Josiah Wedgwood and the seventh dominion scheme

The founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, believed that Zionism would create a new type of Jew. The youth organization that he headed, Betar Youth, used a variety of means to train its members to realize the vision of the “new Jew,” from physical and paramilitary exercises to learning and using the Hebrew language, from a certain code of behavior to making every effort to immigrate to Eretz Yisrael. Jabotinsky presented three figures as models of the new Jewish character: Herzl, who had brought the nation back into history; Trumpeldor, who personified the pure idea of pioneering and serving the nation; and Shlomo Ben Yosef, who, when sentenced to death by the British Mandate authorities, demonstrated strength and honor while in prison and went to the gallows with the Betar Song on his lips. These three men symbolized in their lives the idea of the “new Jew” – the antithesis to the figure of the ghetto Jew.     

性别维度下的“慰安妇”问题研究及其限界北大核心CSSCI

近年来,性别维度作为分析框架被广泛运用到日军“慰安妇”问题及战争性暴力研究中,由此带动研究方法及视角的转移,并促进研究领域的拓展及研究的深入和细化。但一些研究也出现对性别维度的过度依赖或盲目迷信,如以性别史代替政治史,提出超越国家与民族立场,以及由此导致的模糊甚至否认“慰安妇”制度实质等非历史主义倾向。“慰安妇”问题有其复杂性和特殊性,它既是性别史的研究对象,更是政治史研究的范畴,在使用性别维度时需要厘清其研究的限界,并保持应有的警惕。     

The Elusive Idea of the Nation: Israel in the Mirror of Modernity

The article begins by analyzing the historical process that brought many Europeans to question the natural framework of their common political existence: the nation and its secular contrivance, the state. The nation appears as the ultimate casualty of European nationalism, and its “crisis of identity” has further deepened in the last few years with the acceleration of European integration. The state appears less and less as the natural locus of political authority, and, in a continent where particularities are tending to diminish, a very different sense of affiliation has been emerging: the inclination to embrace “global humanism” which has no correlation with the conventional framework of representative government. Israel offers an appropriate counterproof to the tribulations of the European fading sense of nationhood. The article considers the distinctive character of Israel among modern nation-states in light of the classical definitions of the nation, in particular with regard to the role of religion and its relation to the political institutions.     

The "Return of the Subject" As a Historico-Intellectual Problem

Recently, a call for the “return of the subject” has gained increasing influence. The power of this call is intimately linked to the assumption that there is a necessary connection between “the subject” and politics (and ultimately, history). Without a subject, it is alleged, there can be no agency, and therefore no emancipatory projects—and, thus, no history. This paper discusses the precise epistemological foundations for this claim. It shows that the idea of a necessary link between “the subject” and agency, and therefore between the subject and politics (and history) is only one among many different ones that appeared in the course of the four centuries that modernity spans. It has precise historico‐intellectual premises, ones that cannot be traced back in time before the end of the nineteenth century. Failing to observe the historicity of the notion of the subject, and projecting it as a kind of universal category, results, as we shall see, in serious incongruence and anachronisms. The essay outlines a definite view of intellectual history aimed at recovering the radically contingent nature of conceptual formations, which, it alleges, is the still‐valid core of Foucault's archeological project. Regardless of the inconsistencies in his own archeological endeavors, his archeological approach intended to establish in intellectual history a principle of temporal irreversibility immanent in it. Following his lead, the essay attempts to discern the different meanings the category of the subject has historically acquired, referring them back to the broader epistemic reconfigurations that have occurred in Western thought. This reveals a richness of meanings in this category that are obliterated under the general label of the “modern subject”; at the same time, it illuminates some of the methodological problems that mar current debates on the topic.     

Representations of the Chudes in Norwegian and Russian Folklore

Abstract

The objectives of this article are (1) to reveal the meaning (semantics) of the word “Chude” in Norwegian and Russian cultures; (2) to analyze Russian and Norwegian legends about the Chudes in order to define the main plot-constructing elements. When writing this article the authors used a synchronous and diachronous methods of analysis of material that was written down in a period that exceeds one and a half centuries. In etymological sense the word “Chude” (tsjude or Cud) can be derivative form from old Slavic form *tjudjo (strange, foreign) that can in its turn be borrowing from a Gothic or a German word that got the meaning “a nation” (folk). With the Sami the word “tshudde”/ “shutte” means an enemy, an adversary. The image of the Chudes has been preserved in Russian and Norwegian narrative traditions. Oral stories in Norway are called sagn. In Russian folkoristic narratives about the Chudes are traditionally called “predanie”.

The ethnonym “Chude” has a collective meaning in Russian and Norwegian folklore. In Norwegian culture it means plunderers of different ethnical belonging who came from the East to plunder the local population in the Northern Norway. As the undertaken research has shown, this name could have been applicable to Russian, Finns, Karelians, Kvens and peoples speaking Nordic languages (Swedes). In the Russian cultural tradition the name “Chude” was used to name different Finno-Ugric peoples living in the North-West Russia before the Russians came there and who later assimilated with the Russians. The Kola Sami called Swedes and Norwegians who came to them from the west to plunder the Chudes. The existence of a people in the same name in the old times is not excluded. The research carried out by place name scientists reveals that this people could be related to the Baltic-Finnish group of peoples.

The word Chude has historical and mythological aspects. Folk legends about the Chudes have “preserved” memories about the historical past of the northern region. Additionally this ethnonym contains conceptions of the world's binary character that are typical for archaic consciousness. Folk legends about the Chudes are widespread in the European North of Russia while plots about militant and plundering Chudes are localized in traditional Sami regions of Russia and Norway. In folk legends and sagn, the Russians and the Sami belong to one's “own” world, while the Chudes are associated with the concepts of the “strangers”. This nomination acquired the meaning “a stranger”, “a robber”.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

NEITHER/NOR

An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines the advent of antihumanism as a cultural figure out of a network of intellectual crises in interwar and postwar France and ties this advent to the more general consequences of secularization in the modern age. Bracketing political judgments, and eschewing dialectical methods, Stefanos Geroulanos shows how the critique of humanism that emerged from disparate quarters of French intellectual life resulted in a series of negative positions that rendered the human void of any conceptual content and thereby unsuitable as a basis for future political action or philosophical investigation. In addition to basing his analysis on two rigorously sketched concepts of his own design, “antifoundational realism” and “negative anthropology,” Geroulanos deploys a striking use of conceptual irony to show how the critical efforts of his protagonists often led to theoretical cul‐de‐sacs and a heightened measure of existential despondency. The treatment of the emergence of antihumanism as a local phenomenon among a segment of French intellectuals nevertheless encounters problems when it abandons the terrain of historical argument for an engagement with broader metaphysical concerns. By participating in the discourse of its subjects, An Atheism that is Not Humanist finds its way into cul‐de‐sacs of its own, in which, for example, the ostensibly political bearing of efforts to transcend mere politics for broader considerations of the “theo‐political crisis of modernity” remains unclear. Finally, by accepting the terms of the phenomenological diagnosis of metaphysical crisis in the interwar years, the book compromises certain of its genealogical aspirations, especially with regard to the legacy of Third Republic idealism and the specific qualities of post‐phenomenological structuralism.     

Nation,narrative and commemoration: political ritual in divided Cyprus

This article examines the issue of political commemoration, focusing on the commemorations organized by different political parties in the two sides of divided Cyprus. It suggests a new analytical framework for the study of ritual in contemporary nation‐states that moves beyond the usual examination of any single ritual on its own terms. The use of comparison, both within each side and between the two sides, reveals how political actors stage commemorations of different historical events in order to propose contesting historical narratives. Hence, the meaning of any commemorative ritual can be understood only as part of the broader story that each narrative proposes. The historical narratives proposed by different political actors share certain common characteristics by virtue of all employing the narrative form: a beginning, a plot, certain categories of actors, the spatial location where history unfolds, the moral centre through which events are to be evaluated and the end. However, each narrative suggests a different story through which issues of identity and “otherness”, self‐justification and blame are negotiated in order to define the “imagined community” of the nation, its enemies and its pertinent history.     

Gianni Vattimo on Secularisation and Islam

To clarify Vattimo’s position on secularism and Islam, I first discuss his view that secularisation as kenosis and caritas entails the nihilistic vocation of Being, as expressed in our postmodern world where there appear to be no facts, only interpretations. I then survey some of Vattimo’s negative judgements of Islam, which appear to be out of keeping with his own disavowal of “modern” ideals such as “progress” and “grand narratives.” After analysing Islam’s turbulent history of secularism, I suggest the need for Islamic secularism for its own religious and political reasons. Vattimo’s theory of secularisation helps to identify not only what Islam should avoid in pursuing its own secularisation (an Enlightenment notion of subjectivity), but also what it can emphasise within its own tradition as a stimulus towards secularisation: the Golden Rule. This rule, if presented by influential imams as spiritually and as ethically open to the other as possible, may lead through action-based dialogue to a form of reciprocal listening that is the core of Vattimo’s notion of secularism, but which is based, at the same time, on the awareness of the gulf between the transcendence of Allah and the finitude and fallibility of human politico-religious institutions.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

On the Unity of Geography

A Leningrad University physical geographer criticizes attempts to affirm the unity of geography through the creation of new disciplines like “general geography,” which would focus on study of the man-nature relationship. He contends that such a general geography, which would seek to identify general geographic laws, is advocated primarily by economic geographers who would emphasize the role of man at the expense of physical geography. Isachenko takes issue with the view that what makes any research “geographical” is its relationship to man. He contends that the criterion of whether any investigation is “geographical” is its relationship to the geosystem, defined as any natural complex, ranging from the global to the local scale. In his opinion, the unity of geography should be furthered not through the establishment of new supradisciplines, such as general geography, but through closer ties, both in methodology and in organizational terms, between the two main groups of geographical disciplines—physical geography and economic geography.     

CALIFORNIA IRREDENTA

Kevin Starr's Golden Dreams is the culmination to some forty years of scholarship on the unfolding theme of a “California Dream,” that imaginal component to the growth of the self‐identity and increasing international economic power of the most populous state in the American Union. Indeed, the period 1950–1963 that the book meticulously covers forms in many ways the most imposing manifestation of that Dream. This essay reviews the central features of Starr's account, particularly the infrastructural foundations in transportation, water supply, and higher education realized by a triumvirate of California governors, both Republican and Democrat, who regarded themselves as nonpartisan members of the “Party of California”; the expansion of California's major cities: Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco; the characteristics of the Silent Generation and the culture of “cool Jazz” that dominated the period; as well as the rise of dissident elements among environmentalists, minorities, and Beats, that foretold the protest period of the 1960s. This essay then asks whether Starr has avoided the larger implications of his own narrative that California from this period on had become in most respects a putative nation‐state in its own right. From the global impact of its major media industry—Hollywood—to the continued advances of its economic clout throughout the rest of the century as at times the fifth largest economic entity in the world, California may need to be increasingly regarded as a world civilization in itself rather than as a regional civilization to which Starr's historical narrative has so far constricted it.     

“Empirical Anthropologists Advocating Cultural Adjustments”: The Anthropological Governance of Āpirana Ngata and the Native Affairs Department

In 1929, āpirana Ngata published an article titled “Anthropology and the government of native races in the Pacific”. This would appear to confirm the link between anthropology and the rule of indigenous populations in New Zealand and its Pacific empire, but the evidence presented in this article suggests a more complex situation. This paper examines the “empirical anthropology” of Ngata and Peter Buck and the ways in which their activities reshaped the policy and practice of the Department of Native Affairs between 1920 and 1935, particularly through the notion of cultural “adjustments” or “adaptation”. Archival research reveals that behind the activities of the Dominion Museum, the Polynesian Society and its Journal was a Māori-led body, the Board of Māori Ethnological Research, which redirected government collecting, research and publication from salvage to the maintenance and revival of Māori cultural heritage in the service of tribal social and economic development. Seen through the theoretical framework of assemblage theory, we can see how a malleable idea of culture was employed in social governance in quite different ways to the colonial governmentality at work in other settler colonies at this time. The paper argues that this form of “anthropological governance” effectively de-territorialized state institutions, thereby creating a distinctive space for the native exterior to the nation.     

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of “neo-Shamanism” as a “spiritual” practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of “Shamanism” to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made “neo-Shamanism” thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that “neo-Shamanisms” are rediscoveries of a primal “spirituality” write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Spinoza’s genealogical critique of his contemporaries’ axiology

Among Spinoza’s principal projects in the Ethics is his effort to “remove” certain metaethical prejudices from the minds of his readers, to “expose” them, as he has similar misconceptions about other matters, by submitting them to the “scrutiny of reason”. In this article, I consider the argumentative strategy Spinoza uses here – and its intellectual history – in depth. I argue that Spinoza’s method is best characterised as a genealogical analysis. As I recount, by Spinoza’s time of writing, these kinds of arguments already had a long and illustrious history. However, I also argue that, in his adoption of such strategies, we have good reason to think Spinoza’s primary influence was Gersonides. Elucidating this aspect of Spinoza’s critique of his contemporaries’ axiologies brings a number of explicatory and historical boons. However, regrettably, it also comes at a cost, revealing a significant flaw in Spinoza’s reasoning. Towards the end of this article, I consider the nature of this flaw, whether Spinoza can avoid it and its ramifications for Spinoza’s wider philosophical project.     

MULTICULTURALISM,OR THE UNITED COLORS OF CAPITALISM?

In this paper I examine the political manipulation of the meanings of “race” and nation in the context of increasing Pacific Rim ties and multinational capitalist development in Vancouver. As many wealthy Hong Kong Chinese move to Vancouver in advance of 1997, racist incidents and urban social movements aimed at preserving neighborhood “character” have increased, thus discouraging international business activity and blocking capital flow into and through the city. As racism and localism hinder the social networks necessary for the integration of global capitalisms, businesspeople and politicians interested in increasing Vancouver's integration have sought to counter these processes through ideological production. The liberal doctrine of multiculturalism has become linked with the attempt to smooth racial friction and reduce resistance to the recent changes in the urban environment and experiences of everyday life in Vancouver. In this sense, the attempt to shape multiculturalism can be seen as an attempt to gain hegemonic control over concepts of race and nation in order to further expedite Vancouver's integration into the international networks of global capitalism.     

Terror or Terrorism? The “Islamic State” Between State and Nonstate Violence

As a non‐state actor that claims its own territory, the “Islamic State” utilizes a spectrum of very different kinds of coercion and violence. Considering the group's aspirations to govern the territories controlled by it, any clear distinction between uses of force and coercion that states typically claim as their legitimate right, and implement terrorist non‐state violence, tends to blur right before our analytically‐focused eyes. This contribution discusses how the group challenges the distinction between “terror from above” and “terrorism from below” as well as the meaning of the dual character of Daesh's belief system between the ideological and the religious for Daesh's repertoire of violence.     

Nationalism and Historicity

Abstract. In this article the nation is shown to be a historical subject. As such, it is constructed and constantly reconstructed by discursive practices of power and knowledge. The author argues that the symbiotic interlinkage between nationalism and the organising knowledge principle of historicity, is an example of a power practice in the modern state. Throughout the article, it is shown that this practice is produced by interaction between the institutionally represented, sovereign or objective state and intellectual knowledge and its institutionalisation within the state as an academy, which acquires sovereignty in the production of objective truth. This peculiar discursive representation of making what really is personal interactions and struggles into official institutions has managed to produce the subject of the historical nation. The empirical case of Sweden is briefly discussed. During the age of great power, an exclusivist discourse of noble genealogical distinction of the ‘Goths’ was established. In modem Sweden, this genealogical myth is transformed to a popular national myth of exclusivity, a myth with great power potentials in the ‘national projects’ of modem politics.     

(RE)PRODUCING A “PERIPHERAL” REGION – NORTHERN SWEDEN IN THE NEWS

Building on theories of internal orientalism, the objective of this study is to show how intra‐national differences are reproduced through influential media representations. By abstracting news representations of Norrland, a large, sparsely populated region in the northernmost part of Sweden, new modes of “internal othering” within Western modernity are put on view. Real and imagined social and economical differences between the “rural North” and the “urban South” are explained in terms of “cultural differences” and “lifestyle” choices. The concept of Norrland is used as an abstract essentialized geographical category and becomes a metonym for a backward and traditional rural space in contrast to equally essentialized urban areas with favoured modern ideals. Specific traits of parts of the region become one with the entire region and the problems of the region become the problems of the people living in the region. I argue that the news representations play a part in the reproduction of a “space of exception”, in that one region is constructed as a traditional and undeveloped space in contrast to an otherwise modern nation. A central argument of this study is that research on identity construction and representations of place is needed to come to grips with issues of uneven regional development within western nations.