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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Item Open Access A Plague on both your Houses(2006) Morrison, Alexander StephenI wrote this article in response to a polemical debate between Niall Ferguson and Priyamvada Gopal in the pages of the Guardian in 2006. I had hoped that it might be published in the comment pages, but no such luck... It deals with the unjustified assumptions which parties on both sides of this debate make about the omnipotence of Imperial Rule.Item Open Access ‘Alien’ Lamas: Russian Policy toward Foreign Buddhist Clergy in the Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries(Inner Asia, 2012) Tsyrempilov, NikolayThis article analyses the Russian policy towards foreign Buddhist clergy who penetrated into the Russian Empire from Mongolia and Tibet between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on archive materials, the origins of this policy are identified. The attitude of the official Buddhist administration of East Siberia led by Khambo Lama to the so- called alien lamas is discussed.Item Open Access Amlākdārs, Khwājas and Mulk land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest(2013) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis paper is a revision and correction of Chapter 3 of my 2008 monograph ('Russian Rule in Samarkand') in which I made a number of errors and misjudgements. The most glaring of these was to confuse a Bukharan tax official (the amlakdar) with the owner of 'mulk' (a category of landed property which usually carried some form of tax exemption). I have disentangled these, added some further evidence, and reconsidered the evidence which I put forward in my book. I argue that Russian attempts to implement at what is sometimes called 'land reform' in the Zarafshan Valley in the 1860s and 1870s are better understood as a fiscal measure, rather than anything to do with property rights. The Russians found the Bukharan land tax system impossible to understand, and so proceeded to dismantle it, abolishing the annual assessment of the quantity and value of the harvest (which had been the responsibility of the amlakdar) and also refusing to recognise claims made by religious elites in the region that they were entitled to tax breaks on their mulk property. However, the system the Russians put in place instead placed enormous power in the hands of village oligarchies, ensuring that at the lower levels the Russians had little control over how the tax burden was allocated, and almost certainly collected far less than their Bukharan predecessors. The Russians also failed in their attempt to have the region's land declared the patrimony of the state. The paradoxical result was that, at least in the Zarafshan Valley (and quite possibly in other sedentary regions of Central Asia) the advent of the colonial regime meant a reduced tax burden, less state oversight, and security of property at least equal to what had existed before.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 ‘Applied Orientalism’ in British India and Tsarist Turkestan(2009-07) Morrison, Alexander Stephen‘We cannot promise to those who may choose Oriental scholarship, that they shall find themselves abreast, in all the various high-roads of life which lead to profit and distinction, with the men who shall have devoted themselves to acquiring the knowledge which in these days is power, the intellectual treasures which make fifty years of Europe better than a cycle in Cathay, which are the sinews of peaceful empire as surely as money is the sinew of war.’Item Open Access ARTS IN TIMES OF CRISIS: KAZAKH PAINTERS RECONNECTING; AMERICAN ACTORS REGROUPING(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2021-03) Kruszewska, MałgorzataThe second talk of our Spring 2021 speaker series will feature Małgorzata Kruszewska (Instructor, Writing Program), who will discuss “Arts in Times of Crisis: Kazakh Painters Reconnecting; American Actors Regrouping”. To watch this webinar please follow the link above and log in using your library account.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 Camels and Colonial Armies. The Logistics of warfare in Central Asia in the early 19th century(2014) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis article explores the use of camels for baggage transport by European colonial armies in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on two episodes: the Russian winter expedition to Khiva, and the march of the Army of the Indus into Afghanistan, both of which took place in 1839. However sophisticated their weapons and other technology, until at least the 1880s European colonial armies were forced to rely exclusively on baggage animals if they wanted to move around: railways arrived very late in the history of European expansion. In Central Asia this meant rounding up, loading, managing and feeding tens of thousands of camels, which could only be furnished by the pastoral groups who inhabited the region, who in some cases were also the objects of conquest. Camel transport placed certain structural constraints on European conquest in Central Asia: firstly it meant that the forces involved were almost always very small; secondly it prevented the launching of spontaneous or unauthorised campaigns by “men on the spot,” as every advance had to be preceded by the rounding up of the necessary baggage animals, and the creation of a budget to pay for then. Finally, the constraints imposed by camel transport ensured that British and Russian armies would never meet in Central Asia, and that a Russian invasion of India was a chimera.Item Open Access Central Asia as a part of the Russian Empire(2011) Morrison, Alexander StephenAn excessively lengthy review article analysing the collectively-authored volume 'Tsentral'naya Aziya v Sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii', published by 'Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie' in 2007Item Open Access Challenges in teaching and curriculum development for 'History of Kazakhstan' at Nazarbayev University(2014) Alexander Stephen, MorrisonThis is the text on which I based a talk in Russian given at the plenary session of a conference held at the Eurasian National University on the 22nd November 2014. It was published in the conference proceedings: E.B. Sydykov (ed.) 'Actual Problems of Research and Teaching of National History Nowadays' (Astana: ENU, 2014) pp.6-8.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 COLLABORATIONISM OF CENTRAL ASIAN MUSLIMS WITH NAZI GERMANY DURING WWII(School of Sciences and Humanities, 2023) Kapasheva, NargizThe Central Asian population was one of the most mobilized groups in the Red Army. Around 3,4 million Turkestanis (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Kirghiz, and Tajiks) were drafted into the Red Army during the war, thousands of whom died, and many were captured. 1 Taking advantage of the failures of the Soviet soldiers, the German Nazi’s Ostministerium or Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) tried to recruit Muslim Central Asian prisoners of war. The Germans’ attempts at drawing support from the Soviet Union’s Central Asian citizens reflected the heavy losses they suffered after 1942-43 due to the lack of support of people in the occupied areas and inability to fulfil the Blitzkrieg plan as well as their intention to disrupt the stability of the Soviet regime in the Central Asian region. De Cordier estimates that the number of Soviet Muslims ranged from 280,000 to 297,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht and 8,000 soldiers in the Waffen-SS, where the Turkestani battalions had the biggest number (between 110,000 to 178,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht and 3,000 soldiers in the Waffen-SS). 2 While the number of people recruited to these battalions was much lower than the number of Muslims fighting in the Red Army, the topic of war-time collaboration among Central Asian soldiers remains underexplored. The paper will examine soldiers’ motivations for collaboration and ask whether these were exclusively survival-driven. I will argue that Nazi Germany changed its racial policies and created a possibility of collaboration due to the war-time practical necessities, such as advancing on the front and promoting propaganda against the Soviet UnionItem Open Access COPING WITH COVID-19: EMERGENCY REMOTE TEACHING(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2021-03) Guven, Funda; Omarbekova, GulnaraThe next talk of our Spring 2021 speaker series will feature Funda Guven (Assistant Professor, Department of Kazakh Language and Turkic Studies) and Gulnara Omarbekova (Associate Professor, Department of Kazakh Language and Turkic Studies) who will discuss “Coping With COVID-19: Emergency Remote Teaching”. To watch this webinar please follow the link above and log in using your library account.Item Open Access COVID-19, THE MEDIA AND HISTORICAL MEMORY(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2020-10) Elliott, BowenThe next talk of our Fall 2020 speaker series will feature Dr. Elliott Bowen, (Assistant Professor, Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies Nazarbayev University), who will discuss “COVID-19, the Media, and Historical Memory”. To watch this webinar please follow the link above and log in using your library account.Item Open Access COVID-19: THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2020-11) Stitt, Nancy; Crape, Byron; Sarria-Santamera, AntonioThe last talk of our Fall 2020 speaker series will feature Nancy Stitt (RN, BSN, BC-RN; Nursing Professional Development Specialist; Program Director; Department of Nursing Education; Nazarbayev University School of Medicine), Byron Crape (PhD; Program Director; Master Of Public Health; Nazarbayev University School of Medicine), and Antonio Sarria-Santamera (MD, PhD; Associate Professor; Nazarbayev University School of Medicine), who will discuss “COVID-19: The Past, The Present, and the Future”. To watch this webinar please follow the link above and log in using your library account.Item Open Access CREATING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ISLAM OF THE KAZAKH STEPPE: THE STEPPE, THE EMPIRE, AND THE OUTSIDER(Nazarbayev University School of Sciences and Humanities, 2022-04) Baiseit, DinaThesis: The depiction of Islam that the Qazaqs practiced during the 19th and early 20th centuries differed hugely in the accounts of the outsiders and insiders. The first group, which included colonizers and foreigners, had specific purposes while creating accounts of this religion. One of the primary aims was, as Edward Said puts it, to justify their colonial presence in the region and oppressive policies toward these nomads. They depicted the Qazaqs as backward, uncivilized, and uneducated subjects who did not believe truly in Islam and were not true Muslims1 . Christian missionaries were present in the steppe and tried to convert the locals into Christianity. They believed blindly that they could convert the locals to Christianity, but after a couple of attempts failed and the tsarist government just decided to use Islam as a tool to control the locals by sending Tatar Muslims to the steppe and assigning them into positions of the steppe religious community before 1868. In 1868, Qazaqs were excluded from the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly.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 Early Sources on the Qazaqs and their Khans(2015-09-11) Alexander Stephen, MorrisonThis paper was the basis of the 5-minute lecture I gave at the plenary session of the recent 'Mengilik El' conference to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the founding of the Qazaq khanate, held at Nazarbayev University on the 11th September 2015. The 'conference' itself was much more of a political than a scholarly event, and largely a matter of theatre than discussion or intellectual exchange. The paper was designed with a very general audience in mind, and reflects the way in which I teach this period and these sources in 'History of Kazakhstan', rather than any real research of my own. I have also added a link to a short interview I gave to the e-history.kz website the year before, repeating many of the same things in broken Russian.Item Open Access EMBODIED COGNITION: DIMENSIONS, DOMAINS AND APPLICATIONS(Adaptive Behavior, 2021-02-01) Farina, MirkoThis article is intended as a response to Goldinger et al. and to all those, an increasing minority in the sciences, who still belittle the contribution of embodied cognition to our understanding of human cognitive behaviour. In this article (section 1), I introduce the notion of embodiment and explain its dimensions and reach. I review (section 2) a range of embodied cognition theories and highlight the principles and criteria on which they rely or draw from. I focus (section 3) on three crucial empirical domains in which an embodied perspective has driven novel insights about the relationship between mind and cognition. I argue that embodiment is not just a philosophical mantra empty of empirical content. I draw attention (section 4) to some of the recent ways in which principles underlying embodied cognition have begun to be applied in different fields (contemporary psychology). I review some of these interventions and suggest that discussing these applications not only provides additional evidence against any poverty claim but can also help moving the field forward in important ways. Contra Goldinger et al., I therefore conclude (section 5) that embodied cognition is a very fruitful research programme for the empirical sciences and that can adequately explain many aspects of human cognitive behaviour.