By contrast to the majority of the Muslim authors of Chinese origin who composed their literary works in the Chinese language, the authors of the Jahriyya Sufi order, a still active branch of the Naqshbandiyya network rooted mainly in the provinces of Gansu and Ningxia, have produced a small number of…
The article discusses arguments in favour and against the necessity and utility of truth-seeking. It starts with Nietzsche's statement that „truth at any price“ has been the reason for the decline of Christianity and adds post-modern perspectives. It seems that in a postmodern time, Christian religious…
The objective of the investigations was the proof of the use of the neutral salt initiation as a construction material in the protecting silicate coating of concrete components, e.g. factory finished parts or reinforced concrete construction parts, by means of waterglass fused silica suspensions
In this article, the transient modelling for a new construction of the Adsorption cold production was investigated. This system, named in this work the combined Adsorption Ice Production system (com-AIP system), was filled by both silica gel (SG) and activated carbon (AC) together in one adsorption reactor…
Preserved animal bodies have been produced, traded, collected, and taxonomically defined in ever-growing numbers since the eighteenth century. They belong to those quasi-objects that, according to Bruno Latour, are spawned by so-called modernity with its extensive attempts to classify and purify. They…
Pursuing Animal History as Body History, this paper focuses neither on animals nor on humans, but rather on bodies and the different societal demands made on them. It rejects the simple attribution of a history and an actor- or even subject-status to humans and animals per se. Instead, the paper suggests…
This introduction gives a brief overview over the subject of this issue and the individual contributions. It argues that body history is a productive approach for analyzing Human-Animal relationships and helps us to move beyond the dualism of nature vs. culture, materiality vs. discourse and subject…
This paper explores the nexus of slaughtering animals and healing humans in Viennese slaughterhouses in the second half of the nineteenth century. The concentration of animal slaughtering at the urban periphery and the invention of so-called “animal baths” by physician Sigismund Eckstein in 1859, who…
It seems to be a fact of nature that the human body is covered with hair. Not only do the hair of the body and the hair of the head differ with regard to texture and structure, they are also an ideal, benchmark, or threat in terms of gender. The female in particular, has to live up to the ideal of a…
This article examines the continuing close relationship between racehorse and man since the eighteenth century and thus sets a counterpoint to the theory of the horse age coming to an end. There are two bodily practices that are characteristic of this special human-animal relationship: breeding and leadership.…
Early modern chemotherapy made an enduring impact on the human body and on current practices of medical research. Contrary to the widespread myth that locates the origins of modern chemotherapy in the mind of man, this paper analyses its emergence from material assemblages comprising trypanosomes, dyestuffs,…
Almost as soon as the Second World War was over, Germans began describing the Allied occupation as the ›Hunger Years‹. It was a time that was and still is imagined as dominated by the incessant demands of the body. This contribution uses postwar hunger as a way of approaching the history of the body…
This essay argues that modern perceptions of the agency of fat people have been inflected by older ways of thinking about fat and fattening. This claim rests on two basic points. Firstly, the potentially encumbering materiality of fat has long been cited as preventing movement in ways that frustrate…
This essay presents “fattening austerity” as a new conceptual framework that will enable a collective resistance to austerity politics and fat oppression. Austerity and fatphobia have not, to our knowledge, been analyzed in tandem. But the discourses that uphold both punitive austerity measures and the…
The article takes up current scholarship on fat history and outlines three aspects of fat history as a critical “history of the present.” Firstly, it points to a crucial shift in the politics of fat at the end of the 19th century. In the course of fat becoming a biopolitical vanishing point, fighting…
The introduction lays the ground for this issue’s critical inquiry into fat and agency. Agency is a crucial yet ambivalent tool for historical, cultural and social analysis. It denotes a combination of self-reliance, self-will and self-respect among historical actors. On the one hand, it is a symbol…
In the 1990s, the idea of xenotransplantation (i.e., the transplantation of bodily tissue across species boundaries) was largely considered an unprecedented threat to both the individual body and human identity itself. Given that this technique was used since the late nineteenth century to cure a wide…
Hunger has never been a stable term. How people have understood and defined it, changed over time, along with a changing understanding of the body, its functions, physiological mechanisms and its needs. The paper follows these changes in a long-term multiperspective approach for the last two centuries.…