Diogenes articles from March 1997

Diogenes archives from March 1997

Introduction.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... Is Identity a term of abstraction that, by a spell, establishes as metaphysical and absolute that which should best be understood as historical and transient? And is it thus also the origin of the resentment of difference, a source of intolerance...

The metamorphoses of cultural identity.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... Ten years ago, an issue of the journal L'Homme et la Societe was entitled "La Mode des identites."(1) Most of the articles were about cultural identity, but the basic thrust of the work was "a critique of the `fashion' of identity calling into...

Ambiguity and the fixing of identity in early Renaissance Florence.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... A citizen of Early Renaissance Florence that stepped out into the streets and entered the spaces of his civic world joined a concert of creative formal behaviors in which he was at once an actor and a spectator. His problem here was to interpret...

Salvation through writing: the N'ko, a West African prophetism.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... One of the characteristics of this ending century might very well be the resurgence of ethnic, nationalist, and fundamentalist movements, a group of manifestations conveniently designated by S. Huntington in the expression "the clash of...

Cultures of creativity: mathematics and physics. (aesthetics and intuition in Henri Poincare and Albert Einstein)(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... The cultures here in question are those of mathematics and of physics that I shall interpret with the goal of exploring different modes of creativity. As case studies I will consider two scientists who were exemplars of these cultures, the...

Commerce and identity in the Greek communities: Livorno in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... In the eighteenth century a large scale emigration of the most enterprising strata of mainly mercantile Greeks from their homelands in Asia Minor, Greece and the Balkans' area, then under Ottoman rule, resulted in the creation of Greek merchant...

Ghost dancing in the salon: the Red Indian as a sign of white identity.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... In May 1885, the Apache chief Geronimo, along with three other chiefs and a large band of adherents, absconded from their reservation in Arizona and fled to the mountains of New Mexico.(1) The reservation life that had been imposed upon Indians...

"I is an other": delusions of identity.(Identities, Cultures, and Creativity)
March 22, 1997... The word "identity," like too many abstract words, has become a repetitive slogan in contemporary usage, sometimes even a resolute exemption from feeling and thinking. Identity is sacred; it is evident; we can only be for it. We use this...