A NOTE ON AN IRON AGE FOUR-HORNED ALTAR FROM TEL DOTHAN

Abstract

In a recent visit to the site of Tel Dothan the top of a four-horned stone altar of Iron Age type was unexpectedly observed among the structural remains exposed by Joseph P. Free in Area L of his excavations of the late 1950s. Owing to the location of this find within a well-dated building complex (labelled ‘House 14 ’) it can be dated with some certainty to the early Iron Age IIa, i.e. to the 9^th century BCE. Dated four-horned stone altars from this period from the northern Kingdom of Israel are extremely rare. ‘House 14 ’ was identified by the excavators as an ‘administrative building,’ but we suggest it probably had a primary cultic function.     

Pocock,Machiavelli and Political Contingency in Foreign Affairs: Republican Existentialism Outside (and Within) the City

SUMMARY

In this essay, inspired by J.G.A. Pocock's appropriation of Machiavelli's theory of political contingency, and building upon my previous engagements with Pocock's ‘republican existentialism’, I focus on the role played by ‘accidents’ in Machiavelli's analysis of war and foreign affairs within The Prince and the Discourses. In so doing, I consider the following issues: the ways through which a potential imperial hegemon might consolidate control over nearby lesser powers—and, conversely, how such less powerful polities might resist imperial encroachments on their autonomy; the contrasting military modes and orders characteristic of ancient and modern republics; and the extent to which Machiavelli actually thought that accidents in foreign affairs were ever truly ‘accidental’ in light of his determinations concerning well- versus badly ordered domestic institutions.     

Archaeology on the Western Front: the Archaeology of Popular Myths

Abstract

The Sámi of today (the Lapps of yesteryear), currently divided from each other by the national boundaries of Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden, have been, at least in part, ‘defined’ in the past by archaeology and its practices. In creating and modifying identities believedto be appropriate to the 21^st century, the Sámi facemany problems similar to other ‘indigenous’ and minority groups in the world. These include struggles to repatriate human remains and objects of material culture, others concern the use of the archaeological evidence to determine longevity of tradition and land rights, and still others demonstrate the role of heritage in the definitions of ethnicity and even in tourist presentations of what the Sámi might become, or might have been, or currently are.     

Illuminating the Victorians

ABSTRACT

From the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese roboticists have observed specific features in the physical designs of humanoid robots that cause users to react with either fear or affection. Analyzing the sources of these reactions, robotics egineers eliminated from robots those features that might trigger negative associations, and instead embedded their designs with cues to norms, theories, and cultural references valued by their society. By analyzing Nishimura Makoto’s building of an affable artificial human named Gakutensoku, Mori Masahiro’s discovery of the phenomenon of the ‘uncanny valley’, and Ishiguro Hiroshi’s current employment of cognitive, social, and psychological sciences to overcome the ‘uncanny’ impression of his robots, this essay claims that the development of the field of humanoid robotics in Japan was driven by concern with human emotion and cognition, and shaped by Japanese roboticists’ own associations with the social and intellectual environments of their time.     

Explorations in Rome, 1871, 1872

The identification of an eighteenth-century plan and a set of nineteenth-century photographs, in conjunction with a new survey of its remains, has permitted the reinterpretation of an early eleventh-century building at Avranches, in the Département of Manche, Normandy. This has shown that it measured 37 m by at least 27 m, was at least 16 m high, and that it can be considered as a donjon or ‘keep’, or, as now more usually termed, a ‘tour maîtresse’ or ‘great tower’. The remains of the building and its interpretation are described, with the aid of plans and the key material referred to above. Among the largest ‘great towers’ known (at least in plan) and one of the three known pre-Conquest examples in the Duchy, it is of great significance to the rapidly advancing study of this class of building.     

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull,UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.     

Agamben and the Migrations of Glory

Abstract

In the American political imagination, there is a longstanding and wide-ranging discussion about the separation of church and state. Though Americans argue about whether it should be a ‘‘high wall,’’ or whether certain ‘‘breaches’’ in it might be desirable, they all take ‘‘separation’’ to describe an institutional arrangement. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, however, ‘‘separation’’ is an image that conceals much more than it reveals about the religious character of the state and the global economy. Agamben traces ‘‘the migrations of glory’’ from church, to state, to global capitalism. For part of this task, Agamben accepts Michel Foucault's diagnostic approach to power. By one reading, certainly, governmentality has us in its grip. But now government itself is overshadowed by the power of global capitalism. While Foucault sought only to make us ‘‘a little less governed,’’ Agamben is interested in a deeper iconoclasm and a greater emancipation. According to Agamben, our less-than-free condition can be illuminated by reflection on: (1) the state of exception and the camp, which are only made possible by a form of idolatry in which the sovereign assumes to themself a power that they should not have; (2) On another of the ‘‘maps’’ drawn by Agamben, however, there is a further ‘‘migration of glory,’’ away from national sovereignty, toward postmodern global capitalism; (3) The Coming Community provides the barest sketch of Agamben's hope for a remedy, while his reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans in The Time that Remains brings a more visible kind of messianic expectation or vocation back into the discussion of political life. A concluding section discusses five sorts of questions that might be put to Agamben about the overall shape of his project.     

Four English ‘Bohemians’ Manqués: A Short-Term Resident,a Lost Opportunity,One to Do Without,and a Case of Confused Antecedents

Abstract

The article reflects the author’s longstanding interest in the appearance in the English lexicon of items emanating from the Bohemian/Czech environment, including the incidence of the very word Bohemian/bohemian. It discusses four cases where ‘Bohemian’ does not feature, though might well do so. These are: one bird name, the waxwing, once the ‘Bohemian waxwing’, which name survives only in American English because of the local need to distinguish the bird from another in the family; one spring flower, the early star-of-Bethlehem, restricted in Britain to a single site on the Welsh border, which could, on the basis of its Latin name, Gagea bohemica, have become the ‘Bohemian star-of-Bethlehem’; one pernicious hybrid knotweed, Reynoutria × bohemica, which has no common English name, but was identified and named in Bohemia, and would be potentially nameable geographically as ‘Bohemian knotweed’, like one of its parents, the Japanese knotweed; and one modest vegetable, the swede, which owes its name to a perceived origin in Sweden, though it is conjectured that during or after the Thirty Years’ War it was first taken to Sweden from Bohemia and so might have become analogously the ‘bohemian’. The article contains other conjectures as to the items’ origins and explores the history of their naming in Czech and German as well as English.     

The German Reaction to the Dreadnought Revolution

Abstract

The former Conservative and Unionist prime minister, Arthur Balfour, contributed an article in 1912 to the German magazine Nord und Süd in which he explained why the ‘English point of view’s viewed Germany with ‘deep uneasiness’s. His theme was the role of narrative in Anglo-German relations: British anxieties stemmed from the interpretation that people ‘have thought themselves obliged to place upon a series of facts, or supposed facts, each of which taken by itself might be of small moment, but which taken together can neither be lightly treated nor calmly ignored’s. The building of a large fleet, the arms race, the demands for territory, and the threats to Europe's small states, notably the Netherlands and Belgium, made an Anglo-German war appear increasingly likely. If Germany wanted to improve relations with Britain, Balfour concluded, it had to prove its love for peace by co-operating with other states. A longer narrative underlay the famous memorandum written five years earlier by the head of the western department of the foreign office, Eyre Crowe. For him, the ‘maintenance of a state of tension and antagonism between Third Powers’s had characterized German foreign policy since the time of Prince Bismarck, whose bid for colonies had been an act of ‘direct and unmistakable hostility’s to Britain. By the time Crowe put pen to paper, in January 1907, German antagonism had become a feature in the landscape of British foreign policy-makers.     

‘The Heavens are Telling’: Memetic– Calvinian Readings of a Haydn Chord Progression

Abstract

The climax of the chorus ‘The Heavens are Telling’ from Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) employs a harmonic progression that Beethoven later adapted to conclude the first movement of his Symphony no. 2. An earlier (pre-Haydn) version of the progression might be found in a keyboard rondo by C. P. E. Bach. This harmonic unit is regarded as consisting of a sequence of musemes (musical memes): each is a replicated pattern serving as the cultural analogue to the gene. The neural encoding of such patterns is considered in terms of William Calvin’s hexagonal cloning theory, in order to adduce ‘memotypic’ (meme-encoding) evidence to support the ‘phemotypic’ (meme-product) evidence gleaned from musical score-analysis.     

Representative democracy and the ‘spirit of resistance’ from Constant to Tocqueville

ABSTRACT

The role of resistance in the politics of modern representative democracies is historically contested, and remains far from clear. This article seeks to explore historical thinking on this subject through a discussion of what Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about resistance and its relationship to ‘representative government’ and democracy. Neither thinker is usually seen as a significant contributor to ‘resistance theory’ as this category is conventionally understood. But, in addition to their more familiar preoccupations with securing limitations on the exercise of political authority and averting majority tyranny, both thinkers wrote extensively on the nature and meanings of resistance in ‘representative governments’ or democratic societies. Both thinkers are examined in the context of revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the legitimacy of resistance or ‘right to resist’ oppression, and against eighteenth-century discussions of the ‘spirit of resistance’ since Montesquieu. The article notes conceptual distinctions between resistance, revolution and insurrection in the period, and addresses the broader question of the extent to which early nineteenth-century French liberals sought to ‘institutionalise’ principles of resistance within modern constitutional frameworks.     

How Does Theology Go Public? Rethinking the Debate between David Tracy and George Lindbeck

Abstract

The possibilities for taking theological ethics ‘public’ have taken on added significance amidst debates over the nature of moral norms. If realist theological ethics can find a public voice, it will enhance the prospects for interreligious ethical collaboration and the place of theology in it. A key question remains whether particular contexts of religious symbols render them meaningful only within communities of ‘origin’, or particularity actually enables broadly compelling meaning or a public voice for theology. At issue in the Tracy-Lindbeck debate are their understandings of ‘public’, their responses to philosophical anti-foundationalism, and their theological presuppositions. While postliberal emphases on the distinctiveness of the Christian community and attention to the ecclesial community complement Tracy's emphases on dialogue and coherence, Tracy's recent methods provide more adequate responses to the challenges posed by postmodernism.     

‘But this is not geography…! of ontological circumcisions and writing feminist geographies from India

Abstract

Feminist geography still remains at the margins of human geography in India. The space occupied by the subfield, the nature of research and the skepticism routinely encountered by feminist geographers ‘doing gender’ in India all point to this marginal status. Drawing upon detailed status reports, personal communications and everyday encounters with patriarchy in the academy, this essay uses an autobiographical lens to address the pervasiveness of misogyny and the politics of gendered parochial and caste-based gatekeeping to make sense of the peculiar but marked ‘ontological circumcision’ of feminist geographies in India. ‘Coming out’ as a feminist geographer and writing gender from such locations is political and should be read as a resistance to these caste-ridden, male dominated and inherently misogynistic contexts.     

Advisory Commissions for Archaeology — Sense or Nonsense? The Case of Belgium

Abstract

Belgium has a long tradition of consultative commissions, responsible for the preservation of heritage. In the 1940s and 1950s, Belgian archaeologists expressed a need for such an institute, specifically competent for archaeology and the supervision of excavations. Only in 1965, the first members of a National Commission for Excavations were appointed. They had modest powers, but were able to advocate the value of archaeological heritage and, to a limited extent, supervise fieldwork performed by amateurs. The Commission was also asked to prepare a legal text that would protect archaeological heritage. However, ratified laws were not accomplished and, despite much regret of Belgian archaeologists, the Commission was abolished in 1979.

During the 1980s, Belgium underwent several state reforms which ultimately resulted in the complete regionalization of archaeology (1988–89). Throughout this period, a shift in opinion occurred between Walloon (French-speaking) and Flemish (Dutch-speaking) archaeologists. This resulted in different arrangements of governmental agencies responsible for immovable heritage and archaeology. Nonetheless, as UNESCO had recommended in 1968, all three Belgian regions (including the Brussels-Capital Region) installed advisory commissions that were involved in the preservation in situ of archaeological remains. However, these consultative bodies had little influence on politics and policy. Especially in Flanders, the Archaeological Council achieved very little. Probably, the lack of continuity retained the Council from building up a reputation and authority. Nevertheless, advisory commissions for archaeology do make sense in Belgium. They provide a necessary ‘forum’ to discuss problems and to express undivided opinions; they form a ‘channel’ to communicate with policy makers; and they present an ‘instrument’ for advocating the preservation of archaeological heritage.     

Difficult heritage and digital media: ‘selfie culture’ and emotional practices at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

ABSTRACT

This article sheds light on the entanglements of difficult heritage and digital media through an ethnographic analysis of digital photography and social media practices at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. After a discussion of the project ‘Yolocaust’, through which an artist publicly shamed the ‘selfie culture’ at the memorial, the article argues that the sweeping condemnation of digital self-representations in the context of Holocaust remembrance remains simplistic. Instead, many visitors explore and enact potential emotional relationships to the pasts that sites of difficult heritage represent through digital self-representations. This observation raises critical questions about the role of digital media in current transformations of touristic memory cultures.     

Was Digenes Akrites an Oral Poem?

Abstract

It is often suggested that Digenes is in some way connected with oral poetry, whether the oral folk poetry of the modern ‘acritic’ ballads or the type of oral epic tradition identified by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in the Homeric poems and in modern Yugoslavia. Some clarification of the possible role of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Digenes now seems overdue, and in this paper I propose to examine the texts of the poem in the light of recent work on ‘oral literature’, so as to define more precisely in what sense any of these can be described as ‘oral’, and then, more tentatively, to suggest a possible framework for the growth and transmission of the poem which might account for these results.     

Urban low carbon transitions: institution-building and prospects for interventions in social practice

ABSTRACT

As we witness increasing numbers and range of low carbon experiments, attention inevitably turns to how they are sustained and whether they can generate more systemic change in carbon-related consumption. This paper responds to the ‘spatial turn’ in socio-technical transitions, and the ‘practice turn’ in social theory to consider the role of intermediary organizations in potential shifts from experiments to institutional arrangements favouring transitions.

Through the example of Climate Change Alliances in Victoria, Australia, the paper examines how such intermediary organizations seek to experiment and in so doing contribute towards institution building. With a focus on the interstitial spaces between local authorities, regional firms, agencies, and state governments we speculate on the prospects for systemic change given the resources, positioning and social strategies of the Alliances as intermediary institution builders.