‘A Repository,a Switchboard,a Dynamo’: H.L. Beales,a Historian in a Mass Media Age

The historian H.L. Beales (1889–1988) managed to propagate a wider interpretation of nineteenth century social history through non-academic means. Whilst Beales failed to write much in the way of history, his parallel career as an adult education tutor, radio broadcaster and editor of Pelican books meant that he acted as an important propagator of the subject. This, combined with wide influence over a considerable proportion of the younger generation, means that he should be considered as a singularly important historian of the period, who realised and adapted to the potential of new mass media to reach new audiences.     

Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.     

Re/membering the town body: methodology and the work of local history

This paper seeks to rework connections between material productions of memory and formations of local identity, both theoretically and empirically. A growing literature about sites of memory suggests that social groups continually reconstruct the past for political-economic purposes. Often, this literature does not sufficiently theorize the production of social groups, particularly when these groups are taken to be a priori units of analysis. Identity is thereby presumed while showing that some version of history was invented. I suggest that presumed and contested histories embody the performance of group identifications just as social groups construct the past. Commemorative books from Stockbridge, a small rural New England community with national cultural prestige, are then used to outline a town narrative in «double-time» where history both structures and is structured by performances of identity. The projects of local historians, I argue, performatively reconstitute local identity through ongoing processes of union and differentiation. Yet in the production of literature memorializing a town body called Stockbridge, the projects have presumably drawn from localized resources. Narration in double time thus works methodologically both to erase and to evoke the small community, endeavouring to make it visible as a fundamental yet fictitious social formation.     

Hunters and gatherers past and present: Perspectives on diversity,teaching, and information transmission

This article reviews four books on hunters and gatherers. It begins with a discussion of the debates over the concept of hunter-gatherers. Theoretical approaches to hunter-gather studies are examined briefly. The view then assesses the four books and the various subjects which they address. These subjects include the issue of ethnographic analogy, diversity, evolution, and archaeological perspectives as well as understanding contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Additional topics include land use, the assignment of meaning to landscapes, way finding, territoriality, boundary-marking, and networks. Social learning, teaching, and information dissemination are discussed, with emphasis on some of the things that are learned, such as sharing, fair treatment of others, the importance of compassion, and moral values. Hunter-gatherer studies have evolved to the point where both archaeologists and anthropologists are taking into careful consideration the need to consider both past and present in their investigations and to focus also on the non-hunter-gatherer societies with whom they are interacting. As people who defined themselves as indigenous, hunter-gatherers are well aware of the social, economic, environmental and political challenges that they are facing, and they are seeking to address these challenges along with support organizations and researchers in an attempt to ensure their long-term security and well-being.     

Locating the “People Without History” in Histories of the Ancient Near East

Three books discussed here illustrate multidisciplinary approaches to studying ancient civilizations and a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. They suggest that in addition to the traditional focus on elites and urban origins, we should analyze nonelites and smaller scale communities. I concur that focusing on elites gives an incomplete and inaccurate picture of life and culture in the ancient Near East. Instead, these books shed light on the “people without history” in the ancient Near East. This “social history” must be integrated into economic and political models of past cultures to fully understand ancient civilizations.     

History,tradition, and memory among the Basques

This article explores the historical commemoration, the Alarde of the Spanish-Basque town of Hondarribia, re-enacted for almost 400 years. It is a social account of the past portrayed through a history of local militarism and a history of commemorative performance. Since 1996, controversy has divided local inhabitants concerning wider female-inclusion in the male-dominated event, separating the town into factions, traditionalists (asserting traditions remain the same) and feminists (advocating broader female involvement). Theoretical concerns include examining traditions and their gradual transformations over time, rather than as episodic change; that interpreting the past can be competitive over rights of belonging; that history may be influenced by different agencies of gender, kin ties, memory, politics, and social experience; that people do not purposefully ignore the passage of time but may be protecting communal harmony; that commemorative rites are more than embodied performances; and that history can be a multiple, contested, and lived experience.     

Purity and Power: Anthropology From Colonialism to the Global Hierarchy of Value

These four books focalize the links between sociocultural anthropology and the national or cultural identities of its theoreticians and empirical practitioners. Historically caught between the forces of nationalism and colonialism, the subdiscipline has largely transcended its now rejected past, of which significant traces nonetheless remain embedded in its conceptual inheritance. Ranging from vernacular as well as English-language Indian writings to the compromised achievements of German scholars and to the sharp divergences within and among the dominant traditions, the material of these books indexes the emergence of a self-conscious marginality that has engendered a distinctive and productive idiom of sociocultural critique.     

Nature and Technology in History

This essay sketches an expanded theoretical conception of the roles of nature and technology in history, one that is based on a social ontology that does not separate nature and society. History has long been viewed as the realm of past human action. On this conception, nature is treated largely as an Other of history, and technology is construed chiefly as a means for human fulfillment. There is no history of nature, and the history of technology becomes the history of useful products. The essay discusses the changes wrought in these understandings by a social ontology that depicts social existence as inherently transpiring in nexuses of practices and material arrangements. The first implication is that the domain of history should be expanded from the realm and course of past human activity to the realm and course of past practice‐arrangement nexuses. In turn, this wider conception transforms the significance of nature and technology in history. Until recently, most accounts of the relationship between society/history and nature have presumed that society and history are separate from nature. On my account, by contrast, nature is part of society: a component of the practice—arrangement nexuses through which social life progresses. Human history, consequently, is a social—natural history that encompasses the varying presence and roles of nature in human coexistence. Technology, meanwhile, is not just useful products, and not just a mediator of society/history and nature. It also is (1) something through which humans manage social life and the nature that is part of it, largely by drawing nature into this site and thereby conjointly transforming society, technology, and nature in history; and (2) something that, over time, plays an increasingly central role in the nexuses where social life transpires. Through technology, in short, social—natural history takes form and advances.     

Colouring the Nation: A New In-Depth Study of the Turkey Red Pattern Books in the National Museums Scotland

Abstract

The production of Turkey red dyed and printed cottons was a major industry in the west of Scotland, particularly in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Although the extensive works were pulled down in the second half of the twentieth century, our knowledge of this industry is significantly aided by the survival of approximately 200 pattern books, now housed in the National Museums Scotland. These pattern books, examined along with business papers, exhibition catalogues and the Board of Trade Design Registers, are the foundation for a new study into the wider Scottish decorative textile industry. The ongoing examination of these pattern books has shown the variety and longevity of Turkey red dyed and printed patterns, as well as providing insights into wider aspects of the textile industry, including issues of design, manufacture and trade.     

Munsell notations and color names: Recommendations for archaeological practice

Abstract

Archaeologists have long used the Munsell Soil-Color Charts for describing the color of stratigraphic contexts and unglazed pottery. The range of colors in these charts has limited the wider application of the Munsell system in archaeology, and here I review the merits of four complementary color sets: the Munsell Color Charts for Plant Tissues, The New Munsell Student Color Set, the Munsell Bead Color Book, and the Geological Rock-Color Chart. Since the Munsell system does not include color names, I advocate for the adoption of Inter-Society Color Council-National Bureau of Standards (ISCC-NBS) names for colors not found in the Munsell Soil-Color Charts. Using a compromise between these nomenclatures, I collated a list of color names and prepared freely available name charts that can be inserted into the books’ bindings. The solutions outlined here will allow archaeologists to describe a fuller spectrum of colors, while maintaining a terminology that is intelligible to their peers and consistent with past publications.     

Local history as productive nostalgia? Change,continuity and sense of place in rural England

Local history groups are often negatively associated with a tendency to indulge in nostalgic practices that yearn for a romanticized past and propagate resistance to change. Their role in local politics and power networks (particularly in relation to planning and development processes) has also been critiqued as exacerbating issues of social inequality and exclusion. While not contesting the realities of such arguments, this paper adds nuance to such debates using the notion of ‘productive’ or ‘mobile’ nostalgia to explore possibilities for more positive renderings of local history and heritage activities. Empirical evidence from qualitative research in a rural village in Norfolk, England, is drawn on to demonstrate the role of these practices in providing a sense of continuity amid a continuously changing locale through the reassertion of place identities and attachments. Although by no means apolitical, this process need not necessarily be one of preservationism and resistance to change, but can be a mechanism through which residents are able to accept, or even welcome, changes to the social and physical constitution of their village. The paper also critically considers the value of productive nostalgia as a concept through which to explore local history practices and wider heritage movements.     

“探根”现象与彝族史学的社会功能

彝族有悠久的历史、古老的彝文典籍与严谨的治史传统。在各地现存的大量彝文典籍中,可以明显地感到一种追寻万物根源的“探根”与先民足迹的“指路”现象。这种现象,是彝族群众传史、用史传统的具体体现,起到了凝聚、认识、整合、教育的重要社会功能。     

Geography, Space, and Science: Perspectives from Studies of Migration and Geographical Sorting

For the past four decades a significant subset of geographers have had a strong interest in using scientific methods and tools to answer questions about society and societal change. The scientific endeavor, learning and verifying new knowledge, has been at the heart of this project. Even though the discipline as a whole seems currently less interested in the classic science project, that project continues within geography and is a part of the wider social science community's attempt to provide verifiable and useful knowledge to a wide range of stakeholders. The findings from studies of migration and the life course, and segregation and geographical sorting reemphasize the very real contribution of spatial science to understanding societal change. Recent work on the geography of neighborhoods and mobility with the context of legal contestation goes beyond academic research per se to show the continuing relevance of an informed scientific approach and the contributions of geography beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries.     

Ancient social landscapes of northwestern Argentina: preliminary results of an integrated approach to obsidian and ceramic provenance

This article presents the results of ongoing instrumental neutron activation analyses (INAA) conducted on archaeological artifacts from the Formative period of northwestern Argentina (NWA). These studies are part of a wider archaeological project that seeks to understand the structure of the social landscape of the period by examining domestic and burial evidence from a wide range of villages across the area known as the southern Calchaquí valleys. Elemental data is discussed in the light of its potential contribution to reassess past social interaction strategies in the region.     

Death,Grief, and Cross-World Longing

Death has enduringly offered anthropologists a unique theoretical conundrum in that it concerns humans and human personhood, and yet unlike most aspects of social life, it involves an absent interlocutor. A terrifying rupture into mundane existence, death demands a response on the part of individuals and communities. The four books I review here offer varied contributions to this rich anthropological tradition but are united by a concern with grief and the ways in which death both erupts into and transcends social life.     

Voyages,mobilités,lumières

For a very long time and still today, travel stories have fascinated a vast public. It is important to debate their role and the model for intellectual and sensitive construction they propose. An essential link for the European elite's acculturation, they cannot for as much be separated from a much wider circulation which concerns society as a whole. In relation to the social morals of our past, the concept of mobility allows us to appreciate the totality of social practices and to confront the notions of movement and localization. The main cultural categories of space, time, sociability, social constraints and freedoms, are thus creating a structure for our understanding of change.     

沉默也是一种言说——论梁启超笔下的严复

在中国近代思想文化史上,严复和梁启超是两个杰出的代表性人物。他们一个着力译书,系统介绍西方近代哲学社会科学理论,堪称理论之源;一个致力办报,传播西方文化,堪称舆论之母。但是二人之间的关系却非常微妙。以往学术界针对严复在清末民初讽喻和指责梁启超进行过比较深入的研究,但对梁启超的反应基本未予涉及。本文从梁著《清代学术概论》入手,于不疑处起疑,借用烘云托月的手法,通过将梁启超与同时代其他学者进行比较,力图勾勒出梁氏著作在论及严复思想时存在的凹陷现象,并分析了梁启超对严复批评保持沉默的原因。     

Climate and the Chronology of Iranian History

This article offers a chronology of climate events in Iran over the last millennium to challenge traditional chronologies of the Iranian past based on politics, war, and economics. Using insights gleaned from the historiography of climate in Iran, and from neighboring regions, especially the Ottoman Empire, four episodes of climate cooling show how climate-induced environmental processes affected more people for longer in Iran than did the policies of the empires ostensibly ruling over them. Thus, the article aims to put climate more squarely on the agenda of historians of Iran so that the conjectures advanced here can be confirmed, revised, or discarded through future empirical research. Moreover, the article seeks to bring Iran into wider conversations in environmental and global history.     

Straight Pins,Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.     

Health geography in Canada: where are we headed?

This paper overviews the emergence of medical/health geography in Canada. The paper discusses the key questions that Canadian health geographers have explored in the past two decades, how these enquiries have featured in the field and how they contribute to the wider discourse of human geography. It also addresses questions on emerging themes and where Canadian health geography will go in the years ahead. With shifting health landscapes in terms of changes in social, political and physical environments, and changes in health care restructuring, Canadian health geographers are entering a new phase of research, teaching and policy. The complexity of the questions that health geographers seek to address means it is necessary to continue to highlight the policy implications of their findings. Health geographers need to emphasize the public agenda through interdisciplinary research and by continuing to work with geographers in other subfields.