The Divine Eye in Ancient Egypt and in the Midrash Interpretation of Formative Judaism.

This paper studies the “eye” as a religious phenomenon from the multiple traditions of ancient Egypt compared with rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity using a semiotic approach based upon the theories of Umberto Eco. This method was chosen because the eye is a graphic as well as a linguistic sign which both express religious concepts. Generally, the eye represented an all-seeing and omnipresent divinity. In other words, the god was reduced to an eye, whereby the form of the symbol suggests a meaning to the viewer or religious practitioner. In this manner the eye represented the whole body of a deity in Egyptian and the power of a discerning God in rabbinic texts. By focusing upon the semantic aspect of the eye metaphor in both Egyptian and rabbinic texts two religious traditions of the visually perceivable are analyzed from a semiotic perspective.

Travels with Feminist Historical Geography

We explore in this essay the relatively uneven "travels" of feminist historical geography within the academy in order to highlight the realized and potential intellectual productivity that can result from bringing together a feminist and historical approach to understanding place and space. We outline in what ways much of feminist geography is already historical and in what ways much of historical geography is already feminist, and then turn to a discussion of the unevenness of these intellectual journeys. We conclude by suggesting challenges for future research in feminist historical geography.

Charles P. Daly's Gendered Geography, 1860-1890

The American Geographical Society (AGS) serves as a case study for considering the nature of “gendered geography” in the nineteenth-century United States. This article links the ideals and programmatic interests of the society—which were fundamentally commercial in nature—with the personal subjectivity of its chief protagonist, Charles P. Daly, AGS president from 1864 until his death in 1899. Daly is presented as an “armchair explorer” who shifted the focus of the society away from statistical representations of the world toward the action packed narrative descriptions of the world supplied by embodied explorers in the field. The gender dynamics associated with the center versus the field provide a useful way to contrast both sides of Daly’s persona—as a scholar performing detached, careful study yet someone who also derived a great deal of personal authority by staging popular and dramatic spectacles in New York City, speechifying and presenting himself on stage at geographical society meetings with returning heroic explorers. Daly not only served as New York’ smost influential access point to the Arctic at the time, he also served as an important node in the reproduction of masculine culture in promotion of a particularly masculinist commercial geography. Key Words: American Geographical Society, Charles Patrick Daly, gender and geography, history of geography, masculinity.