A Place of Community: “Celtic” Iona and Institutional Religion

This paper identifies the concept of a “Celtic” form of spirituality that has developed recently within Christianity in Britain and Ireland, in particular in relation to ancient pilgrimage sites. One of these, the Scottish island of Iona, has always been subject to reinterpretation; but while the resident population and the Iona Community may have contributed to current expectations, they do not necessary identify with them.     

Images of towns in Frankish Morea: the evidence of the ‘Chronicles’ of the Morea and of the Tocco

Abstract

In the summer of 1205 Raimbault of Vacqueyras, the troubadour who had shared Boniface of Monferrat's exploits in central Greece, exclaimed enthusiastically in Salonica:

‘Never did Alexander or Charlemagne or King Louis had such a glorious expedition, nor could the valiant lord Aimeri or Roland with his warriors win by might, in such noble fashion, such a powerful empire as we have won, whereby our faith is in ascendant; for we have created emperors and dukes and kings, and have manned strongholds near the Turks and Arabs, and opened up the roads and ports from Brindisi to St. George's Straits'.     

“The Balkans’ Other within”: Imaginings of the West in the Republic of Macedonia

Using the case study of the Republic of Macedonia, I explore how people who live in a realm conventionally cast as insufficient of “the European Self” imagine “the West”. Such imaginings are important because they are intertwined with negotiations of nationhood and citizenship. I argue that in local constructions of the global social order, Macedonia emerges in an interstitial position between “the Balkans” and “the West” as “the Balkans’ Other Within”. Social actors craft this position out of Western hegemonic constructions of the Balkans as a socio‐political anomaly and portray “the Other within” (Macedonia) as the engulfed land of promise. The case study of Macedonia allows us to refine the concepts of “Balkanism” by underlining local perspectives on the promise that “the West” carries for the Balkans and “Orientalism” by emphasizing the possibilities that the construction of the Orient charts for the future advancement or demise of the Self.     

Kurangara in Queensland?: A Critique of Duncan-Kemp's Account

A particular historical travelling religious complex in northern Western Australia, usually known as Kurangara, has been the subject of anthropological attention since the late 1930s. Overlooked in all the literature is a similar account assigned to 1912–1918, in the distant Channel Country of southwest Queensland. This is in Alice Duncan-Kemp's last book, published in 1968. My examination shows that a good deal of Duncan-Kemp's account repeated parts of a 1954 popular magazine about Kurangara in the Pilbara. In other respects Duncan-Kemp may have drawn on her own childhood experiences, but in the absence of corroboration her account has to be considered unreliable.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?