The Tale of Tea and Salt

ＴｈｅＴａｌｅｏｆＴｅａａｎｄＳａｌｔ￥／／Ｉｎａｎｃｉｅｎｔｔｉｍｅｓ,ｔｈｅＸａａｎｄＮｕｔｒｉｂｅｓｍａｄｅｔｈｅｉｒｈｏｍｅｓｏｎｔｈｅｏｐｐｏｓｉｔｅｂａｎｋｓｏｆａｒｉｖｅｒ,ｌｉｎｋｅｄｏｈｌｙｂｙａｓｕｓｐｅｎｓｉｏｎｂｒｉｄｇｅ．Ｔ...     

The Construction of Soviet Ethnography and “The Peoples of Siberia”

The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the first time.     

The Marriage of Marx and Darwin?

Recent attempts to develop scientific research strategies for cultural evolution have mostly drawn upon evolutionary biology, but within anthropology there is also an influential tradition of non-biological evolutionary thought whose basic principle is adaptation to the environment. This article is mainly concerned with the "cultural materialist" school of Marvin Harris, but also treats the recent attempt of Jared Diamond to create a more radical model of evolutionary ecology. I argue that the ecological tradition does not represent a real alternative to neo-Darwinism and is in fact a pseudo-Darwinist theory. I also suggest that the bias in favor of materialistic explanation in cultural evolution may not be justified.     

The Lives and Afterlives of Vis and Rāmin

This article is a review of the afterlife, or Nachleben, of the romance Vis and Rāmin, one of the first representatives of its genre in New Persian literature. In addition to providing readers with an extensive bibliography of sources and research concerning the poem, it also analyzes these materials to put forward two basic arguments: one, that moral or religious antipathy to the poem’s contents may not have played as great a role in its fortunes as did aesthetic taste; and two, that V&R proved to be a more widely circulated and durable work than is commonly supposed, but on the level of fragments, not the entire text. In light of these arguments, it is proposed that studies structured around the comparison of fragments—themes, ideas, ethics, and motifs, rather than whole texts—may offer more purchase in constructing models of analysis that situate V&R, and Persian literature more broadly, within a literary oikumene in which it connects and interacts with neighboring traditions.     

The Tip of the Iceberg: The Material of Skriðuklaustur Monastery and Hospital

Material objects from distant societies and cultures have long been an axis for archaeological research. In recent research, however, growing attention has been drawn to exploring simultaneously the conceptual meaning of material substances as the products of humans. The visual appearance of material is in this respect no more than the tip of an iceberg, where only a small part of something largely hidden is evident. In this article, Skriðuklaustur, an Augustinian monastery which operated in Eastern Iceland from ad 1493 to 1554 will thus be approached as embracing the remains of an internationally based society that flourished on the outskirts of the medieval monastic world. An excavation of its ruins has revealed residues of a society whose material is both domestic and international but still reflects the universally based meaning of monasticism. The Catholic Church is in this manner regarded as having fabricated phenomena through its pervasive institutions, upholding a distinct monastic identity. This view does not though involve a general denial of cultural or social changes as it rather underlines the hybrid character of everything that is and, at the same time, the significance of examining the materiality of past cultures as the creation of humans in their relational context.     

“The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems

Yeats’s poetry and drama centre on conflict, and crucially, on the clash between the mortal and the eternal. In this essay, I focus on the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin foreshadows and informs the treatment of eternity in Yeats’s later Byzantium poems. The Wanderings of Oisin explores the intensity of human longing for the eternal despite our time-bound nature, prefiguring his later impassioned though analytical Byzantium poems. Although the Byzantium poems seem initially to glorify eternity at the expense of human life, this essay traces the complexity of Yeats’s desire. Previous criticism has understated the extent to which Yeats’s poetry actively resists the siren song of eternity. The Byzantium poems problematise the eternity that they seem to desire, and this article reveals them as inflected by the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin questions the value of the eternal realm in the light of mortal heroic values. The “intensity, solitude, defeat” of the artist are inevitable, but there is a victory of sorts won from the poet’s deliberate inability to commit to any version of the eternal that preclude his own power and humanity. Yeats’s poetry runs the gamut between versions of desire that express an overweening desire for resolution even as they retain their resistance to any single pure state of being, if any such state is possible.     

Meeting The Bamfords: The Accounts of Victor Aimé Huber and of Fanny Lewald

The distinguished German scholar and political commentator Victor Aimé Huber travelled to Blackley in 1844 to see Samuel Bamford on the recommendation of Thomas Carlyle, in order to pursue his study of the Social Question in England. In 1850 his compatriot, the celebrated novelist and travel writer Fanny Lewald, on a tour of England and Scotland, paid a social visit to the Bamfords instigated by the writer Geraldine Jewsbury, who subsequently arranged for her to see Samuel Bamford again, in Manchester. The reports provide a wealth of information about the Bamfords’ circumstances, opinions and reflections on their past. They also point up differences between English and German culture, class and social conventions. For both Huber and Lewald, meeting the Bamfords was one of the most revealing experiences of their stay in Britain. Whilst reviews of Passages in the Life of a Radical in the German press, like the critique in the Quarterly Review, contain both partisan and measured appraisal, by the late 1840s Bamford’s account of Peterloo had become the standard reference text in German-speaking lands.     

A Review of “The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney”

Craig, Barbara Hinkson. The Legislative Veto: Congressional Control of Regulation. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983. Pp. xviii, 176. $16.00.

George C. Edwards III. The Public Presidency: The Pursuit of Popular Support. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. x, 276. Hardbound, $16.95; softbound, $8.95.

Goldenberg, Edie N., and Michael W. Traugott. Campaigning for Congress. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984. Pp. 192, Bibliography, Index. $9.50.

Kau, James B. and Paul H. Rubin. Congressmen, Constituents, and Contributors: Determinants of Roll Call Voting in the House of Representatives. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishing, 1982. Pp. ix, 160. $25.00.

Melnick, R. Shep. Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1983. Pp. x, 404. Hardbound, $22.95; softbound, $11.95.

Shelley, Mack C. II. The Permanent Majority: The Conservative Coalition in the United States Congress. University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Pp. 201. $24.50.

Sinclair, Barbara. Congressional Realignment: 1925-1978. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Pp. 201. $25.00.

Spitzer, Robert J. The Presidency and Public Policy: The Four Arenas of Presidential Power. University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Pp. 189. $18.75.

Turner, Michael. The Vice President as Policy Maker: Rockefeller in the Ford White House. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. Pp. xviii, 252. Hardbound, $29.95.     

The Dynamics and Evolution of Local Industries—The Case of Linköping,Sweden

This article aims to analyse how innovative, individual actions influence the evolution of local industries according to three stages. When discussing the evolution of industries or economies, the concept of path dependency is often a central element. Its vague nature makes it however difficult to be used as an interpretative lens when studying the evolution of local industries. In order to limit the broad concept, several aspects have been identified for discussion; all are explicitly linked to path dependency in economic geography literature and all are acknowledged to be of significance for stimulating the evolution of local industries. Based on a review of the evolutionary economic theory literature, the following three stages have been identified: first, the entering of new knowledge which may, or may not, be the starting point for a new local industry; second, the formation of the new local industry; third, the anchoring process of the new local industry. All three stages are intertwined and include the question how the new emerging industry and the existing local structures relate to each other. The three stages will be illustrated through the discussion of the evolution of the IT industry in Linköping, Sweden.     

The Dissolution of a Monetary Union: The Case of Malaysia and Singapore 1963–1974

The abrupt separation of Singapore and Malaysia in 1965 set these two states on separate political trajectories, but the economic ties proved more difficult to untangle. This article explores the nine years of transition required to complete the separation of the monetary systems of the two territories based on new archival evidence. It argues that, while socio-political hostility raged between the two partners, common economic interests prolonged an intimate monetary relationship that extended the interdependence of the two states for many years beyond their formal separation.     

The Archaeology of Jerusalem — Between Post-Modernism and Delegitimization

Abstract

The study of the motivations, influences, and agendas of Israeli archaeology has always been the centre of heated debate, the profession today finding itself under the full, and usually highly critical, glare of modern archaeological theory and/or political polemics. This paper addresses the motivations of some these critics and from under the mesh of often over-stated argumentation, tries to provide a more level appreciation of current archaeological work in Jerusalem. Quite contrary to the impression given by some of the recent scholarship, it is argued that the great majority of the published and excavated archaeology of Jerusalem of the past decades presents the finds of the multiplicity of periods of the city’s history, quite divorced from overt and even covert influence of the surrounding volatile political situation.     

The Qing Dynasty Ministry of Justice Memorials and “The New History”

The Qing Dynasty Grand Secretariat Archives are considered to be among the four great ancient texts discovered in modern Chinese history, and the memorials from the Ministry of Justice have garnered particular attention due to their well-preserved socio-economic content(s). From the 20th century onwards the New History, with its emphasis on drawing upon the social sciences’ discussions of citizens, communities and society, came to replace the more traditional “Imperial Genealogy” style of historiography, affording us a grander view of history. Progressing forward with “the times,” the New History continued to innovate and diversify the field; in terms of Qing dynasty social historical research, it brought about constant exploration and change within the field, first having shifted from socio-economic history to social history, then moving on to life history, the investigation of the “seeds of capitalism,” class relations, lower-class society, marriage and family relations, law and justice, gender studies, daily life (“life, livelihood and environment”), and so on, continually pushing the boundaries of academic research. Yet, underlying all this change was a close relationship between the use of the Ministry of Justice Memorials and the field’s overall development. This article not only introduces several findings made by academicians in using the Ministry of Justice Memorials, but also sets out to further reveal the relationship between the New History and the memorials themselves, probing into the deeper question of broader changes in historiography and their relationship with generational shifts in intellectual thought.     

Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.     

The resources and economy of Scotland re‐viewed

The increasing demand for sand and gravel in Scotland is examined and it is shown that most reserves occur in areas of fluvioglacial deposition. Against this background, existing methods of evaluation are compared and it is argued that these techniques are either too costly and time‐consuming, or else not of general applicability to all regions containing aggregate supplies. A new methodology is suggested which overcomes these drawbacks and provides a means by which a trained geomorphologist can produce a reasonably accurate inventory of reserves in a given region. An example of the application of this new procedure to North East Scotland is considered.