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65 books match the query 'Netherlands' and 5 start with e

cover of Eating in Theory

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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cover of Een spiering uitwerpen om een kabeljauw te vangen: How and why the Dutch fished for cod 1818-1911

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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cover of Ethics by Committee: A History of Reasoning Together about Medicine, Science, Society, and the State

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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cover of Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis

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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cover of Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950

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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