In the past, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has been associated with two roles: her experience in the Embassy of Turkey, highlighting cultural diversity, and her transnational travels. The aim of this article is to argue that she was more than a literary aristocrat who described habits and customs from abroad. Drawing on her collected letters, with special emphasis on letters that move beyond descriptions of Istanbul, this article notes that she was also a vaccine entrepreneur, and a journalist of political and urban issues, as well as philosophical issues. In the passages discussed here, she describes and comments on trade, products, pavement, fashion, and social class. It is high time for epistolary studies to shed its biases and to consider aspects that have been overlooked in the depiction of a secular woman of feelings and emotions. Many letter writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth century were already politically and artistically engaged feminists who used letters with precision and expertise. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, as she signed her letters, was one of them. Her letters contribute significantly to building a transcultural view of the world in which diversity and knowledge contribute to a wider perspective on reality, and they provide new opportunities to learn more about what the world was like in her day.
Norbert Elias is one of the great scholars who calls attention to the need for interdisciplinary studies related to actual societies’ challenges. He was one of the precursors of ‘Figurational Sociology,’ through which human relations are studied in a processual way (micro and macro-social aspects). Elias's focus was to understand these concepts, not as a state of fixed and immutable things, but to understand them in terms of their process. In this report, it is pointed out that the ‘civilizing process’ ended up imposing on individuals a greater number of activities as well as greater dependence and complexity in the social relations network. Such factors required a common denominator to regulate such relationships. In this case, the denominator was called ‘time’. By studying time, we may contribute to correct this erroneous image of a world with watertight compartments such as nature, society, and individuals. These are mixed and interdependent and require an interdisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinary studies of time and what to expect of the future are still waiting to being done.
This article aims to argue about the colonization of the future and its narratives. Historically, the future has been determined by a linear Jewish-Christian timeline with a beginning, and an end. Beyond Apocalypse (Armageddon), and Utopia (the dream of Paradise on Earth), the turn of the millennium (the year 2.000) introduced new narratives to these. Technology, the bug of the millennium, and data science become predominant aspects to which the future relates to. This paper argues that the colonization of the future is the act of producing a future in which dominance is still in the power of some, and not available to all. Unless equality and equal distribution of forces win the battle, humanity will continue being a prisoner of the organizations that control and discourse about the future. The colonization of the future, likewise the Church and its final days, or Utopia’s discoveries of Lost Paradise, is being set to determine the future using technology and predictability. It is concluded that the turn of the millennium posts a new time to society, but again, it does not seem that all individuals have been invited. The colonization of the future is a key concept to discuss the forces that are creating the future, and it highlights the necessity to decolonize it.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.