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Eating in Theory
Annemarie Mol
Duke University Press, 2021
As we taste, chew, swallow, digest, and excrete, our foods transform us, while our eating, in its turn, affects the wider earthly environment. In Eating in Theory Annemarie Mol takes inspiration from these transformative entanglements to rethink what it is to be human. Drawing on fieldwork at food conferences, research labs, health care facilities, restaurants, and her own kitchen table, Mol reassesses the work of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. They celebrated the allegedly unique capability of humans to rise above their immediate bodily needs. Mol, by contrast, appreciates that as humans we share our fleshy substance with other living beings, whom we cultivate, cut into pieces, transport, prepare, and incorporate—and to whom we leave our excesses. This has far-reaching philosophical consequences. Taking human eating seriously suggests a reappraisal of being as transformative, knowing as entangling, doing as dispersed, and relating as a matter of inescapable dependence.
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Educational Reception in Rotterdam and Barcelona
Policies, Practices and Gaps
Maria Bruquetas-Callejo
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
The reception of newcomer youngsters by schools constitutes a policy issue in Europe already for decades. This book deals with how practitioners in Rotterdam and Barcelona apply existing policies for the reception of immigrant students, the dilemmas they face and the strategies they design as a response. Using a combination of discursive, organizational, and ethnographic research techniques, the author studies to what extent practices conform to policies, and to what extent they diverge from them in basic principles. This book analyzes the influence of institutional frameworks on the practices of policy implementers by comparing Netherlands and Spain -specifically Barcelona and Rotterdam-, two cases which are very different in terms of their national policies of integration, their educational systems and their programs for educational reception. Much can be learned over the reception practices of secondary schools, but above all over how policy gaps work, and the common and specific features that they present across different countries. In short, this is an indispensable reading for scholars, policymakers and practitioners alike, which offers new insights about the policy-practice gap and the role of policy practitioners in it.Download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter
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Een spiering uitwerpen om een kabeljauw te vangen
How and why the Dutch fished for cod 1818-1911
Overgaard Christine
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Christine Rosenørn Overgaard tells the story in English of how and why the Dutch fished for cod from 1818-1911. Cod fishing was a hook and line fishery. During the 1800s, new vessels and new gear was introduced, especially trawling along the coast in winter in late 1800s. By looking at sources not yet applied in Dutch fishing history she shows how several fishermen fishing for cod ignored these initiatives not because of lack of entrepreneurial spirit, but because of concern for the environment and the cod stock. She examines the business structure in fishing: family business with shared ownership and limited company, including sources showing the importance of social network among ship owners and fishermen. She places cod fishing business within an institutional analysis and development framework, which on the one hand emphasizes the rules the fishermen set for themselves on how, when and where to fish for cod, and on the other hand sees cod fishing as one of several businesses in Dutch (inter)national politics. She illustrates the consequential dilemma facing the ship owners and fishermen when deciding on a profitable or a sustainable business, providing an alternative theory on growth in business, indicating new approaches to current cod fishing.
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Embassies and Illusions
Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K'ang-hsi
John E. Wills Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1984

Embassies and Illusions shows how peculiar circumstances in the early Ch'ing dynasty led to the application of the inherited routines of the tribute embassy to relations with Europeans. Chinese records of those embassies strengthened the illusion, persisting into the Opium War period, that the tribute system was relevant to the conduct of Sino-European relations.

From archival and printed sources in seven languages, John Wills traces the progress of four embassies—two Dutch, two Portuguese—to the court of K'ang-hsi. He constructs vivid pictures of the ambassadors and their staffs, their difficulties in their ports of arrival, the long journeys to Peking, the ceremonies at the courts, the gifts exchanged, the influence of Jesuits resident in Peking, and, of special interest, the young Emperor in the early years of his reign. Contexts of Ch'ing court and provincial politics and of Dutch and Portuguese relations with China are clearly described.

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Emerging Memory
Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance
Paul Bijl
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
This incisive volume brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia. Dutch commentators have frequently claimed that the colonial past and especially the violence associated with it has been 'forgotten' in the Netherlands. Uncovering 'lost' photographs and other documents of violence has thereby become a recurring feature aimed at unmasking a hidden truth.The author argues that, rather than absent, such images have been consistently present in the Dutch public sphere and have been widely available in print, on television and now on the internet. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance shows that between memory and forgetting there is a haunted zone from which pasts that do not fit the stories nations live by keep on emerging and submerging while retaining their disturbing presence.
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Ethics by Committee
A History of Reasoning Together about Medicine, Science, Society, and the State
Noortje Jacobs
University of Chicago Press, 2022
How liberal democracies in the late twentieth century have sought to resolve public concerns over charged issues in medicine and science.

Ethics boards have become obligatory passage points in today’s medical science, and we forget how novel they really are. The use of humans in experiments is an age-old practice that records show goes back to at least the third century BC, and it has been popular as a practice since the early modern period. Yet in most countries around the world, hardly any formal checks and balances existed to govern the communal oversight of experiments involving human subjects until at least the 1960s. Ethics by Committee traces the rise of ethics boards for human experimentation in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Using the Netherlands as a case study, historian Noortje Jacobs shows how the authority of physicians to make decisions about clinical research in this period gave way in most developed nations to formal mechanisms of communal decision-making that served to regiment the behavior of individual researchers. This historically unprecedented change in scientific governance came out of the growing international wariness of medical research in the decades after World War II and was meant to solidify a new way of reasoning together in liberal democracies about medicine and science. But what reasoning together meant, and who was invited to participate, changed drastically over time. In detailing this history, Jacobs shows that research ethics committees were originally intended not only to make human experimentation more ethical but also to raise its epistemic quality and intensify the use of new clinical research methods. By examining complex negotiations over the appropriate governance of human subjects research, Ethics by Committee is an important contribution to our understanding of the randomized controlled trial and the history of research ethics and bioethics more generally.
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Ethnic Identity and Imperial Power
The Batavians in the Early Roman Empire
Nico Roymans
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
This probing case study examines the evolution of the ethnic identity of the Batavians, a lower Rhineland tribe in the western marches of the Roman Empire. Drawing on extensive historical and archaeological data, Nico Roymans examines how between 50 BCE and 70 CE, the Romans cultivated the Batavians as an ethnic "other" by intensively recruiting them to the Roman army while simultaneously carrying out extermination campaigns against other tribes in the region. Roymans also considers how the status of the Batavian settlement reveals intriguing insights into Roman definitions of "civilization" and "barbarism." Ethnic Identity and Imperial Power is a fascinating anthropological study on how ancient frontier peoples negotiated their self-image.
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Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence
A Voegelinian Analysis
Meins G. S. Coetsier
University of Missouri Press, 2008

Although she died cruelly at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine, Etty Hillesum left a lasting legacy of mystical thought in her letters and diaries. Hillesum was a complex and powerful witness to the openness of the human spirit to the call of God, even under the most harrowing circumstances. Her life was as much shaped by Hitler’s regime as was that of philosopher Eric Voegelin, and as Meins Coetsier reveals, her thought lends itself to interpretation from a uniquely Voegelinian perspective.

Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence analyzes the life and writings of Hillesum from the standpoint of Voegelin’s views on consciousness—especially his philosophy of luminous participation in the transcendent ground of being. Through a careful reading of her letters and diaries, Coetsier reveals the inner development of Hillesum’s mystically grounded resistance to Nazism as he guides readers through the symbolism of her spiritual journey, making effective use of Voegelin’s analytics of experience and symbolization to trace her path to spiritual truth.

Intertwining the lives, works, and visions of these two mystical thinkers, Coetsier demonstrates his mastery of both Voegelin’s philosophy and Hillesum’s Dutch-language materials. He shows how mystical attunement to the “flow of presence”—Voegelin’s designation for human responsiveness to the divine—is the key to the development of Hillesum’s life and writings. He displays a special affinity for the suffering and grace-filled transformation that she underwent as she approached the end of her life and gained insight into the ultimate purpose of each individual’s contribution to the well-being and maintenance of the human spirit.

Retrieving one of the lesser-known but most compelling figures of the Holocaust, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence is an original contribution to both Voegelin and Hillesum scholarship that reflects these writers’ strong valuation of the human person. It presents Hillesum’s life and work in an original and provocative context, shedding new light on her experiences and their symbolizations while further broadening the application of Voegelin’s thought

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Expanding Class
Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950
Don Kalb
Duke University Press, 1998
Expanding Class is the study and story of industrial class relations in North Brabant, a Catholic province of The Netherlands, over a hundred-year period. In examining the lives of workers in one of Europe’s more idiosyncratic industrial regions, Don Kalb affirms the utility of class analysis while responding to the cultural critics who have encouraged a movement away from this focus in labor history. In so doing, Expanding Class advances an interdisciplinary historical anthropology of working-class formation. Basing his analysis on oral as well as archival sources, Kalb reveals a dynamic relationship between capitalist industrialization, locality, and cultural class identities.
Expanding Class compares Brabant’s quaint central shoemaking district to its electrical boomtown Eindhoven, home of the enormous Philips Corporation. It introduces the concept of "flexible familism," a sociological phenomenon in which family daughters were employed to facilitate a cheap and ample labor force. Industrialists manipulated and fostered flexible familism to ensure the discipline and loyalty of the working-class community. By using the industrial Netherlands as a paradigm, Kalb reveals new and productive ways to examine class construction and the development of labor history in other countries over the past thirty years, steering a path between the two schools of thought—cultural and economic—that have dominated labor history discussions in recent years.
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