A Pirate's Life for me: The Maritime Culture of the Sea Peoples

An anthropological approach to a culture extrapolates social structures, traditions, and general organizing principles of that culture from the careful observation of patterns of behaviour as described in case studies. In the absence of a living culture to record, archaeologists extrapolate this information from behaviour reconstructed from spatially determined patterns in the deposition of material remains and from patterns found in the general organizing principles of historically documented cultures, using arguments based on analogy. This contribution builds on our previous research on the “Sea Peoples” as a piratical culture in order to apply an anthropological approach to understanding the cultural identities of the various tribal groups involved in maritime activities at the end of the Bronze Age who are popularly known as the “Sea Peoples”, and place this within the broader context of the current discussions on the transition between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age in the Mediterranean.     

Special Peoples

Abstract. ‘Special Peoples’ explores the causes and consequences of believing in a chosen people by considering, first, the Serbian case, as seen especially in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The mythology, history and genuine Byzantine traditions which have created this East European form of belief in ‘special chosenness’ is then compared with West European developments. While both make use of the Bible, the West (and also Ethiopia), it is suggested, depends more directly on the Old Testament, Israelite model, while the Eastern approach rests rather on the experience of the Christian empire of Constantine. The English, Spanish and French are considered briefly as examples of chosen peoples. The discussion ends with the words of Carl Goerdeler, meditating on the Nazism that was about to kill him, and challenging the whole nationalist notion of an ‘exclusively chosen’ people from Israel on, as inherently prone to genocide.     

论两汉时期滇人的封建化问题

滇人是居住在今云南省境内的一个古老民族,其活动的滇池一带在历史上经济、化等方面较周边地区更为发达,在中原化的影响下,较早地完成了封建化过程。本认为滇人在两汉时期尚处于奴隶社会,但已开始传入封建制因素,至东汉时期完成封建化过程。     

The Tragedy of Cambridge Anthropology: Edwardian Historical Thought and the Contact of Peoples

The essay identifies and explores the intellectual formation of a hitherto overlooked constellation of ‘anthropologists’ in Edwardian Cambridge. Three core members of this group were William Ridgeway, Hector Munro Chadwick, and William H. R. Rivers, who today are more normally associated with (respectively) Classics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Anthropology. However, in the decade before World War I all three were active members of the new Board of Anthropology, and each, in his particular field of study, began to turn away from established evolutionary explanation to investigate social phenomena as arising out of the contact of different peoples. The essay first shows the connections between the work of Chadwick and Rivers, and then suggests that both were following a path recently beaten down by Ridgeway who, in his disputes with the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, advanced an account of ancient Greek tragedy as arising out of a fusion of native and intrusive performances, both relating to the commemoration of the dead.