Boundaries, Borders, and Reference Points: The Caribbean Defined as Geographic Region and Social Reality

Terms used to describe a region often reflect and directly influence the way space, identity, and history are conceived or constructed. The Caribbean is one such place where external definitions frequently transcend simple geography and socio-political boundaries. The region can be understood by both temporal and cultural categories. The case is made in this paper that archaeological interpretations of social history are impacted by how one conceives of the region.     

历史与现实

历史与现实只是两个词,而不是两回事。语言把本体弄成两半,同时又遮蔽了另一半。这样,一半是语言性的“历史”和“现实”,一半是事实性的历史与现实。“历史即现实”这个新历史观的命题在最抽象的意义上,它是最具体的,同时,在最具体的意义上,它又是最抽象的。本质上,历史首先是一种深度的存在。只有在历史的无限深度之下,才有永恒的意义。历史是距离人们最远而又最近的东西。但人们只知道“最远”而不知道“最近”,所以,人们的历史观就大成问题。     

Folktales,Reality, and Childhood in Ethiopia: How Children Construct Social Values through Performance of Folktales

This article examines how Oromo-speaking children in Ethiopia construct social values in multiple ways through their participation in storytelling and the subsequent meaning-making discussions. By presenting children as actors in the re-contextualization of folktales, the article argues that participation in a folkloric performance is not a mere play practice for children, but is a social and artistic forum through which they acquire survival skills and grow connected to values of their society. This indicates that in the processes of storytelling and meaning-making, children draw an analogical relationship between imagined situations in folklore and living realities in their local environment. The article is based on data generated through ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with children among an Oromo-speaking society in Ethiopia.     

数字时代的历史事实建构——以电子族谱编撰为例

近年在网络世界出现的帮助用查考及编撰族谱的网页,是探讨数码时代在万维网上衍生的历史叙述的建构过程,以及其有可能产生的社会和心理后果的一个例证。电子族谱在内容上虽然可以沿用既有的手钞和印刷族谱的素材,然而,电子族谱所衍生的编撰传统绝对不能视作手钞和印刷族谱的延续。相反,电子时代的族谱编撰和字时代的族谱编撰,分别见证着两种不同的社会事实建构的过程。进入数码时代,族谱的编撰很有可能从一个传统的、集体的、乡村社会的配套仪式,变成是个人的、存在于城市和网络空间的孤立的仪式。     

CRM Publication: Dealing with Reality

Abstract

This article is a response to the review article by William Longacre published in this issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology.     

Social Media and Social Change

The growing impact of new media around the world has been the subject of study by scores of scientists in multidisciplinary fields. Satellite TV and the Internet have been viewed as instruments of social and political change — connecting communities, educating the youth, and creating social networks previously unaccounted for, like virtual groups. However, in the Arab World and the Middle East, such technological developments have been hailed as tools for the empowerment of marginalized communities such as women and the youth, also brought new opportunities that have resulted in the breaking of the communication monopoly by those in power and the creation of a new communication environment. Such environment has — as part of its manifestations — the current social transformations that the region is witnessing. Drawing on examples from social media networks used in Tunisia and Egypt, this article analyzes the extent to which new technologies have changed the rules of the game regarding public opinion construction and the communication flow traditionally monopolized by the hegemonic power structures in Arab society. This study not only reveals the decisiveness of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the Arab Spring countries’ revolutions, but also the extent to which their availability served in a complex manner the democratic transition that Tunisia have been undergoing and the political turmoil that Egypt is witnessing. Furthermore this study argues that such online spheres of communication mark the emergence of the virtual yet vibrant space of political campaigning and social empowerment, especially for the youth and marginalized communities.     

Meir Har-Zion's act of reprisal: Reality and memory

On the night of March 5, 1955, Meir Har-Zion set out with three friends to avenge the murder of his sister and her boyfriend in the Judean Desert (in Jordanian territory), about two months earlier. They murdered five innocent Jordanian Bedouins and crossed back into Israel. Upon their return, they were placed under arrest and held until the end of March. This article examines the changes in Israeli perceptions of Har-Zion's reprisal act over the course of thirty years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, in order to shed light on the ways in which collective memory is molded in Israel as well as on the changes in Israeli society's attitude toward the issue of revenge and retaliation, from understanding and even admiration to condemnation and delegitimization.     

Ruskin's Modern Painters and the Visual Language of Reality

Abstract

Ruskin, the most influential mid-Victorian aesthetician, has typically been affiliated by critics with one of two incongruous regimes of thought; late English romanticism or an emerging counter-paradigm of factual science. Unwilling to refine this opposition, criticism has failed so far to address the relationship Ruskin bears to a native British intellectual tradition of sceptical empiricism. Beginning by arguing that his early writing on aesthetics ought to be distanced from the cultural legacies of romanticism (intuitive psychology, transcendental order, mysticism), this article offers a re-examination of Modern Painters (1843–60) as a work that intersects instead with the associationist tradition represented in the mid-century by writers like Alexander Bain and G. H. Lewes. Ruskin's realism, I argue, can be rethought in these terms as it dramatises a similar model of subjectivity to that found in their key psychological works; a model whereby the self must paradoxically be sacrificed before the object it seeks to know while also authenticating art's truthfulness through the testimonies of perspective and personality. Discussion ranges from visual art, including Turner and Canaletto, to the psychological theory of Lewes and Bain, to detailed analysis of the form and meaning of Modern Painters itself, uncovering the powerful critique of mimesis that its surprising philosophical inheritance implies.