PRODUCTION,EXCHANGE, AND SOCIO-POLITICAL COMPLEXITY ON BRONZE AGE CYPRUS1

Summary. During the centuries 1700–1400 BC, the archaeological record of the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus shows a number of significant innovations: urban centres with public and ceremonial architecture, differential burial practices, writing, an intensification of metallurgical production and export, extensive trade relations with the surrounding cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, fortifications, ‘mass’burials, and increased finds of weaponry. Documentary evidence from Egypt, the Levant, and the Aegean sheds further light on these developments. These changes represent the transformation of an isolated, village-based culture into an international, urban-oriented, complex society. One of the key questions to consider is why these developments in Cyprus lagged so far (400-1200 years) behind those of the island's neighbours: Egypt, Crete, Syria-Palestine, and Anatolia. Using concepts from development economics and political anthropology, and models developed by archaeologists working on similar problems elsewhere, this study attempts to explain the process of change and innovation apparent in the Cypriot archaeological record of 1700–1400 BC.     

1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION1

Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction.     

ON THE DATING OF THE TYRRHENIAN GROUP1

Iconographic and epigraphic evidence suggest that the Attic black-figure vases of the Tyrrhenian Group should be dated to the period c.560–530 BC rather than to the second quarter of the sixth century BC. Imagery on some vases, particularly those of the later painters, points to a lowering of the date for the end of the group to c. 530 BC. Epigraphic evidence, particularly the absence of crossed theta , closed heta and qoppa from almost all of the vases of the earlier painters allows the start of the group to be lowered to c. 560, closer to Exekias than to Kleitias.     

1. TOWARD A HISTORY ON EQUAL TERMS: A DISCUSSION OF PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE

This essay is a critical discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty's book Provincializing Europe as well as a first sketch of a History on Equal Terms. After giving a short summary of Provincializing Europe, I first argue, against chakrabarty, that there is no necessary connection between the discipline of history and the metanarratives of modernity. To the contrary: the founding idea of the discipline of history was a turn against such grand narratives. With his attempt to deconstruct the narratives of the European Enlightenment and of modernity, Chakrabarty therefore has to be regarded as a thinker of radical historicism rather than as a critic of the discipline of history. Second, I criticize the use of the term “modernity” in Provincializing Europe and the concept of modernity in general. Instead of a deconstruction of the discipline of history, I propose a deconstruction of the concept of modernity. This could open up the way for a History on Equal Terms situated within the discipline of history, that is, a historiography that would—just as Chakrabarty rightly demands—in principle pay the same attention to and expect relevant results from any region in the world, depending only on the focus of research.     

THE TRUE FACE OF MOUNT LU: ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PERSPECTIVES AND PARADIGMS1

From a hermeneutic point of view, understanding is always conditioned by one's own horizon and perspective. as the great poet Su Shi remarks, we do not know the “true face of Mount Lu” because what we see constantly changes as we move high or low, far off or up close. But the point of the “hermeneutic circle” is not to legitimize the circularity or subjectivity of one's understanding, but to make us conscious of the challenge. How do we understand China, its history and culture? What should be the appropriate paradigm or perspective for China studies? More than twenty years ago, Paul Cohen argued for a “China‐centered” approach to understanding Chinese history, but to assume an insider's perspective does not guarantee adequate understanding any more than does an outsider's position guarantee emancipation from an insider's myopia or blindness. By discussing several exemplary cases in China studies, this essay argues that neither insiders nor outsiders have monopolistic or privileged access to knowledge, and that integration of different perspectives and their dynamic interaction beyond the isolation of native Chinese scholarship and Western Sinology may lead us to a better understanding of China and its history.     

THE TEETH OF TIME: PIERRE HADOT ON MEANING AND MISUNDERSTANDING IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS1

The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo‐Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid‐1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time.     

REPORT ON THE 2001 BEIJING SEMINAR ON TIBETOLOGY

The China National Center for Tibetan Studies and the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences held the2001 Beijing Seminar on Tibetology from July 25-29 at the Beijing-based China National Center for Tibetan Studies. As the fourth of its kind (the previous three were held in 1986, 1991 and 1997 respectively), it attracted some 170 Tibetan studies workers and scholars from Tibet, the Tibetan-inhabited areas in the four inland provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu, Beijing, Shanghai…     

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