Natural Law,Poetic Justice and the Talionic Formulation

Abstract

Significant elements of natural law are reflected in the statements of corporal punishment presented in biblical law. In relation to the “eye for eye” clause from the talionic formulation, it is suggested that acts of blinding were perceived also as a form of punishment of an offending organ and can, therefore, be classified as examples of “instrumental talion.” This is distinct from measures which focus on the character of the sinner, or the nature of his crime, which are differentiated as “reflective talion.” Both processes convey an underlying desire for poetic justice, evidenced in biblical and ancient Near Eastern sources, where aetiological explanations clarify accounts of serious injuries to the eyes.     

ASSESSING (AND NOT ASSESSING) THE ITALIAN CONTRIBUTION TO HISTORIOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Edited by Giuseppe Galasso, one of Italy's most distinguished historians, this large volume seeks to convey the Italian contribution to historiography and political thought from the dawn of the Middle Ages into the present century, though it is overwhelmingly concentrated on the centuries since 1400. It includes six overview essays, but over 70 percent of its bulk consists of short articles, 108 in all, the vast majority on individual figures, and most of them five to seven pages in length. Whereas the approach, through individual figures, makes the volume especially valuable as a reference work, the approach also entails limitations making it hard to delineate and assess a distinctively Italian contribution. Readers must often connect the dots on their own if they are to discern the strands of a distinctive tradition. In his introductory overview, Galasso suggests a special Italian sensitivity to history, or capacity for the philosophy of history, but the suggestion is left vague and is followed up only in the most ad hoc way in the subsequent essays. The book offers little on how Italian idiosyncrasy might have either compromised or enhanced wider impact. Although the extent of Italian international interaction is well documented, there is little attention to reciprocity and the scope for synergy. Nor is there much assessment of the implications of changes in the valences of that interaction over the centuries, especially in breeding self‐criticism and sometimes compensatory myth‐making that might have further complicated the resonance of Italian offerings. But the volume demonstrates the richness of the Italian contribution and implicitly invites us to better encompass it, perhaps through comparative work and further research on multinational interplay.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature

Abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the “dirty” history and geography of enclosure, as both an instance of primitive accumulation and a production of nature. Specifically, I reconsider the English enclosures as a struggle over the land‐use designation of “waste”. Whereas both open fields and common waste lands were an essential and valuable part of the common right economy, advocates of enclosure came to see these same lands as wasted commons; lands that were potentially, but not yet, improved. This dialectic of waste and potential permeates the fabric of the nature produced through enclosure, which I name terra economica. Typically, this terrain has been understood as a passive repository of free resources, extending across absolute space. While such accounts consider the making of nature into a universal means of production, it is equally important to consider the ways in which nature is produced as a universal condition of production.     

System failure: the underlying causes of US policy‐making errors in Afghanistan

The United States intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 has brought progress in some areas, but the conflict has expanded, the Taliban remains powerful, and misgovernance and predation are widespread. Afghan national security forces—the linchpin of the coalition's exit strategy—offer no guarantee of future stability. Many accounts describe the mistakes that led to this predicament. This article attempts to explain why these mistakes were made by examining their underlying or structural causes. Based on 51 interviews with officials and experts, it identifies major US policy‐making errors with respect to state‐building, military activities and diplomacy. It argues that there are four principal underlying causes of such errors, relating to organizations, leadership and strategic thinking, psychology, and domestic politics. It finds that there were severe shortcomings in the acquisition and processing of information and a lack of institutional self‐evaluation; civilian and military leaders made major strategic misjudgements in mistaking the strategy for the goal, overestimating the efficacy of military force or resources, and drawing false lessons from history or analogous cases such as Iraq; leaders were predisposed to overconfidence and oversimplification; and, at the highest level, policies were distorted by domestic politics. The article contends that the cumulative impact of these shortcomings was sufficient to seriously disrupt the functioning of the foreign policy‐making system. It argues that action is required to improve US information gathering and assessment, systematize institutional self‐evaluation, build regional expertise, establish mechanisms to understand the motivations and perceptions of other actors, and increase awareness of decision‐makers’ cognitive flaws and biases.     

A Gift of Lace: Queen Mary’s Coronation Train, 1911

This paper is concerned with the context of the commissioning and the making of a Youghal lace coronation train, its ‘artistic beauty’, as well as the confusion about where it was worn and its ‘associations’ which, when it was made, displayed and worn, were diverse and complicated. The lace train began its material life in the Presentation Convent in Youghal in the south of Ireland, but had been commissioned then gifted to Queen Mary by the unionist ‘ladies’ of Belfast. Once made, it was exhibited in Belfast and London before its delivery to Buckingham Palace in time for the queen’s departure for India where, according to a number of published accounts, it was to be worn by Queen Mary in the ceremonies surrounding the Delhi Durbar; it was, in fact, worn in Calcutta. Considered one of the most magnificent examples of Irish needlepoint lace ever made, it expressed the loyalty of unionist women, but in its crafting it alluded to the space of nationalist women. The object highlights the workings of the Youghal Lace Cooperative that functioned in much the same way as do today’s fair trade networks (securing markets, returning profits to artisans), while at the same time the object speaks of social relationships, contested spaces, political tensions and agency.     

Making sense of the state: Citizens and state buildings in South Africa

Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a ‘thing’ by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theoretically, drawing on work from architecture, cultural geography and urban studies on sensory engagements with buildings; and then empirically through an analysis of South African citizens' accounts of their engagements with state buildings, drawing on focus group discussions in urban centres and observations of state buildings in action. It finds that the state is reified through citizens' ability to think and feel their way from material form to idea, using sight to produce abstractions and metaphors, and the haptic senses to connect to personal memory and fantasy. This layered account of the state, described locally through the analogy of the face-brick, constitutes the making and unmaking of the state-thing that illustrates a deep but ambivalent involvement in it.     

Milton,the passions,and the knowing body

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the notion that Galenic humouralism stripped the early modern body of agency and argues that some accounts of early modern materialism were connected to epistemology. It evidences how Milton’s passions are inscribed with the shocking language of agency and moral responsibility to overturn the assumption of “passive”, unconscious passions. It explores two pictures of passions in connection with knowledge: passions as obstacles to knowledge, and passions as sources as knowledge. Both images recast the material body as a knowing agent, but do so with complications. Agency-ridden passions complicate a straightforward notion of agency, and seem to leave early moderns with the option of blaming their passions instead of themselves for deception. Frequent references to internal passions in political discourses also suggests an unsettling degree of comfort with subjectivity in making knowledge-statements, but it is a version of subjectivity that seems far more public than private.     

LET MANY FLOWERS BLOOM

In this rich and sensible assessment of historians' practice and prospects, Allan Megill focuses on the obligation that historians have to support their accounts with evidence. He does this, first, by illustrating the difference between real and merely claimed evidence and, then, by giving an analysis of the underlying nature of evidence in historical accounts. Turning later to the question of how historians and their public should feel about diminishing unity (fragmentation) in historiography and the practices that generate it, Megill explains the sources of fragmentation and then argues that it doesn't matter whether historians are doing the same thing and/or doing it in the same way. What matters, rather, is whether they are doing interesting things and doing them well.     

The Antikythera Mechanism reconsidered

Abstract

The Antikythera Mechanism, the world's oldest known geared mechanism, became widely known through the work of Derek Price who, concluding that its dials yielded astronomical and calendrical information, called it a 'calendar computer'. Price rightly drew attention to its importance as direct evidence for a high level of mechanical accomplishment in ancient times, but his account of the instrument itself is deficient. I have developed a new reconstruction on the basis of an independent survey of the original, drawing on my knowledge of early mechanism and of the history of craft techniques, and on my experience as a practical mechanic. This reconstruction follows the observed detail far more closely than does Price's. It displays somewhat different astronomical information, according closely with the contemporary literary evidence of interest in the making of planetaria. The main features of the new reconstruction, previously described elsewhere in a series of papers, are here brought together so as to convey a better impression of the whole. A model, made to the same scale as the original, demonstrates that the reconstruction is workable.     

Working the Spaces of Neoliberal Subjectivity: Psychotherapeutic Technologies, Professionalisation and Counselling

An analysis is presented of how a particular psychotherapeutic practice, namely voluntary sector counselling, contributes to and resists neoliberal forms of governance. Neoliberal governmentality invokes a concept of the human subject as an autonomous, individualised, self‐directing, decision‐making agent, attributes fostered in different ways by psychotherapies and processes of professionalisation. In this context I explore accounts of counselling offered by voluntary sector counsellors in Scotland, focusing on practitioners' use of the idea of empowerment to describe what they do, and on how this idea intersects with the professionalisation of counselling. I argue that empowerment and professionalisation both privilege autonomy in ways that are consonant with neoliberal subjectivity, but I also argue that there are points of resistance to the individualisation associated with technologies of calculation on which neoliberal subject formation depends.     

The Need for Vengeance or the Need to Mourn? Atiq Rahimi's Exploration of “Afghan” Self-Identity in Earth and Ashes

It has been said of Atiq Rahimi's novel Earth and Ashes that the author intends it to convey a loss of any vision for a better future in Afghanistan. This essay neither disputes nor affirms this, but instead argues that this tone of disillusionment is sustained for a specific purpose—namely, to show how a belief in the Afghan requirement of vengeance helps sustain cycles of violence in Afghanistan. No critical work has explored this key motivation for the writing of the novel; this article does so using a method of close reading that enables an evaluation of the role the reader is afforded as part of this endeavor, be they natives or outsiders to this culture.     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

Reconstructing the history of nationalist cognition and everyday nationhood from personal accounts

New approaches to nationalism have focused on the role of human agency within nation‐building structures (nationhood from below, everyday nationalism, experiences of nation, personal nationalism, etc.). However, the development of specific methodologies is still scarce. This paper proposes the use of personal accounts (mostly journals and autobiographies, but not only) as sources for qualitative historical research in nations and nationalism. Departing from the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘experience’ and ‘memory’, it is argued that, although very problematic, these sources are a valid path to the study of nations as they are: social phenomena of discursive nature and political frame, whose real agents are individuals. When these agents narrate their lives employing the nation as a meaningful category, they are not producing mere second‐hand reflections of superior and prior realms, but are performing microhistorical acts of nation‐making that are significant for understanding any case of nation‐building. The paper includes an empirical example using British personal accounts from the Age of Revolutions (c.1780–1840).     

Partisan sorting in the United States, 1972–2012: New evidence from a dynamic analysis

Whether Americans have “sorted” into politically like-minded counties and to what extent is hotly debated by academic and journalists. This paper examines whether or not geographic sorting has occurred and why it has occurred using a novel, dynamic analysis. Our findings indicate that geographic sorting is on the rise, but that it is a very recent phenomenon. In the 1970s and 1980s, counties tended to become more competitive, but by 1996 a pattern of partisan sorting had emerged and continued through the present. Results suggest this pattern is driven by Southern re-alignment and voting behavior in partisan stronghold counties. Lastly, we find evidence that migration can drive partisan sorting, but only accounts for a small portion of the change.     

Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam

Abstract

The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.     

A Twenty-First Century Archaeology of Stone Artifacts

Archaeologists today, as in the past, continue to divide their stone artifact assemblages into categories and to give privilege to certain of these categories over others. Retouched tools and particular core forms, for instance, are thought to contain more information than the unretouched flakes and flake fragments. This reflects the assumption that information to be gained from stone artifacts is present within the artifact itself. This study evaluates a continued interest in the final form of stone artifacts by first considering ethnographic accounts of stone artifact manufacture and use in Australia and then by utilizing the patterns observed in these accounts to investigate assemblage patterning within an Australian archaeological case study. Reading the ethnographic accounts provides no indication that Aboriginal people valued more or less complex artifacts, in uniform ways, in every situation. In fact, the opposite is true. Stone artifacts were always valued in some sense but which ones, and in which ways, depended on the situations the people who needed the artifacts found themselves in. Aboriginal people were quite capable of making and using expedient and informal artifacts in complex ways. The significance of these observations is considered for stone artifact studies in general and in relation to a case study from western New South Wales, Australia.     

The world picture of Philip the fair

During the arrest and early months of the trial of the Templars in 1307 and 1308, a number of documents emanated from Philip IV's chancery which are not only valuable evidence of the regime's administrative concerns during the trial, but also, in the language used, convey a sense of contemporary concepts of the medieval world order as seen either by the king himself or by his chief advisers. Royal motivation for the arrests is still a matter of controversy, but it does not seem inconsistent to believe that Philip both sought the Templars' wealth to alleviate immediate financial problems and came to convince himself that the Templars had transgressed the laws upon which the whole ordering of society was based. It is upon this second aspect of Philip's mental outlook that this discussion concentrates. This paper aims to examine these concepts and to relate them to other contemporary polemical views on the trial.