Physiognomy

Portrait is a very sought out and popular genre of photography, and not only at the present time. This was the case even in the times of photographers that could be described as pioneers in portrait photography as such. Nadar, Disdéri, and others popularized this medium and predestined its dominant role in society when the celebrities of that time came to gather in their ateliers. Over time, an artist's approach towards photographed subjects has also changed. Besides physical traits, a photographer also tries to capture something "behind" all this. In this paper, we address not only an analysis of interpretation points of view during the process of portrayal or its social function, but also a clarification of what an identity in portrait photography means and how it is reflected. We also enter the context of media, where human identity adjusts itself to a universal model, the so-called beauty myth, is abused and presented in the form of artificial icons and sex symbols. On the basis of theoretical grounds and the content analysis of selected authors and their works of art related to the topic of identity in a portrait, we have created a series of self-portraits, which are aimed at analysing the identity of an individual in comparison to the identity of their closest family members.

In the tenth/sixteenth century six treatises on physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāsat)—a science widely considered able to predict inner moral dispositions (aḫlāq-i bāṭina) based on external appearances (aḥwāl-i ẓāhira)—were written for the Ottoman court. In a world in which statecraft and politics were ultimately based on questions of morality (aḫlāq), physiognomy was presented as a particularly useful skill for the Ottoman court due to its ability to evaluate inner moral character with scientific precision. Based on such knowledge, a partial conception of justice could be implemented with an instrumental coating of impartiality. Moreover, men with prized moral qualities could be selected for the ruling elite. The science also offered the sultan and his court a modus operandi for attaining self-knowledge and, if combined with moral self-disciplining (riyāḍat), a way to acquire divine characteristics.

From the confluence of new materials and new audiences brought about by print emerged new faces and new uses for them: character heads in genres such as physiognomies and cosmographies began to reflect the results of observation. Mid-sixteenth-century physiognomies, books that coached viewers how to read the profiles of their friends and neighbours, aspired to present empirical knowledge to their readers. Despite the tightrope they tread between mimesis and idealisation and their heavy reliance on convention, early modern prints were confident about their ability to cue observations and calibrate sightings, and their organisational aptitude should not be overlooked. Game changers in shaping disciplinary activity related to empirical experience, generic portraits, as this essay will argue, developed skills like visual acuity.

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

MONTANER, Alberto, "Entre la brujería y la teúrgia: formas de la magia en el Siglo de Oro", unpublished slide presentation of a plenary lecture at the conference on «Esoterismo y Brujería en la Literatura del Siglo de Oro» held at the University of Burgos on May 5-7, 2015. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3611.7928

Ta‘likîzâde Mehmed Subhî, who was one of the important favor of the 16th century, has performed the works named imperial council clerkship and shahnama authorship. Ta‘likîzâde, known with his historian identity wrote out the works named Revâniyye, Tabrîziyye, Shahnâma, Shahnâma of Yanik Expedition, and Shahnâma of Egri Expedition which are mentioning the expeditions mainly in which he personally attended. Various studies have been performed upon the history subjected works of the author. But till today any study has been performed upon Firâset-nâme which was most probably the first work of the Ta‘likîzâde’s authorship career. The single known copy of the work has been registered in Bibliotheque Nationale, Turc. No. 1055. Ta‘likîzâde wrote out this work with the request of Murad III (sult. 1574-1595) and has presented one of its nice copy to the emperor within the first period of the sultanate -most probably- prepared in palace’s calligrapher house. This work in basic was written out as prosaic but it contains a lot of copy right or cited Arabic or Persian and less Turkish poems/poem parts.
In this study, it will be tried to introduce the subject work of Ta‘likîzâde Mehmed Subhî. In this context, first and foremost general information as to the literature genre of firâsetnâme will be provided and subsequently information regarding evidences required to make deductions and ancillary sciences as to firâset which are applied during the interpretation process of such evidences will be furnished. Furthermore, its reflections within the Eastern and Western societies and the modification thereof in the Islamic civilization will be discussed. Subsequently, a handwritten copy of the work will be introduced and information as to the content thereof will be provided and the work’s authenticity and its place in the firâsetname literature genre will be tried to be determined.

Firâset is the science of finding unseen aspects basing on various apparent clues and make deductions regarding their qualities and quantities. The works, subject of which are these methods, are called firâsetnâme as a literature genre. The first literary work in this field of science, origin of which should be as old as mankind itself, has been penned through “pseudo–Aristoteles”. Upon translation of this work, the accumulation of knowledge on this subject has been transferred to the western world and has turned into a branch of science that continues to exist in our day under the name of “physiognomy”. On the other hand, this science has also been transferred to the Arab world by virtue of translations and contributed to the emergence of the firâset science through being blended with Islamic beliefs. There are actually outstanding differences, especially including proof methods, between physiognomy and firâset due to some understandings and perceptions in the Eastern and the Western civilizations. In this context, opinions/determinations of important Islamic scholars and personal experiences are the unchanging methods in the interpretation of evidences from the beginning to the end in the firâsetnâme type of works. Meanwhile, it is observed that methods of positive sciences such as observation, experiment, sampling and production of statistical data have been utilized in the historical process in the physiognomy type of works.
In the historical process, it is seen that the purview of firâset science also has changed from society to society. For example the science of scouting (“ilmü kıyâfetü’l-eser” or “kıyâfet-i isr”), which has an important place in Arab society, has lost the significance thereof in the Turkish society due to living conditions. The contents of the works have differed inasmuch as the traditions, customs, habits, traces of previous beliefs of every society as well as requirements needed by the geography in which they live are different from each other. It can be said, by referring to the translated works and cited sources, that the firâsetnâme/kıyafetnâme (works on the science of Kıyafe meaning interpretation of personality by observing the external appearance of a person) in Turkish literature have utilized both Arabic and Persian literature works. It is seen that the sources of the works written in the 19th century and later are the French physiognomy books. This change is in line with the cultural interaction process of Turkish society.
Much as, all of them are fed from the same Islamic tradition, there are some differences in terms of form and content, starting with the naming in works penned as to the firâset /kıyafet sciences in Arabic, Persian and Turkish literatures. When the names of the said works are examined, it is observed that firâset/firâsetnâme is preferred more in the Arabic literature while kıyâfet/kıyâfetnâme is preferred more in the Persian and Turkish literatures. However, it is also seen from time to timethat the terms firâset/firâsetnâme and kıyâfet/kıyâfetnâme have been used for each other’s place. Much as the mentioned terms are used in place of each other as if they are synonyms in naming, the word firâset has been considered as an upper title in the basic sources related to the subject, in particular in Taşköprüzâde’s works, and kıyâfet with the other sciences has been accepted as a science which is the subdivision of firâset or an ancillary science of firâset. In this context, it can be said that a great majority of the works penned in Turkish literature are in the genre of kıyâfetnâme, and some of the works bearing the name of firâsetnâme also bear the features of kıyâfetnâme. The number of works which have the features of firâsetnâme is very few. When these works are examined in terms of discussing the issue, it is seen in the firâsetnâme/kıyâfetnâme genre of works that they mostly focus on the interpretation of the issue only for utilization purposes without referring to the theoretical part of the issue. Risâle-i Kıyâset-i Firâset (or İlm-i Firâset) work of Mustafa bin Bâlî, in contrast, is a “real” example of firâsetnâme in which the theory of the issue is also discussed. Another work discussing the theoretical aspects of the issue, albeit not so detailed, regular and systematic as this work, is the Firâset-name of Ta‘likîzâde Mehmed Subhî.
Ta‘likîzâde wrote his first work Firâset-name probably in 1574 Sultan Murad III came to the throne and presented his work to the Sultan. The only known copy of the work is in Bibliotheque Nationale, Turc. registered under number 1055. This work with 62 leaves was produced in nakkaşhane (painting department) of the palace and ornamented with four paintings in “Nakkaş Osman” style. Much as Firâset-name was mainly written in a prose style, poetic writings as regards the subject of the work were also included. Some of these texts were penned by Ta‘likîzâde personally in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, while others were cited from other works. The work begins with praise to Allah and his Prophet. This is followed by praises to Sultan Murad III to whom the work was attributed. The purpose of the firâset science, its target mass and necessity is focused on in the reason of publication chapter of the work. In this chapter, the author also provides information as to the purpose and process of his writing. The main text of the work is composed of muqaddimah and two chapters. Necessity, purpose, scope and methods of the firâset science have been tried to explained in the Muqaddimah (introduction) part by defining this science. Creation of existence and in particular living things has been explained primarily in the First chapter under the heading of “Tenbîh”. In addition, the characteristics of people living in various climate regions are described. The Second chapter is about the evidences for different temperaments. In this chapter, methods of making inferences about the character of a person by examining “ahlât” (four fluids which affect the human body), age, ef’âl (actions, works), hey’et and sûret (status and appearance), gender, ancestry and entitlement (lineage and existing material accumulation) as well as space, creation and limbs is explained.
There are numerous anecdotes cited in the work for different purposes. Kâyif anecdotes including Prophet Muhammad and determining the kinship between Zeyd bin Hârise and Usâme and the kâyif anecdote of the Jewish person who saw Prophet Muhammad and believed in his Prophecy are included in the work. In addition to these,  there are other anecdotes from some leaders such as Alexander the Great, Nûşirevân, mother of Hajjaj the tyrant, Khalifa Me’mûn, Nizâmü’l-mülk Yavuz Sultan Selim, Damat Ibrahim Pasha as well as some scholars, such as Aristotle, Câlînûs, Imam Shafi, Imam Muhammad Sheybani, Imam Muhammad Ibn Sirin, Ibn Arabi, Al-Ghazali, Sadreddîn Konevî, Kâtibî and Kemal Paşazâde.
Ta‘likîzâde has compiled information from different sources as to firâset science while creating his work. The author has often not felt the need to specify the names of the sources he has utilized due to the understanding of the period. However from time to times he has also recorded the people or works he has utilized -in order to prove the truth of the information he has provided-.

"Este ensaio pretende explorar a forte ligação do conto Branca de Neve, dos irmãos Grimm, com o conceito de imagem e as interpretações que podem ser feitas destas.
Inicia-se o ensaio expondo o modo como a Beleza pode ser considerada como uma imagem. De seguida introduz-se a questão de como pode essa imagem ser manipulada para transmitir uma determinada ideia do sujeito. Analisa-se neste capítulo também a reacção inversa à projecção de beleza por parte das personagens femininas, o voyeurismo que esta beleza desperta nas personagens masculinas.
No capítulo seguinte examina-se a crença na imagem fisiognomónica. São apresentados três casos distintos: a Branca de Neve enquanto bela personificação da bondade, a Rainha como símbolo do pecado e tentação ainda que bela, e finalmente os disfarces da Rainha enquanto revelação da sua verdadeira personalidade e portanto marcados pela fealdade.
Observa-se ainda a presença do Feio no conto, dando destaque à bela representação do feio que ocorre nos sete anões e à capacidade da fealdade de engrandecer a beleza.
Por fim refere-se a questão do espelho mágico, enquanto criador de imagens que inspiram a confiança absoluta."

Reviews the book, "The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered" by Martin S. Lindauer (2013). The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered reviews, summarizes, and seeks to synthesize the author’s four decades of research investigating this topic. Lindauer belongs to a vanishing breed of generalists in a time of ever-increasing specialization and narrowly defined research agendas in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Because of its broad scope and survey of relevant and related literature, his recent book is suitable as a supplementary text for courses on the psychology of emotion and psychological aesthetics encompassing, as it does, not just perception, but cognitive, aesthetic, and social aspects of expressive perceptual experience. The nine chapters of this rich and far-ranging monograph are organized under four headings: “Part 1: Background,” “Part 2: Physiognomy and the arts,” “Part 3: A perceptual framework for physiognomy,” and “Part 4: Answers and questions.” Though Lindauer enthusiastically provides the reader with a rich and informative panorama of sources, empirical findings, and ideas, his book does not forge a unified conceptual framework that links physiognomic perception with an empirically testable science of physiognomics.

It has been over twenty-five years since Jack Nicholson’s performance as the iconic Joker in the 1989 Batman, and still the Joker on film mesmerizes audiences. This study will examine depictions of the Joker in the American motion pictures Batman (1989) and The Dark Knight (2008), beginning with a brief description of the disputed origins of the Joker in the annals of the comic book industry and inspiration for the character in early film, with a word about physiognomy. Next, the paper describes the nebulous origins of the Joker within the narratives of the Batman movies by way of comparison to background given in comic books. After establishing the Joker’s history (or lack thereof), I argue that the character comes to embody different kinds of collective fears and evils in different eras, and these have a relationship to physiognomy. In the 1980s, which saw the rise of neoliberalism, the Joker embodied anxiety surrounding America’s inner cities. In the post-9/11 era, he represents anxiety regarding new global cities and the threat of terrorism, institutional evil, and mental illness. In these two films, the Joker embodies the tensions of whiteness and blackness, beauty and disfigurement, and commentary on institutions and networks. I examine these tensions with reference to the history of physiognomy and contextualize the Joker’s relationship to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Bruno Latour) and cyborgs (Donna J. Haraway). The paper concludes with a reflection on the meaning of Batman’s intimate relationship with the Joker, that is, if Batman and the Joker could have been two sides of the same person.

With this Thesis, I problematize the intellectual historiography behind keyword coding–or key-wording–for facial expressions of emotion, emotion-based, and emotions-like phenomena in the German socio-cultural media imaginary. Using digital research techniques to perform a federated query that links word-organized archival content, I depart from the new Media Art Research Thesaurus to comparatively analyse keyword-coded information resources–or “artworks”–on the online Graphic Art Collection of Göttweig Abbey and the Archive of Digital Art: Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s 1808-1815 Master Study of Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Apostles, and Julius von Bismarck, Benjamin Maus, and Richard Whelmer’s 2008, 2010, and 2014 Public Face. By this meta-analysis I will prove how, in this our Algorithmic Age, that to ask the “face question” calls for a digital literacy in the “black box” keyword concepts by which the artistic, scientific, and technological cultural sectors today operationalize facial expressions into universal as well as utilitarian attributes, and code individual expressors into typologies. I pose that these keyword metadata function along with image-resources to “turn real lives into writing” for the computation, datafication, and even commodification of the facial expression of emotion. But I also propose that such keyword metadata have, since at least the Age of Print, functioned as an “auxiliary organ” or technological prosthesis for extending naked or natural perception of our own faces as well as the faces of others, and thereby overcome the limitations of our own emotional intelligence.

Incluso antes de su viaje por América, Alexander von Humboldt formuló sus primeras ideas sobre la fitogeografía, centrándose en la conexión entre la historia de las plantas y la del hombre. Las notas en el diario de viaje muestran que Humboldt desarrolló su noción de fitogeografía a base de la impresión directa de la naturaleza de los trópicos: La fisonomía de las plantas busca una síntesis de empirismo y estética. El plan de una geobotánica global que siguió en París en las décadas siguientes le llevó al proceso numérico de la aritmética botánica y al fallido proyecto de una nueva edición de su ‘Ensayo sobre la geografía de las plantas’. Analizando fuentes manuscritas hasta ahora desconocidas, quiero descubrir cómo Humboldt revisó repetidamente su concepción geobotánica y siempre incluyó otros estudiosos en su investigación.

From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, Jürgen Heinrichs and Maria I. Dietrich, eds. Münster, Hamburg, Berlin, Wien, London: LIT Verlag (German) and University of Michigan Press (English), 2010; 287-307.

Like Franz Joseph Gall and George Sand, the contemporaries of Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886) could have found that the physiognomy (physical appearance) and genius of the musician disclose those "capabilities with which they end up their elected ones". This light, intensely projected by Franz Liszt, compels us to examine the details of his face, and the moldings of his bust that comes from the historical collections produced in the tradition of the time.

Balazs was theorizing a phenomenological epistemology for cinema based in aesthetics that was heavily dependent on hermeneutics, affect, performance, corporeality and audience reception. In some ways this is very surprising given that post-structuralism’s most prominent forefather figures (Marshall McLuhan, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and others) were not pushing at the frontier of these areas of discourse until several decades after Balazs. Balazs’s early work was produced during a period of accelerated technological development, where the mobile apparatus (or unhinged camera), stereoscopic film, colour film, widescreen format and synchronous sound emerged as more than just experiments in advancing the medium’s capacities to represent and present life, both realistically or abstractly. This may help in explaining Balazs’s many prognostications on film theory in the contemporary moment as well as revealing how Balazs accurately predicted the value of the medium as a popular cultural form.

*Everything uploaded to my Academia.edu in 2017 is considered a draft. I was required to do regular graduate course work for the first year of my doctoral studies and took the opportunity to play out some personal theories. It's all a prolegomenon for a bigger project down the road and these ideas will require a more rigourous distillation to be of real value to the scholarly community.

This chapter examines the use of ethnicity and environment in the ancient physiognomic handbooks of Ps.-Aristotle, Polemon, Adamantius and the Anonymus Latinus.  Although environmental theory may appear to underlie the author’s use of ethnic comparisons, I argue that these technical writers followed a physiognomic tradition, a tradition that relied on basic stereotypes without explicit environmental basis. Individual authors, however, particularly Polemon and Adamantius, engaged in their own way with environmental theory in their methodological and general discussions.

When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a pioneering study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.


ENDORSEMENTS
“This magisterial work by Rotem Kowner fills an important gap in contemporary scholarship about racial history and European perceptions of the Japanese during the age of maritime explorations, beginning with the voyages of Marco Polo. The author approaches a delicate and complex topic with a breadth of knowledge and erudition based on the careful analysis of primary documents from a wide variety of both printed and manuscript sources in numerous languages.”
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. Director of the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco

“Rotem Kowner has written an extraordinary book which will be must-reading for anyone interested in Western perceptions of the Japanese from the beginning (Marco Polo’s account) to the 18th century, and to anyone interested in the history of the very concept of ‘race.’"
Gary Leupp, Department of History, Tufts University

“Erudite, comprehensive, and clearly-written, From White to Yellow offers the reader a panorama of the Euro-Japanese encounter in the pre-modern period that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.”
Ronnie Hsia, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University


REVIEWS
“This is a path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinary well researched. ... This is a dense book, exhaustive in its treatment of European writings on Japan and duly aware of the need to keep in mind how Europeans wrote about Others. There are fascinating explorations of topics such as slavery, miscegenation, and George Psalmanazar, the self-styled Japanese. … [T]he text of this volume covers only slightly more than half of the pages and most of the rest is taken up by endnotes, many of them as long as a paragraph and some filling half a page, together with a huge bibliography covering works in twelve languages. Not only do the notes testify to the prodigious labor that has gone into this book, but they also show how meticulously Kowner has explored the ramifications and details of encounters between Europeans and the various Others they encountered. … This book is, though, unsurpassed in its careful examination of European writings on Japan, and the efficient index makes Kowner’s analyses and coverage of the literature easily accessible”
Peter Kornicki, Journal of World History 27 (2016): 347–350

“From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. ... The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship. … Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial discourse, making a powerful case for the importance of the European encounter with Japan. Japan represented a problem for Europeans, and Kowner brilliantly dissects the varied ways in which they struggled to deal with it in the early modern period.”
Adam Clulow, Monumenta Nipponica 71 (2016): 140–143

“The book is a remarkable scholarly achievement and in some ways almost too detailed in its exposition. It throws valuable light on evolving European attitudes to race and to racial hierarchies and demonstrates how they were filtered through different social mechanisms – religion, trade, power – and how despite empirical evidence, few Europeans could actually ‘see’ racial differences in the case of the Japanese, even depicting their clothing in a quasi-European style in paintings and engravings. … Kowner’s book is the outcome of years of scholarly investigation in many languages including Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, German, English and yet others and is exhaustively documented with fully half of its almost 700 pages being devoted to sources, notes and bibliography. Its essential theme is the tracing of the transformation and images that slowly moved the Japanese from being seen as ‘white race’ to re-classification as a ‘yellow’ one, along it may be said with the Chinese and the Koreans, whose racial history in relation to the West is inevitably part of the larger story of the transformation of perceptions as they applied to East Asia as a whole, and the light that this sheds on the roots of racial and racialist thought in the West. ….”
John Clammer, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (2016): 1500–1502

“In this erudite, complex, and ambitious work, Rotem Kowner examines how Europeans came to see the Japanese nation as “yellow” and inferior, after initially perceiving them as “white” equals. ... Kowner’s work complicates the history of the construction and development of the idea of race by examining the European encounter with the Japanese, whom Europeans initially found different but not culturally or materially inferior  ... A short review cannot do justice to Kowner’s rich, multilayered work. The concluding chapter offers a prologue for the forthcoming second volume, which will examine how the Japanese were relegated to inferiority in the eighteenth century, and how a virulently racial discourse ensued.”
Robert Entenmann, Journal of Jesuit Studies (2016): 132–134.

"It is an unsurpassable analysis redolent of superb scholarship. In the end, Kowner makes a strong case that, from 1300 to 1735, Europeans slowly arrived at a system that enabled them to present a universal hierarchical taxonomy of humankind--based on rudimentary notions of race--with themselves at its apex. ... From White to Yellow does help us to understand ''the mechanisms that govern[ed] the rise and evolution of the concept of race in early modern times.'' In doing so, it richly expands our perspective on the origins of race and racism." Nam-lin Hur, University of Toronto Quarterly 85:3 (2016): 533-534.

“Kowner’s work is unique in that, unlike the majority of studies that focus on race in East Asia, it aims to elucidate the emergence of these distinctions at a much earlier point in Euro-Japanese relations—in fact, from their origin, if such can be found. … Focusing on the five centuries between Marco Polo’s first report of a mysterious island called Cipangu and Linnaeus’s categorization of the Japanese as a “yellow” race in 1735, Kowner builds a compelling argument that traces the development of racism from Europeans’ earliest imaginings of the Japanese people to the heart of Enlightenment thought. ... From Yellow to White is also notable for the breadth of its source materials, which, despite spanning several languages and centuries, are housed within a sound and well-organized theoretical framework; I can think of many other works that attempt to do the same but lack the clarity found here. The discussion of Japanese slavery, which tends to be a less-discussed topic in Japanese historiography, as well as of the cultural similarities between Japanese and their European observers, receive remarkably nuanced treatments as points of comparison between Japan and other countries within Europe’s purview. This work is therefore both timely and adds something new to the contemporary debate on the birth of race in Western thought.”
Christina Ghanbarpour, Itinerario 40 (2016): 318–320


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Figures xi
Note on Translations and Conventions xv
Acknowledgments xix
Preface xxiii
Introduction 3

PHASE ONE SPECULATION: Pre-Encounter Knowledge of the Japanese (1300-1543) 33
1 The Emergence of “Cipangu” and Its Precursory Ethnography 35
2 The “Cipanguese” at the Opening of the Age of Discovery 50

PHASE TWO OBSERVATION: A Burgeoning Discourse of Initial Encounters (1543-1640) 65
3 Initial Observations of the Japanese 67
4 The Japanese Position in Contemporary Hierarchies 101
5 Concrete Mirrors of a New Human Order 143
6 “Race” and Its Cognitive Limits during the Phase of Observation 181

PHASE THREE RECONSIDERATION: Antecedents of a Mature Discourse (1640-1735) 201
7 Dutch Reappraisal of the Japanese Body and Origins 209
8 Power, Status, and the Japanese Position in the Global Order 224
9 In Search of a New Taxonomy: Botany, Medicine, and the Japanese 251
10 “Race” and Its Perceptual Limits during the Phase of Reconsideration 283

Conclusion: The Discourse of Race in Early Modern Europe and the Japanese Case 309

Notes 345
Bibliography 511
Index 617

I argue that Fuseli's paintings and drawings of Greek tragedy, like his work on Shakespeare, do not consist in failed attempts to provide legible examples of virtue, but in attempts to make legible moral codes not shared by his spectators. This is linked with the 'passionately detached' theatrical practice of David Garrick and with Herder's defense of cultural pluralism.

It begins by exposing the idea of beauty as a deliberate mental construction, conditioned by culture. As so beauty functions as an image, although not existing in the means we are used to, such as canvases or screens, instead using the body as its means for expression. Human appearance becomes liable to be moulded, changing itself to fit cultural ideals of beauty.
Then it makes a physiognomic analysis of the main characters presents in the tale under study. Snow White appears as a symbol of goodness and purity, as her physical characteristics indicate. The Queen is shown as possessing a completely distinct kind of beauty, shaped by her capricious and tyrant personality, working as an allegory for the woman as the embodiment of temptation and sin. Finally, when the Queen disguises herself as an old woman, the flaws of her evil personality become incarnated, creating a clear relationship between her interiority and the external aspect she willingly adopts.
After it introduces the question of the ugliness, it thus becomes necessary to mention that, in a tale almost exclusively dedicated to beauty, the ugly plays an important role. It is through the existence of the ugly that beauty becomes noticeable, and its presence amplifies the dimension of the beautiful. It also notes the existence of a pleasant representation of the ugly, observable in the case of the Dwarfs, that although deformed reify positive ideals.
The Looking-glass personifies the illusion caused by the image in its observer. Despite the fact that the magic looking-glass does not actually show any image, its words present the Queen with a conception of reality – an image of reality. Although nothing indicates that such image is true, especially since it regards something so subjective as beauty, the Queen decides to act as though its words were dogmatic, trusting completely in an image that, like all images, is deceptive.

This paper aims to shed new light on the physiognomy of Socrates by comparatively examining Plato's and Xenophon’s passages on the topic. A comparative analysis of these texts is of primary importance for understanding the reception of Socrates’ physiognomy in antiquity, inasmuch as subsequent literary and visual depictions of Socrates almost completely depend on them. The first part of the paper deals with the Silenus motif in Plato and Xenophon: this motif describes a peculiar feature which defines what Socrates is, i.e., his seriocomicness. But Plato and Xenophon also provide other motifs that describe what Socrates does, how he behaves, and which skills he is famous for. These motifs are zoomorphic: Xenophon compares Socrates with a crab; Plato compares him with a bull, a pelican, young female Laconian hounds, a torpedo ray, and a gadfly. This “Socratic bestiary” provides a wealth of information
about Socrates’ activity as a philosopher—and even as a young talented
ephebe, still far from getting acquainted to philosophy: Socrates had a charismatic gaze, which was at times menacing, at times magnetic; he was able to track down arguments even before getting acquainted with philosophy; he would benumb his interlocutor with confusing arguments; and he would stir up his fellow citizens, reproaching and persuading them not to stick to their convictions.
However, Plato and Xenophon do not provide a physiognomic diagnosis in the strict sense: as the paper shows, Plato's and Xenophon's interest in Socrates’ appearance is not physiognomic, but philosophical.

In pre-Islamic Arabia pale, shimmery eyes (zurq al-'uyūn) were overwhelmingly associated with negative character traits. In this paper I examine usages of classical Arabic words with the z-r-q root to understand how they are differently mobilised in the Qur'ān, Qur'ānic commentaries, hadith, early medical treatises and words of adab. Z R Q could signify "ill-omened", "deceitful", "blind", and I will show how these definitions structured and reproduced rivalries between tribal groups (e.g. the Umayyads and the Abbasids), between Muslims and perceived Others (e.g. Muslims and Christians), and within local Muslim groups (e.g. supporters of Mu'āwiya and 'Alī, Sunnis and Shiis).

Following Susan Sontag’s appeal “against interpretation” to pay “more attention to form” and to create a “vocabulary for forms”, I propose to add to our established divinatory, exegetical, philological, interpretative, hermeneutical, (post)structural, deconstructivist critical repertoire of text reading what I would like to call a physiognomical reading of early Chinese texts. The main hypothesis of this paper is that, as in so many other respects as well, the Zhuangzi is exceptional in the way it makes use of this common technique by pushing it to its limits. In its semanticization of literary signs, by means of both metaphorical and physiognomical arts, the Zhuangzi achieves such a great variety and the inventiveness and complexity of combinations of literary meaning
production and the range of subtleties is taken so far that it permanently provokes questions about the possible limits of textual complexity in a reader’s hermeneutical process of decoding understanding.

In his 1882 unpublished essay <Die Eigenthümlichkeiten der magyarischen Volksmusik>, Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834–1911) used and explained the term <musicology>. Since the <Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft>, with Adler's definition of the term, had appeared three years later, in 1885, he assumed--and he died with this conviction--that he was the first to have coined the term. It is to Kuhač’s credit that he defined musicology with thinking independently about the discipline of music scholarship at the same time that Spitta, Chrysander, and Adler were considering the scope of the discipline. Comparative musicology was, for Kuhač, a discipline which had the task of investigating the dominant stylistic characteristics of the music of any given nation. Kuhač saw the point of the discipline to be that of establishing the laws of any national music, which could then be used as the basis for a national style in art music. His far-reaching goal was to create an awareness of Croatian national music and to establish its place in the context of Central European culture. From this starting point, he developed a program for a survey of the national music of South Slavs based on his systematization of comparative musicology (<Versuch einer Musikgeschichte der Südslaven>, 1875). On a large scale, the elements of the discipline as he saw it, comprise the collecting of traditional songs and dances; the analysis of their melodies, rhythms, and forms; their philological analysis (since--as he pointed out--the language and music of every nation constitute an organic union); and, finally, their comparison with musical traditions of the neighboring regions. The auxiliary sciences for this analysis are organology, paleography, histories of literature and liturgy, acoustics, historiography (including biographies of composers, musicians, and music scholars, and histories of music associations, institutes, and performing arts organizations), and oral history concerning music. In musicological literature, Kuhač is most famous for his collection <Južno-slovjenske narodne popievke> (South-Slav folk songs, 1878–81), but in an effort to produce a universal survey of music culture among the South Slavs his interests were unlimited, embracing ancient music notation, organology, music histories of Central European nations, music terminology, linguistics, and acoustics.

Parmi les traductions italiennes du "Régime du corps" d’Aldebrandin de Sienne, se distingue la "Philosomia degli huomini", une mise en vers par Battista Caracino, tirée du chapitre physiognomonique du traité et datant de la fin du XVe siècle. Encore mal connue de nos jours, cette courte exposition en huitains représente un objet assez singulier au sein de la tradition plurilingue du "Régime du corps". Son unicité dérive, d’une part, de sa typologie textuelle (c’est la seule traduction versifiée dont nous avons connaissance) ; d’autre part, de sa place dans la constellation des témoins du Régime du corps, puisqu’elle nous est parvenue exclusivement via des incunables (notamment dans quatre éditions différentes, parues en Italie entre 1489 et 1500). L’identité du versificateur reste assez énigmatique : s’agit-il de Battista Caracini qui publia en 1503 le poème mythologique intitulé "Il Thebano" ? Quant aux rapports de la "Philosomia" en vers avec l’œuvre d’Aldebrandin, les interrogations ne sont pas  moins nombreuses : Caracino s’est-il réellement inspiré du texte français ? de quelle rédaction exactement ? ou bien a-t-il consulté une de ses nombreuses traductions italiennes ? C’est donc à partir de ces questionnements que nous nous proposons d’entamer l’exploration de cette curieuse mise en vers : ce n’est que la première étape d’une recherche visant à éclairer, dans la mesure du possible, la place de la "Philosomia" et de son auteur au sein de la tradition d’Aldebrandin de Sienne.

The objective of this thesis is to provide the transliteration and the translation of the chapter relating to the concepts of the planets, Daśās and the physiognomy of Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra from Sanskrit into Thai, and to explore and compare these concepts as stated in Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra with Thai Brahmajāti popular edition. The result of this study reveals that it is possible that Brahmajāti could be influenced by Indian thoughts due to the fact that the astrological concepts resemble Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra, especially the concepts of the planets and Daśās. As for the concepts of the planets, their names in Brahmajāti have derived from Pali and Sanskrit which share the same etymology with the planets’ names in Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra in terms of the meaning of the origin, the character and the position. Nevertheless, it is worth noted that according to Brahmajāti, the planets are created by lord Īśvara. The characters and the relationships of the planets in Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra and Brahmajāti illustrates some differences. Still, the essential dignities of the planets such as rulership, exaltation and debilitation are similar. Concerning the conpets of Daśā, Brahmajāti calls out Daśā as “Thaksa” and Mahathaksa is also similar to the Aṣṭottarīdaśā in Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra including the total age of 108 years, the age of the planets and the calculation of the span of the planet’s Daśā and the planet’s Antardaśā. Only the calculation of the first planet’s Daśā is different. In fact, Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra is more concerned by the period of the moon in natal nakṣatra whereas Brahmajāti is concerned by the native’s lord of birthday. Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra and Brahmajāti both calculate the span of the planets in Daśā system by cross-multiplication. However, the prediction in Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra considers the planets’ essential dignities. It is interesting to indicate that most of the predictive texts are different. For the concept of the physiognomy, the predictions based on the effects of the characteristic features of various body parts as well as the effects of marks in Bṛhatpārāśara-horāśāstra apply specifically to women even though the last śloka of chapter 81 and some predictive texts in chapter 82 indicate that this can also be applied to men. However, the physiognomy in Brahmajāti predictions are applied to both women and men. The auspicious-inauspicious effects of the physiognomy of both scriptures are similar whereas the predictive texts are mostly different.

This monograph is a microhistory of slavery in Galata, Istanbul between the years 1560-1572, based on a detailed study of Arabic manumission contracts found in the court registers.  It examines questions of forced labour, mukataba contracts, and the legal framework within which enslavement and manumission occurred in 16th-century Istanbul.

ISBN 978-3-87997-436-8