895-1986) used his personal charisma to systematically encourage cooperation worldwide. Through the seminars he led and the International Cartographic Association he created and chaired, E. Imhof federated the cartographers from across the world. I will explain how by 1970, on the eve of the digital revolution, he had forged a common professional identity and improved modes and venues to communicate across the discipline. Eduard Imhof will thus allow us to touch on two important themes in science and society: the geography of knowledge and the adoption of new theories, standards and methods by the international scientific community.