A WORLD CONNECTING? FROM THE UNITY OF HISTORY TO GLOBAL HISTORY

Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill‐reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world‐making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world‐historical process,” a cognitive framework that co‐emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process‐template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world‐historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present‐day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity.”     

Hume's oscillating civilization theory

Hume's repeated mentions of the vicissitudes of civilization have thus far been neglected, overlooked, or misinterpreted by Hume scholars. Although his references to the “death” or “ruin” of a nation are somewhat hyperbolic, his cyclical view of history was neither mere rhetoric nor necessarily pessimistic. This paper aims to show that Hume's notion of historical fluctuations was deeply connected with his understanding of the universality of human nature. It also placed Hume in a strategic position from which he could criticize both those who believed in the possibility of perpetual progress and those who forecast the successive decline of the human world. To explore Hume's position in more detail, we must first examine the reasons his argument was often misunderstood, especially in the context of the “rich country–poor country” debate. We also need to examine how Hume's view of the cyclical nature of history, consistently held, can be reconciled with his status as one of the champions of modern civilization.     

反思与前瞻:中国近代社会史研究的再出发

中国近代社会史复兴四十多年来,成绩令人瞩目。与此同时,日益突出的新老问题,比如近代社会史的贯通性问题、思想理论缺失问题、宏观研究不足问题、区域的代表性问题、脱离时代中心话题的问题,以及过度恋慕地方文献的问题等,正在成为困囿社会史继续前进的桎梏,应当引起学界重视。当前社会史处在与时代同步伐的关键节点上,从事近代社会史的学人十分有必要秉持“长时段”“总体史”和“整体史”的史观,重新审视这些问题,思考探索近代社会史研究再出发的诸种可能性。     

RECONCEIVING THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO TRANSLATION

Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times. This time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. If, as argued here, “the past” does not exist independently of the means by which it is known and represented, then the many different modes of historicity that human beings developed and deployed before the modern form of history became dominant cannot be measured against “the” past in an effort to compare their accuracy or adequacy in representing it. The concluding section of this article asks what we are doing when we write the history of those who did not share the presumptions of the modern discipline but who had their own mode(s) of historicity. What, it asks, is the character and status of the knowledge produced when we write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts?     

The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse,Bookchin, and Dialectics in the Midst of Ecological Crises

In the wake of ecological crises, there has been a resurgence of interest in the relation between dialectical thought and nature. The work of Herbert Marcuse and Murray Bookchin offers unique approaches to this question that remain highly relevant. In the first half of the article, we engage with Marcuse's application of the dialectical method in which he gestured to the “vital need” to push beyond the appearance of “the real” and yet lamented the loss of the ability for negative thinking to pierce the dominance of the “technical apparatus” that tied humanity to this “radical falsity”. Here, we suggest the need for a more holistic dialectical understanding of the social totality—one that is directly located within, and takes as foundational, the environmental conditions of human society. In the second half, we examine Murray Bookchin's conception of “dialectical naturalism” as a more thorough engagement with the human/nature relation that surpasses Marcuse's late engagements with ecologism. In particular, we offer critical reflections on the concept of “nature” in the contemporary ecology movement and illustrate how dialectical naturalism is capable of not only transcending dualistic conceptions of “man/nature” but in expanding our awareness of the potentialities of history along what Bookchin terms the “libertory pathways” to a restorative relation between human “second nature” and biological “first nature”. We posit that systemic, interconnected and accelerating ecological crises (climatic, biospheric and oceanic) form the objective and absolute contradiction of contemporary global social life that compels an awareness of the potentialities of an ecological society. Only through this awareness can we break through the reified “solutions” that have often plagued the ecology movement, bringing about the urgent social and ecological transformation that our species requires for its liberation and long‐term survival.     

Prehistoric Human and Ungulate Remains from Preston Docks,Lancashire, UK: Problems of River Finds

Isolated and usually undated human crania from riverine deposits in the British Isles present something of an archaeological mystery. The large numbers sometimes involved—several hundred from the River Thames alone—together with the recovery of unassociated metal artefacts have been taken to imply some or other “ritual” activity. We offer a taphonomic investigation of human crania and ungulate remains obtained from dock excavations during the 1880s at Preston in Lancashire in northwestern England. Although apparently recovered in close spatial proximity, a series of AMS determinations on crania of humans, aurochsen (Bos primigenius) and red deer (Cervus elaphus) has established at least a Neolithic to Saxon age range for the sample. Such a chronological span for a diverse assemblage when considered against modern forensic studies of the taphonomy of bodies in water strongly implies that the human crania need represent no more than an accumulation of elements that normally separate quite naturally from the rest of the body. While the reasons for initial entry to the water may well have included “ritual” activity in one or more case there is simply no reason to infer such behaviour for the human sample as a whole in the absence of direct evidence.     

THE VIRTUE OF A HISTORIAN: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN HERMAN PAUL AND CHINESE THEORISTS OF HISTORY

This article reflects on the role of scholarly virtues in the Chinese theory of history and compares it with the recent approach proposed by Herman Paul. The first three parts reconstruct what might be called a “Chinese virtue epistemology of history,” starting from Confucian views on sincerity in writing history and then turns to concepts of an “unbiased mind” and the “responsibility of a historian.” The latter ideas were developed by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), who introduced the concept of “the virtue of a historian (shide),” treating it as a sympathetic understanding toward the narrated characters. Interpretations of shide changed along with modern Chinese theorists of history, some of whom elaborated on it in the positivist manner. Thereafter, the article outlines Paul's view on the function of epistemic virtues in the formation of “historical persona.” In the summary, I will draw upon the main similarities and differences between Paul's position and the traditional Chinese view in order to point out the main directions for further research on this topic.     

TOWARD A MULTIDIRECTIONAL FUTURE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: GLOBALITY,INTERDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSTHUMANITY

Compared with the survey offered in the New Perspectives on Historical Writing nearly three decades earlier, historical practices around the world today have witnessed a remarkable change on several fronts. First, marked expansions occurred in such fields as gender history, history of memory, history of knowledge, and visual history, resulting in their noticeable transformation (for example, “gender history” to “history of sexuality” and “visual history” to “history of things”). Second, by exploring and presenting the “other(s)” in modern historiography, new areas are opened up in postcolonial history, global history, emotions history, and so on, which have prompted historians to reconceptualize their notions of time and space. Third, menacing global climate change and notable breakthroughs in various areas of modern technology have exerted an unprecedented impact on historical writing, exemplified by the new developments in environmental history, neurohistory, digital history, and animal history. Science and technology help historians to rejuvenate their research methodology and teaching pedagogy, but they have also demanded that historians acquire a better understanding of the interaction and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans in history, or to take the nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic approach. In sum, what lies ahead for historians and history students today is a multidirectional future, which is at once an opportunity and a challenge.     

MODERNITY IN RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO CONSTANTIN FASOLT'S “HISTORY AND RELIGION IN THE MODERN AGE”

Contrary to Constantin Fasolt, I argue that it is no longer useful to think of religion as an anomaly in the modern age. Here is Fasolt's main argument: humankind suffers from a radical rift between the self and the world. The chief function of religion is to mitigate or cope with this fracture by means of dogmas and rituals that reconcile the self to the world. In the past, religion successfully fulfilled this job. But in modernity, it fails to, and it fails because religion is no longer plausible. Historical, confessional religions, then, are no longer doing what they are supposed to do; yet the need for religion is still very much with us. Fasolt's account would be a tragic tale, if not for his claim that there is a new religion for the modern age, a religion that fulfills the true reconciling function of religion. That new religion is the reading and writing of history. Indeed, for Fasolt, reading history is religiously redemptive, and writing history is a sacred act. The historian, it turns out, is the priest in modernity. In my response, I challenge both Fasolt's remedy (history as religiously redemptive) and its justification (the fall of historical religions). Indeed, I reject both his romantic view of past religion as the peaceful reconciler, as well as his pessimistic view of present religion as the maker of “enemies” among modern people. In the end, I argue that the way Fasolt employs his categories—“alienation,”“salvation,”“religion,”“history”— is too vague to do much useful work. They are significant categories and they deserve our attention. But in my view, the story Fasolt tells is both too grim (on human alienation) and too cheerful (on historian as modern savior).     

马丁·麦乐西与美国城市环境史研究

马丁·麦乐西教授是美国著名的环境史学家,曾经担任“美国环境史学会”(1993-1995年)、“公共史全国委员会”(1992-1993年)和“公共工程历史学会”(1988-1989年)的主席。本文分为两个部分。第一部分从理论基础、概念界定、功能发挥以及具体的历史研究成果等方面介绍了他的城市环境史成就。第二部分是作者对马丁教授的访谈,他就城市环境史与农业生态史的关系、自然环境与人工环境的关系、技术在城市环境史中的作用、环境正义运动的性质等问题进一步阐述了自己的观点。另外,本文在注释中附有朱尔·A·塔尔教授对相关问题的简要回答。     

Hayden White: Beyond Irony

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, asHayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a“bitterness” stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. Anironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline.A current stage of irony manifests itself in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a “prison house of language.” An intellectual parlor-gameproduces “second-hand knowledge” that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony? This text is a “post-postmodern post mortem topostmodernism.” I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative. In trying to break with some modern/postmodern “principles” andretain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in thehumanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poeticapproach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical formof writing in anthropology (James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) and a more literary style inhistorical writing (Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Simon Schama). This trendis associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I wouldwelcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history ashuman self-knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about “what it is to be a man . . . what it is to be the kind of man you are . . . and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.”     

3. NATURE,RELIGION, AND IMAGINATION: COMMENTS ON IMAGES OF HISTORY

After sharing some reflections, I raise three questions. The first asks about the role of nature and reason according to Kant's teleological history, and the extent to which Kant's essays written before the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are “dogmatic,” as his phrase “aim of nature” might suggest. The second asks about Kant's “impure” ethics and the role of religion. What would Kantian religion look like today? The last question concerns the relation between images and ideas—a thornier issue than Kant's initial definitions of imagination and reason would seem to suggest.     

WHAT WAS CRITICAL HISTORY? A READING OF RICHARD SIMON'S HISTOIRE CRITIQUE DU VIEUX TESTAMENT

The roots of our modern critical historical attitude are usually set in one of the following phenomena: (1) the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns; (2) the establishment of historiography as a scientific discipline; and (3) the newly gained awareness of anachronism. However, these accounts either neglect the normative character of the above‐mentioned phenomena or operate with an a priori definition of “critical history,” which leads them to retrospectively attribute the concept of “critique” to historical realities that have not used the term to denote their attitude toward or their treatment of the past. Rather than starting from an a priori definition of what “critical history” is, I propose to inquire into what “critical history” was at the moment when it was first conceived as such—namely in Richard Simon's Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. I will begin by presenting Simon's conception of critique, which entailed: (a) a grammatical and philological treatment of the text in question; (b) a historical and cultural contextualization of this text; and (c) a specific type of judgment to be applied to what is written therein. Since this last aspect constitutes the key to understanding critique's attitude toward the past, I will, in the second part, focus my attention on the notion that plays a pivotal role in the exercise of “critical judgment,” that is, on the concept of tradition. Last, I will propose that since Simon's critical history does not seem to be completely autonomous in relation to its object, the roots of our modern call for normative autonomy vis‐à‐vis the past should be sought with the authors whom Simon opposed in his work, but from whom nonetheless he inherited the term critique: Protestant authors such as Scaliger, Casaubon, and Cappel.     

Storytelling as Method in Spatial Planning

Abstract

Drawing on the case of the Wageningse Eng in the Netherlands, this paper considers the role of “storytelling” within spatial planning practices. It moves away, though, from seeing it as merely a model of spatial planning, where “storytelling” is sometimes used to justify planners' ideals for the landscape, or a model for spatial planning, which pushes for a normative use of “storytelling” as a means of encapsulating local knowledge and the views of those who live in, and use, the landscape. Rather, the paper engages “storytelling” as a method for revealing how formal planning practices may be destabilized by more vernacular narratives seeking to subvert dominant discourses and processes. In doing so, it seeks to not only show the contested nature of participatory planning within the Netherlands, but also the ways in which narratives—as revealed via such a method—construct specific positionalities with real implications for notions of inclusivity within planning practices.     

Quietness beyond Political Power: Politics of Taking Sanctuary (Bast Neshini) in the Shi‘ite Shrines of Iran

“The politic” and “the religious” have had many relations with each other in Iranian history and in some cases “the religious” has been defined in a situation beyond the extent of the political power. A case in point is the right of taking sanctuary in Shi‘ite shrines. Throughout Iran's history, subjects could take refuge in Shi‘ite shrines and some other places related to religious and non-religious authorities. Persecution was delayed or the individual was forgiven, though sometimes they were sentenced when exiting the shrine. By referring to religious texts that have reinforced that tradition, this article seeks to trace continuities between early Islam and modern Iran. It focuses on sanctuary taking and sit-ins at shrines and tombs, and on the interplay between those actions and political power, and discusses the changing mobility and dynamisms of those actions at different periods of Iranian history.     

5. MILLENNIAL SOVEREIGNTY,TOTAL RELIGION,AND TOTAL POLITICS

Discussions of kingship and sovereignty in early modern India have struggled to fully comprehend and assess the work and life of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the celebrated and most famous ruler of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperor's incomparable energy and imagination had lit up, like never before in the history of Islam, the vast networks and institutions of knowledge and practice that could be deployed in the service of sacred kingship. Rather than demonstrate a local history of Indic kingship, Akbar's intersections with networks and institutions show a history that stretched back centuries and linked South Asia to post‐Mongol Iran and Central Asia, and were the crucibles in which a “millennial science” was cultivated. The implications for studying “millennial science” extend beyond the early modern world and into a consideration of sovereignty in modern South Asia.     

清理与重构:吕思勉的神话研究

上古史是中国近代历史学的重要研究对象,有关上古神话的研究更引起了广泛关注。吕思勉利用文献考据、社会从低级到高级的发展规律及“统属思维”塑造的“同质人类群体”的概念,对上古神话进行清理和重构,形成了区别于传统的新解释,并尝试以此取代传统思想中有关上古神话的“旧常识”。这种新旧知识迭代背后隐藏着吕思勉以“统属性思维”取代“关联性思维”的研究理路,是近代新史学打造学科话语体系的尝试,也彰显出历史学家普遍面对的“当下主义”的困境,以及这种困境对于历史知识迭代的意义。     

The emerging of "female citizen": The subject identity of modern Chinese women through literary practices

The construction of “citizen-state” relations in the intellectual world of modern China and the establishment of individual citizenship in political discourse have opened up a political and discourse sphere for modern women to strive for new identities, wherein some intellectually advanced women have managed to establish their individual identity as “female citizen” by carrying the debate on the relationship between women and the state with regard to their rights and responsibilities, and on the relationship between gender role and citizenship. Though the idea of “female citizen” was not provided with a political theory of practical significance, the subject identity of women, however, was repeatedly spoken about and strengthened in brand-new literary practices, resulting in a dynamic discourse of “female citizen”; in the meantime, disagreements concerning the concepts of “female rights,” “civil rights,” and “natural rights” have all helped create significant tension inside the related discourse sphere.