Theology,Idolatry and Science: John Williams’ Missionary Ethnography and Natural History of the South Pacific

This article contributes to the recent scholarly efforts toward a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Protestant missionaries and the practice of natural history and ethnography in the early nineteenth century. Exploring John Williams’ work in the South Pacific, I argue that not only was Williams practicing science in the form of ethnography and natural history, but that his theology was, in fact, central to his scientific work. Through a careful exploration of Williams’ account of his missionary activities in the South Pacific, I contend that Williams’ conception of idolatry served as an explanatory tool that shaped the practice of his ethnography. In the minds of missionaries like Williams, whereas Christianity’s truth was universal, idolatry was the worship of a false god: false because it was just a deification of a particular desire rather than worship of the universal God. This conception of idolatry shaped Williams’ contention, central to his ethnography, that the islanders’ religion was a product of their particular cultural needs. In this way, I argue, Williams used a theological concept to perform explanatory scientific work, contributing to the idea that religion is a product of culture, a notion that became central to nineteenth century studies of religion.     

民族志和口述史的内在类同

民族志(ethnography)是人类学家对于被研究的种族、部落、区域的人之生活的描述与见解。口述史(oral history)是“对有关某些个体之过去的口述证词的记录与解释”。占在对民族志与口述史研究的关注过程中,它们或隐或现的若干共通之处总使我不由自主地将二者相互联系、加以比照,     

Toward Historical Ethnography: Notarial Records and Family History in the Middle Ages

One can easily use nineteenth-century tithe data of England and Wales in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to analyze a range of subjects, for example, land use, productivity, land ownership, or tenancy. Making the tithe data GIS ready, on the other hand, is a nontrivial matter. The tithe data consist of two main types: spatial, that is, the tithe map, and nonspatial attribute data linked to the map. The tithe therefore has the characteristics of a GIS, albeit in paper form. The author outlines the process of creating the structures for building a data repository that allows the storage and dissemination of both tithe schedules and maps in a single GIS-ready system. The author chose Oracle to host the repository. The Oracle Spatial module allows storage of both spatial and attribute information. Oracle also provides the means of serving data to users via the Internet.     

Important Natural Dyes of History

Abstract

Samuel Brown, born January 1774, was one of a number of pioneer engineers who have until recent years been overshadowed by their more eminent contemporaries and been forgotten. Brown did not acquire his engineering expertise in the usual manner; initially he served with some distinction as a Naval officer during the Napoleonic wars. Before being retired on half pay he actively promoted the use of chain cables for securing ships at anchor. This proposal was soon taken into use and it was from his position as a manufacturer of chain cables that he gained his experience in the use of wrought iron and the financial independence to allow him to turn his attention to the development of bar-chain suspension bridges. In 1820 the Union Bridge, the first of its type in the United Kingdom and designed by Brown, was constructed across the river Tweed. From then on he became one of the main promoters of suspension bridges, either designing them or acting as contractor for the supply of ironwork. In the period 1828-32 he constructed four bridges in NE Scotland which are the subject of this paper.     

青藏高原人与生存环境相互作用的特点

青藏高原的生态环境系统与人类社会系统有着特殊的关系。在这种关系下,人类生存行为表现出既与自然环境矛盾冲突的一面,也表现出适应协调的一面。在探索人与自然、环境与社会和谐统一的前进道路上,要为恢复与改造自然生态环境努力,更要发现和总结人类在挑战环境制约实践中的创造。     

Weaving a New Fabric of Natural History

Abstract

Natural history offers an interestingly rich mix of traditional and modern ways of organizing data, information, and knowledge. The Linnaean tradition still defines the basis of how taxonomic knowledge of organisms is organized, while at the same time complementary perspectives on databases and ontologies are developed and implemented, to provide enhanced access to natural history collection data to researchers in taxonomy and biodiversity. Some of this knowledge enrichment may even be automated, and bootstrapped from basic object metadata. This metadata is largely composed of natural language text, which is generally more noisy and ambiguous than numeric data. In this contribution, we present two methods for the automated discovery of metadata from textual object databases: first, the automatic detection of new metadata in existing free-text database columns, and second, the discovery of new ontological relations between metadata elements.     

Why the History of Parliament Has Not Been Written*

There have been legions of individual studies of the history of the English/British/United Kingdom parliament, which is not surprising, since its history is widely acknowledged to be so closely bound up with the history of the nation state itself. But there have been remarkably few attempts to put the story together, to try to consider the long‐term development of parliament as an institution. What would such a story look like? This essay discusses some of the critiques of the whiggish narrative of constitutional and parliamentary development to recognise a common theme in whiggism's tendency to anthropomorphise parliament, to describe it as a single organism with agency and purpose. To forgo that temptation, however, makes it difficult to provide a satisfying narrative of parliament over time. The essay tries to imagine how one might construct a history of parliament as an institution which no longer sees it as an actor in its own story, but, instead, a complex collection of ideas, processes, customs, and conventions, which competing forces struggle to organise in order to achieve their goals, and which is also an arena and forum for that competition.