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This paper will explore the correspondences between Oswald Spengler's approaches to history and biography. In Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Spengler poses the rhetorical question, ‘do common biographical archetypes (‘Urformen’) underlie everything historical?’ The recent publication of Spengler's autobiographical fragments, known under the heading Eis heauton (‘to himself’) gives an opportunity to explore the claim that Spengler's work draws parallels between personal history and that of cultures, and illuminates the identification of his own experience with history. Following a brief outline of Spengler's philosophy of history with particular regard to the core concepts of ‘organicism’ and ‘analogy’, and the duality of being (‘Dasein’) and wakefulness (‘Wachsein’), the paper will address the concept of ‘awakening’ as a precondition of Spengler's own historical consciousness. It will remain to show how this moment is located both in the childhood of cultures and in that of Spengler himself. The twin aspects of awakening as fear and cognition will then be examined in relation to Spengler's creative difficulties, the literary challenge posed by the perceived impossibility of conveying historical experience in prose. In short, the paper's hypothesis is that Spengler's account of the development of historical consciousness, in both its ontogenetic and phylogenetic forms, can be traced to his own experience and also determines the idiosyncrasies of his historiographic method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes primary qualitative evidence from life histories of rural capitalists in contemporary Senegal. Various common themes in the declining literature on rural capitalism in Africa are discussed with reference to the specific individual trajectories of rural farm capitalists in Senegal. The themes include the emergence of rural capitalism in the context of protracted, uneven and gradual rural social differentiation and the various processes that have accompanied it; the condition of ‘entrepreneurship’ in such changing historical contexts; the symbiotic relationship between different spaces (loci) of accumulation, especially trade, transport and farming and the historical context in which they take place; the crucial but sometimes contradictory role of the state in spurring or constraining rural capitalist accumulation; and the variety of ‘idioms of accumulation’, which reflect transitions and synthesis between non-capitalist and capitalist forms of labour surplus appropriation at the level of individual capitalists, despite some uniformity in the general logic of capital and the spread of capitalist relations of production and exchange. The paper also discusses the methodological power and limitations of oral narratives as a method to gather evidence on long-term processes of agrarian change and accumulation in rural Africa. Finally, the life histories shed some light on the origins of rural capitalists and show that there is a combination of instances of ‘capitalism from above’ and ‘from below’ but that no dominant pattern can be clearly discerned at least in the space of one or two generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the life story accounts of 12 left wing terrorists in India. Narrative interviews revealed that the accounts were broadly coherent and contained similar rhetorical structures with regard to: i) images of the self (imagoes); ii) significant others (interpersonal figures); and iii) visions of the future (generativity script). Specifically, it appeared that individuals developed imagoes of poverty and oppression, identified the state structure as corrupt, and terrorist leaders as heroes of the oppressed. Further, the accounts revealed a commitment to an exploitation-free society (generativity script) and an ideological devotion to a rhetoric that justifies extreme violence. The paper considers the possibility that such coherence is formulated around propaganda and indoctrination that is more sympathetic and harmonious with these individuals' worldview and hence has a powerful shaping process on their development. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of the findings and suggest major policy shifts in dealing with the left wing terrorist groups in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Wright Mills's arguments in The Sociological Imagination are very popular and this paper focuses on the biographical context in which his programmatic statements were occasioned. This breaks new ground by locating The Sociological Imagination and earlier programmatic statements in the professional and personal travails that motivated them. This approach is adopted in order to display the intersection between biography and sociology in Mills's life and career, a feature that he made a central part of sociology's promise. The paper utilizes this approach to reflect on the reasons why The Sociological Imagination became so popular and was able to transcend Mills's general unpopularity at the time of his death: and as part of the explanation of why the dismissal of the book on its publication contrasts with the contemporary view, enabling it to transpose successfully to a time significantly different than at its writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the rewards that feature in the ideology of professionalism and those that inspire nurses. A core feature of a wider thesis, which examined the congruence between the status aspirations held by nurses and the aspirations to status recognized and rewarded by nursing's professional leaders, this paper reveals both that professionalism is not all of a piece and that nurses' expectations of work rewards are characterized by segmentation. No association was found between the expectation of the reward of professional membership and other intrinsic and extrinsic work rewards associated with professionalism. It was found that nurses, for the most part, desired intrinsic rewards for their work and that the high appeal of intrinsic rewards had not been translated into a high desirability for extrinsic rewards-a dynamic common to many professional groups. Finally, this examination of expected work rewards reveals the segmentary nature of nursing. Not only do factors of biography, mobility, work context and dominant work orientation profoundly influence the expectation of given rewards, only very minimally are the extrinsic rewards currently promulgated .as legitimate for the profession as a whole by nursing's professional leaders, reflected in the work reward expectations of this sample of nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the concept of 'animal individuals' and puts forward a nominalistic approach. Nominalism is an ontological thesis (only individuals exist), but also an epistemological claim: that our 'nouns' are practical tools for a quick dispatch of things, but do not correspond to anything real. Hence for a consistent nominalist, 'animals' do not exist, except as a powerful fiction. First, we show that the word 'animal' commits what we call (after Plato) the 'fallacy of the crane': it encompasses a huge range of living entities that have only one thing in common: they are not humans. Differences between our term 'animal' and the ancient Greek 'zoon' also show the fluctuating boundaries of 'animality.' Besides, our ways of speaking systematically deny individuality to nonhuman animals. The philosophical meaning of the term 'individual' implies a genuine dimension of artistic singularity and a political claim for emancipation. Portraits of apes are striking instances of such individuality, captured by photography, as is art produced by particular animals. Methodologically, this leads also to the collection of anecdotes and a focus on animal biographies. The eighteenth-century controversy between Buffon and Condillac helps us understand what is at stake in the tension between species and individuals. Buffon claims that each nonhuman animal species can be represented by a 'specimen,' whereas Condillac shows that animal individuals feel like us and that their nature is impenetrable to us. Finally, a focus on individuals is not only a way to renew or extend historical methods. Biologists are also increasingly concerned with individuals. They develop tools to distinguish individuals from one another: 'animal bertillonage' for morphology. They question standard norms of behavior and preferences. This emphasis on animal individuality has not only theoretical but also ethical and legal consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the historical inscriptions at the North Head Quarantine Station, Manly through the lens of biography to examine what the archaeological record can tell us about some of the people who found themselves in quarantine and who chose to mark their presence in the landscape. In particular we focus on two inscriptions located in the Wharf area of the Quarantine Station to illustrate how the archaeological record in this instance provides a mechanism for investigating and exploring the personal and social histories of migration and quarantine. Half of all the inscriptions at the Quarantine Station contain some biographical information about people, place and passage. They provide a material portal through which we can access something of the stories of the ordinary men, women and children who migrated to Australia. The archaeological record of names and lists of passengers and crew does not simply map onto the shipping registers in the archives, as the Samuel Plimsoll and John Howie examples illustrate. The material characteristics of the inscriptions set up a discursive interaction between the archaeological and historical records that allows us to interrogate them as objects with a biography and as objects as biography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue on biography and geography in New Zealand reviews some of the existing biographical and autobiographical writing relating to the university discipline of geography in New Zealand. It then frames the five papers in this issue within the boundaries of haphazard events, mistakes and accidents, definitions of geographers and definitions of geography. While arguing for further research into disciplinary history in New Zealand, it is asserted that these endeavours are of value for the future of the discipline and not only a matter of concern for those interested in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds upon emerging work on the geographies of sleep by turning to the sleep-hopeful body. More specifically, it attends to the methodological challenges posed by this work and the question of how spaces and states of sleep-hopefulness might be approached by geographers. Building on existing research on the geographies of biography, personal diaries are offered as a methodological avenue through which the sleep-hopeful body might be thought through. Two private diaries are used to discuss sleep as an affective process. The affective allows an opportunity for thinking sleepy bodies in relation to other non-human objects, things and forces. This opens up questions of how such processes can be known and recorded by the subject. These are held in relation to a wider discussion on the (un)knowing subject. The paper considers how diary entries might be used to get at the spaces and relations of sleep, between human and non-human bodies and the affective forces between them. The article concludes by considering what this approach and use of diaries brings to nascent geographies of sleep, and in turn, how attending to geographies of sleep might add to existing non-representational geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the potential future of political biography in Great Britain. While it is attested that the British political biography is a very well-honed and respected form of literature, this paper also posits that biography is intellectually and culturally the least confident form of political writing. Biographers are contrasted with artists in other genres, such as thriller writing, filmmaking, and wood-carving. Prominent political figures such as English author Samuel Johnson and English anarchist and biographer Lytton Strachey are discussed in relation to the topic. It is urged that complacency poses a risk to the future of British political biography.

Samuel Pozzi was a major figure in the early development of modern gynaecological surgery. His textbook, A Treatise on Gynaecology, published in French in 1890 and rapidly translated into five other languages, was the first internationally acclaimed text integrating modern principles of anaesthesia, antisepsis, diagnosis, surgical technique and postoperative care, and in later editions remained a standard reference up to the 1930s. He was the author of more than 400 papers on gynaecological and general abdominal surgery and his technical expertise drew surgeons from all over the world to his theatre in the Hospital Broca, in one of the poorer parts of Paris. He was equally successful in several professional fields apart from medicine. However, his name is now little known in the English-speaking world. This short biography aims to re-introduce Pozzi to readers of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the biography of a single piece of pottery found in a tomb in Sardinia. The form is one that is common in Levantine sites in the Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age, but this single vessel, its history, context, and form, allows a greater story to be told: it points to a second wave of Levantine exploration and colonization – probably Tyrian – that built upon a Euboean–northern Phoenician initial phase in the eighth century BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While historians have made use of early modern English diaries as a source for information on a variety of subjects there has been little corresponding research beyond a few select biographies into those people who actually wrote the diaries of this period. From the first English diaries of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth a picture can be pieced together of the growing number of diarists, their status, economic backgrounds, and where they wrote these highly personal documents. In terms of gender it is clear that although female diarists were in a minority, their ability to write analytical and intimate accounts of their lives and close environment differed little from that of their male counterparts. In terms of occupation it is evident that great events and dangerous times inspired men to re-create their lives on paper. Consequently, military and naval diaries collectively make up the largest occupation for diarists. However, diarists also earned their livings from trade, the law, as astrologers, farmers and also, in one case, as a theatre-owner. Moreover, the spread of diaries across England during the period shows that this personalized form of writing was not confined to the capital or to England's universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical data on many species of terrestrial orchids suggest that their between-year flowering pattern is extremely irregular and unpredictable due to costs associated with sexual reproduction and/or herbivory. In a more mathematical context, the irregular behaviour of orchids may be explained by difference equations describing deterministicgrowth of the vegetative dry weight and deterministic relationships between vegetative and reproductive dry weight. In this paper long-term data on the terrestrial orchid Epipactis albensis are used to testthis explanation of the irregular flowering patterns of orchids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analysing how individuals allocate resources, sexual display should be regarded as is any other life-history trait: patterns of allocation are expected to be individually optimised. It thus follows that the costs of sexual selection can not be studied by simply comparing unmanipulated individual effort and some measure of cost. This rather trivial consequence of life-history theory has received surprisingly little attention in studies of sexual selection despite the almostuniversal acceptance of the theory and the fact that several papers have addressed the question specifically in the context of sexual selection. We therefore again outline why sexual displays are expected to be optimised at the level of the individual and why individuals with high access to resources should generally display at higher levels than individuals short of resources. We use some recent findings fromstudies of birds and spiders particularly relevant to the above questions that illustrate these principles. The examples we present show that the cost of sexual selection could be mediated in many ways and we thus suggest that future studies should focus on such mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life-history method of qualitative research is an alternative to empirical methods for identifying and documenting health patterns of individuals and groups. It allows the nurse researcher to explore a person's microhistorical (individual) experiences within a macrohistorical (history of the time) framework. Life-history information challenges the nurse to understand an individual's current attitudes and behaviours and how they may have been influenced by initial decisions made at another time and in another place. This paper describes a new direction in nursing research and identifies specific steps for using the life-history approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a systematic outline and discussion of Victor Turner's anthropology of religion and ritual. Along with an examination of Turner's theoretical stance, an account of his personal life history is presented. Attention is paid to Turner's initial functional analysis, the development of his methodological frame and processual mode of analysis, and his conception of anti-structure. This account will serve to elaborate on some important issues in the study of ritual and religion. First, the discussion focuses on the parallels between Turner's life and the innovations in his approach. Second, his notion of religion in the study of ritual is examined. Finally, the distinctiveness, value, and limitations of his work are analyzed with reference to other approaches in symbolic anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biography is a useful tool in trying to understand a society like Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century. This article explores the world of provincial Russia during 1870-1905 by reconstructing the life stories and spiritual universe of three inhabitants of Nizhnii Novgorod province, namely Petr Bankal'skii, Anna Shmidt, and Vasilii Vakhterov. These three were of different social backgrounds, but all were born in and grew up within the confines of Nizhnii Novgorod province. All three were writers: they sought, in other words, to make sense of their perceptions enough to put them on paper. It is this desire that makes them attractive subjects if one wishes to get at least a sense of that elusive phenomenon--the beliefs and worldviews of ordinary people. The particular problems in their stories illustrate--how they made sense for themselves of the competing or at least coexisting claims of religion and science; how professional life could be reconciled with femininity; what lay behind the seemingly cookie-cutter populism of the many members of the urban intelligentsia whose origins were in the provinces--begin to sketch the outlines of a shared local or provincial culture.

In this paper, I reflect on the life and work of Everett Hughes. I discuss the similarities and differences between his writings and those of Robert Park; I describe his biographical influences and the use he made of marginality; I consider the relevance of his professional commitments for contemporary sociology and his unique vision of sociology's mission. I conclude by calling for renewed interest in his concepts and principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a biographical note and postscripts of psychoanalysts Sabrina Spielrein. Personal background of Spielrein; Commentaries on Spielrein's paper works; Relationship of Speilrein with another author.

The article discusses the biography of Hagop Akiskal. Hagop Akiskal, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the International Mood Center at the University of California at San Diego. His prior posts included Senior Science Advisor to the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology and co-director of the Sleep Disorder Center at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. Professor Akiskal has also served as Special Advisor to the Director of Mental Health of the World Health Organization. Professor Akiskal is the author of more than 500 scientific papers and 25 books. Highly cited researcher, fluent in five languages, he has been invited to lecture in 250 universities worldwide.

The article presents a biography of Patrick W. Corrigan, Patrick Corrigan, a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago where he directs the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. Professor Corrigan has been principal investigator of federally funded studies on various forms of rehabilitation, team leadership and consumer operated services. He is a prolific researcher having published more than 150 papers and seven books including "Don't Call Me Nuts! Coping with the Stigma of Mental Illness," co-authored with Bob Lundin.

In this paper we consider the relationships between effects of toxicants on population growth rate (r) and the individual-level traits (survival and reproduction) contributing to it by examining population dynamics theory and by reviewing the experimental work that has been carried out in this context. There was no consistent pattern in termsof which individual-level traits were most or least sensitive to toxicant exposure, and it is therefore impractical to select traits for ecotoxicological testing on this basis. Although percent changes in several of the individual-level traits showed significant overall correlations with percent changes in r, changes in any single trait couldexplain no more than about one-half of the percent change in r. Our conclusion is that r is a better measure of responses to toxicants than are individual-level effects, because it integrates potentially complex interactions among life-history traits and provides a more relevant measure of ecological impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corrects portions of an article published in Part 2, Volume 1, Number 9, 1988 issue of the periodical "Electronics & Communication in Japan," about biographies from the paper "Bidirectional Characteristics and Applications of Temperature-Sensitive Magnetic Semiconductor."